Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Becoming So Good They Can’t Ignore You with Cal Newport
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited you're here today. And since you're listening to All The Hacks, I'm pretty sure you're interested in optimizing your life in a lot of different ways. And you probably also love technology, but paradoxically, those two do not always mix well. And that's the message of my guest, Cal Newport.

He probably doesn't need an introduction because he's the award-winning author of seven books that have been translated to over 40 languages, including Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and most recently, A World Without Email. His writing explores the intersection of culture and technology, and he's been featured in so many publications, including The New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, and Economist.

He's also an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He hosts the top-rated podcast, Deep Questions, and he's a dad with a young family. We're going to talk about what a deep life means and some of the ways you can create the best life possible for you, why the hyperactive hive mind of constant email and messages is making you less productive, what you can do about it, how to implement what Cal calls high-quality leisure time into your life, and so much more. So let's jump in.

Cal, welcome to the show. Well, Chris, I'm excited to be here. I want to just jump right into the big picture to start. Talk about a deep life and what that means and maybe an example of what your deep life looks like. Well, the term came along before I had a good definition for it. It was at first one of those when you see it type of concepts and it emerged, this might not be surprising, but in the first month of the pandemic.

So, I started doing a lot of writing. I have a newsletter and blog that I would typically update once a week and I was doing it every single day. I just felt like I wanted to grapple with the various disruptions in a more public way with my long-standing audience. It was in that initial month or so of writing that this term, the deep life emerged.

as an umbrella term, very roughly speaking about the type of things I talked about. And then in May of 2020, I started a podcast because I couldn't see anybody. I wasn't on the road. I wasn't seeing people. And half of the show

was dedicated to the deep life. It just emerged forcefully into what I was thinking and writing about. And it was at first, when you see it, a deep life is a life that you look at and it just resonates. Something about that, it's exciting, it's interesting. And it just resonated. But over time, I've worked through the definition. I've tried to become a lot more clear about it. And now, the way I typically define it is a deep life is one...

in which you make radical changes to align with your values. So it's when you see someone that have done somewhat radical things in where they live, how they live, their work, the nature of their life, they've made radical changes to align their daily existence with things they truly care about. When you see that come together, you're looking at the deep life. And when you see the deep life, something inside you typically sings a little bit. Yeah, that's right.

Are there some examples of those radical changes you've seen people make? Or maybe you've made yourself to get closer to a deep life? There's a couple of general categories you often see when you're looking at deep lives. So one, I think certainly involves work, where people radically upend or focus their working life to be closer to their values. So it's where you see...

the person who becomes whatever, the full-time writer or starts that really interesting business or moves away from the job that maybe was stable but soul-deadening and goes towards something that has a lot of autonomy just to make it concrete. There's someone I know named Paul Jarvis who wrote this great book, Company of One, which

which is about the value of not trying to grow your business to be as big as possible, but to make it the best possible small business. And I remember the move he made, he talks about early in that book, was leaving, he called it his glass cube in downtown Vancouver, the condo and the big crowded building. And they moved to the middle of nowhere on the tip of Vancouver Island, not far from where they filmed the History Channel show alone, several seasons of the show alone. So this really was in the middle of nowhere, but they can surf.

in the morning and walk through the woods in the afternoon. And he was doing this very thoughtfully. He wanted to slow down his life, quiet his life, focus on just the work that's important. You see it in craft a lot. You see it when you look at someone who's deeply involved in craft and maybe it's not the most lucrative thing but it feels really meaningful. You see it when people make

Location shifts that just the location itself really speaks to them. One of the types of case studies I like to gather is writers who have really cool second homes where they spend half the year to go and write. Usually, these writers will spend the other half the year in cities.

And I've become a collector of those stories. Sebastian Younger has this farmhouse in the scrub pines of Turow, Cape Cod. So, it's the sort of non-populated area of Cape Cod. It's a little artist colony. It's not on the water, it's in the woods. You have to go down a really long dirt road to get to the house. They spend half the year there. Simon Winchester leaves New York in the summers to go to a farm in Sandysfields, Massachusetts in the foothills of the Berkshires where he converted a barn.

That's where he goes and that's when he writes and they tend to be in the afternoons when he's not doing that. These are the type of examples that sing out to me of people who made radical changes in their lives to align it with what they really care about.

There's a lot to touch on there with work and career and where you live. But I want to ask something I haven't seen you write too much about or talk about is, what about people? Is there like a deep version of a relationship that is much more important in this kind of life? Well, I think community is a big part of the deep life. Typically, when I talk about this concept, I break it into different areas. There's a long running joke on my podcast where everything has to be alliterative with C's when we talk about the deep life. But there's typically the five areas I talk about. There's craft,

which is like work, producing things. There's community is number two. So that's what we'll talk about here in a second. And then you can have, I use constitution

just to be alliterative, but to talk about health and fitness. You can talk about contemplation, to talk about philosophy, theology, etc. Sometimes we throw in celebration to talk about gratitude, enjoyment of life, just developing interests that have no functional reason other than just appreciation and enjoyment. So community is, of these five things, incredibly important. And I think that's another thing. It's actually something my family did in our own life. When we were looking to move, we were gonna have our third child, our house was too small.

One of the things we really focused on and thinking where to move was community. So, we found on the outskirts of DC right across the border, there was a town that had been around since the 1800s and the city has grown out past it since but the town is still there and retains all the character of a town. It has its own mayor, its own police force and it's a place where everyone knows each other. It's a place where your kids come and live after they go off, they come back and live there and they take over your houses. We moved here purposefully.

because we wanted to be deeply enmeshed in community. So I think that's another thing you certainly see when you look at people living deep lives is the role of these interpersonal connections actually being deeply connected to other people, sacrificing non-trivial time and energy on behalf of other people, trying to take up a role of leadership among real flesh and blood people around you. I think all that's critical to deep living. What about within your family? What about those relationships? Is there anything changed as you've thought through this?

Something that came out - and this was before I really coined the term deep life - but when I was doing research for a book I wrote about our relationship with digital devices, one thing that emerged from that is that the human social brain, which is a very large portion of our brain, we're very social animals, we dedicate a lot of neuronal firepower to interacting with other people, maintaining relationships. It doesn't understand

digital connection. It does not understand

text on a little piece of glowing glass with bitmap smiling face emojis. It does not understand that in the same way it understands you are right here. I can see you, I can hear you, I can look at your body language, I can look at your inflection. I know that this was a sacrifice. I had to take time out of my day to come to your house and spend time with you and out of that sacrifice, I actually increase the importance I'm going to assign to this as an interaction. This is what our social brains expect.

when it comes to relationships. And so, if you move more of your social life into a digital context, especially a text-based digital context, it can actually make you profoundly lonely because so much of our social brain doesn't know what that is. But it does not think about that in the same way it thinks about "I'm spending the afternoon with you with a real person in person." So certainly, that seems to be an important element about our current moment, especially post-pandemic is getting back to

real-life analog interactions that require non-trivial sacrifice of time and energy on your behalf. If you're doing that, your brain's going to be a lot more happy than if you're instead juggling seven or eight WhatsApp threads.

