Ep. 195: The Social Media “Algorithm”, Deep Walks, and Cal’s Simplest Productivity Tool

00:00:00.000 | I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 195.

00:00:13.160 | I'm here in my Deep Work HQ joined by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:19.000 | I was late today.

00:00:20.800 | We're late getting started.

00:00:22.600 | Jesse, my apologies.

00:00:24.160 | I had the AC repair people coming out to do maintenance and we discovered all sorts of

00:00:30.640 | issues.

00:00:31.640 | Long story short, 45-minute appointment became two and a half hours.

00:00:38.400 | So I have been up to my ears literally, I suppose, and free on.

00:00:43.240 | I'll tell you though, and I've mentioned this to you before, Jesse, I am obsessed with my

00:00:47.000 | AC in my current house and my old house.

00:00:50.600 | I've never had it work the way I want it to work.

00:00:52.440 | I've never just had it cycles on and off, like reasonable length cycles, keeps up on

00:00:58.720 | hot days.

00:00:59.720 | There's always weirdness going on.

00:01:02.040 | I am this close to taking, I think, a year-long sabbatical from Georgetown, putting all my

00:01:08.240 | writing projects on hold to just full-time work on my AC.

00:01:12.760 | Doesn't Tesla have a heating system coming out?

00:01:15.520 | You could buy one of those now that you're boys with Elon.

00:01:17.640 | That's what I should do.

00:01:18.640 | Yeah.

00:01:19.640 | I'm going to do it, whatever the most complicated expensive, but it's true about HVAC.

00:01:24.440 | You could spend your entire life obsessing about HVAC to try to get it right.

00:01:28.120 | So we're now rebuilding a very old unit.

00:01:30.720 | We're starting from scratch and rebuilding our upstairs AC from scratch, re-insulating

00:01:35.160 | everything, trying to perfectly size the unit to it.

00:01:38.240 | I mean, I literally could give this, I would say 50% of my time and would be happy.

00:01:42.960 | And I could solve this problem so that it's a hot DC summer day and the upstairs AC is

00:01:47.800 | coming off and on, but not even thinking about it, not worried about it, not going from vent

00:01:52.720 | to vent, checking the temperature, trying to see what's going on.

00:01:55.960 | Is it leaking?

00:01:56.960 | Is it old?

00:01:57.960 | I mean, I would be a happy man.

00:01:58.960 | So I'm just going to dedicate a huge amount of time.

00:02:01.120 | And then one day the AC will just work and I'll be lost.

00:02:04.600 | Because you like a cold, right?

00:02:06.000 | I like a cold and also just a work.

00:02:09.720 | This house, but also in my last house, we just had this maddening thing where maybe

00:02:14.280 | this is the way ACs are supposed to work, but it would just be on and on and on.

00:02:17.760 | And I'd be like, well, shouldn't it be cycling off and on?

00:02:20.120 | Like, can't we just make it powerful enough that on like a reasonably hot day it's cycling

00:02:24.160 | off and on.

00:02:25.160 | But it's always been that even on a somewhat hot day, our AC just runs and runs.

00:02:28.240 | It's like, this is not other people's ACs don't do this.

00:02:30.760 | Like something's not right.

00:02:31.760 | It's not powerful enough.

00:02:32.760 | It's not big enough.

00:02:34.680 | And I want to dedicate my time.

00:02:36.200 | That's where I want to dedicate my time.

00:02:38.760 | Just have a beautifully balanced, perfectly proportioned variable speed system.

00:02:46.480 | That's just well suited.

00:02:48.560 | The reality is I live in a very tall house and it, I mean, you've seen it, we're on a

00:02:53.600 | hill.

00:02:54.840 | So the front of the house at the top of the hill is a normal height.

00:02:59.720 | And then the hill drops away, fully exposing the basement.

00:03:03.100 | And so it's just like a 30 foot tall, like just tower that just the sun beats on just

00:03:08.800 | a box.

00:03:09.800 | And it's a big old, like early, very early 20th century house where it's very narrow

00:03:13.880 | roof.

00:03:14.880 | So it's just like a straight up and that thing just bakes.

00:03:18.520 | But anyways, I think what we need to do, and you would agree with this is our new podcast

00:03:23.340 | that was supposed to be mainly about sports and fantasy novels will now have a Ask Cal

00:03:30.900 | about AC segment.

00:03:33.420 | I like it.

00:03:34.420 | Nothing crazy.

00:03:35.420 | I'm talking just like a tight 45 minutes every episode.

00:03:38.700 | Just me talking about Freon levels and balance and return rates.

00:03:46.620 | So oh man, I'm going to fix this problem though.

00:03:50.100 | AC in here works fine.

00:03:51.660 | Yeah.

00:03:52.660 | You like it.

00:03:53.660 | I mean, it gets cold in here.

00:03:54.660 | Yeah.

00:03:55.660 | So a little bit inside the curtain and not to dwell on this, but the studio is probably

00:03:58.300 | the warmest room in the office because we only have this one little vent and we have

00:04:03.260 | people in here and we have all these curtains up.

00:04:05.420 | So to make the studio broadcasting cool, and if you've been on, you know, I've done a bunch

00:04:09.980 | of TV and et cetera, it's cool because you don't want to sweat on TV.

00:04:14.280 | You have to make the rest as Jesse will attest.

00:04:16.900 | The rest of the HQ has to be an icebox, but we have our own unit here, which is what's

00:04:21.580 | nice is we there's just our own AC unit.

00:04:24.460 | It's in the closet.

00:04:25.800 | It just runs us.

00:04:27.520 | This is how I justified safety concerns when I moved over to this HQ, like way early in

00:04:33.020 | the pandemic, I was like, it's fine.

00:04:35.100 | We have our own air handling system.

00:04:37.020 | That was the way I thought about it.

00:04:38.300 | It's not like we're sharing because that's the type of stuff we worried about in spring

00:04:41.220 | of 2020.

00:04:42.220 | It's like, well, what if the air from the other offices are going to like bring virus

00:04:45.660 | in or this or that?

00:04:46.660 | And we were worried about it back then.

00:04:47.660 | And so I was like, you know, we have our own HVAC in here.

00:04:49.820 | It's we're in our own closed loop.

00:04:51.820 | So yeah, the AC here works fine.

00:04:53.300 | All right, Jesse, enough about that.

00:04:56.340 | Um, actually we did get a email from Carl.

00:05:00.820 | He's a big fan.

00:05:01.860 | Was it about air conditioner?

00:05:06.620 | It wasn't, but it should be.

00:05:07.620 | Well, then I'm not interested.

00:05:10.740 | But he actually, he's been emailing me and he was interested in when you're talk about

00:05:16.500 | the algorithm, when you were talking about the Obama call for more regulation for during

00:05:21.740 | one of our Cal reacts to the news.

00:05:24.260 | Yeah.

00:05:25.260 | Yeah.

00:05:26.260 | Yeah.

00:05:27.260 | So he thought it was enlightening and he's like talking about the algorithm and how it's

00:05:32.860 | like one of the worst things about social media.

00:05:34.820 | And he'd like to kind of hear you talk about that more.

00:05:38.420 | And he's even wondering why an algorithm is even needed.

00:05:41.620 | Yes.

00:05:42.620 | Um, so if you could just dive into that a little bit, that's interesting.

00:05:44.980 | I mean, there's two things about the algorithm.

00:05:47.460 | One is it's not an algorithm, right?

00:05:50.220 | So we're going to get a little bit more precise with our terminology.

00:05:53.860 | Uh, I'm teaching algorithms for example, this semester and an algorithm technically is you,

00:06:00.980 | you have a finite sequence of unambiguous steps that are executed in a clear control

00:06:06.220 | order.

00:06:07.420 | It's way more ambiguous what goes on with social media.

00:06:11.020 | So instead of really an algorithm, think about it as a, a large bank of black boxes that

00:06:18.500 | takes in lots of information and then using that information helps make decisions about

00:06:24.060 | what should we show this particular user.

00:06:26.980 | It's actually assigning weights to different possible things to figure out which tweet

00:06:30.220 | to show this user, which Facebook newsfeed posts to prioritize.

00:06:34.780 | And what is actually happening to these black boxes is not just a single algorithm that

00:06:37.740 | you can study.

00:06:38.780 | It's really for the most part, a collection of mainly neural nets.

00:06:41.600 | So you have, you have neural networks that are trained through back propagation to try

00:06:45.820 | to essentially learn what it is that appeals to you and what doesn't, but it's not just

00:06:52.660 | one neural net.

00:06:53.740 | There's multiple different neural nets that do different things.

00:06:56.100 | And then their feedback is fed into each other in somewhat complicated ways.

00:07:00.160 | And so it's a real, almost intractable mess of black boxes connected together in complex

00:07:06.900 | manner.

00:07:07.900 | So it's this real complicated mess of different networks hooked up to each other that in the

00:07:12.460 | end spits out its recommendations in the terms of weights of show this tweet, not that.

00:07:19.980 | So it's completely obfuscated.

00:07:22.380 | It's very difficult to try to find out what is going on inside those networks.

00:07:27.660 | I mean, if you want to really get into neural networks, I mean, what they're really doing

00:07:31.420 | is they're, they're really, as we've talked about before, but they're, they're, they're

00:07:34.700 | essentially building spaces like regions and multi-dimensional space that they can associate.

00:07:42.180 | So this is what a standard, I don't want to get too far down this, but a standard, not

00:07:46.140 | many layer neural net was, is basically just building up the space in which the inputs

00:07:50.620 | exist into these different regions.

00:07:52.140 | So it can categorize things.

00:07:53.140 | And then when you get something like a deep learning neural net, you have multiple layers

00:07:57.980 | that are each doing something like that.

00:07:59.780 | And then they're communicating to each other.

00:08:01.380 | So one layer might look at a picture and just be really good at figuring out where the straight

00:08:05.540 | edges are and how many there are.

00:08:08.300 | And then another layer takes that input is really good at figuring out, well, if there's

00:08:11.140 | this many straight edges, then it's probably a crosswalk.

00:08:14.660 | And so it all gets kind of complicated, but that's what I want to emphasize is complicated.

00:08:17.940 | So it's not an algorithm we can tweak easily.

00:08:19.660 | It's not an algorithm we can understand easily.

00:08:22.800 | Can we get rid of that in social media?

00:08:25.580 | I mean, we, we can imagine that being true.

00:08:29.620 | We can imagine that being true because we used to have social media without these quote

00:08:33.120 | unquote algorithms.

00:08:35.360 | This was basically all social media before 2009.

00:08:39.560 | So if you use Twitter in 2007, there's no complicated algorithm involved in showing

00:08:45.720 | what you see.

