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 bestselling books focused on productivity, focus, and how to access the specific states of mind to bring out your best in terms of cognitive performance, and indeed in terms of performance in all endeavors. One of his more notable books is entitled Deep Work Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Deep Work is a book that has had tremendous positive influence on my work life, and indeed my life in general, because it spells out how exactly to go about doing one's best possible work. For me, that's in the context of science and podcasting, but it includes tools that I and many others have extended to other aspects of their life as well. And it's a book that I highly, highly recommend everybody read. Cal also has a new book out now.

It's one that I'm currently reading entitled slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. And as the title suggests, it gets into specific protocols to avoid burnout and to bring about one's highest quality work over the greatest amount of time. Today's discussion starts off with extremely practical steps that any and all of us can use in order to enhance our level of focus, productivity, and creativity. Cal shares much of his specific practices and also offers some alternative practices for those of you that perhaps do not want to disengage with social media, or with smartphones or with email, to the extent that he does, I found the conversation to be extremely useful in the sense that I indeed am on social media. I use email, I use my phone and texting quite often. So I'm not somebody who's willing to completely disengage from those tools. But I share in the sentiment that those tools can often be an impediment to doing one's best work. So today's discussion gets into not hard and fast rules for enhancing focus and productivity, but a variety of different tools that you can select from in sort of a buffet to suit your particular needs.

We also, of course, discuss the specific research studies around focus and distraction, task switching and context switching, all of which support the specific protocols that Cal offers. So whether you're 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 bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are of the absolute highest quality I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that quality sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance.

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It's very convenient to use. I also have a Juve whole body panel, and I use that about three or four times a week. If you would like to try Juve, you can go to joov.com huberman. Juve is offering an exclusive discount to all Huberman lab listeners with up to $400 off select Juve products. Again, that's Juve joov.com huberman to get $400 off select Juve products. And now for my discussion with Dr. Cal Newport Dr. Cal Newport, welcome.

Dr. Huberman, good to see you.

I'm a huge fan. I've been a huge fan ever since I read deep work. I can't say that I've adopted all the principles, but that's on me, not you. You provide an incredible incentive for why one ought to pursue deep work and slow productivity in service to high quality, true productivity, et cetera. 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 smartphones aren't that interesting if you don't have any social media apps on it. Yeah.

What's that like?

So if you have nothing that is engineered that 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 look at maps on it. 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 my wife gets in touch with me. But I'm notorious somewhat among my friends of my, the ability to capture my attention with text message is really hit or miss because I'll go hours without looking at my phone. So it's not this default appendage. I think for a lot of people, if you know someone, you can basically assume, like, look, if I text them, they're going to get right back to me. My problem is I'll go two, three, 4 hours without looking at my phone, and then there'll be text messages on there from conversations that people were trying to start. And I typically just have to declare text bankruptcy a few times a day. If they really needed me, I guess they would have called. So I do text, but I'm not considered to be very good at it.

A few other questions about your phone practices.

This makes me nervous.

Is your phone in a drawer on the desktop while you're working? Is it face down? Face up? Is the ringer on? Is it off?

You mean if I'm writing or it's nowhere near me. Yeah, it could be anywhere. It's just not going to be anywhere near me. So I have in my house, two different offices, basically, right? So there's a home office. The printer's there. The filing cabinets are there, like the nice big monitors there, pay taxes, that type of thing. Then I have a library, and there's no permanent technology in the library. No computer in there, no monitor, no printers, nothing like this. I have this sort of custom built desk I had made by a company from Maine that makes desks for college libraries. That's what they do. So I had this custom fit desk to fit into. It's not that big of a space. That's where I go to write. I'm surrounded by books that I've really carefully curated what's where, each shelf like, what type of book it has on it, so I can look different ways for different inspirations. I got a fireplace, so I can just turn on a fire if I need it. I'll bring my laptop in there to write. If I'm going to write on a computer and my phone doesn't come in there.

Yeah, you don't look at a phone in that room, and it just helps you. It's a ritual. Right. If I'm in there, I'm thinking, I'm creating with the sort of same patterns of cogitation that we would have been using for hundreds of years when people have been thinking professionally, if I want to be near a printer and I want to go on to a web browser and pay my taxes or whatever, I have a different place for that.

I'm curious about the fireplace. I have this theory based on my understanding of visual neuroscience and the fact that when we're looking at visual scenes that have some degree of predictability to them, we get into a mode of anticipation. Our thinking is at least somewhat linear and so forth. When we are looking at, say, ocean waves or in a skyscraper, we're staring down at the street of, say, New York City, and the cars are moving in obviously not random fashion, but at least to our visual perception, pseudo random. You're not tracking any one thing, that the mind goes into this sort of state where our thoughts become nonlinear. They're not anchored to any kind of if, then kind of what I call DPO, duration, path, outcome, kind of trajectory. There'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 thousands of years because it has that random aspect to it. Does it tend to spark creativity, linear thinking? At what point in your writing do you turn to the fire and stare at it?

That's interesting, actually, that there's a neurological explanation. When I use the fire, it's actually when I read, right. So I have chairs by the fire, but I think for exactly this reason, because when I'm reading, I'm looking to spark ideas, right? Like, okay, what's my takeaway from this? What's the connection you're making between this thing you're reading here and this idea over there? That type of connection making is a lot of my brainstorming, and I read by the fire when the weather allows it. I also walk a lot, so I wonder if there's something similar going on, like when I'm trying to work through an idea for an article or a math proof or something like this. Almost always, I'm going to do that on foot. And there might be something similar going on there where you're encountering. It's not entirely exotic stimuli, right? So it's not. Oh, my God, my attention is being drawn, but you don't quite know what you're going to see. And you also have that circuit quieting effect of the walking. So your motor neurons are going. You can tell me if I'm getting this right or not. You are?

Yeah, absolutely.

The motor neurons are going, and you get some inhibition going on in some of these key networks, which allows you to actually maintain the internal focus on a concept a little bit better. 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, if it's the winter, I read by the fire. And so when I read that, I get a lot of my original ideas.

I have this theory that the two opposite states of mind that both facilitate creativity and productivity look something like this. And you can tell me whether or not this maps to anything that, you know, one is just as you described. Our body is in motion. Could be running, walking, might even be in the shower or something of that sort. But we aren't trying to direct our mind toward a specific linear trajectory or outcome. It's not like working out an equation or a theorem the same way we would if we were at a piece of paper or writing out a sentence, a structured paragraph. So it's body in motion, mind, not channeled 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, forcing oneself to be still and thinking. So it sounds like you incorporate both. And I'm curious, as a computer scientist who writes code, does theorems, does a lot of math, where you can't just kind of wing it.

There's a right and wrong answer involved. What is your mode for sitting down and working through something that's linear and hard?

Yeah, it's interesting the way you talk about it, right. Because when I'm walking, and this is actually something you can train, and I talked about this in one of my books once, that you can actually train yourself to maintain your internal eye of focus more stably while you're walking. Right. So I called this productive meditation in deep work, actually. And I practiced this in grad school. Right, okay. So I'm going to work on a particular problem while I walk, and then you actually practice bringing your attention back to the central problem. And 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, but 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, I know I'm going to get around this. Then you have to sit down and actually formally capture that.

Yeah. For me, that's still working with notebooks, though. When I was coming up in grad school, and I was just excavating these thoughts recently, we were talking before we recorded that I just wrote this essay about what I learned as a grad student that impacted all my writing as a grad student in 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, because now I've fallen out of the whiteboard effect. Discussion, that's going to be a problem. So you actually maintain your focus at a higher level, and then when someone else is making their move, okay, what about this? And they're working math. It's all math on the board. You're giving that the highest attention you're capable of because you want to keep up, right? You don't want to fall behind.

So it was like this hack that was figured out in theory group that if you put two or three people at the same whiteboard that try to alchemize these insights into actual, mathematically precise proofs, you get a 20 30% boost in your concentration level, and that could make all the difference, right? If you're working on a very hard proof, 20 30% boost could be the difference between solving it or not.

In one of these situations where you're at the whiteboard or chalkboard and there are two other individuals facing it, are they interrupting you? Or is the etiquette in that scenario to just let the person go until their natural inclination to raise a hand and scream, help.

Whoever has the marker on the board, they're the ones talking. So you go, okay, what about this? You say, and now you're working, you're writing down equations or drawing your diagram, and everyone is just watching. And then when they're done, everyone steps back and looks at it. Then you can step forward. Okay, but what if we did this and you still work on it? So, when I built some offices, or worked out some offices near my house, 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. 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 Gary design building for the computer science artificial intelligence laboratory and the linguistics. But half of it was computer science.

I know those buildings because the Peacock and the McGovern neuroscience. And those buildings are very interesting. People should check them out if they're ever in Cambridge.

Yeah.

Kendall Square stop.

The status center. Yeah. Right down the street from the Kendall square stop. Yeah. So the 6th floor was where theoreticians were. This is where I was. So they opened that building the year I started the doctoral program. And what did they want to show me when they brought me to this 300 million dollar building? Look at our whiteboards. And that's what they were proud of. They had filled the common space on the 6th floor, theory floor with these freestanding double sided whiteboards. It was like a maze of whiteboards. And this is what everyone was so excited about, was, yeah, look at our whiteboard coverage, surrounded by a 300 million dollar meals. I was trying to explain this to someone recently. Having good whiteboards, to us, is like an astronomer saying, look, we got this great radio telescope. This is going to allow us to get data to work on that we wouldn't otherwise have access to. I think to a theoretician. That's why you see a whiteboard, because 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 where they're comfortable.

I love this because I often think about visual maps that represent our internal memory stores and plans, et cetera. For productivity, I've always relied heavily on the whiteboard. I'm getting one for home. I have one here in the podcast studio. All of my podcast notes for my solo episodes are distilled down to four, eight and a half by eleven notes, which are photographs of the whiteboard.

Yes.

And I don't use a teleprompter. I've been accused of using one before. I don't even know how that would work. But it's extremely useful to use the whiteboard. And I think because ideas are so easily put up there and removed, there's something about writing on things that are vertical as opposed to on a flat surface, because that's actually the way our visual perception casts things. We don't cast visual perception onto the ground. We experience the visual world mostly in front of us. I think the cognitive map and the visual map are inextricably linked for at least for sighted folks. So I think there's really something there. So in the absence of colleagues to sit there and boost our attention by 25% to 30%, what could one do? 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 in the absence of colleagues looking on?

Yeah. So you work on it just like someone's there. The other hack is using really good notebooks. That's always made a big difference for me.

Paper notebooks.

Paper notebooks.

Okay.

Yeah. Though recently I've been messing around with a remarkable, which is one of these digital notebooks where it's e ink technology. So it's like a Kindle, but you can write on it, but you have endless pages on it. So I've been messing around with that recently, but I remembered when I was a postdoc, for example, I found it recently. I went and bought a lab notebook because those are expensive, at least for a postdoc. Right. They're like $70. Because a lab notebook has to have archival quality paper.

It's bound.

It's bound, yeah.

People might not realize this. Lab notebooks need to be kept for many years. Yes. You're not supposed to tear pages out of them, and so they tend to be bound. So if you have terrible handwriting, like I do, you just have to deal with it.

You can't rip it out. And it's thick paper, acid free archival paper, big, sturdy covers. But I bought this because I thought, okay, look, I'm going to take it more seriously because I think that's also part of what goes on with the whiteboard, is your mind thinks about writing on the big vertical space as a public crystallization of thoughts. I'm putting this up for people to see, even if there's no one actually there to see it. And so you take it more seriously. Right. If I'm writing on a whiteboard in class, I'm not just going to put up nonsense. Like, I'm going to be very careful about what I'm writing, because you imagine there's an audience, this is something for other people to see. And so you get a little bit of a similar effect. If you have a very nice notebook, you think, look, I don't want to waste pages. And somehow that helps with the thinking. So then I found this notebook, because I store my old notebooks in my closet. So I found it when I was working on a recent book. I found it, I went through it, right? And then I started ticking off.

This turned into a paper, this turned into a grant. This notebook, I used it for maybe two years, only used maybe about half the pages. It's all very careful, neat script and diagrams. I think I found seven different peer reviewed papers or funded grants where the core ideas were in this notebook. So it's like that $70 was an incredible investment, because 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 bar method of capture where if we just have an idea that spontaneously comes to mind that we can capture that in a voice memo or, dare I say, a phone notes segment. But then something, as you're suggesting, like a whiteboard, like a bound notebook, where the moment we look at it, it brings about a level of seriousness to our thinking and to our actions. This is different than just texting. What we're really talking about are kind of layers of sophistication, but not in a snobby way in terms of highest productivity and quality to kind of bubblegum wrapper on the floor type levels of quote unquote productivity.

Well, I mean, I've become a fan of this idea of having specialized capture for specific type of work. So, for example, I'm a big believer in pretty quickly, you want to capture ideas in the tool you use to do that work. So when I have ideas for an article or a book, I'm going to go write the Scrivener, which is specialty. This is specialty software writers used to write.

Right.

I'm going to go write 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 tool we use to actually write papers. I'm going to move an idea into there as soon as I can. I'm going to move proofs out of a notebook and into formally marked up like you would for a paper as soon as I would. So this idea, this is something I've been leaning to more is capture the notes in the tool you're going to use, take out the middleman in some sense, right. So it's reducing friction, but also puts you in the right mind space. Like, okay, this idea, I'm going to put it where I'm going to need it later, as opposed to a more elaborate third party system that you construct, that you then later pull everything out of as needed. This is what I've been doing more recently.

Let's just get straight to the tool I'm eventually going to use with maybe a high quality notebook intermediary if I'm actually literally working out thoughts. So math, you have to work out thoughts, but I'll get that into an actual paper format pretty quickly.