Is there science for broader principles of deep work and other parts of deep life that really support, not just anecdotally, but with evidence and data, the benefits of making these changes? I mean, I think in each of those different buckets we talked about, you can pull upon your own stream of science. So if you want to look at this community bucket and the importance of

in-person socialization. There is no shortage of studies. I talk about a lot of this in my book, Digital Minimalism, that really gets into the human processing of social connection and how much information really goes back and forth. There's a really nice study that I summarized in that book where they brought in business students, I believe. They brought them in to hear pitches for business ideas. So half the group

gathered in a conference room and actually did this and then the other half of the group they gave them written transcripts of the pitch for the business and It was night and day the difference between the receptions because the people who are in the room were actually having a real social connection They're getting all this information from the person. It was a much more sophisticated understanding what was going on There's another really cool study that was looking at email and

What it really focused on is the degree to which when you're writing an email, you completely overestimate how well you're going to be understood by the recipient.

Because you know the whole context, you know the whole social context, you know the whole emotional context, you know when you're writing it, you're chuckling like this is funny. I know what's going on. And it all gets reduced down to characters and it gets to the recipient and all of that context vanishes and they have no idea what's going on. Is he joking? Is this serious? Is he's mad? What does he mean? It's a great reflection of context.

how much information is actually captured in the non-linguistic aspects of communication, the aspects that go beyond just the actual written transcript of what you're trying to say. There are similar lines of research you can look at for work and deep work and what happens with context switching. There's certainly research, obviously, about health and fitness and the advantages you get from actually taking care of that. There's an even broader research on efficacy, just the idea that

in any of these areas that you are taking control, you're expressing autonomy on how your life unfolds, that's an elixir. That is magic. What it does to yourself, your sense of self-worth, your ability to act when you feel like you have control, you have agency over areas of your life, that agency itself

is incredibly beneficial regardless of the details of what exactly you're doing with it. So, there's a lot of different science floating around underneath and supporting up the notion of the deep life. I know you've said that you kind of tell people, imagine that life that you want, where you are, what you're doing and kind of work backwards to make that a reality. I think you've called it lifestyle-centric career planning. How do you think people put that into place? Is it something that anyone can do at any point in their career?

Yeah, I think it's important that you refresh this exercise. I turned 40 two days after recording this. And to me, turning 40 is a great milestone to go through this exercise again. You go through it when you're leaving school and then a lot of people go through it again in your late 20s. Once you actually have some momentum going and some sense of what's happening, what your opportunities are, then you want to redirect.

And then I think 40 is another time to do it. Now, here's the key about lifestyle-centric career... Well, I call it lifestyle-centric career planning, but it could really just be lifestyle-centric planning. It's not just about your job. The key to this is trying to work backwards from a

almost a sense memory of the lifestyle. What type of place do you live? What is your day like? Are you in the countryside and it's sun dappled and in the evening, some friends are gathering outside in a picnic table under cafe lights? Or is it a city and it's hard charging and you're making moves? You really want to get a sense memory of this ideal lifestyle that you can see and you can smell and you taste. The hard part is

You don't want specifics about, for example, what you do for work. So, I think where people get tripped up is they say, "Okay, well, I want to imagine what job

would make me really happy. And the magic of lifestyle-centered career planning is you go for what lifestyle makes you happy, and then you work backwards to say, what could I do to get there? And it unlocks. That's when you're thinking through that exercise. How do I get to that lifestyle? It's where you start thinking through what type of job might make that possible. So, you actually want the vision of the lifestyle to inform...

your professional choices for it. And I think it's a lot different than how a lot of people do it, which is instead to try to navel gaze and figure out through reflection, this is the job I want. And then how do I make that happen? I actually think that can be short-sighted. You get too focused on the job you want. A, people are terrible at predicting what the actual on-the-ground reality will be of a given job. And B, when you're focused too much on just the details of the job...

you're allowing all the other aspects of your lifestyle to be ungrounded and fall into place somewhat arbitrarily. And they're almost certainly going to fall into a configuration that doesn't resonate. You might end up unhappy. So it's this

weird conflicting demand of clarity of what your life is like without any clarity or specifics at all about exactly what allows that life. That's what you work backwards to figure out. I don't know if you're familiar with this concept. I think it's Japanese of ikigai, where it's like what you're good at, what you love, what the world needs, what you can get paid for. When I hear what you're saying, I wonder how much does it matter what you love doing and

Professionally, as much as how much does what you do professionally allow you to live the life you love, people often say, "Find the thing you're passionate about, make it your job." Do you think that's just overused advice for people and that they could probably be happy with many jobs? Yeah. If they live a life they love? Yes. I think the latter is true. I wrote a whole book about that called So Good They Can't Ignore You, where the entire premise was to push back on the idea that follow your passion.

is the most effective advice if your goal is to end up passionate about your life and what you do. And the premise of that book is if you study more closely, people who really do love their jobs and love their lives, nine times out of 10, they did not start with a clear vision of their professional life that they then pursued and then once achieved, felt that passion. Actually, the passion was emergent as their professional life unfolded. And their professional life often unfolded in directions that they did not predict

in advance. And so I think this notion that we have an ingrained innate passion, so we're wired for a certain type of job.

And to unlock that feeling of passion, you have to find that job. I think that construction, which in the American context, I did the research on this, is relatively recent. You don't find the phrase follow your passion in a professional context really till the late 1980s, early 1990s. It's a relatively new concept. I think it's actually a dangerous construction. What you want to do is not follow your passion, but follow the goal of being passionate about your life. And I think that's a much more complicated endeavor

than just having this lightning bolt clarity when you're 19 that whatever. I'm meant to be a social media brand manager for an athletic wear company. And if I can just go get that job, I'm going to be happy. It's kind of naive. It's like a Disney tale version of life satisfaction. The reality is more interesting, but it's also more complicated.

Well, I can tell you when I was coming out of college, I thought, I don't know what I want to do, but it sounds like the best job is to be an investment banker. And I now, I don't know, as a creator making podcasts, couldn't be farther from that. And funny enough, I think mine also started May 2020 during COVID. So I don't think you can predict that path. So I'm definitely a fan of working on things you enjoy, but not trying to presume that you can figure out what it is in advance. It explains why I ended up a professor.

But I got there doing lifestyle-centric career planning when I was trying to figure out coming out of college, what do I want to do? It was a lifestyle image. And there's this lifestyle image where autonomy, more control over my time, sort of intellectualism. I had a pretty clear image of the house. It's not so big, but there's interesting people coming over to the backyard. And that really resonated. I had a job offer from Microsoft and I had grad school acceptances.