00:08:47.940 | All it did was sort of all the people you follow here, their tweets, sort them in chronological

00:08:54.060 | order, but the newest one at the top, Facebook was doing the same thing.

00:08:58.660 | You have different people that you, I don't know what their terminology was.

00:09:01.900 | You'd like, you friend.

00:09:02.900 | See, people don't even talk about this on Facebook anymore.

00:09:06.100 | It's just become this newsfeed distraction machine, but you know, you would friend people

00:09:09.700 | and would look at what they were posting and put it in chronological order is what people

00:09:13.940 | were posting.

00:09:15.700 | And then at some point after that, as we've talked about before, you get these complex

00:09:19.860 | neural network based algorithms that say, well, I'm not just going to show you things

00:09:22.620 | in chronological chronological order.

00:09:24.700 | I'm going to prioritize things that are going to increase engagement, which means time on

00:09:27.980 | service.

00:09:30.220 | And that's where we get this complicated play where we no longer understand how it shows

00:09:34.860 | us what it shows us.

00:09:36.500 | Many of the impacts that the switch to this quote unquote algorithmic sorting of social

00:09:41.180 | media content had like many of the issues of this were unexpected.

00:09:45.420 | There's side effects.

00:09:46.420 | Like all you're trying to do with these networks, these neural nets all connected together is

00:09:51.180 | just to make the user happier in the sense of I want to spend more time looking at this.

00:09:55.820 | But I had all sorts of side effects.

00:09:57.060 | And I think one of the big ones is what we talked about when we covered John Heights

00:10:01.860 | Atlantic article from a few weeks ago.

00:10:06.380 | And it was it introduced intense virality.

00:10:10.260 | Because now I could post something, other people could start spreading it.

00:10:14.780 | The algorithm will see that it's popular.

00:10:17.360 | So it's going to start showing it to more people, which gives it a chance to be even

00:10:19.700 | more popular.

00:10:20.700 | And you can have explosive virality.

00:10:22.180 | And Heights point was explosive explosive virality led to a environment that was high

00:10:30.300 | stakes and terrifying.

00:10:31.940 | You could be a hero or canceled in 12 hours, you know, just like, boom, it could just happen.

00:10:38.540 | And that completely changed who you social media, how they used it.

00:10:41.820 | Another issue with these type of algorithms had to do with I talked about this in digital

00:10:45.940 | minimalism, but it made it way less predictable about what reaction you were going to get

00:10:51.940 | to your pieces.

00:10:52.940 | And that also touched on just social psychology, the intermittent reinforcement of sometimes

00:10:57.540 | people like what I do, and sometimes people don't.

00:11:00.300 | That became a real addictive factor in getting people back, especially for Instagram and

00:11:04.580 | Facebook in the earlier days of these algorithms is now that when people could like and things

00:11:09.260 | could be shared, you had this much more unpredictable and unstable environment of feedback.

00:11:15.700 | And that was very addictive.

00:11:16.700 | Like, are people going to like this?

00:11:17.940 | Are people not going to like this?

00:11:20.260 | So it's possible.

00:11:21.500 | But there's no reason why companies would because Carl, it makes them way more, way

00:11:27.900 | more profitable.

00:11:29.980 | It's fantastically more profitable.

00:11:32.500 | People use these services all the time because they are perfectly optimized to get you to

00:11:36.940 | do that.

00:11:37.980 | If you went back to 2007 Facebook, it is way more boring than 2022 Facebook.

00:11:46.060 | If you go back to Twitter, early Twitter, before they began building these algorithmically

00:11:52.260 | juiced timelines, it was a way more boring place.

00:11:55.420 | Like most of what you saw was not interesting because most of what most people you follow

00:12:00.100 | post is not post is not interesting.

00:12:02.340 | So it's good for us as a culture because it was a diversion.

00:12:06.740 | We don't want to spend too much time on, but it's a completely different beast.

00:12:10.080 | And I believe the timeline was Facebook made that move.

00:12:13.860 | I mean, Twitter made that move first and then Facebook and Instagram followed.

00:12:19.980 | So when they saw when Facebook saw Twitter move away from a strict chronological timeline,

00:12:27.220 | Facebook realized they had to do something similar.

00:12:29.340 | So now I don't know if that genie is going to go back in the bottle for those companies

00:12:31.780 | because I mean, it would be like going to an oil company, like going to Exxon and saying,

00:12:37.340 | I know you've, you've invented these technologies, which allows you to get 10 X more oil out

00:12:40.860 | of the ground per day.

00:12:43.580 | But could you stop using them?

00:12:45.940 | And they're probably going to say, no, they're probably gonna say, no, like, you know, this

00:12:49.780 | is our main technology, we can oil the ground.

00:12:51.380 | We got, we've gotten really good at it.

00:12:53.480 | We don't want to artificially go back to a time when we were worse at it.

00:12:56.260 | Yeah.

00:12:57.260 | So it's interesting.

00:12:58.260 | You know, I got another email about that segment.

00:13:00.620 | So that that particular article, the reacting to Obama's call to regulate social media.

00:13:06.660 | And I mentioned section 230.

00:13:10.380 | So there's this rule on the books called section 230 of this larger legislation that has a

00:13:16.540 | big impact in that it protects.

00:13:18.260 | So we talked about it protects platforms from liability for what other users are posting

00:13:25.260 | on the platforms.

00:13:27.020 | And it was invented.

00:13:28.020 | We talked about this before it was the intent was thinking about comments.

00:13:32.940 | You know, I have a blog, it's 2008 of a comment section, and maybe someone's going to come

00:13:39.940 | along and leave a comment on that section that is, you know, violate some laws like

00:13:45.820 | revealing insider trading or conducting libel against someone or something like this.

00:13:51.060 | Right.

00:13:52.060 | And section 230, very crudely speaking, would say, I'm not responsible for that.

00:13:55.660 | I just had a comment board, but I'm not the editor selecting information.

00:13:58.820 | And the idea was these large social media platforms were using that coverage to say,

00:14:02.820 | look, we're not we're not an editor.

00:14:05.100 | Right.

00:14:06.100 | So we can't be held liable for what people actually say on it.

00:14:08.340 | And so there's one of the pushes for regulation is to get rid of that protection and say,

00:14:12.140 | no, you are liable for what's posted on your platform, just like a newspaper is liable

00:14:15.620 | for what they print and that this might lead to more aggressive or more effective content

00:14:22.620 | moderation.

00:14:23.620 | I said I might be interested in it just because anything that would lead social media to fragment

00:14:30.100 | and have to have to become more niche, I thought would be good.

00:14:32.740 | Anyways, I got an email from a lawyer who used to specialize in section 230.

00:14:37.180 | Long story short, Jesse, he was basically saying.

00:14:40.500 | It's a tricky path to go down.

00:14:43.300 | He's like, if you pull up to 30 and you do so because you want to, there's an impact

00:14:50.500 | you want on these very large social media companies, he said, actually, they would probably

00:14:53.780 | be OK.

00:14:54.940 | They can afford the legal expertise to try to walk around and sidestep these liabilities

00:15:01.680 | and that like small people are going to get hurt.

00:15:04.320 | It's going to be, you know, Cal Newport dot com.

00:15:06.740 | Like it really could be a problem for smaller companies.

00:15:09.860 | So look, I'm not a lawyer, but it's an interesting note.

00:15:12.100 | And he's like, it's just complicated.

00:15:15.140 | So there you go.

00:15:17.540 | Good question, though, Carl.

00:15:18.980 | Yeah, I like people emailing.

00:15:21.100 | Jesse is Jesse at Cal Newport dot com.

00:15:23.100 | He loves to hear about the show.

00:15:24.940 | What you like, what you don't like.

00:15:27.820 | J.E.S.S.E.

00:15:28.820 | J.E.S.S.E.

00:15:29.820 | At Cal Newport dot com.

00:15:32.820 | Somebody asked about that.

00:15:33.820 | That's the only reason why I threw that in there.

00:15:35.820 | Yeah, it's not it's not G.E.S.S.E.

00:15:39.300 | Why is it so I saw Jesse's spell with I.E.

00:15:45.420 | Fair enough.

00:15:46.420 | Fair enough.

00:15:47.420 | So that was from that was someone asking about an older reacts to the new section segment.

00:15:51.860 | I thought we would do a brief Cal reacts to a new segment about a new article today.

00:15:56.300 | What I.

00:15:57.700 | I think I without exaggeration can say probably like one of the most important articles published.

00:16:05.020 | Let's be modest here, but look at the last.

00:16:08.940 | Decade.

00:16:10.700 | And that is an article that appeared in The New Yorker last week.

00:16:14.540 | So you're hearing this on a Monday.

00:16:15.620 | It appeared the Monday before it was an article written by this young buck named Cal Newport.

00:16:20.500 | I'm joking.

00:16:22.020 | This is not one of the most important articles of the decade, but I did after a bit of a

00:16:26.620 | hiatus have returned to the page of The New Yorker, published an article about Elon Musk

00:16:31.180 | and Twitter.

00:16:32.180 | We should talk about it briefly.

00:16:33.180 | I'm not going to talk about in depth because honestly, you've heard through various segments

00:16:37.740 | we've done on this podcast.

00:16:38.820 | You are ahead of the curve listening to this podcast.

00:16:40.940 | You have heard a lot of my ideas about Twitter and Musk's acquisition.

00:16:45.060 | Well, I refined and polished my thoughts on this for a reaction piece that I wrote for

00:16:52.100 | The New Yorker.

00:16:53.400 | It was titled our misguided obsession about Twitter.

00:16:57.840 | And here's the here's the basic point.

00:16:59.420 | Let me just give you the basic point.

00:17:00.980 | When I looked around at the landscape of coverage of Elon Musk making his bid to acquire Twitter,

00:17:09.060 | what I noticed is that almost every reaction was unified by a belief that Twitter was very

00:17:16.020 | important.

00:17:17.580 | Twitter is the digital town square.

00:17:19.620 | That's the terminology Musk used himself in the official statement announcing the acquisition

00:17:24.140 | and everyone seemed to more or less agree.

00:17:27.220 | Now once you agree that Twitter is the digital town square, then of course you are going

00:17:33.340 | to care a lot about exactly how Twitter operates.

00:17:36.380 | If this is as most people who are writing about this believe, if this platform is where

00:17:44.060 | policy is set, if it's where the ultimate adjudication of goodness and badness of individuals,

00:17:51.980 | of ideas of organizations is made, if it's where activism gets its priorities, then even

00:17:57.180 | small changes to how it operates, the rules for content moderation, if you can go back

00:18:04.300 | and edit a tweet or not, who is kicked off, who's not kicked off and under what circumstances,

00:18:10.660 | the implicit norms that are being implemented by all these rules makes a huge difference.