Tell me what you think of this, what I always call protocol. If I want to learn something from a manuscript I read or a book chapter, I used to highlight things, and I had a very elaborate extracted from my university days system of stars and exclamation marks and underline that mean a lot to me. That can, yes, bring me back to a given segment within the chapter. But a few years ago, I was teaching a course in the biology department at Stanford, and for some reason, we had them read a study about information retention. And I learned from that study one of the best things we can do is read information in whatever form, a magazine, research article, et cetera, a book. And then to take some time away from that material, maybe walk, maybe close one's eyes, maybe leave them open. Doesn't matter. And just try and remember specific elements. How much does one remember? Then go back to the material and look at it. And I've just been positively astonished at how much more information I can learn when I'm not simply going through motor commands of just underlining things and highlighting them, but stepping away and thinking, okay, I don't remember how many subjects there were.

I'll go back and check that, maybe make a note. And, okay, they did this, then they did that, and then it's crystallized. 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 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, like, not burnt out, and I'm just going to interview them. Right. And the protocol was, how did you study for the last test? Did you study for how did you take notes? 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's efficient. It doesn't take much time, but it's incredibly mentally taxing. Right. This is why students often avoid it. It is difficult to sit there and try to replicate and pull forth. Okay, what did I read here? How did that work? It's mentally very taxing, but it's very time efficient. Right. If you're willing to essentially put up with that 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 whole lines from what you studied. The ideas sort of come out fully formed because it's such a fantastic way to actually learn. It was my key. The whole premise that got me writing that book is I went through this period as a college student, where I came in freshman year, was like a fine student, not a great student, but a fine student. And I was rowing crew and I was sort of like excited to do that. And then I developed a heart condition and had to stop congenital wiring in the heart atrial flutter thing. I mean, I couldn't row crew anymore.

Prolapse of some sort.

It was a circuitry issue that would lead to an extremely rapid heartbeat. It's like really rapid. Like Tachardia, right? You get 2250 beats a minute and it could be exercise induced, which is not optimal. You could take beta blockers, which would moderate the electrical timing. But beta blockers reduce your max heart rate. And if you're an athlete, where the entire thing that matters is your max heart rate, so you're doing something like 2000 meters rows. Your performance on beta blockers just goes down. It makes no sense. It's like being a basketball player that wears weighted shoes. It's too frustrating, right?

It also makes you super mellow.

I was pretty mellow guy, but I was a worse rower, so I stopped that. I was like, okay, I want to get serious about my studies. I. I said, can get serious about my studies and writing, right? That's when I actually made the decisions that I'd been stuck with for the next 25 years after that. But one of the things I did to get serious about my studies is I said, I'm going to systematically experiment with how to study for test and how to write papers. And I would try this. How did it go? Deconstruct, experiment. Try this. How to go. Deconstruct, experiment. And active recall was the thing that turned me all around. And so I went from a pretty good student to 40 every single quarter. Sophomore year, junior year, senior year, I got one, a minus. Between my sophomore year through my senior year. It was like this miraculous transformation. It was active recall. I rebuilt all of my studying. So if it was for a humanities class, I had a whole way of taking notes. 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 going to come back and try it again later. Completely transformed. I did so well academically. That's why I ended up writing that book that basically spread that message to other people. So I'm a huge advocate for active recall. It's really hard, but it is the way to learn new things.

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Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a problem. It was a social problem for me that I would have to pretend during finals period that I was going to the library to study because I would be done studying this active recall. It's brutal, but it's incredibly efficient. You sit down there. I would have my cards and I would mark it. Okay, I struggled with this. I'd put it in this pile. I got it done. I'd put it in this pile. And so then you would just go back to the I struggled with it pile and work on that and then make a new I struggle with it pile, and these would exponentially decay and so in, like, a few hours, you could really master, or with a few other tricks that worked, you could really master the material pretty quickly. And then what am I supposed to do? I didn't do all nighters. It wouldn't make any sense. Like, active recall is how you prepare, and it's going to take 4 hours, and it's going to be tough. So do it in the morning when you have energy, and then you're done.

I love it. I learned essentially all of neuroanatomy looking down the microscope at tissue samples. And then I would try and take photographs with my eyes. I do not have a photographic memory, but then I would get home in the evening, look through the 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 basically, I learned neuroanatomy, which 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 kind of move through it, fly through it dynamically, and that it's the same process. Not all things lend themselves to that approach. I'm guessing maybe we could think of a few that don't. I guess if people were learning music, that might be tricky. Maybe they need the sheet music in front of them. I don't know. I'm not a musician.

Yeah, I mean, I studied a professional guitar player at one point.

You were a professional guitar player?

No, I studied one. So for a book, everything's from some book. I've written a lot of books. So I wrote a book ten years ago where I was trying to figure out as part of it, how do people get better at things? And so I spent time with a professional guitar player. I just wanted to see how he practiced. What does this actually look like? And what I learned from them is 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 bluegrassy type licks. He probably had it memorized, and he knew how fast he could comfortably play it. For them, it's all about adding 20% to what they're comfortably doing, and then that push passed where they're comfortable. And the thing I remember writing about him was he was concentrating so hard to try to hit this lick 20% faster than he was used to. It is that he'd forget to breathe. So he'd be like, going, going, and then just gasp because his body would force him to breathe.

So, yeah, there it seemed to be all about deliberate practice. They don't waste any time. Professional musicians waste no time doing things they're comfortable doing every time they spend practicing. And this is also incredibly difficult, but every time they spend practicing 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. It's like the maximal growth, stimulating state. And so I wrote in this chapter, why was he so much better at guitar than I was at the same age? Because I played a lot of guitar when I was younger and was in rock bands, right. And this kid was young, right. But really, really good. And I said, okay, now I realize it. I can recognize me when I look back at my time playing guitar at his age. I played stuff I knew how to play. That's what was fun. Yeah, I want to jam along with the songs I knew or rip some pentatonic scales to a Jimi Hendrix album.

It was fun. And he spent almost no time. The pro spent no time having fun. Practicing was your brain had to know, uncomfortable. So I learned a lot from that. This actually led to a bit of a battle, because my readers, there was this battle that emerged where people were trying to combine Anders Erickson and deliberate practice with Mihaili. Chin sent me high and flow, and really, they were trying to make flow apply everywhere. Like, it's all about flow. Deliberate practice is flow. Everything is flow. The whole thing is to get to a state of flow. And I remember Anders talking about this at some point and saying, no, 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. It's not fun. It's not the skier going down the hill. And it's all instinct. It's all you thinking about exactly what you're trying to do. And so I began to push this point out here.

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 was a lot of fights about this for a while. I think there was a lot of flow advocates that just wanted life to be flow all the time. But I think Anders was right, because I watched these professionals practice. That's what it is. It's not fun.

Well, everything we know about neuroplasticity, which of course, is the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience, says that there needs to be some neurochemical or electrical condition that changes in the nervous system in order to queue up plasticity. And to my knowledge, one of the most robust of those is the release of the so called 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, a state of alertness and often a state of agitation. But if you think about it, in the absence of some neuromodulators, like those that change the conditions for wiring of neurons, everyone loves fire together. Wire together. A beautiful statement by Carla Schatz. Not Donald Hebb. Dr. Carla Schatz said that, not Donald Hebb. But why would neurons need to change their patterns of connectivity? If you can complete the operation? The nervous system needs to. It doesn't feel discomfort, it creates discomfort. But the nervous system needs a cue to like, okay, this is different. I'm failing. And it's the failures that actually trigger the plasticity.

It's the discomfort that cues that. Conditions are different now. Otherwise, there's simply no reason to devote energetic resources to rewiring neurons. And I feel like we don't learn this when we're kids. And I think as kids we can learn so much without that feeling of agitation. We get into these modes of looking for flow, and I have respect for the research on flow and the people who are involved in, but I'd like to talk about flow a little bit. The only thing I really know about flow for sure is that backwards it spells wolf. So what of flow? It's such an attractive idea, right?

It's like Star wars.

It's like you have the force and you're doing things without thinking, and awesome. But I can't flow myself through a paper and extract the critical data. I can't create a podcast in flow. But when it's done, it feels great, especially if you nail the key metrics. So what do you think about flow? I'm not trying to beat up on it. I just want to understand how you place it in the framework of learning and deep work. If it belongs there at all.

It doesn't have a big place in it in the deep work framework. And this was what the controversy was for. A. And I knew Mahaly a little bit. We corresponded some, and I knew Anders a little bit. Like, we corresponded some, so I sort of felt like I was. And both of them actually tragically have died in the last three or four years, I think.

Very sad.

Yeah, I think both recently. Flow doesn't play a big role in the deep work framework. Right. So when I was trying to justify deep work, so why focusing without distraction was important, I was drawing a lot more for Anders work. Right. Because why is focusing without distraction important? Well, you have to quiet the neural circuitry so you can isolate the circuit that's actually relevant to the thing that you're doing. Right. You're not going to get better at something if you have noisy circuitry, and that requires a really intense concentration. So one of the big advantages of deep work was if you're used to that cognitive state, you're going to learn things faster. And I think it was all Anders to understand why. So if you're not distracted, I'm really focusing hard on what I'm doing, trying to learn this new thing. You're giving the right mental conditions, but it's not a flow state. I always used to say, okay, when your deep work is not flow because of this, like a lot of deep work is, you're trying to do something that is beyond your comfort zone, and that's going to be difficult. That's a state of deliberate practice.

And there's a famous paper about this where Anders actually explicitly says, deliberate practice and flow are very different. And I wrote an essay years ago called the father of deliberate practice disowns flow. And again, people are really flow partisans out there. It's interesting. I think people just like the idea because it feels good. But I mean, flow is the feeling of performance is the way I think about it. It's really hard to train for certain sports, but then when you're actually performing, you're in the game, you can fall in the flow, right. Because then everything is undo. It's really hard to train guitar, but when you're performing in front of a big crowd, maybe you fall in the flow, maybe you don't, but you could. Right, but it's the performance state, not the practicing, getting better state. So to me, flow has very little role in how I think about what I do as a cognitive professional. It's just not something that comes up that often.

I agree that we learn through focused work and that flow does manifest itself during performance, and sometimes so much so that people exhibit virtuosity. They're surprising themselves even at what's in there. I always think of it's what is unskilled, skilled mastery, virtuosity. Virtuosity seems to incorporate some random elements of. Maybe even the performer has not done that before, and they surprise themselves or something like that. Who knows? These are words for something that isn't easily quantified in the first place. But in terms of deep work and getting a little bit back to kind of practical steps towards deep work, I also have to ask you, because I didn't earlier, when you are on your laptop, in your library, with your fireplace and these books, it's a beautiful image, actually, that you've drawn for us in our minds. Is the wifi connection to your computer activated or are you offline?

It's connected because it doesn't really matter to me, because what's drawing my attention, the most important decision I think I made, technically speaking, to be a cognitive worker, is the lack of social media. I think we underestimate the degree to which our problem with digital distraction is not the Internet. It's not our phones. It is specific products and services that are engineered at great expense to pull you back to them. When you take that away, the Internet's not that interesting. I don't have a cycle of sites to go to. I can check my email, but I don't really know where else to go. I mean, I could go to the New York Times, I guess. But then you've seen the articles, right? They change it once a day. There's just not much. I've set things up, so there's not much that's that interesting to me.

We've all heard of FOMO, fear of missing out. I feel like there's the other thing, which is fear of missing something bad, right? Sort of like anxiety. A more primitive anxiety within us that if we are not engaged on social media or looking at our phone often or texting often, that it's not that we'll miss the party, we'll miss the emergency. You don't seem to suffer from those kind of everyday ills.

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't happen that much. I mean, I have a phone, a.

Standard no, I mean, I have my.

Phone, I guess, if I'm working away from it. Yeah, I guess it's true if there was an emergency, but this was the case for a very long time. Right. We didn't have smartphones till really relatively recently. This is 15 years ago. So we were just used to this until yesterday, essentially, that there's just periods of time where you're out of touch, like you're at a restaurant with someone, you're out of touch until you get back to your office. Like, we were okay. We weren't plagued by emergencies that led to disastrous results because we couldn't hear about it. Right. Then you go to the movies like you're out of touch. Right. And be a couple of hours, so you're in touch again. And so it's not something that's affected me as much. So maybe I'm working without my phone nearby. A lot of people have this response. They begin sort of catastrophizing, like, what if this happens or this or that? And I'm thinking, I survived before that. My parents survived without that. My grandparents survived without that. I don't worry about it as much. 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 or have my phone, but it really does upset people. Right. There's. Well, what about this? What about that? What about this? And I don't know how much of this is just maybe I'm oblivious and how much of this is people back sliding explanation for why they do need their phone, why they do need to look at all the time, but I get a lot of it.

Well, maybe they're upset and you don't know because you're not looking at your phone. That's right.

I'll tell you what, that's a blessing, not knowing how upset people are at you. Yeah, it's a blessing. As a semi public figure, I'll tell you that.

Yeah, I can comment on that, but I won't. I am on social media and I do enjoy it. I sort of got started posting on Instagram and then expanded to other platforms, including the podcast. But there's a threshold beyond which it becomes counterproductive for sure. I think there's information there. Questions that people ask are often informative. It's sort of like ending a class and asking, are there any questions? Sometimes the comments that people bring back are truly informative towards both where they might have some misunderstanding, but also sometimes some really terrific ideas. So there's that. But I completely agree that this is a very precarious space, and I'll just relay a quick anecdote. Years ago, I gave a quick lecture down at Santa Clara University, south of Stanford, and I was talking about this issue. I recommended your book, and a student came up afterwards and he said, you don't get it. At that time, I was in my early 40s. He said, you don't get it. You grew up without social media and the phone, and so you've adopted it into your life. But we grew up with it. And when my phone, he's speaking for himself in the first person.

When my phone loses power, I feel a physical drain within my body, and when it comes back on, I feel a lift within my body. So I'd love your thoughts on whether or not you think the phone, and perhaps social media as well, are in some ways an extension of our brain. It's almost like another cortical area that contains all this information. It's 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 writing about AI, but to me, when the phone is used in that way, it really is almost like a piece of neural machinery of sorts.