And that was the thinking that led me towards grad school. Not, I'm super passionate. I have to be doing theoretical computer science theory. I liked it, but I also liked the stuff I'd be doing at Microsoft. It was that job out in Redmond.

is going to be much less autonomous. My schedule is going to be much less mine. It's going to be much more driven. That lifestyle, forget the specifics of the work, that lifestyle doesn't resonate. And so then I went over towards grad school and said, we'll figure out what happens next, next. And so anyways, just to use that as a concrete example of letting the lifestyle pull you forward. Because ultimately, the life you live, what your day-to-day life is like is what is going to

generate your satisfaction or dissatisfaction with life. Most jobs, no matter what the content is, 80% of it is not going to be the specific activity being exciting. You have to answer this email and pay this invoice. So what really determines your day-to-day satisfaction is the actual full

experience subjective structure of your day. No content of your work can make a day-to-day existence that's largely out of line with what really resonates with you, what really matches with what you want your life to be like. No specific content of work in the long run can save you from that mismatch.

It's the famous canard. No matter how great your job is, if there's a two-hour commute, you're going to be miserable. This is sort of that writ large. I want to jump into that work moment. But you mentioned what I think was the brief quote that I've heard you share before from Steve Martin. And I just want you to reintroduce us to that because when I first heard it through you, it had a big impact on my life. And I know it was an early big impact on your life. So the actual quote came from an interview that Steve Martin did recently.

about his memoir Born Standing Up, which I actually just reread last month and I highly recommend it. It's a professional memoir only focused on how Steve Martin's career took off. So it's just really focused on his career. It's a great encapsulation of how someone does something innovative. So he was doing an interview about that book Born Standing Up. It was on Charlie Rose. And Charlie asked him about career advice. And Martin said, and I'm only slightly paraphrasing here,

He's like, "I always give the same advice and it's never what people want to hear. What they want to hear is here's the secret to getting an agent, here's the secret to getting attention among when other people are trying to do it." He's like, "But what I always tell them is the same thing. Be so good they can't ignore you. If you do that, all the other good things will come." And that was really important to me, that advice. I was probably a third year

doctoral student at MIT at the time. And it clarified a lot for me. And I was a writer. I'd written two books at the time and was working on a third. And it just clarified so much for me. Because I still had this entrepreneurial hack culture mindset of...

The way I'm going to break out in academia is you got to figure out the right topics that no one else knows and market it well and hit a topic that's really cool. And your books, it's all about getting this marketing plan. And Martin's advice is sliced through that, right? Like a warm knife.

through butter. No, no, no. You got to just do great stuff. The other stuff will work it out. So that quote was so influential that I mentioned it before in the context of a book I ended up writing where I actually called the book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. And that was just a direct quote

from that Steve Martin line, which has been a guiding light to what I've been doing in my career from here on out. So maybe we can combine that with lifestyle-centric career planning. Figure out your lifestyle, work backwards. Okay, what can I do for work that's going to get me near that lifestyle? Then once you've figured out that work...

Use Martin's advice. Aim to be so good you can't be ignored because that's going to unlock more and more leverage, more and more opportunities, more and more interesting angles you never would have thought about before. Skill is your best weapon when it comes to trying to fight back on Wii and build a really cool life. Continually trying to be good is probably the most useful thing you can do to keep the options for your life to be cool as interesting as possible.

I was having a conversation with Dan Pink, who you might be familiar with. He talks about mastery being one of the biggest motivating factors for people. I think of what Steve Martin said, and I think of it a little bit as mastery is find this thing that you can become incredible at and...

Whatever it is can excite you. It doesn't have to be the thing you thought you were the most excited about. But that process of honing a skill, if you asked me two years ago whether the process of honing the skill of preparing and researching and planning and conducting interviews would be something that was high on my list, I never would have put it in the top 20. And I get so much satisfaction from doing that.

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You know, this show is called All The Hacks and I struggle with the name all the time because a lot of what I do in my own life is, oh, you have to really put in the work to make this possible. It's not just there's a trick here and there. So in many cases, most of the hacks that we end up talking about are these massive fundamental mindset shifts.

or changes to your routine. They're not little tricks and twists. So I keep coming back to, gosh, is that the right name? A lot of people see that. And even if the message isn't, there is a trick to fix everything in five minutes, the story brings people in. And if I can convince them that maybe life isn't necessarily about just little tricks and hacks, but bigger fundamental shifts, then maybe the name does its purpose. I share your situation because my longstanding... Originally, just a blog that I started in 2007. And now...

also primarily an email newsletter, is called study hacks. Because when I first was writing, I was writing student advice books. And my long-standing newsletter has the word hacks in it. And I have the same feeling about it. Because hacks can mean two different things. The positive aspect that you're talking about, I think, is coming at something fresh with intention. So, instead of just assuming, hey, what can I do here? I just have to... In my old context, studying, studying, all that matters is how many hours you put at it.

And the good aspect of that hack mentality is like, "Well, wait a second. Let's question assumptions here."

Like, what does studying mean? What am I really trying to do? I'm trying to prepare for this type of test. Well, what type of activities could I do to prepare? You know what? These things that everyone else is doing in the library are pretty ineffective. But if I instead did active recall on index cards and did it first thing in the morning in a novel location, I could cut this time down by a factor of four, which I think is like a really positive connotation to hacks, which is questioning assumptions and saying, am I really doing this correctly?

the best way? Have I really thought this through?" So you don't just get stuck. The negative interpretation, I think, is... When I was saying entrepreneur hacks, there's a period where there was a culture

I used to call it checklist entrepreneurship. So maybe this sounds familiar. Like the early blogging culture, where there's this sense where you could have a successful blog or something like this, be a successful content marketer, if you just had the right checklist, like the right information, do this and this and this and this. And if you just went down the list and did all the things, you would have all of this success. That checklist entrepreneurship that was early on. And pretty quickly, people found out, oh, that's not enough.

It's not enough like how many words do I publish and how do I set up my funnel? I actually have to write something that's interesting and that's going to take some craft. That was what was tripping me up early in my academic career was I was trying to hack around the marketing of my work. I was trying to hack around like if you just got the right topic. It's so easy to fall in love with this idea of everyone else is just conventional.

And just by being more bold, I'll be able to immediately have success. And in the end, it turns out like, no, you still have to do really hard work in the end. So I'm with you. My work is associated with the word hack to this day, proudly so. Because when you're questioning, why are we doing it this way? I think there's a lot of value in it. And then where it becomes a problem is where people leave out the second piece of, okay, anything really important is still going to require a lot of hard work. Yeah. That's why I love travel so much is that...

Part of what gives me the ability to question so many assumptions is that I've been fortunate to spend a lot of my free time traveling. And you just see all these people doing different things in different ways all over the world. I think there's probably 20 or 30 different ways to count money. And there's like cool videos on YouTube where you watch them and you watch people count money. And I was like, oh, interesting. And the other day, someone showed me how in Korea, they count numbers on your hand.

And they start with an open hand and they count in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And then they go out 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And you end up with a whole hand and then you can just keep repeating it. And I was like, oh my gosh, I've been counting with my hand in a less efficient way my whole life. And I just love that ability to see how other people do things can open you up to how you might be able to do things better. I'm going to use that to jump into talking a little bit about deep work because that was my first exposure to your writing.