00:18:16.740 | So of course there'd be a big uproar about the ownership changing hands for this coming

00:18:22.860 | from a public company to a private company where one individual would suddenly have way

00:18:27.020 | control over this platform.

00:18:28.300 | So almost everything I read came from that starting place.

00:18:31.900 | And once you're in that starting place, you're either really worried, I'm really worried

00:18:36.140 | about Musk, I don't think he's on my team, I'm worried he's going to do things that's

00:18:40.540 | going to make this conversation worse, or you're gloating like this is great, I think

00:18:44.340 | Musk is going to do things we like and that's all you focused on.

00:18:46.940 | I basically stepped away from that whole argument and said, forget the details of what Musk

00:18:50.980 | is or is not going to do to Twitter.

00:18:53.460 | Let's actually poke for a second, this fundamental assumption that it is the digital town square.

00:18:59.500 | And as you've heard me allude to in previous segments on this podcast, I do not believe

00:19:05.940 | that to be true.

00:19:08.660 | I drew heavily from John Heights, recent Atlantic article, which helped to make the point using

00:19:14.260 | numbers that a lot of us just understand intuitively, those of us who monitor Twitter from a media

00:19:19.540 | perspective.

00:19:20.540 | What we all understand intuitively is that the primary users on Twitter, the people who

00:19:24.980 | are doing all these tweets, who are doing takes and combating other people's takes,

00:19:30.420 | the grist of the mill that is the content mill that is Twitter, are not at all a broad

00:19:36.260 | representative sample of this country.

00:19:40.060 | They tend to consolidate on the political extremes.

00:19:44.020 | They also tend to be wider and richer than the average American.

00:19:47.460 | Now, I didn't talk about this in the New Yorker article, but I did come across, I think,

00:19:53.620 | a related compelling quote from a George Washington University media studies professor who made

00:19:59.460 | this point that like, keep in mind, Twitter is a very demanding platform.

00:20:03.740 | It is very difficult to be an active, successful user on Twitter, much more difficult than

00:20:08.100 | Instagram, much more difficult than TikTok.

00:20:10.760 | It's basically a full time job.

00:20:12.220 | You have to tweet a lot.

00:20:13.620 | It's complicated to get the tweets right.

00:20:15.420 | It's this tightrope walk.

00:20:16.420 | And so we really get this incredibly rarified group of gladiators from the different political

00:20:20.540 | extremes.

00:20:23.180 | And because of the dynamics of the platform, this is what Haidt talks about.

00:20:26.620 | They're in this context of virality, which means that they push themselves even farther

00:20:31.580 | to the extremes.

00:20:33.200 | They're doing this high stylized combat back and forth.

00:20:36.340 | And that spectacle is fascinating.

00:20:39.580 | It's very engaging.

00:20:41.780 | There's a whole periphery of people who like to watch it, but it's not the town square.

00:20:46.500 | It's not the town square.

00:20:47.500 | It's the it's a coliseum.

00:20:49.760 | And so my point is, once we recognize that, and this is the point I made in the article,

00:20:54.060 | the right response to all this uproar about Musk taking over Twitter is not, oh, my God,

00:20:57.680 | what Musk is going to do?

00:20:58.680 | It's, oh, my God, why is everyone still paying attention to Twitter?

00:21:02.140 | This is where we actually need to put our attention is to look at people in positions

00:21:05.660 | of power who continue to look towards this gladiatorial, unrepresentative spectacle and

00:21:12.340 | use it to help guide their decision making and say, stop it.

00:21:17.000 | That's not real life.

00:21:18.780 | This is not a representation about how the culture at large feels about this issue or

00:21:22.620 | this person or this idea.

00:21:25.340 | So if you are a head of a academic institution, head of a company, if you're a politician,

00:21:30.940 | if you're a journalist, don't look over there.

00:21:34.760 | It's exciting, but it has nothing to do with real life.

00:21:36.960 | But when you look over there and use that to help influence what you do, the rest of

00:21:40.660 | us, the 95 percent of people who could care less what's happening on Twitter, we're impacted

00:21:45.440 | by the service.

00:21:46.580 | We're impacted by that gladiatorial battle.

00:21:48.700 | It's as if the Roman Senate was over at the coliseum and passing law that affected the

00:21:54.740 | entire empire based on what was happening on that bloody, sandy ground of the arena.

00:22:00.020 | We would say that's a terrible way for you to figure out what you should do or shouldn't

00:22:03.140 | do, get out of there, go talk to the actual people, be among real, be among the rest of

00:22:08.380 | us, get away from the spectacle, ground yourself again so that we can all be working from a

00:22:14.100 | shared sense of common sense.

00:22:15.420 | So that was basically my argument is who cares what Musk is going to do?

00:22:18.780 | What I care about is that all of you are paying attention to Twitter still and thinking that

00:22:24.380 | this is somehow a town square.

00:22:27.260 | And I really don't think, I really don't think it is.

00:22:30.060 | All right.

00:22:31.060 | So that was my article.

00:22:32.900 | This Jesse, I will say this might hurt our plan to get Musk on the show.

00:22:37.340 | Not necessarily.

00:22:38.340 | I think he's going to be on.

00:22:39.340 | You'll be chilling with him and Rogan.

00:22:41.580 | Yeah.

00:22:42.580 | He basically I'm saying 44, this is like a bad, if I'm right, it's a very bad investment

00:22:48.020 | because it would say, uh, you know, he's within the bubble that thinks that this is so critical.

00:22:52.060 | And I'm basically trying to stand outside the bubble and say, it only seems critical

00:22:55.720 | to a small group of people, but it's not really.

00:22:58.480 | And they need to change that.

00:22:59.480 | They need to pay attention somewhere else.

00:23:00.660 | And we're starting to see this.

00:23:01.660 | I talked about in the article, something I talked about on the show, which was the New

00:23:04.180 | York times changing their policy, resetting their social media policy and saying, you

00:23:08.860 | know how before we told you reporters that you should be on social media, you should

00:23:13.740 | be on Twitter.

00:23:15.100 | Nevermind.

00:23:16.100 | Uh, don't use Twitter.

00:23:18.140 | And if you really feel like you have to use Twitter, use it a lot less.

00:23:21.600 | That's the, that's the right response this time.

00:23:25.020 | Do you think Elon and Jack Dorsey talk a lot or at all?

00:23:28.660 | I don't know how well they know each other.

00:23:30.060 | Yeah, that's a good question.

00:23:31.620 | Do you think he called him before?

00:23:34.980 | It's a good question.

00:23:35.980 | I don't know.

00:23:37.100 | I know Elon has tweeted back when Jack was in charge of Twitter on multiple occasions,

00:23:45.340 | Elon got a ban or a temporary ban overturned by tweeting him, but that almost makes me

00:23:52.580 | feel like maybe they're not closer because he didn't call him privately and say, bring

00:23:58.300 | this person back on.

00:23:59.300 | Elon would just at Jack and be like, why is this person banned?

00:24:04.020 | And then the person, the person would get on band.

00:24:06.540 | So yeah, that's, that's a, it's a good question.

00:24:08.500 | I'm not quite sure.

00:24:09.500 | I'm not quite sure.

00:24:11.300 | So we'll see.

00:24:13.540 | We'll see how it goes.

00:24:15.100 | There's a Simpson episode, a tree house, a horror Halloween episode that this really

00:24:20.120 | reminds me of.

00:24:21.420 | And the premise of this episode, so you remember tree house, a horror, it would be like ghost.

00:24:26.700 | There'd be fantastical kind of Halloween scenarios.

00:24:30.540 | It didn't take place in the actual universe of the Simpsons.

00:24:33.500 | It was just these Halloween episodes.

00:24:34.900 | And then one of them advertising figures like the, the brands, the brand figures, you know,

00:24:42.060 | Mr. Clean, right.

00:24:43.300 | These types of brand figures came, came alive and they were giants or like the state put

00:24:48.460 | marshmallow man and they were sort of destroying Springfield.

00:24:52.340 | And the solution to the problem that Lisa figured out was just to get people to stop

00:24:56.300 | paying attention to them.

00:24:58.380 | And she sung this jingle with the help of Burt Bacharach and it was just called just

00:25:03.340 | don't look.

00:25:04.740 | And that's how they, they stopped the attack on the, the very structure of the town itself

00:25:09.300 | was convincing the townspeople just don't pay attention to the advertising.

00:25:13.260 | And obviously this is like a, it was like a clear metaphor, but don't pay attention

00:25:16.980 | to the giant advertising monsters and they, they all fall apart.

00:25:20.620 | I mean, this is what I think this is where we've gotten with Twitter is we all just need

00:25:24.960 | to stop paying attention.

00:25:26.740 | The power users are still going to be on there doing their weird stylized violence and warfare.

00:25:30.860 | But if you just don't look, it doesn't have an impact on the town.

00:25:35.780 | It doesn't destroy the buildings.

00:25:37.840 | It sort of just becomes its own thing.

00:25:39.340 | And again, I, and I make this point in the article, Twitter used to have a lot of good

00:25:43.460 | stuff that happened on there.

00:25:46.020 | I mean, there was obviously the, the, the activism, the early toppling of dictators

00:25:52.260 | in the, in the Arab spring, we had the accountability played a big role in me too, but even beyond

00:25:57.220 | those sort of high value uses, the, the, the original core of what made Twitter interesting

00:26:03.100 | was there were smart people making interesting or funny takes.

00:26:05.980 | It's like, here's a topic I kind of like, and I want to follow people who are smart

00:26:10.620 | and they're going to have these smart takes.

00:26:11.980 | And then you, you have better takes and it's interesting and you can use those takes to

00:26:15.020 | make yourself feel smarter.

00:26:16.020 | And then there's funny people doing funny takes like that was actually like a pretty

00:26:18.680 | compelling mix.

00:26:19.680 | But I really do believe it can't just be that anymore.

00:26:23.580 | Viral dynamics pushed out all of the interesting people in the middle.

00:26:27.780 | It left us with people on the political extremes.

00:26:30.340 | It brought in this type of huge tribal warfare where it's about not giving ground to the

00:26:34.180 | other team and doing combat about them.

00:26:35.900 | They're trying to come back to you and you're a hero and then you're canceled.

00:26:38.860 | And I think those, this height was absolutely right about this.

00:26:41.380 | Once those intense dynamics came into play, the idea that Twitter was just a place you

00:26:45.420 | could just go and here's some funny observations and here's some smart observations about this

00:26:50.260 | political issue.

00:26:51.620 | And it's, it's quicker and pithier than waiting for the newspaper.

00:26:54.740 | It can't be that anymore.

00:26:56.740 | And I don't know how you get, I don't know how you would get it back.