Yeah, I mean, there's two ways of looking at it. So there is the sort of cyborg image, I suppose, right? You're plugging into this neurosphere like you have this sort of digital networked extension of information. What's going on? There's also the much more pessimistic view, which is no, that feeling is the feeling of a moderate behavioral addiction. Right? So you'll hear the same thing from a gambler when I'm away from being able to play, right, to make my bets or do whatever I feel, not myself. And then when I'm around it and I can play, make some bets, play some poker, whatever it is feeling of the chips, I feel myself that chips, right. Both of these things could be true. I think the moderate behavioral addiction side is more true than a lot of us want to admit. Actually, it does feel bad, because moderate behavioral addictions build these feedback response loops. And then you get the dopamine system going when the anticipation, because what's on there is things that have been engineered that you're going to get this sort of highly engaging stimuli and then you see the deliverance of that stimuli, right?

This really nice piece of glass on a piece of metal. I'm going to press this sort of carefully, this icon whose colors have been chosen because we know it's going to hit various parts of our neural alert systems to be as engaging as possible. And I'm going to see something in there that's going to generate some sort of emotional response. So, of course, when you see that thing sitting there, you want to use it, and when you can't, it's a styming dopamine response. You're like, this is not good. I'm uncomfortable. And I think that's a big part of it as well, because I've had this argument with some people, and by the way, I see both sides of this, there are great advantages to what people are doing with these tools. It's just that it's all mixed up with all these disadvantages and it becomes very difficult. It's like the alcohol in the neighborhood bar is too potent and people are going there to socialize and they're coming home at three in the morning, passing out. It's like the balance is off. Not that there's not something good there, but the balance is off. So it becomes pretty difficult to navigate.

So I think some of that's what's going on, especially with the younger generation that was raised on it. Which is why, by the way, I think the cultural norms are going to change around this. I think we're going to think about unrestricted Internet usage, not as something that we just sort of bequeath on youth as they become ten years old, but something that we're actually much more careful about. Probably something that's going to be post pubescent is going to make a lot more sense once you've had more brain development, once you've had more social entrenchment, you sort of understand your identity, et cetera, because we recognize the flip side of plugging this thing into your brain is, yeah, you have access to more information, but it also pumps that into your brain. So, I don't know, I lean a little bit heavier towards the pessimistic read because I know too many people, because of my books, who've really reduced the impact of these things in their lives. And they don't. On the far side of that transformation, they don't typically report a great impoverishment and experience. They don't report, I'm less mentally agile, the information at my fingertips is less.

I'm missing out on life. There's typically this coming out of the fog on the other side of it where they're like, oh, this is fine. I'm a little bit suspicious about exactly what this mechanism is.

Yeah, I think you're right about the moderate behavioral addiction piece. Years ago, when I was starting my lab, I had grants to write, and I found the phone to be pretty intrusive for that process. So I used to give the phone to somebody in my lab and announced to everyone in my lab that if I asked for it back prior to 05:00 p.m. That day, I would give everyone in the lab. I think it was $100 bill. My lab was pretty big at the time. As a junior professor, they did not do not, sorry, academic institutions not to be named, pay us very much, despite what people might think. And it was difficult several times throughout the day or more, I was like, I really want to look at that thing. But the end of the day, I'll tell you that no one got paid. I got my phone back, but it's wonderful the amount of work that you can get done when that thing is out of the room.

Me, it's my, it's my superpower, right? I don't work that hard in the sense that I don't do long hours. I'm not constitutionally suited for long hours. This was never my thing. My brain tires. Right? I mean, I'm good for four and a half good hours a day of actually producing good stuff with my brain, probably Max. But I don't use my phone that much, I don't use the Internet that much, and I prioritize it, and a lot just gets done. It just sort of piles up over time. And there's this sense of like, you must be burning the midnight oil and you have all these things going on. But again, people, I think, underestimate, and they underestimate the impact of this. It's not just the accumulation of time you spend looking on your phone. It's also this network switching cost. Right. Because 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. We can't do that in 2 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. 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 marshaling. Okay, so what semantic networks do we need to start activating here? Oh, we don't need this let's inhibit this. We're not doing that anymore. It takes a while. So what happens then when you have a lot of these quick checks to social media, you're jumping in on email. Back and forth is you have this disaster, catastrophic pile up of aborted task switches happening, right? And so it's not just the total time you're looking at, let's say, email or social media, it's the 15 minutes window. You have to add around each of those checks in which you have this cognitive disorder that really adds up. And then you realize, oh, there was no time during my day in which I was more than 15 minutes away from looking at something that induced a network switch.

The data I like to cite, which was looking at email and slack checks and knowledge workers, this came from rescue time, the software company. The median average interval between checks was five minutes, the median, and the mode was 1 minute in this data set. So it was like we are checking all the time. That means you were never in a state then in your day where you don't have a confused cognitive space, where you don't have partially, you were switching to this task, but then you switch back to this task before that finish, but before you could fully lock in on this task, you look back over here, and so you're spending your entire day in the state of cognitive disorder, which is going to be reduced cognitive output, right? So you get rid of that. I always say 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 it pretty well now I'm done.

This didn't even take that long. So I think people underestimate what's going on here.

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And sure, you might arrive, but you're going to burn far more fuel. It's the least efficient way to go about it. You want to get into that deep groove. And I think when we hear about flow, I feel like, at least for me, that's the sort of notion of flow that I'm looking for, 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. 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.

No. Let's invent a term and you tell me the term makes sense. I'm invented on the fly, but neurosymantic 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 why 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, over time, inhibited most of the unrelated networks that were fired up before. And so you get in this sense of, it's hard. Maybe I'm not losing track of time, but I'm all focused on know, I'm grappling with the bear here, 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 that cognitive disaster of. I'm constantly network switching back and forth. So we'll call it neurosymantic coherence. I'm going to coin that term, because you have this coherence of the semantic neural networks on what you're doing.

And that's the feeling of I'm getting after this hard problem, 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 what does it actually feel like in your head when you're solving a math proof? It's a lot of you hold this here, and then you try to get to the next step by doing this, and it doesn't work. But you have to keep holding this here, which takes a lot of concentration. Okay, let me try this. That didn't work either, but this looked promising. Okay, so now I need to go back and in my mind's eye, update this setup, and now let me try this. So, it's a lot of holding things in your working memory and keeping them loaded while you try an extension and then evaluating how that worked without. And so it requires just internal concentration, which isn't pleasant. But in neurosymantic coherence, it's all that's happening in your world in that proof. So maybe that's what we should be pitching. What people should be looking for is, yeah, forget flow, but also remember this default where you're like, the rescue time data set, participants checking email once every five minutes.

That's cognitive nonsense. That's crazy. That's like, you're trying to play football and you're covering over one of your eyes and wearing, like, a 50 pound ruck sack on. You're just, like, handicapping your abilities here for no reason. Right? So what's in between is this idea, and that requires focus.

It requires deep work or 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, and then going back and trying a totally different play set.

Right.

At risk of throwing too many analogies and stories, I'll just briefly say I went and saw the play in New York with my sister this year. I think it was Harry Potter and the cursed child or something like that. I didn't really enjoy the play that much, but the set stuff was amazing. And they have this magic library, I think is very relevant here, where essentially the book that you open has a certain topic. I don't know, maybe it's spells or something. It's Harry Potter again, fun show, but great set stuff. Didn't really resonate with me too much, in any event. And then the books around it change their topic 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, the books around it change, they become either more specific, there might be a distant but related idea that could lend itself to creativity. So, sort of that's the way the brain works in cognition, is that we get into a frame of a certain discussion or a certain theme, and the books on the shelf change according to their relatedness based on memory of past, what's going on now, and plans for the future.

I think anytime we change context and we look at a raccoon video on Instagram or our calendar and, oh, there's that thing, the books become very scattered. So when we return to it, there's a lot more friction, a lot more work or neural energy required to get back into this narrow states of cognition.

That exactly explains sort of my experience and the way I think about it. Yeah, because it takes time to load up these sort of relevant, these secondary and tertiary semantic ideas, and now they're there, so, like, you can pull from them, and then as you shift you have to sort of shift this whole thing around, and that takes a lot of concentration. I mean, I wrote this article once that got me a little bit of trouble. Not trouble, but mild trouble. But it was called for the Chronicle of higher education. And the title they gave it was, is email making professors stupid, which wasn't my title.

You basically called every one of your colleagues stupid. We all check email.

The dean at the time did call me in for lunch, but actually, 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? 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 should maybe think about, like, at universities, we need to be explicitly not just teaching how to think, but also modeling the life of the mind at the highest level. And so this idea that we just allow the professor Sarit to be drowned in emails and tasks and be as distracted, it's the main war that every research professor has is, 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 these citadels of concentration. I said, if you want to get the best academics in the world to your university, just tell them, here's at the top of our contract.

You will not be assigned an email address. Like, you're going to get Nobel laureates coming from all over the country to come to this place. And so I was making this argument, we should think a lot more about thinking. We should talk more about it. We should model it exactly the type of things you're talking about, but we don't. It's much more contents focused. But really, this should be something more that we get into specifically, like, this is how you actually use the mind to produce innovative, interesting, high value new cognitive artifacts. This is a very hard thing we're asking you to do, but you can apprentice here because this is what we do, and we've mastered, and we're going to teach you how to do it. But we never have that sort of meta conversation, a 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. University was how to take the thing in your head and really put it to work, really extract out of it.

As capabilities or even high school or even elementary school level.

I agree.

Yeah. You have kids. Do they have smartphones?

No. Yeah.

How do they feel about that?

Well, I mean, they're not old enough yet, that it's a real problem, but they're not going to be happy with me probably soon.

Hate me now, love me later, as.

My mother used to say, basically, because I'm convinced, having spent some time thinking about this, writing about this, doing some journalism on this, talking to a lot of the experts, that I think where we're going to end up, where all the arrows from the relevant social psych research, which I've been following this research since 2017, 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 and smartphones on young people. And you can track this, right? I have a talk I actually gave at my kids school. I'm happy about this, where I tracked how this research evolved. And like any literature, it's contentious at first, and then you begin to see concilience between different lines of evidence, and I think where everything now in the last couple of years is starting to come together. This idea of, we don't really know if this is bad or not. I think that's just an old take. The research has moved past that, and I think where we're landing on is unrestricted Internet use. Pre puberty is risky, and the new standard is going to be post puberty is probably the right time to be given a device that gives you unrestricted access.

We're talking like, 16 is probably the appropriate age. So this does not make me popular at the middle school, where my oldest son's about to go. I think in two or three years, that's just going to be common sense. This is the direction I see the research literature and the advocacy going. And I think there's a solid ground for this.

Because you're a computer scientist, I can ask this question, what about video games? I'm not a big consumer of video games. It's been years since I've played one, in fact. But video games are so very different than smartphones and other technologies because they seem to put at least the kids I've observed playing them and adults into a very narrow trench of attention.

Yeah, there are definitely issues with it. Look, I'm not a social psychologist. I just sort of play one in my articles. But I've looked into this literature a lot. There's a bit of a gendered breakdown that has a lot of overlaps where when they're looking at potential harms of these technologies, young adolescents, right. Pre adolescent young adolescents, you tend to see social media to be more a signal for cognitive distress for young women and girls and the video games to actually be the bigger culprit for young men and boys, right. There is a bit of a difference here, because with the social media impact, the content of what's happening matters in this picture, right? So what I'm seeing, the engagement I'm having, how this impacts my social life, this is part of the mental distress with video games. It seems to be more an impact of just disharmonious passion and obsession. Just the time it takes, right. Because the games can be incredibly addictive. So the problem that young men are having are just. They're playing it all the time. I'm staying up late because I have an iPad in my room and I'm 14, and I am going to play Fortnite until three in the morning because my brain cannot handle what you're giving me here.

Right. So it's less of a content concern than it is just a time concern. Right. That seems more solvable to me. Like my solution with my own kids, I don't mind video games. I'm a computer scientist, but I say nothing that's online, nothing that was free, because if it was free, that means their business model involves getting you to play it all the time so you can upcharge or whatever. They have Nintendo switches. Like, I like Nintendo. Okay, Nintendo Switch. Here's a $60 Zelda game that someone spent five years making or whatever. You can only play those games so long at a time. Before 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 play that till their eyes bleed because those are meant to be addictive. So I'm wary about video games. But there it's all just a usage game, so you stick away from the more addictive games. It's a much easier problem to solve, I think, than the social media issue.

Earlier you talked about books. I still read hardcover and paperback books. What are your thoughts on audiobooks and learning by way of audiobook 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, 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. Fiction is fine. That's great. Let me put a thriller on audible. Great. I'll listen through it. And I think some of this might be particular to my engagement with books, which is, I'm a writer and a thinker, so I'm constantly looking for ideas. And so I might have a different engagement with a nonfiction book than someone just listening to one of my books, but I can only do fiction on audio.

That makes sense, thinking about what works for me, what doesn't. I agree. I love stories and fiction by 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. In your most recent book, you describe this concept of pseudoproductivity. Is pseudoprotivity a general term to refer to some of the things we've already talked about? This task switching, context switching, or pseudoproductivity, something that includes other categories of limiting ourselves as well?

I think it's more specific than that. Right. So, to me, soda productivity was the answer that we came up with in knowledge work to a real dilemma, which is, that's a sector using your brain primarily to create value. That's a sector that emerged as a major part of the economy in roughly the mid 20th century. When that emerged, all the definitions of productivity that we had were inspired from agriculture and industry, right? So, in agriculture, we can have ratios, bushels of corn per whatever, acres of land under cultivation. In industrial manufacturing, we have ratios, model t's per input, labor hour. So you could just measure these things. We also had clearly defined systems of production. So you could then say, if I change this about the system of production, what happens to this number? And you could do gradient descent, right? Okay, I do this, that number goes down. Let's not do that. If I make this change, it goes up. That's a better way of building it. This was the dominant way of thinking about productivity since basically Adam Smith. The knowledge work arises. That doesn't work. Right? Because I'm working on whatever, five different things.