I learned that if I can concentrate and focus on things, that's a skill that people can learn. But for people who haven't read the book, first off, you probably should because we're not going to do it justice. But could you talk a little bit about what you learned that led to that book and how people can work on that skill? I think what people underestimate is the cost of context shifting.

This is the scientific underpinning of deep work, which is this argument that concentrating on one challenging thing for a long period of time is a very important activity. And you should practice it and you should spend a lot of time doing it. It's a huge competitive advantage if you do anything that requires your mind to make a living. And the reason why it's so effective is when you are focusing on one thing without distraction, so you're not

flipping back and forth. You're not glancing at your phone. You're not jumping off and on on Slack. You're avoiding cognitive context shifts, which are a productivity poison that most people don't realize that they are ingesting. Because every time you take your attention off of your primary target and switch it over to something else, even if it's brief...

Even if it's just like got a glance at my inbox because I'm waiting to hear back from someone or try and set up a meeting, even if it's 30 seconds, when you bring your attention back to that primary hard activity, that little switch,

has a massive cognitive impact. It degrades your cognitive capacity for a non-trivial amount of time going forward. Because if you look actually under the covers in the neurons of your brain, what happens? It sees the inbox. It sees all of these highly salient pieces of information different than what you were working on. Many of them coming from individuals, from bosses, from clients. So there's this whole

social situation to it. You don't want to keep your tribe members waiting in the Paleolithic evolutionary Tardis. So it gets a lot of attention. You're beginning a very messy process in your brain where certain networks are being amplified, other semantic neural networks are being inhibited. So you begin this big process that takes five or 10 minutes to complete, but then you abort it almost immediately to try to go back to the original thing. Now you have a collision.

unrelated networks were beginning to be amplified, related networks were beginning to be inhibited. Now these things are clashing with each other. The way that actually feels subjectively is fuzzy thinking, resistance, a powerful urge to just, you know what, screw it. Like, I got to stop working on this hard thing. Let's just do email, right? And so, what most knowledge workers are doing without realizing it is that they are

persistently putting themselves into the state of reduced cognitive capacity because every five to six minutes on average they have to check an inbox, check Slack, see what's going on email, see what's going on my phone. And they think they're single tasking because they don't literally have two things open at the same time. They're not trying to talk on the phone while they write. They think they're single tasking, but these quick checks every five or six minutes are a neuronal disaster.

you're working at a fraction of your cognitive capacity, the work you're producing is worse, the time it takes to produce it is longer, and you get to a mental exhaustion where you just give up and go on social media and email much quicker because your brain can't take it. It cries uncle by whatever, lunchtime, one o'clock, two o'clock. And so we don't realize, as people who use our brains to make a living, that we are

giving ourselves this huge handicap. We are literally making ourselves much dumber and it's an unforced error. So deep work is basically saying, don't do that. If you're going to work on something hard, just do that for an hour, do it for 90 minutes with no context shifts. It feels like a superpower, not because it makes you much smarter, but it makes you avoid the things that's making everyone else much dumber.

So by comparison, the one-eyed man is a king in the kingdom of the blind or however that saying goes. That's really what happens. If you are not context shifting, you feel like you're the Bradley Cooper character in Limitless and everyone else is slamming back some shots during the workday. I get why it's important, but I wonder if you've had any...

experiences or learnings to help people fight that discomfort. One way I've tried is just turn on Do Not Disturb. I love the features that Apple rolled out where you can basically hide all of these notifications so you don't see them. But you still have this urge where you're like, I wonder what happened. Is there any tips to try to fight that and get comfortable with it? Well, you got to do two things. You have to time block and you have to train. The time blocking is I'm not just going to wing it.

As I go through my workday, I'm not just going to say, what do I want to work on next? What am I in the mood to work on? You're always going to lose that battle. You'll be like, well, I got to check this. And there's all these urgent things. So time blocking is you give every minute of your day a plan.

So during this time, I'm working on this thing. And then during this time, I'm doing email. I'm not in the email time right now. I don't do email during this block. This block is specifically put aside for writing this article. So that's what I'm doing. And if I stop, I'm failing on my plan. You make the stakes clear. Then you actually have to train your ability to concentrate so you can actually get through those blocks without it being a horrific experience. And this is something people miss.

the trainability of concentration. And the reason why that's important is if you don't realize that, here's what happens. You just hear the first part of what I say. Okay, I'm going to put aside two hours. I'm going to focus. No email, no social media, no Slack. If you have not trained your ability to concentrate, you're going to make it 20 minutes into that two hours. And it's going to be just...

that friction and the boredom, your concentration, you'll just break down because your brain doesn't know how to do it, right? It's the physical equivalent of saying,

I want to be a runner. All right, I'm going to go run 15 miles. And after you get half a mile, you're down on your knees, huffing and puffing, right? Because you haven't trained. The difference is for the aspiring runner, they're like, okay, of course, I didn't make it very far. I haven't been training, right? But when it comes to focus, because people don't realize it's trainable, they have the wrong conclusion, which is, well, maybe I'm just not good at concentrating. And they stop trying. So knowing it's trainable is critical so that you don't give up

when it's hard at first. And training is actually not that hard. I'll mention two really quick things you can do. One is boredom exposure therapy. So this is where you on a regular basis, let's say once or twice a day, give yourself small controlled doses of boredom. And all that really means is don't use your phone.

So if you go to the pharmacy, "Okay, I have to wait in line to get my prescription. I'm not going to check my phone while I'm in line." Or "I'm getting gas. You know what? I'm just going to fill up my car with gas and not look at my phone and just stare at that incredibly expensive price that's piling up and get worried about it or whatever." You do this a couple times a day on a regular basis. Once a week, do a more extended period of boredom. So go for a fair-sized walk without your phone. The reason why you do this

It's so that your brain gets used to the ideas that sometimes when you're bored, you don't get novel stimuli. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. That's critical. So when it comes time to actually do deep work, which by definition is boring because there's not a lot of novel stimuli, you're doing just one thing, your brain will tolerate it.

If at every instance, when you get the slightest hint of boredom, you always pull out that phone, your brain's just going to form a Pavlovian connection that says, we always get shiny treats when we're bored. There's no way we're going to tolerate sitting here for 90 minutes just looking at one thing. So, boredom exposure therapy is important. The second thing you can do is interval training. Literally get a timer. For 20 minutes, I'm going to concentrate hard on doing this one thing. If I break my concentration and look at something else, I have to stop and restart to timer.

You will follow through because you don't want to embarrass yourself. It's only 20 minutes. You see a finish line. Okay, seven more minutes and we're done. I can keep focusing. And you just do that until it's comfortable and you add 10 minutes. And then you do that new duration until it's comfortable and you add 10 minutes. Do this in three or four months of this. You'll be able to lock in for 90 minutes to two hours without an unbearable friction. So those are two examples of things you can do to actually get better at holding your attention on one particular target.