00:26:58.700 | I mean, we talked before about Galloway, Scott Galloway's idea about going to a subscription

00:27:03.180 | model.

00:27:04.180 | Maybe that could get that back.

00:27:05.660 | Maybe there's a way to tamp down virality so that you don't have these huge stakes.

00:27:09.980 | Maybe there's a way to niche out Twitter so that like the community that's interested

00:27:13.620 | in sports talk or the community interested in comedy or the community interested in this

00:27:18.660 | particular political topic can be there and see interesting takes without it spiraling

00:27:22.380 | out of control.

00:27:23.380 | If you lower the stakes and I called it this sort of terrifying but thrilling combination

00:27:29.220 | of you could fall, you could make it across the tight rope and be fettered or you could

00:27:32.900 | fall and be splattered on the pavement.

00:27:34.980 | It was like really compelling.

00:27:35.980 | If you can lower the stakes and maybe it could be back to what it was before.

00:27:39.100 | I mean, I see what the value was.

00:27:41.100 | I just think it can't right now.

00:27:42.700 | It just can't support that.

00:27:45.500 | It's a bloodbath.

00:27:46.500 | It's like, I use these analogies.

00:27:48.820 | You had the theater, the Greek theater in which you're having the Aeschylus plays and

00:27:54.780 | then over time without people really noticing it transformed to the Coliseum and mixing

00:27:59.940 | Greek and Roman.

00:28:00.940 | But I think the point gets across.

00:28:04.080 | In terms of investment, he's bringing a private, right?

00:28:07.020 | He's bringing a private.

00:28:08.020 | Yeah.

00:28:09.020 | So, and I had to work out those numbers.

00:28:10.020 | I mean, it's not in the context of mergers and acquisitions, just companies buying other

00:28:16.020 | companies.

00:28:17.020 | This is not a notably large amount of money, 44 billion.

00:28:21.020 | I mean, I think when Disney bought Fox, it was 185 billion.

00:28:25.020 | Jack Dorsey just bought a FinTech company called Afterpay for like 30 billion, you know,

00:28:31.940 | less than half a year ago, right?

00:28:33.300 | It's similar, right?

00:28:34.300 | So, it's not that exceptional, but it is exceptional for a public company being bought completely

00:28:39.020 | to be made private.

00:28:40.580 | And there, that's actually really, that's like way more rare.

00:28:43.220 | And I think this might be, if I have my numbers, right, the second largest buyout of a public

00:28:49.140 | company.

00:28:50.140 | So, that's like more unusual.

00:28:52.820 | And there is some concern about the ability, which this makes sense to me, the ability

00:28:56.420 | for someone to have in theory so much money that they can just buy what we'd call like

00:29:00.620 | a moderate size public company and just take it private.

00:29:04.940 | That's maybe that's something to be concerned about.

00:29:06.980 | So, it's a very big buyout amount, not a very big just merger and acquisition amount.

00:29:12.540 | So, it's not a huge company, but usually you don't have public companies even at that modest

00:29:18.140 | size completely bought out by, I mean, Bezos paid in the low hundreds of millions for the

00:29:25.180 | Washington Post.

00:29:26.180 | That's like way more common when you see these type of buyouts.

00:29:29.140 | It's like I bought a newspaper for $150 million.

00:29:35.020 | But 44 billion is a lot.

00:29:37.420 | It is a lot for one person to spend.

00:29:38.940 | So, I am sympathetic to the general heebie-jeebies that give some people like, I mean, I can't

00:29:44.940 | quite put my finger on it, but like that's a lot of money for one person to be able to

00:29:48.900 | spend to like take control of something.

00:29:51.180 | It's like a sports franchise times 10.

00:29:54.620 | Yeah.

00:29:55.620 | Yeah.

00:29:56.620 | That's to me, that seems like the nearest analogy is like rich people buy sports franchises

00:30:00.660 | and that's single digit billions.

00:30:03.420 | Yeah.

00:30:04.420 | Yeah.

00:30:05.420 | So, we'll see.

00:30:06.420 | We'll see.

00:30:07.420 | It's one of those articles where if the article works, it should hopefully get very

00:30:12.340 | low Twitter engagement.

00:30:13.860 | It's like ironic.

00:30:17.020 | If it goes viral on Twitter, it means you failed.

00:30:19.500 | I still wouldn't be shocked if you guys talk at some point at all.

00:30:23.740 | Yeah.

00:30:24.740 | I would love it.

00:30:26.740 | You'll probably get along.

00:30:27.740 | Oh yeah.

00:30:28.740 | He's an interesting guy.

00:30:31.660 | This was something, I mean, look, I don't know a lot about him.

00:30:33.500 | I just know it's hard to make yourself the richest man in the world.

00:30:38.460 | It's hard to make rockets 10X cheaper than they'd been throughout the history of rocketry.

00:30:42.980 | It's hard to create the electric car industry from scratch when no one else can do it.

00:30:46.100 | So obviously this is a guy who has a certain set of skills that are really unprecedented

00:30:50.420 | and really have a big impact.

00:30:52.060 | He's also just from a personality perspective, an unusual person.

00:30:55.700 | I mean, I do not think he's neurotypical and even putting aside the actual wiring of his

00:31:03.180 | brain, he just has lived his entire adult life in weird, rarefied circles of just being

00:31:07.300 | up to his ears and businesses and God knows what influences he's had his life.

00:31:13.060 | So he's an unusual person.

00:31:16.020 | And I do think that distresses a lot of people because no one knows how to claim them.

00:31:20.300 | He doesn't really exist on the right political spectrum.

00:31:23.300 | I saw a lot of articles.

00:31:24.300 | I mean, I get that there's a lot of concerns I get.

00:31:26.580 | I get the concern of, do we really want to enter an era where individuals can buy out

00:31:30.500 | big companies if something is really important?

00:31:33.500 | And again, I don't think Twitter is, but just abstractly speaking, if something is

00:31:37.100 | really important to the public discourse, we want one person to be able to own it.

00:31:40.220 | Like I get that there were a lot of pieces though, that were just trying to generally

00:31:43.220 | slander Musk.

00:31:44.220 | Like, well, Musk once said this and Musk once made this reaction.

00:31:48.540 | And to that, I'm less sympathetic because I'm like, look, this is a guy who is an unusual

00:31:51.940 | guy who's not very careful about the way he speaks.

00:31:54.700 | I think if you try to mine things, he's tweeted.

00:31:57.180 | He also trolls.

00:31:58.860 | So I was like, I don't think you're going to get a good indication of how he feels about

00:32:03.820 | things by looking for the way he's mentioned, mentioned issues, because he's a weird guy

00:32:09.380 | who, who just spits things off left and right and smokes up on Rogan's podcast.

00:32:16.260 | So I don't know.

00:32:17.260 | I like, like, like there'd be dragons.

00:32:19.260 | Yeah.

00:32:20.260 | Is that Musk hacking into our feed here?

00:32:22.820 | Anyways.

00:32:23.820 | Yeah, I would, I would talk to him, but I think he has other things to do.

00:32:26.540 | I said this, like, I don't want to go on to this too long, but there was a, the most interesting

00:32:31.740 | in my research, the most interesting take I saw came from Walter Isaacson, who's writing

00:32:38.060 | right now, the biography of Musk.

00:32:40.760 | And so based on this tweet, I think he must be following him around right now on the day

00:32:45.760 | that the deal was announced.

00:32:48.540 | Isaacson, Isaacson tweeted.

00:32:49.940 | I was like, here's what Musk did today.

00:32:51.580 | Like after that deal was announced, he went on to his, his weekly meeting at so-and-so

00:32:57.300 | proving grounds on the such and such rocket engine where they spent three hours trying

00:33:03.380 | to troubleshoot a problem with one of the valves.

00:33:06.260 | Twitter wasn't mentioned once.

00:33:08.020 | This is someone who can multitask.

00:33:09.540 | And I thought that was kind of interesting, this idea that he came in and it was like,

00:33:14.180 | maybe not even the most interesting part of his day was, oh, I'm buying Twitter.

00:33:18.920 | And then he kind of moved on and was working on other things as well that he is probably

00:33:21.980 | paying less attention to this thing he did than all these other people surrounding it

00:33:27.300 | in the media universe who are just talking, talking, talking about it, like is the biggest

00:33:30.300 | story.

00:33:31.300 | It's probably like the third most interesting thing going on in his life right now.

00:33:34.060 | So it's an interesting character, but I thought that was the most interesting reality.

00:33:37.060 | I wonder if he's going to work on it a lot because his days are already pretty filled.

00:33:40.220 | Yeah, that's the other thing.

00:33:41.220 | That's the other thing.

00:33:42.220 | He probably, he's busy.

00:33:43.280 | So I don't know.

00:33:44.340 | And he works constantly.

00:33:45.340 | He works constantly.

00:33:46.740 | Yeah.

00:33:47.740 | It's unclear.

00:33:48.740 | Because now, of course, he executes like he comes in like look at Space Link.

00:33:52.860 | You know, he comes in with these ideas and somehow actually gets these companies up and

00:33:58.320 | running.

00:33:59.320 | So who knows?

00:34:00.320 | Maybe he will come in, but he could very easily just lose interest.

00:34:01.820 | I don't think he's replaced, I don't know that he's replacing the CEO or anything.

00:34:07.140 | So it's unclear.

00:34:08.140 | According to my research, it's very unclear what's going to happen.

00:34:11.540 | I'd like to hear you guys talk about reading.

00:34:13.360 | He reads a lot.

00:34:14.360 | Yes.

00:34:15.360 | I like talking.

00:34:16.360 | We could talk.

00:34:17.360 | We could nerd out.

00:34:18.360 | Yeah.

00:34:19.360 | We could talk algorithms for sure.

00:34:20.360 | Yeah.

00:34:21.360 | Yeah.

00:34:22.360 | I think he would appreciate that.

00:34:23.360 | It's just a matter of time.

00:34:24.360 | All right.

00:34:25.360 | Well, now we have we're feeding the beast because now we've talked about Elon Musk for

00:34:27.600 | 20 minutes.

00:34:28.660 | So we're feeding the same beast that I'm complaining about, which is like the real issue here is

00:34:33.360 | stop obsessing about Musk and Twitter and just stop paying attention to Twitter.

00:34:37.880 | And then you won't care who owns it.

00:34:39.120 | You won't care what's going on there.

00:34:40.640 | All right.

00:34:41.640 | So obviously, we can't control ourselves either.

00:34:45.440 | Let's do some questions.

00:34:46.440 | Let's see what people out there actually care about.

00:34:49.600 | So we got some good questions to get to some written questions and some calls.

00:34:53.080 | I also have a habit tune up lurking.

00:34:57.320 | But first, let me briefly talk about a sponsor that makes this show possible.