It's different than what you are working on. How I'm managing my work is entirely obfuscated. Right. In knowledge work, organizational ideas is entirely left up to the individual. How you manage your work and your workload and collaboration, that's 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 pseudo productivity, which is okay, in the absence of being able to be quantitative about this, we will use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. So that's it. We see you doing things. That's better than not. The more we see you doing, the better. I call that pseudoproductivity. And I think that's implicitly how we've been organizing the management of knowledge, work and labor since the 1950s.

And when you say visibility, people doing things, 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 technocritic. I see everything through the lens of technology in my writing. We got computers, we got networks, we got email. Pseudo productivity can't be 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 grained level. And essentially everywhere and anywhere, all throughout my day, I can be demonstrating labor. At home, I can be demonstrating labor because we have mobile computing, we get the smartphone revolution. So there's now an ability to constantly be demonstrating effort at all points of our day. And that's where I think the wheels came off the bus, right? And led to this point that got worse and worse, starting the early two thousand 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?

All I do is Zoom all day. What's happening? I think that's pseudo productivity plus front office it revolution. They did not play nice together. And you can see this, by the way, if you look even at productivity books, you see this huge shift that happens early 90s versus early 2000s. It's like a completely shift in tone, right? Early 90s, it's Stephen covey, it's very optimistic. It's like how are we going to self actualize and carefully choose the most meaningful activities to fulfill all of our dreams for all of our roles. Early 2000s. Now we have email, you have David Allen. It's like, oh my God, we're so overwhelmed with task. All we can hope for is like these little moments of Zen in the day. If we can just automate how we're just churning through these widgets, at least we can find some cognitive piece. What happened in those ten years was the front office it revolution. And now we just felt like we had to constantly be demonstrating that visible effort. So I think that's where we got into the problem. Pseudo productivity plus technology.

Recently, my podcast team was in Australia, and my producer and close friend here, Rob Moore, instructed all of us to get rid of social media on our phones, except one guy who would post our weekly episodes announcements. And it was pretty brutal at first. And then coming back to social media has actually turned out to be more challenging. You really experience the friction coming back the other way, and then one experiences the lack of friction, and that's where it gets scary. It's so interesting the way that the brain can adapt the friction, leaving something behind, the friction coming back to it. And I think for people listening to this, I raise this because I think, of course, many people listening have work that they really need to focus on. They may be having issues with productivity and burnout, et cetera. I think a lot of people use the phone and social media because it fills their life. It provides some enrichment, and they aren't necessarily committed to specific projects. But I guess through the lens of, let's just call it the Cal Newportian lens, one might argue that those people almost certainly have untapped creativity, untapped resources within them that they don't yet know about because they're essentially using that energy elsewhere.

Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's papering over the void. You have this void in your life because there's unmet potential, unmet interest, living in misalignment with the things you care about, right? I mean, a lot of people, this is the classic sort of catastrophe of life, right? Social media. And before this, it was other things, right? There was other intoxicants or other sorts of distractions. It's a way for some people of essentially putting a screen over that gaping void, and it just makes it bearable enough that you can kind of go on with life. And so it is true, if you just rip it out, you see the void. And that's really difficult, right? Because I did this experiment for one of my books. I ran an experiment with 1600 people. And they all turned off all their social media for 30 days.

30 days.

30 days, right.

These are young people, old people.

A whole mix. A whole mix, right.

Not just university students.

I recruited them from my newsletter readership. So they weren't university students and it wasn't formal research. It was. 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 through this. And then I got a lot of information back. So people reported back how it went. And this was like the number one thing I heard was, it's really hard at first, right? And so who are the people that succeeded for 30 days versus those who didn't? The 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, and I don't want to do a bad thing. I'm just going to hold on to the table to white knuckles. They wouldn't make it 30 days. The people who did succeed followed my advice to incredibly aggressively pursue alternatives in those 30 days. So it's like, go learn new hobbies, join things right away. Get 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 all the books are free and you could just grab whatever, and it's okay if you don't like the book because you didn't have to pay for it. I'm going out with friends again. Okay. Every week 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 the 30 days and beyond. Right. And so then I came to realize, like, oh, I see. What's happening here is you have these unmet needs. These tools can give you sort of a simulacrum of meeting them. I'm a social being. I need to be connected to people. Well, I'm texting and doing comments on social media. It sort of touches that a little bit, just enough that you don't feel hopelessly lonely. But it's not really fulfilling that I have a need to see my intentions made manifest concretely in the world. Humans want to do this. Well, I'm posting these things and people are responding.

It's sort of this simulacrum of real creation. So it's like, kind of satisfying that just enough that it's not just intolerable. Right. And so what happens is if you remove that, you have to actually fill those things the right way. So now I'm not socializing on social media, but I'm going out of my way to sacrifice time and attention on behalf of other people. I'm filling the social void in the right way. Now I don't really feel like I need to go back. I'm actually making my intentions manifest. I'm learning skills and building things now this sort of pseudoconstruction and collective attention economy of social media. I'll post this and you'll like it. I'll like this. I don't need that anymore to fill that void. So it's like you have to fill the void first. Five years ago, I wrote a book that was about reforming this part of your life. And a lot of the book had nothing to do with technology, but about how to actually just rebuild parts of your life. And on my podcast, honestly, one of the big topics we talk about, which is crazy that I'm a technologist and I write about trying to find focus in a distracted world, is this thing we call the deep life, which is just straight up building a meaningful life 101.

And it's like, crazy that my podcast is talking about it. But on the other hand, it's not, because my is the podcast people go to when they're fed up with the digital world. And it turns out if you don't get the analog world working right for you, you need something to avoid staring into that void. And the digital world will do that well enough. It's like just good enough to keep life tolerable.

There's a lot of discussion nowadays about ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, sometimes minus the H, minus the hyperactivity. A lot of kids have true clinically diagnosed ADHD, so we want to be sensitive to that. It's a real issue for a lot of people. A lot of adults have true ADHD, but nowadays, people talk about ADHD the same way. Terms like depression, trauma, gaslighting, and et cetera are discussed in non clinical territory.

OCD clinically as well.

Right. And I'm not disparaging that. It's just that we have sort of a dilution of deeper understanding of what these things really are and aren't. What are your thoughts? I realize you're not a psychiatrist, but what are your thoughts on the idea that many people that think they perhaps have true attention issues have either built those attention issues through neuroplasticity into their system, meaning their system probably worked, nervous system probably worked pretty well to focus, but they gaged in enough task switching that the circuits of the brain involved in cognition became optimized for this very distributed cognition, as opposed to narrow, focused attention. And what are your thoughts about just the amount of stimulant use on college campuses and in adult populations to try and overcome this? I feel like there's a lot of attempts to use pharmacology to match the level of distraction, to try and make that distraction not seem like distraction. But 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. You don't need pills, you need a different phone relationship. My optimistic hypothesis is, again, this non clinical difficulty with maintaining attention, like in your work or if you're a college student or whatever, it's not necessarily representing, sort of knock on wood, like a wholesale neural rewiring. I've basically rewired my circuits on my brain to be a sort of distributed switching processor. I think most of this is persisting in that much more malleable area that gets affected by moderate behavioral addictions. Right. So we have parts of the brain that are part of these, like, feedback reward loops that's meant to be malleable. Right? I mean, this is supposed to be so we can have really rapid learning about what's happening in our environment and how we're supposed to respond to it. And this is what gets hijacked. When you build up these behavioral addictions, it's very quick to change. But that malleability means you can change it back. Right. I think this drive to. I have to keep checking my email or my phone is.

Again, you build up a moderate behavioral addiction because of standard reward cues. And that's a part of the brain that it's difficult, but it's not. Your whole brain is now a social media brain, and that's just the brain you have because you're exposed to this. It's a matter of getting this stimuli out of your life, doing the same type of training you would do, boredom exposure, like get used to the idea of feeling that drive and not actually doing it. You can work with blocking apps, like, there's stuff you can do. This is sort of like standard. It's painful, it takes two months, and then 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 rewirings, but are like absolutely sort of expected outcomes of working with malleable reward queue circuits in the brain. We can fix those just like we can if you're gambling too much or compulsively eating the junk food or something. We don't say your whole brain got rewired for junk food. It's like, no, you have this particular cue cycle that we have to work on.

So maybe I'm being optimistic there and you know the brain better, but it would be extraordinary if in like a ten year period, right, your entire brain somehow got rewired in a way that it couldn't sustain focus anymore.

I totally agree with that statement. Unless you're a young person and you grew up in a distracted world and your brain optimized, as the young brain does, for the conditions it's in. And then I think you have a real issue, which is not to say it can't be rescued through the use of discipline tools, protocols, pharmacology, nutrition, great sleep, and if necessary, prescription drugs, right? Because there is a case for prescription drugs in certain instances for ADHD. And as I understand it, anytime people say, wait, aren't those drugs just meth? Isn't it just speed? Yes, they are amphetamines in most cases. And the idea is to increase the deployment of certain neuromodulators, the ones 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 do worry about young people.

I think it's akin to putting them in a kind of a. Well, we know this in the visual system, if you take an animal or human and you put them into an altered visual environment, the visual system changes and your perception of the visual world 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 ten years or so, 1015 years, we've been raising kids in a sort of house of fun house mirror things, which is anything but fun, where you look at yourself and your legs are shorter than and your torso is long, and so everywhere you turn, you're getting a distorted perception and trying to navigate the world through that distorted perception is very difficult. You can do it, but it's a lot of extra work. That's what I feel we've done to young people.

I'm very concerned about that as well. Yeah. I don't know what your take on this, but 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, et cetera, because maybe there's a reduced cognitive focus capacity, which is like the key skill for this sort of very artificial thing of learning, complicated college level work. I think this would be an interesting experiment to find out, is have we been implicitly having to sort of simplify things to keep, roughly speaking, grade distributions where normatively we feel comfortable? I mean, do we see the signal yet? That's my interest. Do we see the signal yet? If we look back a generation, 20 years ago versus now, I don't know.

For courses of the sort that I teach or taught until very recently, I still teach, but I was directing the 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. You can try use VR, but it ain't the same. I mean, how would you like it if your neurosurgeon learned on a virtual brain and then does surgery on a real brain? No such thing should happen. I think that my experience with this is perhaps most relevant with respect to social media, where I teach neuroscience, and I use a variety of duration of clips, the 92nd reel, the seven minute thing, the two and a half hour podcast. We have solo podcasts that are four and a half hours. I don't know how many people listen start to finish, but I think having a variety of different durations really helps. And I'm told by my team I have a TikTok account, although I've never logged on there. I think TikTok represents the extreme of kind of bubblegum level information entertainment, and they really nailed 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.

And I don't think that's anything like a real understanding or education. Yeah, it's nothing like a real understanding or education.

Yeah. I mean, TikTok in particular, I think something. What people get wrong about TikTok is they think that there was a real algorithmic innovation, which is actually not the case. As far as I understand, the machine learning algorithm underneath TikTok is probably like a relatively standard sort of multi arm bandit, intermittent feedback reinforcements algorithm. All they did is they cleared out all the other. You know, if you're Facebook or something like this, you're trying to use algorithms to curate things, but you have all these other legacy structures you also have to try to satisfy. There's friends, and you want to show stuff that your friends like more than other people, and there's groups you're joining. TikTok just got rid of all the noise, and so all we're doing is optimizing watch time. We don't know, but we think watch time is the main thing that they're optimizing. We want to optimize it. Watch time and everything, all these videos all just exist as multidimensional points in this sort of semantic cloud. And all we're doing is just showing you things, and then you swipe another thing. Swipe another thing. So when you get rid of all the noise from a machine learning algorithm, it doesn't also have to satisfy that I follow this person on Instagram, or, this is my friend.

All I have to do is optimize this one number. How long did they watch before they swiped? It just turns out like, oh, it's really easy. You do that for a couple hours, you're going to hone in on these subregions in this massive multidimensional space of stuff that just tickles this particular person's brain. And it's very cybernetic, because now I'm the user of TikTok, I'm the content creator. I'm getting immediate feedback, what's working, what's not. I really quickly find these particularly rich regions in this sort of cybernetic. So it's like TikTok just purified something that was simple, basic machine learning, but just, like, purify what we're doing here. And that turned out to be enough to create what's probably the most addictive force we've seen in the digital world in a long time.

So TikTok is optimized for dwell time.

Yeah, that's the thought. Right? Because it's not public. So we don't exactly know how the algorithm works, but people have been studying it like a skinner box, 100 phones. And we look at all these accounts, looking at the variables, it seems like that's largely what it's optimizing for, is how long did you watch before you swiped? And that's it. This was both what was smart about TikTok and also why I've been arguing it's destabilized the whole traditional social media narrative is because the traditional massive social media players of the last decade had this first mover advantage on these giant actual social networks, right? So, like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram had these massive networks of people's preferences of, I'm following this person and this person I'm following. And they could leverage these actual social graphs as a huge source of producing interesting content, right? And this was a huge first mover advantage because it's hard to get 100 million people to use something now, right? TikTok got rid of all that. We don't want a social graph. You, as a user, don't have to declare anything. You don't have to follow people or say who your friends are.

We'll just start showing you things. And that was more compelling than what you could generate with a social graph. But now there's no first mover advantage. So as the big social media players follow the TikTok model, which is much more algorithmic, let's just try to curate based on algorithms, not who you follow or who your friends are. They're now much more vulnerable because TikTok could come along and do this without having to spend five years getting people to clear their friends, and now someone else could come along and do this. So I think the major players are giving away their competitive advantage, which is the social graph IP that no one will ever replicate again. They're giving away that advantage, and now it's a free for all playing field of all sources of attention, engagement. So I don't know. I think TikTok accidentally destabilized the social media decade that had been defining, until, I think, just recently.