Is that 90 to 120 minutes? Is that a good cap for you can't do this for eight hours straight? I think two hours is a good goal. So where the 90 minutes came from is I first started using that technique when I was advising students. So my first few books were aimed at students and I was helping them with their focus. And students have terrible focus, especially once the era of smartphones and ubiquitous wireless internet came along. I mean, they had terrible focus.

And the way they studied was just awful. Back then it was Gchat and texting. They would be doing this simultaneously while they're studying. My goal with them was always to get them the 90 minutes. I could do it in a semester.

like a three months period, I could get them up to about 90 minutes. I think two hours is really good. If you can go two hours and you take a break and then maybe do another two hours later in the day, you're going to be in the top 25 percentile of concentrators. And you can do a lot of damage with that. It reminds me, I took this scrum class where I was being trained to be a scrum product owner. And the instructor was sharing that...

They were doing this test where they shorten the work week first by half a day, by another half a day, and by half a day increments. And they found that people could eventually become equally as productive at two and a half days as they were at five. And then after two and a half, it fell apart. You couldn't get to two or one and a half. And I read something you wrote about slow productivity, which really aligned with that, which is, wow, if you can be very productive in smaller periods of time...

Then you have other time throughout the week to live a more fulfilling life. And the net result is better both for work and not. I think that's somewhat in line with what you talk about with slow productivity. But I'm curious, how does that practically work in the world? And is it even possible? Or is it more an idea that seems amazing, but would be hard to actually execute in our modern workplace? It's not impossible. Part of it is just pulling apart work that you're mixing together.

So everything still gets done, but you're pulling it apart. So part of it is that easy. Just saying, when I'm working on this, I'm just working on this. And then when I'm doing communication, email and Slack, I'm just doing communication. I'm just doing email and Slack. So just pulling apart the stuff you had muddied together, all the same things happen.

All the same people get email replies, all the work gets done, but the work gets done faster and at a higher level of quality because you avoid the context shift. So part of this is just pulling apart stuff that we are mushing together. There's a bigger challenge, I think, in the world of work, however. I do apologize that my answer to every question is I wrote a book on this. This is what happens after you've been writing books for a long time. But the most recent book I wrote was called A World Without Email. And it asked this question of,

How do we get to this place where especially office work or knowledge work is so frenetic with so much email and Slack and Zoom and we're always running around coordinating and talking about work and it's so hard to actually have time left over to work. How do we get there and what should we do about it? And the premise of that book was we got there accidentally. In knowledge work, we made this critical decision that productivity should be personal. So it's just up to you

to figure out how you're going to organize all your work. You got to read David Allen. You got to go to 43 folders. That's all on you. And in a world where everyone is responsible for their own productivity, we fell into this least common denominator, optimally flexible, optimally easy way of collaborating, which I call the hyperactive high fine, which is just

Back and forth unstructured messaging. Grab people as you need them, have this ongoing asynchronous back and forth conversation happening with everyone at all times. At first, it was just email. Now we have Slack and Teams and it's all the same thing. Just say, what about this? You have this. What's going on over here? And that hyperactive hive mind mode of collaboration, that's probably the biggest enemy to undistracted focus because it demands a lot of attention.

If there's 15 different things you're involved in, streams of conversation where things are trying to be figured out and it's asynchronous, so you never know when the next chat's going to come in or the next response is going to come in, it's really hard to disentangle from checking those channels. Because if you go away for three hours, now there's 15 conversations that have to wait for three hours and that might not be acceptable.

Because there maybe has to be five back and forth messages required to figure out what time we're meeting tomorrow. And so we can't wait three hours between each messages or we'll never get to a decision. So probably the largest systemic enemy to this deeper, more sequential, slower way of working is this hyperactive hive mind mode of collaboration that demands constant attention to communication channels. So my argument is fixing that is going to have a huge impact. But even before we fix that,

Just time blocking and pulling apart. When I do this, I'm doing this. When I communicate, I communicate. And I have to apologize, I'll apologize. But I'm not mixing those two things together. Just making that declaration is going to make you a lot more effective. I just thought of some combo of trying to solve that in a work environment that I might experiment with, which is putting something public on your calendar that's like...

letting people know that this is the time that we can collaborate to schedule things or communicate. So not just time blocking for yourself, but time blocking for others. Because like you said, sometimes you need five or six back and forths. But if you can tell someone, hey, from 3 to 4 p.m., I'm available for five to six back and forths. Maybe people can work around each other's schedules a little better and get into deep work more. Yeah, not to overstep, but that is one of the easiest things that people can do that has the biggest difference is office hours.

And there are companies that do this and that they write about it, but here are the times

in which every day my office door is open, my phone is on, my Slack is open, my inbox is open. If you have anything, any sort of interaction with me that requires more than a one message answer. So anything with any interaction beyond just, can you remind me again when the meeting is next week? So if I can respond to it with one message, that's fine. I can wait till I next check my email. If it requires more than that, wait till my office hours.

You wait till my office hours and then I will go back and forth and we'll all go back and forth. And in that one hour period, we can get 15 different asynchronous conversations solved. It is a game changer. And it sounds like a simple thing and you worry like, oh, people will be annoyed that they have to wait till three when they could just get it off their plate. Now, they'll live. They don't really care that they have to wait to three. They just care that there's some way they know that they're going to get an answer so they don't have to worry about it. But think about the mathematics here.

Like imagine you have 10 conversations that each are going to require 10 back and forth messages in order for you to resolve just to make the numbers easier. That's 100 back and forth messages that have to happen. Now imagine if this is happening with emails going back and forth. You can't wait that long before each of these replies because you have to keep the conversations going. So maybe you check your inbox on average

three times before you see each of these messages because you're waiting for them. That's 300 inbox checks that we have now associated with these 10 conversations. Now imagine if instead we put aside one hour of the day where you just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, handled all 10 of those. You've taken 300 context shifts out of your week.

That is a massive benefit to how much you can concentrate the value you're going to produce. All of that work still got done. All that collaboration still happened. At worst case scenario, people have to wait a couple hours, but you have just become 5x more effective in terms of the actual underlying value you can produce. So you came across a very simple idea that is really, really powerful.

Is it most effective when the whole company adopts the same office hours? It's like, hey, we're all going to, as a company, solve these things from these two blocks of time every day. I've seen both, right? There's some argument that says you should have coordination of office hours so that you can basically have impromptu meetings, like a bunch of people going back and forth. But in practice, often people's office hours are more specialized. And that's fine. What it leads to is what I call a reverse meeting. So instead of me being able to take three people

and force all of you to come to me and spend an hour of your time. So now we have four total people sacrificing an hour of their time so that we can discuss some issue. A reverse meeting is...

I go to each of your office hours to talk to you about this and figure it out. Yes, I had to spend more time, but the total impact on the company's time is much less because for everyone else, you just stop by their office hours and chat with them for five minutes, right? So even if you're not all synchronized, reverse meetings makes that a lot more powerful. That's what...