00:35:01.480 | And that is ExpressVPN.

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00:38:57.500 | Jesse, I think we need to start putting your personal cell phone number at the top of every

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00:39:06.060 | Flashing.

00:39:07.060 | Nobody's going to call.

00:39:08.060 | Flashing like on a telethon.

00:39:09.380 | Call now.

00:39:10.380 | If you have any complaints on Cal's Takes, call now.

00:39:13.500 | We've got to show them we care about customer service.

00:39:18.980 | Yeah.

00:39:19.980 | All right, let's do some questions.

00:39:23.940 | Our first question comes from Walker.

00:39:27.700 | I don't think this is his real name as you'll see when I read the question.

00:39:31.180 | I suspect it's fake, and you'll see why.

00:39:34.140 | Here's what Walker, air quotes, has to say.

00:39:36.980 | "In the context of a deep life, have you any thoughts on how to balance what I think of

00:39:41.860 | as my three walking modes?

00:39:46.380 | There is mode number one, which is walking while listening to a podcast or audio book,

00:39:51.580 | mode number two, which is walking while listening to music, and mode number three, which is

00:39:55.740 | just walking.

00:39:57.740 | Alone with your own thoughts.

00:39:59.380 | I have made daily walking a big and very enjoyable habit in my life, but I am looking to fine

00:40:03.820 | tune the process.

00:40:04.820 | Should I be time blocking each mode separately, perhaps?"

00:40:09.220 | Now, Walker, what you need to do is what I call block blocking.

00:40:13.420 | I want you to get a detailed map of your neighborhood.

00:40:16.180 | We're going to divide all of the road segments block by block.

00:40:20.260 | And then you're going to label each of these blocks with exactly what you are going to

00:40:23.780 | be thinking about or listening to during that block.

00:40:27.940 | Worry not, I sell a planner for this.

00:40:29.980 | It's called the Block Block Planner.

00:40:32.060 | It's a little bit large.

00:40:33.060 | We're talking about like three feet by two feet.

00:40:36.460 | So it's a little bit of a pain to bring with you, but it's not a big deal.

00:40:38.700 | What I recommend, and I think this is easy, is that you get one of those rolling media

00:40:44.020 | stands that they used to put TVs on to bring in between classrooms.

00:40:48.080 | Remember that when you were a kid?

00:40:49.080 | And then you could just put the Block Block Planner on the rolling media stand.

00:40:53.500 | You just push the media stand with you as you're going for your walk, and then block

00:40:56.240 | by block, you can optimize exactly what you were thinking about.

00:41:01.140 | So that's the Block Block Planner.

00:41:03.700 | No, okay, Walker.

00:41:06.300 | No, you're not time blocking walking.

00:41:09.980 | But I do have a couple notes about what you might do.

00:41:14.980 | So walking can show up in your time block plan if it is something you were scheduling

00:41:20.860 | into your workday.

00:41:21.860 | So if you're in your workday, which you are time blocking, then yes, the time in which

00:41:26.480 | you were blocking walking will show up because everything during your day, during the work

00:41:31.220 | hours will show up on your time block plan.

00:41:32.740 | So in that sense, yes, it'll show up in your time block plan if it happens during your

00:41:36.820 | workday.

00:41:38.360 | Do you need to plan in advance, like when you're building your plan, what to do during

00:41:43.100 | the walking?

00:41:44.100 | I would say for the most part, no.

00:41:46.220 | It is good to have intention as you set out for a walk, but I think it's completely fine

00:41:49.940 | to make that decision as you're walking out the door.

00:41:54.180 | You know, I put aside a half hour to walk midday just to recharge.

00:41:58.460 | By the way, I think that's a great thing to do.

00:41:59.860 | Just kind of figure out how you feel.

00:42:01.460 | Am I going to listen to an audio book?

00:42:04.260 | Or am I just going to be with my thoughts for a while?

00:42:06.580 | Just make the make the call on the call.

00:42:08.020 | I think it would be it would feel a little bit over planning to figure out well in advance

00:42:14.340 | what you will be doing during walks.

00:42:16.500 | Two exceptions.

00:42:17.940 | If the point of the walk is to make progress on a professional problem.

00:42:23.220 | So I'm writing this morning and I'm stuck and my plan is to go for a walk to try to

00:42:27.620 | get unstuck.

00:42:28.620 | OK, there you are planning in advance what you were doing with that walk.

00:42:32.420 | So if it's for solving a problem, sure.

00:42:35.340 | The other exception is some people have regularly occurring walks that serve a particular purpose.

00:42:40.820 | So for example, a morning walk to get ready for the workday or an end of day walk to help

00:42:48.300 | just reset and recharge those might you might know what you're doing in those walks because

00:42:54.140 | you do the same thing every time.

00:42:55.380 | My afternoon shutdown walk is just me alone with my own thoughts.

00:42:59.140 | So I get a little bit of solitude and can transition from work to non work.

00:43:02.660 | So those are the two occasions where you might have some advance notice of what you're doing

00:43:06.100 | in a block.

00:43:07.620 | I'm planning a walk to solve a problem or this is a regular occurring walk that I use

00:43:12.300 | for the set purpose every time.

00:43:14.420 | Otherwise just figure it out when you get there.

00:43:17.220 | I am glad, however, that you're walking.

00:43:21.260 | You know, we missed Jesse the opportunity in April Fool's thing.

00:43:23.820 | I was so busy in April, but like a block block planner video like that was like really serious.

00:43:30.740 | Yeah, like we could hire Rob and film it really good and just have someone walking.

00:43:36.220 | That's the type of thing we should be spending time on.

00:43:38.820 | But we missed it.

00:43:39.820 | That and ACs.

00:43:40.820 | That and ACs.

00:43:41.820 | Yeah, this is one.

00:43:42.820 | Yeah, I should be spending about three days a week working on my air conditioner and then

00:43:47.100 | two days making parody videos.

00:43:49.660 | I like it.

00:43:50.660 | And then I'll leave a half day on Sunday for like computer science and book writing and

00:43:54.220 | New York article writing.

00:43:55.700 | All right, let's move on here.

00:43:58.420 | Valerie, Valerie has a question.

00:44:03.100 | Why do you not recommend time blocking for leisure?

00:44:07.660 | I'm retired and we consider myself to be well on the way to having a good mix of elements

00:44:13.100 | in of a deep life.

00:44:14.700 | My quarterly and weekly plan have four quadrants, service, social stuff and self.

00:44:22.660 | I'm convinced that specific planning for the self ensures that it gets included regularly.

00:44:29.580 | Quarterly plans like visit X exhibition get reviewed and entered into my weekly plan.

00:44:35.180 | Well, Valerie, I think that's all great.

00:44:37.860 | But that's different than time blocking your leisure.

00:44:39.940 | So the thing I don't recommend people do is after their workday is done, have a similarly

00:44:44.860 | fine grained detailed time block plan for the time outside of work.

00:44:48.580 | Is this too exhausting?

00:44:50.200 | Your brain needs some freedom to recharge from the rigidity of here's what comes next.

00:44:54.860 | Here's what comes next.

00:44:56.440 | One of the reasons why time block plans really significantly increases the amount of work

00:45:01.740 | you get done per day is because there's this intensity of this is what I'm working on now

00:45:05.940 | and I need to get it done by the end of this block.

00:45:08.780 | It focuses you.

00:45:10.900 | And more work gets done.

00:45:11.900 | But that's exhausting.

00:45:12.900 | So you can't do that all the time.

00:45:14.620 | So that's why I say don't literally time block your time outside of work.

00:45:18.300 | I think what you're talking about is more like heuristics and rules and metrics, things

00:45:23.740 | you do every day.

00:45:25.940 | You know, maybe I always go for a walk first thing in the morning.

00:45:28.460 | This is when I exercise every day.

00:45:30.640 | I have I like to do a reading session on Sunday morning.

00:45:35.180 | I want to try to hit one exhibition at an art museum per month.

00:45:39.120 | Those I would call rules or heuristics.

00:45:41.620 | And those are great.

00:45:42.620 | I mean, as you know, when I talk about the deep life, this is one of my most pragmatic

00:45:47.540 | suggestions that you identify the buckets of your deep life and you start for each by

00:45:52.180 | identifying actually a keystone habit, something you come back to on a regular basis and that

00:45:55.940 | you track right there in your time block planner or if you're walking your block block planner.

00:46:01.600 | And so I'm really big on this idea of having rules and heuristics and metrics you track

00:46:05.100 | in all elements of your life to the extent that that's helpful.

00:46:08.060 | It's just that is different than time blocking.

00:46:09.700 | So I think the issue here is we're expanding the scope of the term time blocking, perhaps

00:46:15.700 | to mean systematic organization of any type.

00:46:19.600 | And I want to keep it very narrow.

00:46:21.020 | Time blocking is a very specific approach to allocating activity to time.

00:46:25.820 | It's very intense.

00:46:27.620 | Only do that during work hours.

00:46:29.100 | But that doesn't mean you don't have structure to other types of things in your life.

00:46:34.180 | So I think the things you're doing are great.

00:46:36.680 | Other people should do those type of things as well.

00:46:38.500 | All right.

00:46:39.500 | Well, I'm thinking we should take a call.

00:46:41.980 | We've read a couple of questions.

00:46:43.020 | Let's take a call.

00:46:44.020 | Jesse, do we have a listener call queued up here?

00:46:47.420 | Yes, we do.

00:46:48.620 | We have a tired father and he's got some phone problems.

00:46:53.020 | Hey, Cal.

00:46:54.020 | My name is Diego.

00:46:55.900 | I'm a graduate student, work at a nonprofit.

00:46:59.900 | I also do some freelancing and I'm recently a new dad.

00:47:05.380 | My son was born not too long ago.

00:47:08.660 | And I was curious about how you find intentionality in a moment like this when you're so exhausted.

00:47:16.380 | And honestly, I've been going on my phone way more than I was before because the stimulation

00:47:23.080 | is so helpful sometimes when you're tired and you just need to do something fun or whatnot.

00:47:30.060 | I was just curious what your thoughts are on finding intentionality in a moment where

00:47:36.340 | you need to give yourself a lot of grace, but also in a moment where maybe intentionality

00:47:40.660 | is more needed than ever.

00:47:42.700 | Right.

00:47:43.700 | Well, I mean, congratulations on the new kid.

00:47:49.420 | I think we should not underestimate the difficulty of this.

00:47:52.580 | We often do this in our culture is we don't want to confront the difficulty.

00:47:58.140 | For example, having a young kid or a new kid at home, we're like, yeah, just kind of figure

00:48:01.900 | it out.