What I find so interesting about social media platforms like TikTok is that, sure, it makes sense that kids and teens would use it, they were raised with it, Snapchat, et cetera. But when I see my peers, who we call ourselves adults, people in their mid to late forty s, fifty s, essentially playing kids games or engaging through these platforms that are. They're not childlike necessarily, but they just prove that, or rather, that their adherence addiction to them just proves that this is tapping into some core neural circuit that exists in everyone. So while it might be shaping the young brain a lot, this is adults basically eating junk food all day. Which raises a question. I think while there are many different ways to eat, and that's not a topic we want to get into now, Lord knows that's a great way to create a lot of social media content. Debating which diet omnivore, carnivore vegan, et cetera. The notion of intermittent fasting, limiting one's portion of the day, where they eat to whatever, 6 hours, 4 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 not turning wifi on, if people are, are not as disciplined as you are with the laptop or tablet for the first 2 hours of the day or 4 hours of the day, or for a portion of the day, sort of like you're taking a social media fast that isn't 30 days, which I think for a lot of people is going to evoke high cortisol release.

Just the idea of it.

Yeah. This is an idea I've 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 what I was arguing in that chapter was exactly what you're talking about. You should have some moments every day where you're free from distraction, even though you could be accessing distraction and you want to, and like a little bit each day, 20 minutes each day, and then maybe a longer session once a week, like a couple of hours. My argument for that was it's about breaking a pavlovian connection in this sense. Right. So if it's every time I feel bored, I'm lack of novel stimuli, I get this release of the phone. Your mind is really going to make that association of like, this is what we always do. If sometimes you don't, it's a different cognitive landscape. Right. Your mind is, 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, your mind's like, I've been here before.

We don't always get the distraction. So this is going back early 20th century psychology. There's probably a more neuroscientific way to think about this, but it's like breaking pavlovian loops. If, like sometimes at the end of the day, I'm exhausted, it's Instagram time and it scratches an itch. But other times I'm bored, I'm in line at the pharmacy and I don't look at the phone, my brain learns, like, yeah, we don't always do it. The idea is that 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 super uncomfortable with boredom. Don't go seeking it. I'm not a big believer of in boredom is where all creative insight comes from. I think it's a strong evolutionary cue, like, leave this state, but you do have to have some tolerance for it.

I wonder if we need a different word than boredom. Are you familiar with this notion of gap effects in learning? These gap effects are similar to the effects of neural processing during sleep. Focused attention with some agitation triggers neuroplasticity in learning. But it's during sleep, in particular, deep sleep, rapid eye movement, sleep, states of deep rest, maybe in some forms of meditation, that the actual rewiring takes place. And then there's this literature about gap effects, which have been demonstrated for music, for math, for many things, in which if people, say, are practicing new scales on the piano, for instance, but it can be any skill, and then they intermittently are queued by a buzzer to just stop and do nothing. The hippocampus, which is involved in learning memory, replays the action, sometimes in reverse, just as it occurs during sleep, at a rate of maybe 20 or 30 times faster at the neural level. We're not talking about boredom. What we're talking about is pauses, during which perhaps we are obtaining accelerated neuroplasticity. The gap effects certainly accelerate learning. I've talked about these in other podcasts, but I wonder whether or not this thing that you're calling boredom.

So, being in line to get some groceries and not taking one's phone out while the checker is 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 reviews. So I don't know if you've had this experience, but you're, like, reviewing a paper. I often have this experience where, when I'm first engaging with the paper, I feel incredibly frustrated. I don't quite understand what they're doing here. This mathematics isn't quite making sense to me, and it'll often be the fact I come back later. Well, let me just write up what I have so far. And your understanding is much, much better. Right. So there's this sense of maybe something's being processing. I took that so seriously, especially a postdoc. Like, when I was at the height of. Just. All I do in my life is produce value with my brain. Every day I would do what I call Thoreau walks because I discovered Thoreau while a grad student. I read it down by the Charles, like the full sort, know, just minus the beret, like, pretentious grad student thing. But I was really in the walden real influential book for me. So every day when I would walk back, I was living on Beacon Hill, walking from MIT.

So people who know Boston, it's going across the Longfellow bridge. I would say nothing but nature observation. That's what doing. I'm just, oh, the ICE is thinner on the Charles today. Look at this tree. Or the leaves coming back partially. I think what was going on is 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 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. To me, that was a very productive period of my life.

Yeah. I feel like in the last 510 years, thanks largely in part to Matt Walker's book, why we sleep 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 resources to trying to get the best possible night's 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 embrace not the notion of boredom per se, but the notion of gaps, lack of external stimuli coming into 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. And I think it's 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, Cal, but maybe we'll just have you rename boredom as neural rewiring epochs or something like that.

I'll come up with a 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 and just having the language around it really matters. Like, it's a deep work. Oh, okay. That's, like, this activity. I kind of knew that was important, but I didn't have a name. Or digital minimalism, like, oh, yeah, I kind of know what that means. It's a different philosophy towards it. So I do have a name related to the gaps we're talking about, 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 the one negative effect, which was the pavlovian connection to distraction. The other one I've written about before is solitude deprivation. 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 just isolated. But there's a cognitive, psychological definition of solitude, which means absence of stimuli created by other human minds. So I'm not taking in information that's coming directly from another human mind having no period with this solitude.

So having no period in your day where you're free from stimuli created from other minds is solitude deprivation. And it's a real issue, and partially it's a real issue, because when we're processing input from another human brain, it's all hands on deck, right? I mean, we're very social beings. A huge portion of our brain is dedicated to this, right? So it's a very cognitively expensive activity. When I'm trying to understand another human's, what they're saying, I'm simulating their mental state. I'm trying to understand where do they fall in this sort of social hierarchy? And one of my arguments was, when you spend your entire day in that state, it's exhausting and anxiety producing. And intel. We had smartphones and ubiquitous wireless Internet. The idea that you could banish all solitude from your day is laughable. It's just impossible. So, of course, we had a lot of portions of our day where our brain was not ramped up in gear four, the sort of social processing mode. But smartphones makes it possible that you can be in that mode all day long. And so 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 another negative effect of the constant. We have two negative effects now for the constant stimuli and one positive effect for the absence of the constant stimuli. So I think we're making a case here for not always being on your device.

Yeah, I agree. One of my favorite literatures from neuroscience is I think most people have heard of the so called critical period, stages of development, when the brain is essentially hyperplastic to any input. For better or worse, this is a stage of life called childhood. And then, of course, people throughout the number 25 after age 25, plasticity is possible, requires more effort, tension, et cetera, 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 blackened room with no input, but you essentially limit the amount of sensory input in the period that follows, you get an opportunity for a hyperplastic response to any stimuli. And this just makes sense if you understand basics about signal, the noise in the visual system and the brain. It just means when there's a lot of background chatter of stuff, it's harder to see the stuff that matters and the stuff that the brain should rewired to very computer sciency, neuroengineering type perspective. But yes, I would love for you to come up with a two word description of this.

It's not boredom induced plasticity. It's this quiet induced hyperplasticity or something. I don't know. Maybe we can riff on this together sometime. Not trying to move into your space, but I have a very practical question, and I'd love to get a little more insight into the structure of your days. But are you a list maker? Like, do you wake up in the morning and make lists and cross things off and then decide what are the key items on that list?

No, I'm a time blocker.

Time blocker?

Yeah. 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 pick my kids up from school here. Here's the actual hours of the day that are free and where they fall. All right, what do I want to do with that time? Well, okay, now that I see that there's a lot of gaps in the middle of the day here, they're short. Maybe there. I'm going to do a lot of small, non convoy demanding thing. Oh, this 1st, 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 of this since I was an undergrad. You give your time a job as opposed to having a list which is somewhat orthogonal to what's actually happening your day. And then just as you go through your day saying, what do I want to try to do next? Which I think is a lot less.

Efficient, I'm going to try your method. I try and structure my days as much as I can, but it just never quite works. Do you work late into the night or.

No, I'm a 530 man.

Okay.

Yeah.

So 05:30 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, 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 my kids went to bed. Now they're older and they don't go to bed as early. So it's like the one thing I have left that I'll do after or 530 is like every once in a while I'll do like a 90 minutes 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 hour schedule. That's my commitment. I work in these hours and then work downstream from that for everything else. So this controls even what you decide to bring into your life because, you know, I can't go past a schedule. And it drives you to be more innovative in how you deal with your time and schedule. You have to be efficient because you only have these hours here. That's been a signal for my life since I was in my early 20s.

Fix the schedule and don't work outside of that schedule. Now it's your move to figure out anything you want to do. You have to make that work. You want to become a professor, figure out how to make that work. You want to write books while you're being a professor, figure out how to make that work. You don't have the option of just throwing hours at it. And you innovate a lot. I think when you have the constraints.

That where do 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 ask about this is because I think nowadays, hopefully people understand that exercise and cognitive function are inextricably linked and we're all going to live longer lives and be sharper mentally by doing exercise.

Yeah. So, I mean, my main actual working with weights, I do this pre dinner, and this was the innovation of the last couple of years. It's fantastic psychologically. For me, this is a transition from work to family time after work. So I'll do like 45, 50 minutes garage gym that we built during COVID after I'm done working before dinner. And once you get used to that, it also forces you to, like, God, finish work. Because I got to get this in before dinner. But then I'll do also quite a bit of walking if it's not a teaching day. So I'm not on campus. I do a lot of thinking on foot, 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 my serious exercise now is always pre dinner. Then I want to be up in our room by ten, and then at that point I don't track. So I have insomnia issues, which actually has been like, key driver of a lot of the things I think about, especially with slow productivity, is I'm very wary because I can, without any control on my own, just find myself unable to sleep, sometimes fall asleep or stay asleep.

Fall asleep, yeah. I mean, I used to get it really bad. Not so bad now, but it comes and goes. That really affected the way I thought about productivity because it seemed like to me, 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 every day being able to just hammer on a bunch of stuff, I'm very busy, I have lots of commitments. What would happen if I couldn't sleep? I wouldn't be able to do that. So I drifted naturally towards a definition of productivity, which was, it doesn't really matter if you work tomorrow, but it is important that this month you work like writing a book. It doesn't matter if you work on your book chapter tomorrow in particular, but like this month, you have to spend a lot of time working on it. So it was like an insomnia compatible definition of productivity was sort of morphed into this idea of slow productivity, taking your time with it. So it's interesting. So sleep issues really shaped the way I thought about work and put me on these much longer timescales 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 ten days. We're going to make this deal happen. I can't operate in that space because I worry about it anytime my brain could betray me and I could lose sleep for a couple of days.

I think it's really important that you're sharing this, because while people's challenges differ, I think oftentimes people hear the content of my podcast or other podcasts and think I have to have everything dialed in just right, when in fact, most all of the tools and protocols that have been discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast are in response to a particular challenge that I've had or that others close to me have had. And I love this. I'm sorry that you suffer from insomnia. We have a series on sleep with Matt Walker in which he lays out some great tools that we haven't yet discussed on the podcast. I'll just send you, text you, I'll call you with a short list of those, and hopefully they'll help. But we do cover insomnia in some depth. But I think it's important that people realize that they can be very productive with the hours that they have and the moments or hours of high focus clarity that they have, even if they're not sleeping great, even if they're raising small children, because that's the real world. And certainly that's the real world of deadlines and academia, but family and colds and flus and travel and jet lag and arguments and all the happy stuff, too, vacations.

So sounds like you're very good at adapting your day to what's going on around it, but that you have certain sort of committed time. Am I correct in assuming that you have at least one period of, say, 60 to 90 minutes of real, what you would call deep work, let's say at least five days a week? I know that might be an underestimate, but it seems like that's what I'm extracting from this.

That's the goal, right? So, to me, depending on the season is how extreme that can get. So the busiest season would be like a teaching semester, right? But even then, I'm going to make sure that five days a week I'm starting with deep work, and the non teaching days, I'll have more than the teaching days. Compare that to the summer, for example, where 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, 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 unhappy, right? Because, I mean, I keep coming back to this as, okay, because I'm not going to be able to. I mean, fortunately, the insomnia hasn't bothered me in years, but the threat of it completely shaped the way I think about things. And because I know I'm never going to have sort of like an Elon Musk style energy of like, I can just take on seven companies and make it happen.

Right.

I just don't have that ability. I've always focused on the long game, and to me, the long game plays out with, get your deep work time in, just keep working on the stuff you do best and get better at it. Tomorrow doesn't matter. But if you're doing this most days for the next four months, that's going to matter. And so I often think about productivity in my own life. At the scale of decades, what do I want to do in my 20s? Okay, what do I want to do in my 30s? What do I want to do in my forty s? And that helps in my thirty s? I had a lot of young kids. Yeah. I mean, the amount of time I could spend total working is much less. Right. But I could still think about, what do I want to do in my 30s? How do I make that happen? Let me make sure I'm pushing on those things. Then everything else I can adapt to, I can give here and there. It allows you to be very adaptable when you're thinking about what do I want to do for the next ten years.

It also means you're not on a random Tuesday chiding yourself, because why didn't I get three more hours of work in? That becomes sort of a nonsensical question when what you care about is what happens in the next decade? Which is, that's a long game. It's not about hustling today. It's about, I came back to deep work day after day after day when other people got distracted by TikTok, 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, which at that time was great, and we won a few they won a few. But there's something very addictive about those Netflix shows. They're unbelievably addictive. Just even seeing the slider next episode Slider come up, you can skip the intro. It's just like they've just dialed it in. So I suggest those to competitors all the time, not 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, I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, perhaps to use the restroom or something, and then starting another episode of Ozark. It was wild. And I wonder whether or not a way to reverse engineer one's way to productivity, reverse hack our way to productivity, would be to think about all the ways that you would benevolently deploy distraction for a competitor and then ask yourself 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.