One of the big solutions are for non-repeating, one-off, ad hoc issues that need to be resolved. For any type of work that happens again and again, we produce a podcast episode every week. We put out this report to our clients once a month. Anything that happens again and again, you have to figure out a process. This is how this work unfolds. Here's when we talk about it.

about it, where the information goes, how the information moves back and forth. You have to come up with some sort of process for regularly occurring work that minimizes the number. And this, I think, is the key thing. Minimizes the number of unscheduled messages that must be received and replied to get to done.

So you're not trying to minimize the total time investment. You're not trying to minimize the footprint on the schedule. What you're trying to minimize is there a way to get this podcast episode out or those report to clients that does not require the people involved to just keep checking their inbox and waiting for messages. Is it some sort of structure? This goes to this Dropbox by this time. There's a standing meeting where we go through these issues. We annotate report issues in Google Docs at end of day Wednesday, whatever's in there, the designer can take however you want to figure it out.

That, I think, is the goal for regularly occurring work. How can we get this done in a way that people do not have to be checking inboxes or chat channels for unscheduled messages to arrive to prompt them to do the next thing? I feel like I am ready to redo a few structures and processes specifically related to getting podcast episodes out. So that covers a lot of the work I have to think about.

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I want to change gears a little bit and talk about not work, right? We talked about the deep life and how important it is to think about the things outside of work. You talk about high quality leisure time, right? Like how do you spend your free time in ways that adds the most value also? We work backwards. We're going to back up backwards in the high quality leisure. The reason why someone like me who talks about technology and culture and technology and work and how do I end up talking about leisure is because if you start with the issue of

of people spending more time than they think is useful or healthy scrolling, right? And this is really the big issue I think people have with their phones. Contrary to what we see in media criticism of things like social media, it's much less what they're seeing and it's much more how much time they're spending on it. This is people's main complaint is this slack jaw, just, I just...

I'm tired and just scrolling and it's playing with my emotions. It just makes me unhappy. I don't want to just be doing this. How do you solve that problem? Well, one of the big things that turns up is that this doom scrolling or boredom scrolling or dopamine hacking or whatever you want to call it actually has a psychologically functional purpose. The reason why a lot of people do this is because it is an escape

from some sort of existential void that is really uncomfortable. In other words, if you go up to someone and say, aha, I've solved your problem. I called all the heads of the social media companies. They've kicked you off all their platforms. You're not allowed to use your phone anymore. What happens is it's

It's frightening for people. It's despairing for people to be faced with just me alone with my own thoughts. What do I actually do? What do I do with my time? It's what we often miss is that this is an escape that is functional for people. So that's how I ended up talking about high quality leisure is that if you don't like how much time you're looking at your phone, you have to build up the attractive alternative first.

You have to have the thing that's more human, more compelling, that touches deeper parts of our humanity than just scrolling on screens does. That has to be in place first. And then it is much easier to walk away from excessive phone use because you have something else to do instead. And so that's why I've been an advocate of high quality leisure is you have to actually develop

A really high quality life outside of work that you enjoy and is challenging and disciplined and meaningful before you have any hope of spending less time looking at that glowing little screen. What are some high quality leisure activities maybe for you or people you've talked to that can inspire us all?

What makes an activity high quality is that it's touching more the type of things that we expect as humans to fill our time. So certainly non-trivial analog social interaction, things that require non-trivial sacrifice of time and energy. I'm spending time with other people. I'm doing things with other people. That is really important. Structured discipline activities that makes you more capable or a better person. This can be really rewarding. So this is fitness training, getting in shape.

picking up useful skills. You'll notice there's a certain circle of podcasters out there now that all really got into things like bow hunting or jujitsu at the same time. It's not coincidental. They're activities that are challenging but feel functional and they touch something deeper in our evolutionary past. I can capture my own food or defend myself. That could be really meaningful. Cultivating connoisseurship. So, I'm going to get really into, I don't know,

coffee or movies and really build up a sophisticated understanding of what makes the good good and the not good not good. There's huge pleasure in that in connoisseurship. And when you're a cinephile, the pleasure you get out of seeing a beautifully crafted movie is really difficult to replicate. So, these are the kind of the big categories. So, just to summarize is deep social connection, real sort of social community type connection to

disciplined acquiring of what feels like useful, interesting skills, and then three, building up connoisseurship. Anything that falls in those three categories, it's much harder than scrolling, but it's no contest. When you're spending time doing that, it just feels. You just feel it in your bones. This is right. This makes me come alive as a person, even if I'm exhausted and sweating. This makes me come alive as a person,

In contrast to just the scrolling after scrolling on the screen tends to make us feel like we're closing down. Like something about our humanity is just being digitized and cybernetically subverted. People just feel it in their bones. And I ran this whole experiment for one of my books where I had 1,600 people

walk away from their screens for a month and very aggressively cultivate these new leisure activities. And it's just a report you got again and again. I forgot how much I enjoyed X or how meaningful Y has been. It was leaving Plato's cave. Oh my God, it's not just shadows on the wall. There's actual sunlight and that world is so much richer. When I

When I heard you describe social media, not necessarily as the content, but the activity, it reminded me of binge watching a TV show. And then you use the cinephile example as, okay, well, movies could actually be this high quality leisure.

Do you think that habit of loving a show and watching an entire season at once could actually be high quality? Or does it end up falling prey to be more like social media? Yeah, it can go either way. I think it's a really good example. So for someone who is a cinephile or really is interested in that particular art form, watching a great show on HBO can be like a really rewarding thing. On the other hand, if it is I Am...

binge watching whatever, how I met my mother episodes for the third time because I just don't want to deal with me feeling down on myself. And I'm going to do that for the next two hours. It can be really negative. And I think that's a really good example. And it's the same thing with obviously internet and social media or all these various tools. When they're deployed on behalf of something important to you, they're really powerful.

when they're used as a numbing mechanism, it's really negative. If you're a whiskey connoisseur, whiskey could be a really positive thing. Like, wow, I just tried this new whiskey that this new distillery did and they're doing something great and it's really interesting. Or you're pounding Jack Daniels, it could be really negative, right? So, I think there is this duality, this dichotomy to a lot of these activities. I think recognizing that makes it

a more sensible conversation. It's not useful when you get into these debates about these false binaries. Is technology terrible? Is technology good? Though I'll say, I don't actually ever see anyone arguing any of those points. You never actually come across anyone who says,

technology is terrible, we shouldn't use it, or all technology is good. Yet almost every book or article on techno-criticism makes it feel like that's what the whole world is doing. Whereas a lot of people are out there just saying technology is terrible or technology is great, but I'm so smart and nuanced, I think it's somewhere in between. Everyone knows it's in between. No one is actually arguing those extreme positions. No one is saying let's disconnect electricity. No one is saying that it's great for 12-year-olds to be spending three hours on TikTok every day.

Like we're all actually already in the middle. This little pet peeve of mine is that everyone always makes it seem like there's some sort of intellectual hero for saying, I'm not a Luddite. There hasn't been Luddites for the last 150 years. It doesn't impress me anymore for someone to say that.