00:48:03.780 | During the pandemic where in the East and West Coast, schools were shut down for these

00:48:07.980 | extended amount of times and no one really wanted to confront just how much of a dumpster

00:48:12.220 | fire that was that suddenly all these kids were at home and employers were like, let's

00:48:15.420 | just let's just not talk about it.

00:48:17.780 | Right.

00:48:18.780 | So I do think that is an issue.

00:48:19.780 | So you're going through a great time, but a hard time.

00:48:22.740 | So what I what I'm going to recommend is that you couple intentionality.

00:48:28.020 | So a return to intentionality with an increase in simplicity.

00:48:34.460 | You got to you got to simplify things as much as possible right now.

00:48:37.380 | You have this new kid.

00:48:38.380 | So you want to simplify down to the basics.

00:48:39.980 | You want to get work constrained and surrounded with a bigger buffer of time that you can

00:48:45.940 | recharge and rest and nap, etc.

00:48:48.660 | You want to bring intentionality then into not just how you cut things down, but what

00:48:52.220 | you do outside of that time.

00:48:54.180 | Don't in this don't in this instance confuse intentionality with increasing quantity of

00:49:00.580 | activity, increasing ambition of activity.

00:49:03.220 | I want you to scale all that back.

00:49:05.940 | But I don't want you to wander once you be pretty intentional.

00:49:07.980 | So I've cut back on work and I come home and I nap and then just a two hour period where

00:49:16.100 | it's just like me and the baby, like very intentionally, it's very important.

00:49:19.100 | We're tired together, but it's just this time we have together.

00:49:22.140 | I am doing reflection walks every morning because this is a big new part of my life

00:49:27.100 | and I need to start to make sense of through solitude and self-reflection what's important

00:49:31.820 | to me and what's not and how I need to shift my self-conception given that we have this

00:49:35.820 | new child and it changes everything I understand about the world.

00:49:39.000 | So these type of things you want to inject into your life, this type of intentional activity,

00:49:42.860 | but coupled with an intentional simplification.

00:49:47.460 | Where you go easy on yourself and say, I can't do as much work.

00:49:51.340 | Now is not the time to take on the new project.

00:49:53.780 | Now is the time I'm going to have to step back from this project.

00:49:57.540 | Keep things simple.

00:49:58.980 | Keep work in a more narrow time frame with time off in the middle to nap.

00:50:02.740 | Maybe get a little bit more organized about it so I can keep up with things with it.

00:50:06.860 | I can't do frenetic stuff right now.

00:50:08.660 | I can't stay up late to get something done.

00:50:10.140 | So I have to be really organized.

00:50:11.340 | So that's what I would recommend.

00:50:14.180 | Be more intentional and simplify your life at the same time.

00:50:17.180 | That can actually be, by the way, a wonderful combination.

00:50:21.540 | There are periods in your life when there's a challenge, like the challenge of the carrying

00:50:26.860 | up a new child, but you've also simplified your life during this time as well.

00:50:31.060 | You're not so work focused and you have these important intentional rituals.

00:50:36.020 | You and your kid, you go on this walk every day.

00:50:38.740 | You're doing more thinking and reflecting.

00:50:41.200 | You have this new bedtime routine.

00:50:43.980 | There's a lot of value that can come out of that, but only if you get intentional.

00:50:47.740 | So do not confuse intentionality again with ambition or quantity.

00:50:52.700 | It's just about are you in control of what you're doing or not.

00:50:55.020 | And when you go through this exercise, you're going to find you don't really want to spend

00:50:58.740 | a lot of time on your phone.

00:51:00.940 | You're tired.

00:51:01.940 | You'd much rather be tired sort of laying there on the blanket that you put out in the

00:51:05.620 | park with the kid because this is what you do in the afternoons when the weather is nice

00:51:09.140 | and you kind of play and you kind of rest and that's what you do when the sun is shining

00:51:15.260 | and it all feels good.

00:51:16.980 | And you say, why do I need to look at TikTok?

00:51:21.060 | All right.

00:51:22.060 | So I want to go return to a segment we introduced a couple of weeks ago, the habit tune up segment.

00:51:28.900 | The idea here is that I just take a piece of advice from the large toolbox of tips and

00:51:36.100 | tricks and rules I've written about or talked about over the years and just focus on it

00:51:40.420 | a little bit.

00:51:41.420 | And so in particular, today, I want to talk about what I think is the most important piece

00:51:48.220 | of productivity software that's out there.

00:51:50.860 | And I'll give you a hint, you all already have it on all of your devices.

00:51:55.180 | That's the good news.

00:51:56.800 | And that is my strategy of using a working memory dot txt, plain text file.

00:52:04.940 | So I have a couple of different names for this.

00:52:06.180 | A working memory dot txt is one name for this.

00:52:08.300 | The other is what I call text file or plain text file productivity.

00:52:12.220 | Over the years, I've used both of those terms.

00:52:13.780 | But the basic idea is quite simple.

00:52:16.160 | You have on the computers you use a blank text file and you keep it open and it's always

00:52:23.460 | open on your desktop.

00:52:25.380 | I call mine working memory dot txt.

00:52:28.260 | I'm just using the text editor on my Mac.

00:52:31.260 | I don't even have rich formatting turned on.

00:52:33.420 | It's plain text.

00:52:34.420 | There's no bolding, there's no font sizes, just plain text and you just have it open.

00:52:38.260 | And it is literally a way to offload things out of your brain, where you can still see

00:52:44.980 | them, look at them, organize and make sense of them without having to keep all these things

00:52:49.720 | in your mind at the same time.

00:52:51.920 | And what this is recognizing, the reality this is recognizing is that we have very limited

00:52:57.360 | working memory.

00:52:58.360 | So we can only keep so much in our head at a time.

00:53:00.700 | And as I talk about all the time on this show, there's a real cost of cognitive context switching.

00:53:06.540 | So if you're trying to keep track of multiple different things at the same time, it's very

00:53:09.500 | difficult to sort of go back and forth between them, to see how they trade off, to see how

00:53:16.100 | you're going to make these things work, because your mind is trying to switch back and forth

00:53:18.340 | between all these contexts.

00:53:19.940 | If you offload things to a text file, you can just see them.

00:53:24.060 | It is a huge cybernetic boost to your organizational capacity.

00:53:30.940 | So now you can have lots of things written down, you can see them without having to hold

00:53:34.260 | them in your head, you can focus on one thing at a time at your head.

00:53:37.180 | You can also juggle a bunch of things and see their connections, because when you're

00:53:39.780 | looking at them all written down and not trying to hold them all in your head, you're not

00:53:42.780 | paying nearly as big as a context shifting cost.

00:53:45.820 | It's a huge secret to my success.

00:53:49.300 | So there's a couple ways you might use this.

00:53:51.980 | One would be you're trying to solve a complicated problem.

00:53:56.380 | How are we going to get, we have this visitor coming, how are we going to get the travel

00:54:00.900 | logistics?

00:54:01.900 | What do we need to do?

00:54:02.900 | Man, this just seems so complicated.

00:54:03.900 | Are they going to come?

00:54:04.900 | Are they going to need a hotel?

00:54:06.740 | Where are they going to stay?

00:54:07.820 | So you have a problem that's complicated, it has a lot of moving parts.

00:54:11.020 | You're not going to solve this in your head.

00:54:13.580 | You start typing everything out.

00:54:14.820 | What are all the different things that need to happen?

00:54:16.900 | You refine it and you combine it.

00:54:19.080 | You can start doing visual lexicographic thinking.

00:54:21.460 | Like, well, let me grab these three lines, copy and paste and put them down here and

00:54:25.020 | label them with, all right, this I can all offload to, you know, Jesse to do this I don't

00:54:30.940 | know about this.

00:54:31.940 | I'm going to move to Thursday.

00:54:32.940 | You can start labeling these things and categorizing them.

00:54:35.340 | You're doing very complex organization and thinking here that you would not be able to

00:54:38.660 | do very well just in your head.

00:54:40.440 | The text file helps.

00:54:42.180 | Another scenario where the plain text file is going to really help you is let's say,

00:54:44.900 | you're trying to get through your email, trying to clear out all this email that's built up.

00:54:50.060 | I have 50 messages and they're all different.

00:54:54.220 | They're dealing with different issues, all different cognitive context.

00:54:58.260 | Trying to deal with each of those one by one as so many of us have learned can be devastating

00:55:02.840 | because you're switching context again and again, email to email and you burn out like,

00:55:07.500 | I can't do this anymore.

00:55:08.500 | And you start hunting for easy to reply to messages because your brain is tired.

00:55:13.100 | The alternative is using your plain text files.

00:55:15.280 | You start actually like capturing what's in these emails, what their request is, what

00:55:19.260 | you need to do in your text file.

00:55:23.380 | Just give each of them a different line.

00:55:25.320 | Now you have 20 or 30 different lines on here.

00:55:28.480 | You haven't had to solve any of these issues that you've just summarized all the emails

00:55:31.340 | with one or two lines on this big text file.

00:55:34.300 | Now you can start grouping.

00:55:35.340 | Now you can start organizing.

00:55:36.680 | Now you can start pulling everything related to one project, copy and pasting and put them

00:55:40.260 | next to each other.

00:55:41.260 | And everything related to this project over here and things you have no idea how to answer

00:55:45.180 | over here.

00:55:46.180 | You're making sense of the information without having to dive into it, without having to

00:55:49.900 | try to keep track of all the stuff in your head.

00:55:52.100 | And then you go through and you answer all these emails at once, then switch through

00:55:55.660 | and put a calendar notice for answering these somewhere else.

00:55:58.820 | It is really like a organizational superpower once you get really good at using this plain

00:56:06.260 | text file to extend and organize what's on your plate.

00:56:09.180 | It's like taking your brain and making it a much better brain.

00:56:12.020 | And it's something I swear by.

00:56:13.180 | I keep the file open all the time.

00:56:16.620 | Stuff is just on there.

00:56:17.620 | If I just have a random thought, I'll just write it on there.

00:56:19.220 | And you know, by the end of the day, I try to look at that.

00:56:21.980 | Is there anything on here that needs to go back into a system?

00:56:24.220 | Was there a thought I dropped that I haven't handled?

00:56:25.940 | And I'll look through and kind of process that working memory.txt at the end of the

00:56:29.420 | day to see what's left on there.

00:56:31.700 | But it's always there.

00:56:33.820 | And it's storing all sorts of information and being used for all sorts of different

00:56:37.060 | purposes.

00:56:38.140 | And I cannot overemphasize once you get good at this simple but powerful productivity hack,

00:56:46.940 | how much extra capability that it gives you.

00:56:50.660 | How much extra capability gives you.

00:56:51.820 | So stop trying to do all this stuff in your head.

00:56:54.640 | Use a simple text file.