Because I think that one task, I think, for us today is to try and think about for the person listening to this, who's not an academic, who's hearing about all this distraction that enjoys some social media, how can they bring about the best version of themselves in terms of productivity, but also presence for family, presence with self, et cetera? And if one isn't in a competitive environment, then 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, I like this idea of thinking about my competitor. What would really give me a leg up. Am I 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, give yourself a break on everything else, too. You know what I mean? It's like, I'm this way with, if I'm getting in my writing time, I have to write. I'm very uncomfortable when I'm not writing. I just write all the time. Articles, books. I'm always writing. If I'm getting in my writing time, then it's like, okay, the rest of the day, maybe this week was kind of a loss. Like, the kids were homesick, or there was a crisis at the university or whatever. And I'm just trying to keep that under control and have good productivity habits and don't context switch too much and don't be too distracted, but still have your fixed tail to productivity. Like, end at 530 every day and time block and try to be reasonable with that time limit the damage.

But if I'm doing the thing that ultimately really matters, I'm going to be pretty happy with it. So it's like moving the definition of am I happy with what I'm producing away from a quantity metric and to this more am I aggregating the quality reps? And I think in weightlifting, this would make a lot more sense, right? It's like, yeah, there's a certain number of, a certain amount of time under load each muscle group needs to be on. And if I'm doing that, I'm happy. If I'm weightlifting, right. There's no notion of, like, why didn't I exercise 5 hours more, this or that? And so I sometimes try to think about my core intellectual work that way. If I'm getting in the core deep reps on the thing I care most about, which for me is almost always writing, then the rest, I just want to, it's. It's like damage control. I want to do the other stuff well and not get too stressed out about it. And there's the productivity habits then that are about doing the stuff that matters and protecting it, and then there's the habits that are all just about, let's not let the other stuff get out of control.

I find it a little bit easier. You go easier on myself when I think about it that way.

Do you listen to music while you work?

No.

Well, the data certainly support not listening to music. Or if you do listen to music, listening to music without lyrics.

Yeah. You have to train even to get used to it, right? I mean, even to get used to music without lyrics. You got to get used to it. I guess your brain is 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. And he blasts, because he has four kids, he blasts Metallica in NASCAR earphones. And I was like, how do you possibly write like this? I think he just trained. His mind has just like a pure auditory filter that has he adapted? I guess. Or maybe his books aren't that good. I don't know. But I like silence or like background noise. But even background noise is hard. I have a hard time writing at cafes, for example. I really do like lack of stimuli.

Do you use visual blinders? Some people actually do this. It's like a hoodie, and they'll really try and tunnel their vision, which makes perfect sense from the perspective of neuroscience. I mean, your visual world strongly constrains to the narrowness or the broadness of your cognitive maps.

Yeah, I mean, I just have my spaces engineered, right. So, like, where I write in my library at home, all the interesting windows are behind me. And over here, I'm staring across to windows that just lives right next to the neighbors and just typically blinds down.

As you say this, it just makes me want to shout that 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 there's absolutely no way that they ought to be able to focus. In fact, perhaps the fact that they can focus at all is miraculous, given the constraints, like trying to run with shackles on.

Yeah, I mean, look, we're used to this with physical stuff. If we analogize to physical fitness, we're so used to all these details, right? It matters, like what you're eating, how you're sleeping, the details of how you train and when you train and how much. We're very used to this idea that really matters. We have no intuitions for cognitive development or application. We treat our brain, I guess, because we associate it so much with a sense of self. It's just this sort of ineffable connection to us as a person. We don't think of it as much of an organ as, like, a muscle or something like this, but we don't have a sophisticated vocabulary at all for thinking about how do you do stuff with your brain, which is the, if you're in knowledge, work? That's the whole game. The whole game is this brain takes an information, adds value to it. It alchemizes value out of mind stuff, and people who alchemize value out of muscles. I'm a relief pitcher in baseball. I know my whole job is to take a certain muscles on my kinetic chain and use them to move a ball very fast.

And if I really am very careful about this, I can have a multimillion dollar deal. Those of us who do this with our brain don't have any of these intuitions. It's just like, you have to work hard, and we're on our phone all day. I mean, this has to be the physical equivalent. If you had, like, an endurance athlete who was smoking all the like, this is like, this is directly contra intricating or 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 was before I got tenure. And she was like, you're trying to go from minor leagues to major, go from second string to starter. You have to treat what you're doing like a professional athlete with their game. Like prioritize sleep, prioritize food, prioritize time, prioritize. And as you point out, we don't do that with the mind. For cognitive stuff, we tend to assume that we could just flip a switch and 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. Unlike a marathoner, where, sure, I could probably finish the 26 miles, or wherever it is, 26.23. I forget what it 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 I think that's the kind of caveat here, is that the kid that loves video games can definitely focus.

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. Right. Stuff's obvious when one states it, but I think it's worth pointing out that this stuff needs attention, it needs work.

Yeah. Which means, and it starts with vocabulary, it starts with intention, starts with examples. There should be a book like how to think that we just give to everyone and learn. Right? Yeah. Like how to use your brain. Like the user manual. That would be a very useful user manual. And I think in elite cognitive professions, this gets handed down as lore and people figure it out. Right. I mean, this was my experience training at MIT in theory group, is that everything was focused on getting the most out of your mind. And so it's being passed down from person to person. It was also in the culture, it was in the way that people acted. But most places that do cognitive work don't have these cultures. Yeah, but here's the advantage, though. Here's the silver lining, right? If you're one of the few who cares about it, it's a huge advantage right now. It's a big part of my success. I don't think I have the highest horsepower brain, but I care a lot about trying to get the most out of it, like to push it to the edges of the reps, the RPMs, I can actually get out of it.

So it's an advantage as 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. Suddenly in your office or in your grad program, it's going to be like, well, what's going on here? Little superpower.

And sometimes there's a bit of a social cost up front. 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 something happened fairly seldom. I still did, but. And it was. Yeah, actually lived alone in a studio apartment. I mean, it's isolating. 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. Of course, what you said a moment ago also reminds me. David Goggins. The David Goggins, no introduction needed, has been quoted as saying, it's easy nowadays to be exceptional because so many people are just distracted and wasting their time. You put in 20% more effort to being more focused or toward your fitness program, and you're going to surpass many, many people. So it's not that hard to accelerate. It's just. It takes 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 to do things with my brain. I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be an academic, but that takes a lot of work and I really cared a lot about it. So I was a fraternity brother for one day and I went to the first meeting where they're doing. He's held a pledging or whatever. And I remember I said, I'm just not for me. And I walked away because this is going to be distracting, like the hangovers and this and that. And 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. They don't all have to be as intense as you and I were, but caring about your brain, it gives you a lot of options.

And if you're playing catch up, there's almost always a social cost associated with it. But you eventually are joined by many other people. You find the other nerds, there's a lot of nerds, the other nerds, misfits and people who are seeking something, they come around, you find them. I'm interested in this concept of burnout. We hear about burnout we associate with too much adrenaline, lack of sleep, tired and wired, feeling disengaged. The poet David White has a beautiful poem, I forget the title about burnout, where he says that 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 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 burnout in, if we're thinking knowledge work like 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, in part because communication is low friction and we always want to be demonstrating activity because of pseudo productivity. And people are always asking us to do things. We say yes. Everything we say yes to brings with it administrative overhead, which is talking about the thing but not actually doing it. So it's like emails about the commitment, it's 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 work and not actually doing the work and then make it even worse. It's not like this overhead is all batched together. It's sort of spread out throughout your day.

So it's also putting you in that state of constant distraction which makes it hard to do work. What I think is burning people out is they're now in this state where they're saying, I'm spending most of my day talking about work, sending emails, attending meetings. Very little time is left to actually make progress on the work. And then the workload gets larger and larger. This by itself is deranging right. It feels like you're in some sort of nihilistic experiment. Like what is this? Why do I have 6 hours of meetings? This can't be the right way to work. And then what happens of course is you have to recover time in the morning and the afternoon, maybe after your kids go to bed to try to actually make progress. So now you also have just a straight work quantity issue. So you're working more hours. There's an energy drain. But I think that psychological piece of this can't possibly make sense. I am checking email once every two minutes and spent 6 hours in Zoom like doing very little actual high value work. This can't be the right way to work. That's what I think the burnout epidemic right now is coming from.

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. This is a highly trained brain. Like I could be writing these reports or this code or creating these business strategies, but we're all just accepting this. I think the absurdity of the current situation is creating as much of the burnout as it is just we also have to add these extra hours. There's 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 on and on. So it's all woven in with stuff that's also highly adaptive. It makes it know. It's almost like the work of being a selective filter is half the work of trying to deload the cognitive systems that would allow you to do deep work.

Yeah, well, in the workplace it's even harder than that because part of the issue is email and slack. Let's just say digital communication. I spent a lot of time studying that closely from like a technocritic 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 individual habit de optimization. It's not, oh, I should just check this less often. What happened is when we introduced low friction digital communication to the office, this emergent consensus came about that said, great, let's just use ad hoc messaging as our major way of collaborating. We can just figure things out on the fly. I can just be like, Andrew, what's going on with the whatever? And you can answer me and I can send it back. This was very convenient. The activation cost was low, and so this is how we began actually collaborating on work. Now what happens is as workloads get higher, we now have many things at the same time. They're all generating these asynchronous back and forth conversations. Most of these have some sort of time sensitivity, right? So if I email you and say, what's going on with the guests 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 gap is 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. From a mathematical game theory point of view, it's a suboptimal NaS equilibrium. It's not the right place, it's not the right way to run this. The utility value of this configuration is low, but no one individual can deploy a different strategy that's going to be higher value. We're stuck in it, right? And so now it becomes really hard for an individual just to say, I want to check my email less often. It's built in systemically into this hyperactive hive mind workflow. And the only way to break free from the suboptimal configuration is to basically have the organization itself do like a really high cost change to the rules of the game.

These are how we're collaborating now. We're not using email freely anymore. We're going to use this system instead. It's a very expensive top down procedure to free ourselves from the suboptimality in the world of work. That's partially why this is such an intractable problem. I tried to write a book about this recently, and it was really hard to gain traction because it's not easy to solve this. 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 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. This is much worse. This is like a systemic problem. It's an emergent deterministic work impact on an economic, social, cultural system that was completely dynamical and went in a way we didn't really expect. So 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 I wrote deep work.

And I was like, well, why don't people just do this? That's why they don't just do this, because it's not so easy to reclaim this time.

Well, it's like when I was a graduate student in postdoc, I was focused on eating pretty well, meaning just cleanish food. And people talked less about that at that time. I was also really committed to exercise since I was 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 going to my yoga class, I'm doing my zone two cardio. I go to the gym. Men and women do this. I remember having sneak off to the gym and you felt like a bit of an odball if you were the one bringing your lunch to the pizza luncheon. Not there's anything wrong with pizza. I love pizza, but I was trying to eat well. I have for a long time. I feel better when I do, and I'm grateful that I did. But you get some weird looks like, oh, do you have an eating disorder or something like that? That's what people would say then. Now people would probably look and go, that looks better than the pizza. People start to understand. So I think there needs to be a cultural shift, and I think there has been a cultural shift around food and exercise, certainly food, meditation, sleep.

I think people are far more accepting and actually encouraging of their workers and coworkers, taking really good care in order to function better for longer.

Yeah, I think this is going to be the next revolution. And it's going to be a revolution that's going to unlock. We're talking on the scale of, like, a trillion dollar GBP. When we go through knowledge work and have this revolution, I call it like the cognitive revolution. Let's take really seriously how the brains of our workers work. These are our number one assets. Like, not to be too mechanistic about it, but what is our main capital asset? If we're a knowledge work organization, we have some buildings, but it's really these brains that we have, like, employment contracts with. These brains create value. Let's take seriously how the brains actually operate. And as soon as we do, we'll say, oh, my God, these brains are checking email once every two minutes. What a disaster. It's like if we had a car factory and we spent $20 million on one of these german robots that can put cars on the doors or whatever, and we just weren't taking care of it, and it was like, rusting and it was dropping the doors and the production pipeline was going down. We're like, this is crazy. We got to take care of this equipment, right?

When we have the cognitive revolution, the sort of cognitive capital revolution and knowledge work, I think it's going to unlock a trillion dollar 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 super deterministic and kind of inhumane about it, so much is being lost because we're in these suboptimal NAS 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 AI might play a role in this, right? Because maybe AI, once it gets planning capabilities, is going to be able to take the burden of some of this back and forth planning. I think it's easier to get there with cultural shifts. I don't think we have to wait to build an email capable chat TPT to do this. Like, you could solve this tomorrow. This is cultural as much as it's tool based, but I think it's going to be a huge revolution when we get there. Akin to the assembly line in manufacturing, which was like a ten X improvement in productivity metrics.

When we figured out the continuous motion assembly line with interchangeable parts was a massive. It created this productivity engine. I'm using the economics into productivity now. Dollars per worker. The economic miracle that came from this process based industrial innovations in the late 19th, early 20th century, the money generated by that, the wealth generated by that, was the foundation of the modern west. 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 brain. And I think it's going to be a huge revolution. 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 it's going to be hard to even imagine.

Yeah. And I think as long as there are individuals who, either by virtue of lack of family or other constraints, or by virtue of just having more energy and requiring less sleep, because these individuals do exist out there, there will always be these individuals that can kind of apply themselves more than others in the sense that they can get in earlier and stay in later, and that trying to be them is not a good idea that we all need to optimize for our 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 hearing about a student, he's now a professor, a very accomplished endocrinologist. I'll just give him a name because he did this thing. He doesn't know me, but I heard about this guy that had been in the department, Randy Nelson, and everyone was like, he used to work 100 hours a week. So I was like, all right, great, I'm going to start logging my work hours silently. I'm going to do 102 hours. And I ended up with a flu and an autoimmune condition.