Now, I will push back and say, I have seen a TED Talk you gave telling people that you should get off social media, which is the full get completely off. Now, maybe that's a provocative example to get people to experience it. But I know you're not on it. Do you think that it has some positive applications when used in particular ways? So my philosophy is called digital minimalism, where the whole idea is you figure out first what you're all about, what's important to you, what you want to do with your life and your time. And then you work backwards from that.

to say, what's the best way to deploy technology to support these things I care about? And the answer to that question is what decides what tech you use. So that's ultimately what I preach. And so everyone's going to have their own profile of technology. I don't really care about the specifics so much as I care about how you get there. So the minimalist mindset is I deploy technology in specific ways to gain specific benefits that are important to me. That contrasts to what a lot of people do instead, which is maximalism, which is

Why not use this technology? Or there might be something interesting over here, so why don't I do that too? It's sort of like, it can't hurt. I don't want to miss out. So let me just use everything. You'll drown if you try maximalism. Minimalism is much more focused. And so everyone's going to end up differently. When I go through the minimalist exercise, I didn't end up seeing a real powerful use for the standard social media platforms. I never had a Facebook account or Instagram account or Twitter account. But I think YouTube is a powerful medium.

And we release video of my podcast on YouTube. I'm a big believer in podcasts. I've had a blog and email newsletters for a long time. So you end up with a very customized portfolio. It's the intention that I care about. Why are you using technology? You can set reasonable guardrails about how you use it and you'll get more benefit than cost. If you stumble in the technology, the cost is probably going to outweigh the benefit. It's interesting. You just made me feel a lot better about my use of Twitter because I've kind of curated a particular list of a handful of...

more or less like news sources that I don't want to go to their sites and look at every article and stuff. I want a quick way to almost use Twitter as an RSS reader, because I think it's like the most efficient way for me to have a finite list of things to look at from 20 or so news sources that I'm interested in, whether they're newsletters or blogs or actual media companies and publications. That's my primary use of Twitter. I think coming into this, I was like, oh man, I feel bad about it. Now I feel actually a little bit better about it. So thank you.

Oh, that's a great example because you don't just use Twitter. It's not a binary thing. You don't say, oh, because I get interesting news on Twitter, I just use Twitter all the time for all purposes and I'm on there yelling with trolls and doing this type of thing. Because you know why you're using Twitter, you can put guardrails up.

"Oh, if I use it because it's a RSS feed for news sources, and a lot of news sources will post on their Twitter all their big stories," then you just curate who you follow down to those lists. There's no reason why you would ever be tweeting at people. You don't get dragged into weird pylons or fights. And that's like the magic of minimalism. If you know why you use it, you can put up rules. The other big example is Facebook groups. A lot of people use Facebook groups for specific, often local organizations.

that are very important to them. But if they recognize that's why they're using Facebook for the Facebook group, they realize I don't need to be on the newsfeed. And I can use a plugin that just eradicates the newsfeed and I don't need Facebook on my phone because I just need to check when the next group meeting is. I can do that on my desktop. And my total time on Facebook is...

six minutes a week. And it's really useful to me. Because when I know that Facebook's groups is why I'm using Facebook, I realize there's no reason to be scrolling through my uncle's political rants while waiting in line to get my burrito. Because if you know why you're using a technology, you can focus how you use it. And there's a real advantage in that. What do you do when you're waiting in line for the burrito? Is that practicing boredom? What are you sitting there in line doing, whether it's on your phone, in your thoughts? Do you have an activity?

Well, so when you're practicing boredom, you don't have to do it all the time. You just want to make sure you do it on a semi-regular basis. On one of your burrito runs every day, practice the boredom. But you don't want to see boredom as being intrinsically valuable. That's one place I differ from some others in that I think boredom feels really negative.

Anything that feels really negative, that's usually a pretty strong evolutionary signal that there's something going on here that we want to avoid. So I think our minds actually use the sense of boredom to try to spur us into productive activities. Perhaps is why humans, even when they have food in the cave, get up and go out and invent the wheel. We feel boredom. I don't think cats do. Right?

So, I'm not one of these people who thinks boredom is great and you should feel it all the time. So yeah, you can entertain yourself in the line for the burrito. It could mean a lot of things. It could be listening to the podcast. I think it's completely fine. I'm listening to an interesting conversation. Chris and Cal are talking. I want to hear what they have to say. It could be bringing a book with you. I have friends who started a company called Mouse Books, which I really enjoy. You get them in a subscription. They print books. It's usually short stories or heavily abridged books.

in a paper format roughly the size of a smartphone. And their whole pitch is it fits wherever your smartphone would fit. So, when you would pull out your smartphone, just pull out the latest mouse book instead and you can actually read wherever you are. And so, yeah, boredom is not a virtue. But what you want to avoid is never experiencing it,

Or B, I just get really suspicious with numbing behavior. So if it's just, I'm just scrolling and it's numbing me, I get worried about it. If you're like, yeah, when I'm bored in line, I start drinking. I'm like, yeah, it'll numb you a little bit, but I don't know if this is the healthiest thing. Maybe there's other things to do. I'm all for boredom spurring productive activity, but maybe amplifying activity.

the level of productivity to something a little bit higher on some occasions than simply let this algorithmically constructed stream just start playing my brainstem like some sort of nervous system harpsichord or something like this.

I want to talk a little bit about how you end your day because I read something that I think was an older post of yours about your routine at the end of the day. I think it was like schedule shutdown complete. I'm curious if you still use that as a way to wrap up the workday and draw things to a close. Yeah. You need a clear distinction between workday and non-workday just from a

cognitive hygiene perspective. And so, what I've always preached as a shutdown ritual where you have to close all the open loops. Okay, am I missing anything? Let me do a final check my inbox. Look at my calendar and my plan. What am I doing tomorrow? Does my plan make sense? Am I good?

Am I good to stop working? Right? So you want to do a sweep like that so you can switch from work to non-work. The problem is your brain, especially at first, is not going to trust that. And so when you stop working, your brain will be like, are we sure? Let's think through our plan. And what about our boss sent that email? Did we really send him the right response? Maybe he's mad. And are we forgetting this? Your mind wants to keep talking and thinking about work, which is difficult. It drains your energy. It makes it hard to enjoy other parts of your life. So the secret here...

is to have an unusual hook that you use to indicate that you've finished your sweep. And so, I famously used a phrase, schedule shutdown complete. I now sell a time block planner that has a checkbox. So, for people who don't want to actually say that phrase and attract the scorn or concern of people around them, it actually has a shutdown complete checkbox. But the point is, it's a unique demonstrable activity. So, whether you're saying that weird phrase...

We're checking off a very specific checkbox. It's clear and demonstrable and unique. The whole reason why you do that is that later in the night, when the work mind tries to come in and say, what about, are we sure? Like, what about tomorrow and our boss? You say, I said that stupid phrase or I checked that checkbox. There's no way I would have done that if I had not gone through everything and convinced myself that it was fine to shut down. So I'm not going to get into this rumination with you tonight, mind. I said the stupid phrase. I trust it.