00:56:56.500 | Can I ask a couple of follow up questions?

00:56:59.620 | Yeah.

00:57:00.620 | When did you start this?

00:57:01.620 | It's a good question.

00:57:05.340 | So if you search, I wrote about it on my blog back in my MIT days.

00:57:12.180 | Look for if you want to do a Google search, I don't know if you have that up there.

00:57:15.340 | Work like me is plain text productivity, working memory.txt.

00:57:20.220 | I don't know, but it would have been the original post on this would have been 2008, if I had

00:57:26.260 | to guess 2007.

00:57:30.540 | Maybe a little bit later.

00:57:32.100 | Plain text productivity is what I used to call this, I think, or freestyle productivity.

00:57:35.140 | Yeah.

00:57:36.140 | I also used to call it freestyle productivity.

00:57:37.660 | So like forget, I don't care how you structure this or format this, just like get stuff on

00:57:41.300 | the file and start rocking, rolling with it.

00:57:42.780 | There's a plain text dash productivity.net URL.

00:57:48.260 | I take full credit.

00:57:50.340 | I say before you go to the website and realize it's actually about like kidnapping children

00:57:56.460 | or something.

00:57:57.460 | So you were doing this in college or was it after college?

00:57:59.620 | After college, but definitely or pretty early in grad school.

00:58:02.740 | And then do you remember how you discovered it?

00:58:07.580 | That's a good question.

00:58:08.580 | 2009 freestyle productivity.

00:58:09.580 | 2009.

00:58:10.580 | There we go.

00:58:12.340 | Probably because there's a whole culture of this in computer science and developers.

00:58:17.160 | So developers, the people who write computer code.

00:58:19.900 | So I was exposed to this obviously as a computer science graduate student at MIT.

00:58:24.260 | They are really big on using these text editors like Vim or Emacs because that's where they

00:58:29.580 | would write their code and they customize it.

00:58:31.260 | And they got really big on using these for all parts of their life.

00:58:36.420 | And probably I came across the original, so I'm really just a deep hole.

00:58:43.340 | I'd say Danny, I'm going to get this name wrong.

00:58:47.500 | Danny Lewin maybe, gave this famous talk where he introduced the idea of life hackers.

00:58:54.060 | It's like life hacking as a notion was introduced by a gentleman named Danny something.

00:59:00.620 | And I'm going to look this up because I've got the actual name.

00:59:03.540 | But anyways, it was this famous talk he gave about life hacking and how computer developer

00:59:10.800 | types life hack.

00:59:12.760 | And on, I believe Boing Boing, Cory Doctrow, if I'm remembering this right, posted his

00:59:20.380 | notes from this talk.

00:59:22.180 | And it was a pretty, oh, Danny O'Brien, not Danny Lewin, Danny O'Brien at 2005.

00:59:29.460 | So look, I'm looking up, I'm looking up in real time, blah, blah, blah.

00:59:35.820 | The term life hack was coined in 2004 during the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

00:59:41.060 | It's coined by technology journalist, journalist Danny O'Brien to describe the embarrassing

00:59:46.860 | scripts and shortcuts productive IT professionals use to get their work done.

00:59:52.060 | And then Merlin Mann ran with that notion.

00:59:54.380 | Okay, so Danny O'Brien was talking about how IT professionals use these macros and

00:59:59.700 | shortcuts in a text editor, how they would run their whole lives out of these text editors.

01:00:06.100 | So real early in this notion of digitally enhanced productivity was this idea of life

01:00:10.180 | hacking, which became to encompass everything.

01:00:13.140 | But when it was first introduced, it was what IT nerds would do to track their life.

01:00:17.620 | And they would keep track of everything in their life in these text files.

01:00:20.220 | And so I'm sure that's where I was exposed to it through Merlin Mann and 43 Folders in

01:00:26.180 | that 2007, 2008 period.

01:00:27.900 | So I bet that's how I was exposed to it.

01:00:30.060 | But that's it.

01:00:31.060 | It's a whole interesting history, by the way, the whole life hack history.

01:00:34.820 | Do you have a, what about when you're walking around, do you have like a file on your phone?

01:00:41.620 | I don't, I don't.

01:00:43.100 | So it depends on how long the walk is.

01:00:46.540 | So typically if I have my bag with me, I'll have a notebook in it and I can capture thoughts.

01:00:50.980 | But yeah, if you're on foot, I mean, this is like a productive meditation, right, is

01:00:55.100 | working through ideas just in your head.

01:00:58.100 | You're much worse at it than if you're sitting at a computer with the plain text file.

01:01:03.380 | But it's a really good exercise because A, it expands your ability to concentrate and

01:01:06.820 | focus just that discipline of keeping track of things in your head.

01:01:10.340 | And B, the walking can unlock things.

01:01:12.340 | It can unlock creative connections that you don't get sitting down.

01:01:15.060 | So you almost have two options here.

01:01:17.260 | If you're especially, I'm focusing now on trying to have big ideas or like original

01:01:21.260 | ideas, right.

01:01:22.700 | You can sit at a screen and expand your working memory with a plain text file and try and

01:01:26.780 | move ideas around and figure things out.

01:01:28.720 | Or you can go for a walk.

01:01:30.700 | You don't have as big of a working memory to work with, but you get the ambulation bonus,

01:01:34.780 | the ambulation bonus, this idea that walking can unlock other types of connections.

01:01:38.620 | So it's, it's sort of like two different types of cognition.

01:01:41.580 | But certainly I am kind of committed or I don't know how to plan anymore, especially

01:01:47.820 | planning, email, trying to figure out, okay, I have to book my travel for something.

01:01:53.860 | Those type of seemingly mundane tasks actually have with them seven or eight, you know, different

01:01:57.860 | things that have to happen that connect and dates that matter.

01:02:00.620 | I don't know how to do that anymore.

01:02:02.780 | If I can't have a text file to start moving all this information around.

01:02:05.860 | Right.

01:02:06.860 | Part of it too is like, my next question is when you're writing, do you like, and you're

01:02:10.940 | working on whatever you're working on, do you, and something comes up that's not related,

01:02:15.500 | do you write on that a lot?

01:02:17.420 | Yeah.

01:02:18.420 | Yeah.

01:02:19.420 | Does that happen a lot?

01:02:20.420 | Yeah.

01:02:21.420 | Like, look, I have my computer open, so let me load this up.

01:02:25.140 | All right.

01:02:26.340 | So on mine now it's called WM2.txt.

01:02:29.540 | WM2.txt was my working memory text file.

01:02:33.860 | Turns out when you keep a text file open on your computer for years, like weird stuff

01:02:36.620 | happens.

01:02:37.620 | So at some point, I don't know, I just couldn't access that file anymore.

01:02:40.140 | So I moved on the WM2.

01:02:42.980 | And okay, I'm looking at it now.

01:02:46.500 | The first item is a GU mailbox colon two grade request.

01:02:51.500 | So there's like two students who are asking for their current grades.

01:02:55.100 | And I came across that and I know I need to do that.

01:02:57.780 | And so I'm just noting it there.

01:03:00.460 | Two, there's another, and this, it loses the hyphen, plain text hyphen.

01:03:05.980 | The next thing says schedule, schedule new haircut.

01:03:08.460 | So I was supposed to get my haircut yesterday.

01:03:11.260 | My stylist got COVID, they're like, I have to reschedule.

01:03:13.980 | And I was like, I can't do this right now.

01:03:15.820 | So I just wrote down schedule new haircut.

01:03:17.060 | And now that's going to sit there and I'll see it.

01:03:19.060 | I'm not going to forget.

01:03:20.060 | And then I have 330 office hours Zoom, because there was, as I mentioned, I was like, oh,

01:03:25.220 | at the last second as I was coming over here, a student asked if they could ask me some

01:03:29.140 | questions about an exam on Zoom.

01:03:30.580 | And I told them we could use the office hours, Zoom room, et cetera.

01:03:33.100 | Boom, it's just on here.

01:03:34.740 | And I see this every time I open it.

01:03:36.400 | So this is just stuff on my mind is no longer on my mind.

01:03:42.100 | And the other thing I'll do is I'll put equal signs, a bunch of equal signs to make divider,

01:03:47.500 | horizontal divider lines.

01:03:48.620 | So if I want to just have a space for just messing around with things, I put a bunch

01:03:51.440 | of equal signs and like below it, I'm just messing around with notes.

01:03:54.400 | And typically at the top of my text file is like things I don't want to forget, tasks

01:03:58.020 | to deal with or process.

01:03:59.620 | And then if I want to think about another thing, I might put another bunch of horizontal

01:04:03.700 | equal signs and so kind of create these little spaces where I can just mess around with.

01:04:09.380 | I guess it's one last clarification question.

01:04:11.420 | So like when you're walking around, like doing an errand or something and you don't have

01:04:15.460 | like your phone or you don't happen to have a notebook, what do you, I guess you always

01:04:19.900 | have like a piece of paper.

01:04:21.060 | So you just write it on that.

01:04:22.220 | Yeah.

01:04:23.220 | And if I don't, I just, you know, holding it.

01:04:25.260 | Yeah.

01:04:26.260 | Got it.

01:04:27.260 | Yeah.

01:04:28.260 | So then when you do your shutdown at the end of the day, you look at that notebook and

01:04:30.460 | then you look at your file.

01:04:31.460 | Yeah.

01:04:32.460 | So if I'm just thinking about something when I'm walking and I just have it in my head,

01:04:35.180 | I'm going to write it down as soon as I get back.

01:04:37.060 | Got it.

01:04:38.060 | Yeah.

01:04:39.060 | And that's another great thing.

01:04:40.060 | It's an incredibly low friction to just drop it into a text file.

01:04:42.780 | Just whatever, however you want to summarize.

01:04:44.300 | That's why I used to say freestyle productivity.

01:04:45.740 | I don't care how you do it.

01:04:46.740 | Just get it in there.

01:04:48.100 | You know what you mean.

01:04:49.800 | Whatever formatting you want to do, just get it in there and it's out of your head.

01:04:53.940 | Yeah.

01:04:54.940 | So that is the most important piece of productivity software that you already own, but you're not

01:04:58.900 | using is your text editor.

01:05:03.780 | And maybe in the future we'll have like an augmented reality thing where wherever you

01:05:07.140 | are, it's like, boom, you pull up this thing.

01:05:09.140 | I can just like drop thoughts into it and then boom, like make it go away.

01:05:12.940 | It's like always kind of there with you with some sort of like AI agent that like help

01:05:17.100 | you like a Siri type thing.

01:05:18.380 | I can see how this goes.

01:05:19.780 | I mean, we could try, this would be difficult, but we could try to have a high price software

01:05:24.100 | project product.