I literally had an autoimmune condition. I've never had one since then. I stopped working that much, started working, quote unquote smarter, along the lines of many of the things you're saying here, although I didn't implement or know about all these tools that time. And of course, the autoimmune thing went away. It was a fairly minor thing. Never had it again. But you can destroy yourself simply by working more, even if it's deep work. So the solution is not necessarily more. It's just like with exercise, I guess that stands. It's obvious, but I thought I'd share that 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, too, it's not just who's capable of working more get these advantages. There's these other unpredictable inequities. I talked at a law firm once years ago about deep work, and I was invited by a group. It was actually a group of women lawyers who had a reading group. And they said part of what was happening at this law firm is that people who were disagreeable, like, just sort of gruff and jerks, would get asked to do less of what they would call non promotable activities or can you organize this? Or whatever. Which meant they had more time to do deep work, 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 our most disagreeable employees to the partnership level, where actually, you need to be pretty agreeable because your client acquisition is really on the partners. And so they accidentally had pushed towards 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? Well, I just sort of, like, I'm gruff and people don't like me or I have something going on at my house that means I don't have the 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. 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 in a five day a week model.

Yeah. I mean, my proposals. I've thought about this a lot. Is okay if you're going to do hybrid work. And I proposed this in atlantic article recently, which created some positive, some negative waves. Here's the way you should do it. Synchronize the 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 have the same schedule, but then make the rule. At home days, no meetings, no email. 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 churn through things. I think it would really make a big difference on the overload issue. I think it would be much more sustainable remote work because I did a lot of coverage of remote work as this was first emerging, the early pandemic there I became convinced. I was doing this twice a month column for the New Yorker back then that was just looking at the pandemic, transforming work. And I came away with the idea that remote work can be 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. If you're going to be fully remote, we have to rethink what work means for that.

And there's a lot of differences. It needs to have, it needs to be way more structured. It probably needs to be, you're working on less things, it's very clear what you're working on. The collaboration is much more defined and much less frequent. You probably need to be freed from the sort of hyperactive hive. My dance of we're just emailing each other all day and in Zoom meetings all day. You have to sort of reconstitute what a remote work job is, I think, before it works. And we know this in part because software developers, pre pandemic, were one of the only knowledge sectors to have a really successful track record with remote work. That is the only sector within knowledge work where we had large companies, fully remote, they did that because their jobs, they had really structured them around these agile workload management systems where, okay, here's when we talk about work, here's how long it takes, here's how we assign you new work. You work on one thing at a time, you sprint till it's done. They had all this structure around work, which then it didn't really matter if you're in the office or not.

So the less structured work is, the more free for all, the more you need. We have to be in the office. So 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. I used to take Wednesday mornings at home from the lab, but nowadays it's wild because especially during the pandemic, but still now you can do the whole day in pajamas and getting work done. And I love this idea of no email and limiting text and social media while at home doing work to really extract the most out of it. Are there any data, maybe from the pandemic era 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 just found ourselves in Zoom all the time for a while.

That was the bigger problem. 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 work as well. But the bigger problem with Zoom, I think, was the quantity and part of it was just the technology involved. Right? So if we're in the office together and I have a relatively quick thing to talk to you about, I can just grab you and we can talk about this. And the footprint is going to be five minutes. That's not just that, it's five minutes, it's five well allocated minutes. Because I'm probably going to use the social cues of your doors open or you're going to get coffee anyway ways right in the Zoom era instead we would say, well, we should set up a meeting, right, because 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 have to drag it. 30 minutes is like the default smallest length meeting. So we're taking a lot of informal back and forth and inflating the time.

I think that was part of it. So we just had too much zoom going on. Right. If it was just, I do one meeting a week now it's on Zoom. It used to be in person. We were all on Zoom. We used to all be in person. That's not that big of a deal. It's maybe like a slightly less effective meeting, but it's fine, it's good enough. But if it's. I have four X more meetings than I used to because of the inherent inefficiencies of having to go to prescheduled virtual for basically all collaboration, that could be a huge problem. The data I saw from Microsoft, the last data I saw was a 252% increase in these meetings from 2020 to now. And it's not like it peaked and then it started coming back down again. Once we went to hybrid, it's just high and it's still creeping up. Right. That's a lot of time. That just vanished and we sort of pretend like it didn't. But that's a lot of time that is not actively working on things and just talking about work or talking about other stuff while we get around the talking about work.

I think it's a real issue.

Is there a top three list of things that if you had a magic wand, you would see everyone do each day? If you had three wishes?

Yes.

What would they be?

Visa vis workers?

Visa vis 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, but a great degree of life enrichment, like a deep level of enrichment in terms of happiness, feelings of well being, time for connectivity with others, lessons about deep work that can be exported to time with others where we are really present, et cetera. Just so much to be gained from engaging in deep work and things like it that you've written about and in your various books and talk about on your podcast. Is there a top three?

Yeah. So if I do three, I would say, okay, first of all, with your workload, simulate something like a pull system instead of a push system. And what I mean by that is when you keep track of what you're working on, have the top part of that list, which is I'm actively working on these things. And keep that top part of your list to like, two or three things. Everything else is in the bottom part of the list. It's to work on next, and it's in an ordered queue. And so when you finish something that you're working on, you pull something new to take its slot from the list below. Right. So what I'm trying to do with that advice is reduce all this administrative overhead, because now, even if you can't get away, you have to say yes to these things because it's the way your organization works, the stuff that's in the waiting to work on queue. You say, I don't have meetings about that, I don't do emails about that. I wait till I'm actively working on it. And I only actively work on three things at a time. Now, I'm going to finish those things really quickly because I don't have 15 items worth of meetings I'm going to every day.

So things are going to pull up there pretty quickly. And so the rate at which I'm accomplishing things will probably be higher than it was before. But I only work on three things actively. You could even make this visible. It's in a shared document if you want to. When someone asks you to do something new. Tell them to put it on the end of your queue. You're like, oh, okay. So like, Andrew is not working on this right now. He's working on these three things. And there's seven things here. And I'm adding something number eight. So I know not to expect something for a while. In fact, I can keep checking this list until I see Andrew's working on it, so I can see it's making progress. And then once I know he's working on it, I can start email him about it and we can do just the normal type of overhead you would have with projects. Right. That alone is going to have a huge difference. Now, the amount of distraction your day is going to plummet because that's generated from overhead of things you've agreed to do, and that's going to plummet that down.

All right, so that'd be number one.

Thank you. Could I just ask a few questions about that, just to clarify? So I'll 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, solo podcasts in particular for me, is my major task in life these days with respect to work. So that would be top of the list. And then there could be two other items on this top of queue. Would daily activities like exercise, social time with loved ones, et cetera. Would that be included there? Or we're talking specifically about work.

Yeah, let's just keep. Just work. Okay.

So it would be podcast prep. Podcast prep.

You might have the particular topic though, right?

Okay, I'm working on an episode right now about skin health. Yeah.

You could have two different episode topics you're prepping. Those could both be up there. Yes.

So skin health, allergies episode. These are two that I'm spending a lot of time on. Months, in fact.

And then your third might be something that involves the media companies, something around the business side of it, like, okay, we're trying to figure out a plan for whatever.

Right. Content for new content, a brand association or something. 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 it's not being forgotten. Or here's a business idea. We need to figure out whatever we want to add. Do something with our camera. Configure. Okay. Put on the list. It's not being forgotten. It's on there. And you can see where it is. Not only is it on there, but this could be shared among your team. So as people had extra information or things to add to one of these projects, they can add it to it on the list. Right. So the information is aggregating. So if you use a tool like Trello for this.

Trello, spelled T r e l l o. Okay. Is it an app?

It's a web based service. That the metaphor is just index cards in piles.

Got it.

Right. But they're virtual.

Okay.

But you can flip over the index card, digitally, attach files, write notes. I use Trello for my own organization, what I'm working on. So now you have a place where you can gather, like, oh, I just heard about something that's relevant to this thing I need to work on. You have a place to put it. It goes onto the Trello card. Or you could do this with shared documents. Doesn't matter. You're just, like, literally typing things into a Google Doc.

Or a whiteboard.

Or a whiteboard. Yeah, we're keeping track of these things. Right.

I'm going to do this, by the way.

Yeah, well, I'm a big believer in this. And then everyone can see what you're working on. But the key thing is, if it's not in your active list, you don't have meetings about it and you don't have emails about it. Right. If people have ideas or things, they just add it to the card. So when that gets up to the active list, we can work on all the information there. We haven't forgotten anything.

And what two word language do you use to describe this first point? This method. I love this.

I called it a pull based.

Pull based. Right.

What gets pulled up, you pull into the. So you're fixing in advance. Here's how much concentration I have to give on work, and you pull stuff into that. The alternative is push based, which is how most organizations run, which is when I want you to do something, I just push it onto you. And now you have to deal with it.

Got it. I once heard email described as a public post to do list that made me scared of email in a way that nothing else had. It's Newport's pull based system. I called it that. By the way, this is what in.

A lot of the advice in one of the chapters of the new book is basically, how do you get away with implementing this? 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 lot of subtle ways you can. Yeah, right. So that's number one.

That's number one. Cal Newport's poll 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 will.

All right, so that's one. All right. Number two would be multiscale planning. Okay, so now this is planning. You're planning on three different scales. Daily, weekly, seasonally, or quarterly. However you want to think about it. Right. So you have a plan for the semester, the season, or the quarter. This is what I'm working on. These are the big objectives I want to hit. Here's to reminders to myself about what matters. Remember, I'm overhauling my workout routine. We're trying to do this with the podcast. You look at that scale of planning every week. When you build your weekly plan and the weekly plan, it is free form text. You don't need 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? Where there's the busy space. You also change what's on your plate right here. If I cancel this thing, that frees up that whole morning, which means 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 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 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 blocking is you're literally drawing blocks around the free time. Okay, this, I'm working on this. This, I'm working on this. So you're making a plan for your day that is informed by the weekly plan. So in multiscale planning, you have the big picture. Things you care about trickle their way all the way down to, okay, what am I going to do during this hour during the day? But you don't have to grapple every, this is what most people do every time I'm figuring out what to do next. I'm not grappling with all these scales at the same time. What are my objectives? What's my big plan? What's going on this week?

You're dealing with each of these scales when the time is right. And so when it finally gets down to it's now 03:00 you're just doing what that block is. And you figured out that block earlier today when you looked at your weekly plan, that weekly plan reflected what was in your semester plan, which you figured out you spent a whole afternoon working on at the beginning of the semester. So multiscale planning, it keeps you focused on what matters. It prevents you from wandering through your day and how you disperse your energy. And it gives you control over your time on different scales, from canceling major ongoing obligations to just being 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 Kell Newport aiming towards the right shores, like keep correcting and keeping it aimed back.

I 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, two or three cardiovascular training sessions. I know I'm going to train my legs once. It's either going to be on, depending on travel, Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday. I'll train torso muscles in the middle of the week. I'll train sort of limb accessory muscles on a Saturday, long run on Sunday, or hike on Sunday or some other day, there'll be some sort of hit workout in the middle of the week. And ideally there's a jog in there, too.

And you can adjust it a little bit based on the reality of the week.

Yeah, I might double up for two days and take a day off. I have my ideal schedule. It sometimes it gets compromised, and then I do that for 16 week cycles where I vary the kind of intensity, load, et cetera. And I've done this for years, and it just kind of works for me. Now with cognitive work, I don't tend to do this. It tends to be more deadline based. But I think that the pull based system is really going to help if I dovetail it with this multiscale planning. I love this.

And you can see the deadlines, now you see them coming, right? So that's part of what's nice about multiscale planning is, you know, the deadlines coming up. And so when you're doing your semester planning, you start thinking like, okay, for the big deadlines, like when I get to December, I need to be really starting getting after this thing that's going to be due.

Yeah, I've got a book due.

Yeah, this really helps me book writing because now when I'm planning, it's like a year in advance. I know this month I need to get roughly the rough draft of chapter two done, and then that trickles down to my week where I'm going to make sure I have enough time cleared to be on track for finishing it. And then that trickles into my day. Now I know to block those mornings to work on it, so it all works together. An added bonus of the daily scale is I would say communication should get its own block. Email, social media, whatever. That's like you communicating with the outside world goes into your time block plan. So if your block doesn't include that, you don't do it. So it's like this block is writing. It's not email, it's not social media. So the rule is really simple. I'm not going to use email or social media, 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 the latest episode or something, I got to give that time and then you can focus because then it's a psychological hack.

But basically when you schedule communication and distraction now the only thing you have to muster willpower to do is obey the single rule of I'm following my blocks. If you don't do that, if you're like, I just sometimes do email and social media and sometimes I don't. Now what you have to do is just constantly be having this debate, is now the right time to do this? I know I'm going to do it at some point today. Why not now? Well, what about now? What about now? 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 really feel good when I do it and I check off a box, if I do give yourself some feedback here, it's a much easier cognitive battle. To win than just trying to be reasonable about, well, let me wait a little longer to check my email. You're going to lose that battle 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. Again, not that that's the best way to lose weight or maintain weight or its role in longevity is still debated, et cetera. But I think for many people, not all, but for many people, the decision that they do not eat during certain time blocks and they do eat in other time blocks is just far more tractable in the real world for them than trying to limit portion size. Decide whether or not they're going to eat. They're going to pass the cookie and have a little bit no, they're in a fasting window. It simplifies the issue, and as a consequence, I think it improves behavior overall. Although the clinical trials point to some mixed results with that last statement, again, I don't want the nutritionistas after me. The point is the time blocking and the thick black line didness of the yes no, the binary yes no as eat, don't eat or single commitment email communicate, don't communicate in a given time block. I think that really is what it's about. It honors the power of those sorts of neural computations.