And the point is you do that enough times, you're not feeding the beast. And that urge to ruminate about work after work is done eventually diminishes. So it's a way of calming rumination without engaging. If you engage it and say, "No, no, look, here's our plan. Let's go over the plan again and again," you give it power. And the rumination gets more powerful, it gets more energy, the groove gets deeper. But if you don't engage it and say like, "I'm not going to get into any of the specifics of this cognitive concern. I'm just going to go back

and say, "I would not have said schedule shutdown complete unless I'd gone through everything, convinced myself it was okay." It's a way of actually tamping down rumination and actually getting some cognitive peace outside of your work hours. What happens when you're at that end of the workday, but you're not done? There are things that need to get done. For example, I release an episode every Wednesday, and I now have two kids as of a couple weeks ago. And it's like, "Okay, well, we're all sitting down to dinner at X and I'm not done. I can't check the box.

Any tricks or routines or ways to come back to that in a healthy manner when you know you're not going to be able to finish before you wanted? Yeah. So, for second shift work like that, usually what works well is, okay, you go through your first, they call it like a provisional shutdown. You're shutting down most of the open loops, like especially the open loops about, is there emails I'm missing? Is my plan for the week makes sense? And you set up at the end of that initial provisional shutdown, here's what I'm doing later.

And it's very focused. I have to get this episode out. Here's where the files are. That's what I'm doing. I'm not doing email. I'm not doing slightly. It's very focused what has to happen later tonight. So, I'm doing a schedule shutdown on the open loops are closed for the day. I have a plan for tonight. I know when that's happening and what has to happen there. And so, now I can go back to my kids and know when it gets to 8 and I have to switch over the second plan. I'm just executing this sort of focus thing I've set aside. And I don't even have to do a second shutdown after that second shift because I've already...

done that after the first shift. They're like, are we on? Are we good? Yeah, I can do this tonight and we'll pick it up tomorrow. You've looked at the whole plan. You've looked at the email inbox. You've done that all with the first shutdown. And then the second shift is like a focus thing you come and do when you're done, you're done. And that's what I usually recommend. The only other thing I recommend to people though, is if you're consistently doing that second shift,

If possible, end your first shift earlier. Think about, I want the sum of all the work I do in the day to add up to a reasonable amount of hours. And that's just a burnout prevention tool. If you're like, I'm not gonna be able to get this done. Can I end work a little earlier? If I know I always work on this in the evenings or I record my podcast in the evenings, like why don't I end my day work earlier? So the total sum of effort if possible remains reasonable.

I really like that. I might try that this week. We're recording this on a Tuesday. I know I'm going to get an episode out tonight. So maybe I'm going to end it early, spend some time with the family, which leads me to ask this quick follow-up, which is you have more kids than me. I learned a math lesson with our second child. The two is a greater number than one. And you've learned that as well. I'm curious how any of these...

Things you've written about, things you've talked about have changed in a world with children where time is more of a finite resource. Yeah. I've had kids now for a little while. I'll come up to a decade now of wrangling kids. So a lot of these ideas actually got developed in that crucible. And I think that's actually not surprising because one of the things that becomes clear...

When you have kids and you have a job and you're trying to balance what's going on with your spouse, etc., is you need more structure and clarity about your time. You can't just wing it. Now it suddenly matters. When do I work? When do I need to be done at work? Do I need to go pick up someone from here? Do I have to drop someone off here? I think that's probably one of the origins of thinking through, let's say, time block scheduling.

You got to suddenly be clear about your time. Work is not just this generic thing you try to do as much as possible about. No, you have time that you have to allocate among different priorities. Some professional ones, some family ones, some personal ones. What's the best possible allocation? So I think that's really important. I'm a big believer in fixed schedule productivity, which I think kids really hammer home. When you fix in advance, here's how much time I have to work. That is non-negotiable.

So I have to work backwards from that to figure out how to make everything work. And maybe that's going to have to make me more efficient. Maybe that means I have to take things off my plate. Maybe that means I'm going to have to change my professional situation. But you work backwards from a fixed amount of time and say, what can I do with that? That often leads to a lot of innovation. So I think that's important. And obviously, having kids really emphasizes the importance that work is just one aspect in a deeper life.

that it's not the sole source of meaning. So you want to give work its place and do what you can with it, but you want that place to be controlled and have these other parts of life as well. The final point I'll say is kids are a big source

of my millennial generation who are now, we're all of the age, we're all having kids. I'm an old millennial. I'm about to turn 40. They're all in their 30s now. They're all having kids, starting families. I think it's a big driver of discontent with social media because when you have these other things in your life that are important and demanding and require your attention, suddenly spending a lot of times doing this to escape

seems like it's almost an existential threat. This is a big threat in a way that if you're 24, you're like, whatever. Why not? I'm bored. Why not just look at this thing? So I don't know. I think having kids has probably shaped a lot of my thinking and can help a lot of other people start

start thinking about these issues as well. It's definitely drived a lot of my desire to be more optimal with my time, my days, my travel. Layovers are not nearly as tolerable as they once were. It shaped a lot of things. On that note of travel, our listeners really love travel. They love getting tips from our guests. So I'm going to ask you before we go to pick a place you're familiar with and share some recommendations for a meal, a place to grab a drink or some unusual activity someone should check out.

Maybe I'll pitch where I am right now. I mentioned I found this small 19th century town that is just nestled right in the middle of all the DC sprawl. So I'll give it a pitch. The town is called Tacoma Park, spelled with a K instead of a C. It's a cool little town. It has a metro stop and it's right across the boundary. But I'm recording right now. My studio is above a restaurant in downtown Tacoma Park called Republic.

The bar is right below here. We don't yet have the dumb waiter working, but I'm working on that innovation. I want to be able to just bring the drink up as we're finishing here. Great nestled out of the beaten path of the city and the suburbs, a great restaurant. Down the street from here is where I do a large amount of my writing. It's a coffee shop. Shout out to BevCo.com.

just celebrating their five-year anniversary. So I live a couple blocks away from my studio, this restaurant, and that coffee shop. And between the three of those, that's where you get deep work done. That's where productivity comes from. So you should definitely give Tacoma Park a visit next time you're in the DC area. And if you swing by Bebco, you'll probably see me in a corner somewhere wrangling a New Yorker article or trying to edit a book. And definitely don't interrupt you because you're in the middle of some deep work.

Yes. You're going to get coffee in your face. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. Where do you want people to go to find everything you're reading, writing, producing, talking about on your show? So I have that newsletter I've talked about. You can find out about that at calnewport.com. And on my weekly podcast, which is called Deep Questions with Cal Newport. So you can find that where podcasts are. We release the full...

podcast episodes as video and clips of the podcast as video. That's all on YouTube at youtube.com slash calnewportmedia. Really the only places to find me because I don't use any of the other services. Great. We will link to all those on the show notes. Definitely check out the podcast. I know I enjoyed it a lot the last few weeks as I went pretty deep to get to know you a little better. So thank you so much for being here. Well, thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.

I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com or at Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.