And there's another hidden bonus of time blocking too, is visually distinct blocks. So what I do, for example, is I put a double thick line around deep work blocks, focusing on not just deep work, but deep work on things I really care about. Just this gives you a visual record. How much deep work am I doing? Right. Like, it's this diagnosis. I use a paper based time block planner. So you flip through those pages and you're just looking for dark blocks, right? So if I see I don't have a lot of dark blocks, I say, this is my whole job. Like my whole life I've been trained in a lab to think really hard about things and write things. Why do I not have very many dark blocks? You get this feedback mechanism. So there's all these bonuses when you start doing this type of doing this type of planning.

Before you tell us about number three, I often have fantasized about a web based program that seems to run countercurrent to much of what you're talking about, but goes back to the whiteboard MIT observer stuff that you talked about at the beginning, which is I often longed for. Okay, I need to write today. I need to write a book, or I'm going to do some podcast prep. I'm going to pop up a few windows of other people that are also doing deep work. And we're not going to communicate. In fact, if we do or if music comes through on the microphone or somebody coughs, that's going to be considered a distraction. But does anyone want to join me for some deep work where we don't communicate? And I've often thought I would just pay someone to be there, to just sit there, but I haven't done that.

There are multiple companies that do this.

Okay.

Yeah. It's interesting where you're online or in person with just other people doing deep work.

So a deep work club. The challenge is synchronizing schedules because I might want to do this with somebody on the east coast, and they might not be doing deep work at the same time. And a recording isn't the same because then they're not really watching. But there's something really to mean, especially for at home workers or people like me that work, often in isolation.

Students do this, right? Dissertation boot camps. I don't know if you had this experience, but Georgetown does is 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 because they would often have me come speak at these things earlier in my career. It would just be a bunch of grad students. They were just coming to the same space, and they would work for, like, okay, 90 minutes, and then they would have, like, a speaker come in or lunch. So the group cohesion of everyone working deeply at the same time. Writers retreats are the same way. We all go to the same house in the middle of nowhere. So that we're all just going to encourage each other to write because that's all what everyone's doing here. Yeah. So, social pressure. I'm with you. I was thinking if I ever needed to put a big extension on my house, that's what I should do. Just like, okay, pay me money and I will sit there on Zoom and do deep work with you. This is my secret place.

I'd pay money to do deep work in parallel with you with a virtual window there. There's Cal in his office doing that. I think there's something nice about having some knowledge of who people know. Like, hey, logging in today. All right, let's get down to it. Set the timer and go. And then, Asta, I'm out working at the library.

Academic libraries. Why do people do that? Right? Everyone there is working.

Right?

Yeah. No, I'm a big believer in that.

There's really something sticky to that. Okay, number three.

All right. Have a shutdown ritual, which clearly demarcates the end of work in the start of the night, after work and the shutdown ritual. So 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 time block and my calendar. Really make sure there's nothing urgent that needs to be dealt with that I didn't. And there's nothing that's just in my head that I don't want to forget that's not written down somewhere. Like, take care of all of that. Right. So you review all these things. You get, what am I going to do tomorrow? You don't have to build your whole plan for tomorrow, but you have a sense for it. And then you need some sort of demonstrative thing you do to indicate that you finished a routine, right? So my longtime newsletter readers know I used to actually have a phrase. I would say schedule shut down complete. Like a crazy phrase, right? It's not how normal people talk. Right? Now I have a planner that has, like, a checkbox that says shut down complete next to it.

The reason why that is a demonstrative anchor is that you use this then, for cognitive behavioral therapy, because at first, people have a hard time shutting down work. I mean, I invented this because I had a very hard time shutting down working on my dissertation. What if this proof doesn't work? And blah, blah, blah. So what you do is when you get a rumination, post shutdown, hey, what about what's going on with our work? Are we doing the right thing? Do we forget this or that instead of engaging in the rumination? Well, it's like, no, I think we're okay. Let me think about my schedule tomorrow. What's my plan? You instead can just say, I said that crazy phrase or I checked that box. I wouldn't have said that phrase unless I had gone through everything and made sure that I had a good plan and nothing's being missed. And it was okay to shut down work because of that. I'm not going to engage with your rumination. I said the weird thing. Let's get back to what we're doing. This is like cognitive behavioral therapy that after a month or so, you are really able to actually effortlessly disengage from work and do everything, all the other stuff that matters, right.

Without having the constant ruminations about work, which gives your mind an actual break to do other things. This is more mental health than productivity. But for me it was critical. I mean, I can really remember when I came up with this, exactly where I was in my grad student career, and there's just too many ideas and concerns that were just roiling. And once I did this, it took a few weeks, and then I could actually shut down and go on and do other things.

Yeah, the paired associative nature of the brain can make it really problematic. If you're thinking about work at the dinner table, you start to associate the dinner table with work. I mean, when Matt Walker came here to do this six part series that's soon to be released and we were discussing insomnia, he know one of the major issues with insomnia is people who have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep will often stay in bed when they can't sleep. And then the bed becomes associated with challenges with sleep. Hence the recommendation that virtually every sleep coach and sleep scientist 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 you feel sleepy enough to go back and try or fall asleep on the couch elsewhere. I put that in as a note to 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? How was work?

What did you do today? 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 something I read about unrelated to work. Yeah, no, I think it makes a huge difference. And again, there's all these meta benefits for these things. So one of the meta benefits for all of these is also these are all very structured. You'll begin to build a reputation as someone who is very careful about how they manage themselves and their time. Like if you're doing multiscale planning, and certainly if you're doing poll based workload management, people are going to start thinking, this is someone who thinks a lot about how they manage their workday and how things happen. This gives you massive leeway, right? Because we think what our colleagues want from us is accessibility. But really why they want accessibility is because they have no clarity about are we going to do this thing? Are we going to remember to do this thing? Am I going to have to keep bothering you? You know what if I don't really think you have your act together, I just wish you would just do this right away or respond to me right away, because I'm going to have to worry about this until I hear back from you that you did it.

Accessibility is born from lack of trust or lack of clarity, right? So if you have the reputation of someone who really has their act together, you can, for example, lean into a shutdown. I don't do email at all. And people, they don't think that you're being lazy or that you're not keeping up with the work. They're like, no, Andrew has his act together with this stuff. I trust him. When you show him something like this workload management system, like this is where the queue is. Like, I can't get to this yet. Like, okay, that's reasonable, 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 better you get at actually working with the resources you have. As 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 the reason people want to access you is because of presumably the consequences of the deep work you did. But people love meetings. Gosh, I won't do brainstorm meetings anymore unless it's with my close team. You can pitch me a contract and we can reverse engineer the idea, but it just doesn't work to meet with people and kind of brainstorm stuff. But I don't know what this is. 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, pseudo productivity as well. This is what I have, like visible activity. And so we have meetings, let's talk, let's hop on calls. That all feels useful when ultimately it's not. I'm with you on like, remember, the reason why everyone wants to talk to me is because not, I'm so great at brainstorming. Know people. Like, this is like, Andrew's great at brainstorming meetings, so that's why we want to bother him. No, it's because you were really good at the podcast and you were doing like the deep thing, and then that brings know the better you get at what you do best. The more the world can aspires to take away your time to actually work on it. Professors know this well, like pre tenure. Most big universities are pretty good at preaching. The professors, all that's going to matter is going to be your research, but.

They throw a ton of other stuff at you.

It depends on the school. I would say Georgetown is very good about this. From our perspective, it's a waste of resources to hire you and have you not get tenure. We want to try to protect you from. They keep service requirements low, for example, and just focus on your research, because that's what's going to matter. At least professors know this, right? There's a clear process, like the tenure process. Most people don't understand tenure. They think it's like getting promoted at a job, and there's, like, all these different ways you can sort of impress your boss. It's none of that, right? I mean, it's these confidential letters from leading scholars in your field that are doing nothing but brutally assessing your research. How good is Cal? Who are two people who are better than him on the market right now, who are like, two people he's slightly better than? Would you tenure him at your university? What university could he get tenured at? I mean, it's all that matters is research quality. So you have to somehow rediscover what that is if you're not a professor. Ultimately, this is the thing I do best for my company, so let me do that really well.

There's also an aspect, by the way, of if you do a deep thing really well, that does not attract as much work as if what you do is you're just really good at 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. If you get trapped in the game of how I distinguish myself is I reply right away, it doesn't matter when it is. I make your life easier. You're playing the game of making other people's lives easier, and that's what they're going to ask you to do. But if instead you play the game of I'm competent with this, like, I'll respond to the emails and I won't be pathological about it, but the real thing you care about is this code I'm producing, or these reports I'm producing are just really second to none, then you're not going to get them much of the small stuff. They're like, okay, well, do that then. That's what we want you to work on. So 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 the company barbecue. I don't know if anyone does company barbecues anymore, but, like happy hour or I don't know if anyone does that either. And social engagements with family, because obviously those things are important too. Are those on your schedule?

Well, I treat work schedule different from non work schedule. Right. So my work schedule is this time block plan, part of a multiscale plan, really dialed in. Like when I'm working, I'm working, right. But then when I'm not working, I'm way more lax. So I don't do time block planning of my weekends or my evenings. The work shutdown being clear gives you more flexibility there. So it's like, okay, what do we want to do? Let's go see these people. Let's do these things with the family. I like to be flexible and not overly PLanned outside of the workday. But then during the workday itself, it's much more machine like.

So you're fairly not lax, but you're a bit more ReLaXed around social engagements and engaging with the Kids. But at work or when you're working at home or in the office, you're a beast.

Yeah. I'm like a black box in the workday. When I'm working, I disappear.

Nice. Yeah.

And then when I'm done, I'm around. But my family and friends, and they've learned if you text me during the workday, I'm not part of that game of, like, I'll just respond back to it. People know it may have been 4 hours since I saw my phone.

That's like Lex Friedman.

Yeah.

And people often ask to get in touch with Lex and know made that connect for a few people. But I always point know Lex will go long periods of time where we don't connect. And then we're close, close frIends. We spent a lot of time in person on the phone, text. But I understand that if I text Lex, I might not hear from him for four or five days. And it's all just, in fact, it tells me he's good. It's like that scene at the end of goodwill hunting where he's like, I just want to show up at your house. You're not there. And he gets there and he smiles. His friend's gone. He knows he went the direction of his heart.

You're saying if you start to get a lot of memes texted to you from Lex.

That's not going to happen.

You're going to be like, what's going on?

That's never going to happen.

What struggle are you having in your life right now?

I'm a big believer in the phone. I'm old school. I pick up the phone, make a call, we'll get on a call. Sometimes FaceTime, we do text one or two things back, but it's often really quick. Really quick. And I have other friends in the podcast space for which it's the same. It's just phone is a great tool and drop in and then get back to it. Not a lot of chitter chatter on.

I like that. I always like, text is like a great logistical tool. Like, wait, what restaurant are you at? Oh, okay. I'll meet you there. Are you free to talk? I love text as a logistical tool, but you're right, as a conversational tool. Yeah, it's not for me either.

And do you take vacations where you are on pure vacation, so just with family or maybe even solo or with your spouse where it's no digital anything?

Yeah, digital is not a problem for me on vacation, but my wife won't let me not bring something to work on, on vacation because I become a monster.

Got it. Your brain needs that.

It needs it. Yeah. When we had little kids, I tried this, right? I was like, okay, this is it. I'm not going to think about anything. And I would just become an anxiety case. So what I've learned is bring one thing that's very deep and non urgent, but a book concept. I'm trying to make work or an academic paper that I was trying to crack or like something new. And I need that 90 minutes a day to walk on the beach and think. And I have to have a notebook. I have it with me in here. I have to have a notebook with me so that I can capture notes and get them out of my head on vacation. And now we have a happy medium. I work a little bit every day. No email. I don't get. Not email, not deep work. Thinking. I'm much happier.

It's like an itch that you have to scratch.

Yeah. If I'm not writing or thinking, I get cognitively antsy. I get, now, I'm talking to you now, but I've been traveling, doing some podcasts and stuff like this, and I'm way out of my cognitive comfort zone here because I'm not like early in this trip, I was on a New Yorker in an atlantic deadline, like writing all the time in California time up at 05:00 a.m. And I'm done with that now. And I'm really cognitively antsy. I just feel out of sorts right now. I'm not working. I'm not thinking.

Love it, Cal, for me, this has been such an honor. I mean, I should have said this at the beginning of the episode, but I've been such a fan for such a long time, 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 it required that I do things kind of against the grain people around me. And very quickly I saw that I was making progress much faster than I would have otherwise, and I never looked at it as a competitive endeavor with others. And you've just continued to churn out valuable information, actionable tools, book after book after book. And obviously they require some structure and some restriction, but also some moving toward action items. And I love these top three that you provided us, the pull forward, the multiscale planning, and the shutdown ritual and all the others that you've put forth. And I guess 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 that you also have a flourishing career as a computer scientist. So you're not just somebody who talks about, and here I'm not dissing anyone else in the information sphere, like just talks about habits or just talks about protocols. You do these things and you implement them in the context of your work life, your creative life, your family life, and your relationship to self. And you exercise. And I think that all combines to be an amazing example of what's possible if we introduce a bit of understanding about how we function as a being and that 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 some posts about what I experience as a consequence.

So thank you so much. I would pay a substantial amount of money to do deep work sessions with you on the screen there, but I won't put that on you. I'm going to just bite down and do this stuff. So thank you so much for being a pioneer in this space and such a clear communicator. We all owe you a debt of gratitude.

Oh, thanks, Andrew. Well, and for the rest of us professors who are also podcasting, we owe you a debt of gratitude because you're showing us what's actually possible. So this has been great. Meeting you as well has been fantastic.

Well, thank you. We won't see each other on social media, but we'll share a meal at some point before long. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Cal Newport. To find links to Cal's website, books, and to his excellent podcast, please see the links in the show. Note caption if you're learning 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 subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple. You can leave us up to a five star review. Please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments, not during today's episode, but on many previous episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast, we discuss supplements. While supplements aren't necessary for everybody, many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like improving sleep, improving focus, and for hormone support.

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