01:05:25.740 | It's actually just a text file.

01:05:27.780 | In the meantime, I think we had like really good marketing for it.

01:05:30.780 | And it was, there was like a really compelling YouTube video where people are getting on

01:05:34.460 | private jets and this and that.

01:05:36.060 | And it's just like a really slick sound effect when it turns on.

01:05:40.300 | And in the end, people don't realize that it's just the text, the text editor, like

01:05:45.660 | for only 49.95 a month, you too can unlock your productivity brilliance with WM2, the

01:05:55.340 | most important piece of productivity software, which is true ever invented.

01:06:01.420 | And all it is is like a little script that just opens a notebook.

01:06:06.260 | Oh my, well, that would not be a useful product to try to sell, but let me tell you one that

01:06:14.660 | is useful.

01:06:15.660 | And that is Grammarly.

01:06:16.660 | So I have a couple more questions I want to get to, but first let's talk about Grammarly

01:06:20.900 | because they helped make this show possible.

01:06:25.140 | Grammarly is more than a spelling and grammar checker.

01:06:28.820 | It is an all in one writing tool that allows you to clearly and effectively communicate

01:06:33.500 | your ideas.

01:06:35.460 | It's free to download and easy to integrate into your daily life.

01:06:38.020 | It works where you work like in Gmail to help you work more efficiently on any of your projects.

01:06:45.860 | Now Grammarly has some pretty advanced features, especially when you upgrade the Grammarly

01:06:52.380 | premium.

01:06:54.500 | You can now do things like tone adjustments, which will help you have a more confident

01:06:59.860 | and polished tone in your writing.

01:07:02.100 | It can do sentence rewrites.

01:07:04.740 | It's true I've messed around with this.

01:07:06.420 | It can be eerie.

01:07:07.420 | Grammarly premium is like, yes, see this thing you're trying to say here?

01:07:10.780 | Say it like this instead.

01:07:11.780 | It makes you seem much more clear and crisp and professional.

01:07:17.300 | It'll also even give you clarity suggestions.

01:07:19.140 | I think this is muddled.

01:07:20.420 | Use this word instead.

01:07:21.700 | Use this construction instead.

01:07:23.300 | So this is what is really most impressive about Grammarly and its premium product these

01:07:28.300 | days is that it can go so far towards now helping you actually make your writing better,

01:07:33.340 | not just fixing mistakes, but making the writing itself better.

01:07:36.940 | It's like having a copy editor looking over your shoulder and making sure what you write

01:07:41.460 | and all the different apps you use and all the different devices you use, making sure

01:07:44.140 | what you write sounds good.

01:07:48.000 | So get through those emails and your work quicker by keeping it concise, confident and

01:07:51.620 | effective with Grammarly.

01:07:53.460 | Go to Grammarly.com/deep to sign up for a free account.

01:07:56.620 | When you're ready to upgrade to Grammarly premium, you will get 25 or 20% off rather

01:08:00.660 | for being my listener.

01:08:03.300 | That's 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/deep.

01:08:13.380 | I also want to talk about our friends at stamps.com.

01:08:17.980 | If you've got a small business, inflation isn't doing you any favors right now.

01:08:24.200 | It's harder than ever to stay profitable.

01:08:26.120 | So you have to look for those practical ways to cut cost.

01:08:30.700 | Stamps.com is a great way to do that.

01:08:32.520 | If you use stamps.com to mail and ship, you get access to exclusive discounts and great

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01:08:45.720 | You print the postage right here at home.

01:08:47.940 | You do not have to wait in line at the post office.

01:08:52.540 | I like the time saving one.

01:08:54.460 | As Jesse knows, there is a post office right down the street from the HQ.

01:08:59.860 | Nothing gets crowded.

01:09:01.900 | And every time I walk by and see that crowd, and I think this is excusable, I walk over,

01:09:07.500 | I pound on the window until everyone turns to look and I go, "stamps.com."

01:09:14.660 | And then you hear like one person start clapping, and then there's kind of slow and then another

01:09:19.660 | person starts slow clapping and then more people join and the clapping gets louder and

01:09:23.760 | it gets more enthusiastic and soon people are cheering and I'm doing peace signs.

01:09:28.900 | And then I walk back to the HQ.

01:09:29.900 | And I'll tell you why they're cheering because they don't want to be waiting in line.

01:09:34.620 | Stamps.com would not only have saved them that time, but it was going to save them money

01:09:38.740 | as well.

01:09:39.740 | I think this is a no brainer.

01:09:42.680 | So start mailing and shipping with stamps.com and keep more money in your pocket every day.

01:09:48.420 | Sign up with promo code "DEEP" for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus

01:09:53.460 | free postage and a digital scale.

01:09:56.540 | No long-term commitments or contracts required.

01:09:59.580 | Again, just go to stamps.com then click on the microphone, the microphone at the top

01:10:03.740 | of the page to enter that code "DEEP."

01:10:07.700 | All right, I'm thinking, I've been talking for a while, Jesse, maybe we should do another

01:10:13.320 | call and see if we have someone who can ask us a question here.

01:10:19.560 | We got a call from Dave.

01:10:21.080 | He's an architect.

01:10:22.080 | He's also a manager and he's having trouble scheduling deep work because he doesn't have

01:10:26.480 | any time block space for it.

01:10:28.360 | Hi, Cale.

01:10:29.360 | My name is Dave Birlkamp.

01:10:31.320 | I'm an architect working on an in-house design team for a large hospital system.

01:10:35.880 | I've had great success adopting many of your principles from "So Good They Can't Ignore

01:10:40.040 | You" to "Deep Work" and most recently, "A World Without Email."

01:10:44.280 | Your tools have really helped me manage a role with complex responsibilities.

01:10:48.520 | In the past year or so, I found my role evolving away from an individual contributor to more

01:10:54.200 | of a design manager.

01:10:55.520 | While my position does not have me managing a team of direct reports, I ultimately manage

01:11:00.680 | projects and oversee consulting teams, requiring much of my time in collaborative meetings

01:11:05.980 | with larger project teams, providing direction and working through design challenges.

01:11:12.200 | I've started to wonder whether having days with large blocks of deep work is too lofty

01:11:16.400 | of a goal for a manager.

01:11:19.140 | In both reading on the topic as well as talking to other peers in similar manager roles, it

01:11:23.840 | seems the common mentality is that a manager is subject to endless meetings and face time

01:11:29.000 | with those they're responsible for.

01:11:31.240 | I can only imagine how much more demanding having a team of direct reports would be.

01:11:36.760 | This all seems at odds with the deep work philosophy and my own personal values on work

01:11:42.120 | and productivity.

01:11:43.120 | What's your advice for managers trying to incorporate deep work practices with potentially

01:11:48.760 | limited deep work time blocks?

01:11:51.080 | Thanks, Cal.

01:11:52.080 | >> David, it's a good question.

01:11:55.160 | So in A World Without Email, my book, A World Without Email, I go into more detail about

01:12:00.640 | managers in general and how you deal with issues like focus and distraction when you're

01:12:08.760 | dealing with managers.

01:12:09.760 | So I'm going to summarize four points here, four points about the deep approach to being

01:12:15.480 | a manager.

01:12:16.480 | One, I think you're correct to note that a schedule built around long periods of uninterrupted

01:12:24.440 | concentration is often going to be incompatible with the responsibilities of a manager.

01:12:32.200 | That's not really what they're asking you to do in a lot of cases.

01:12:35.240 | It's like we're not asking that you on your own create new value from scratch by adding

01:12:42.240 | value to information.

01:12:43.240 | We're actually asking you to manage other people who are doing this.

01:12:46.200 | So yes, I think that's completely relevant to say long stretches of uninterrupted time

01:12:51.100 | might not be reasonable.

01:12:52.400 | That's fine for a manager.

01:12:54.960 | Two, the key thing you want to do as a manager, as you would any other position, is prevent

01:13:02.880 | context switching to the extent possible, which means you want to be one thing at a

01:13:07.920 | time, full attention, so you move on to the next.

01:13:12.960 | Very important as a manager that you're not multitasking.

01:13:16.720 | I'm trying to work on this person's problem while also answering Slack messages about

01:13:20.800 | this and switching over that problem.

01:13:22.760 | That's a huge cognitive drag.

01:13:24.160 | You're going to make worst decisions and you're going to get exhausted quicker.

01:13:28.640 | I actually cite research about this in my book, A World Without Email.

01:13:32.000 | There's a very relevant study to this discussion where they studied the actual behaviors of

01:13:39.000 | managers and they correlated it with the amount of email they were receiving.

01:13:42.480 | And essentially when managers had more and more email that they were trying to deal with,

01:13:46.360 | their activities shifted away from what they called leadership type activities and towards

01:13:50.400 | much more small productivity focused activities.

01:13:53.080 | So if you're bouncing back and forth between a lot of things, your managerial scope goes

01:13:58.360 | from clear, big picture thinking and directing and towards just more frenetic, small, let

01:14:03.160 | me just get the obligation hot potato and get it out of here.

01:14:06.840 | Let me solve this question, answer this, move this over here.

01:14:09.440 | It's a much less effective way of being a manager.

01:14:11.440 | So you want to do one thing at a time before you move on to the next.

01:14:14.600 | To make that possible, we get to point three and four.

01:14:19.840 | So point three is you want to avoid a sense of overload.

01:14:27.520 | So if you have more going on, more on your plate, more things that represent an obligation

01:14:32.700 | to you that you can really easily even imagine making sense of, you are going to find that

01:14:39.280 | the cognitive stress of having such a crowded plate is going to make it quite difficult

01:14:45.360 | to really focus on one thing at a time and the resulting overhead of each of these obligations

01:14:52.240 | is going to pile up in a way that's going to make it impossible for you to do one thing

01:14:55.280 | at a time because there's always the next Zoom meeting, there's always the next email.

01:14:59.400 | So this is what we've talked about, the overhead spiral.

01:15:01.200 | We've talked about this before on the show.

01:15:03.520 | Everything on your plate brings with it some amount of fixed overhead, meetings that have

01:15:06.520 | to happen, emails that have to be answered.

01:15:08.840 | So if you have too many things on your plate as a manager, just that overhead, the checking

01:15:13.560 | in, the emails, the meetings will eat up your whole schedule.

01:15:16.400 | And now it's impossible for you to actually give each thing on your plate, each decision

01:15:19.840 | that you need to make, each advising you have to give, each reassignment or helping of an

01:15:24.680 | employee.

01:15:25.680 | You can no longer just give these things the attention they deserve one after another because

01:15:28.880 | there's so much Zoom, there's so much conference calls, there's so much email, this overhead

01:15:33.360 | of what's on your plate becomes too big.

01:15:34.760 | So you have to keep that smaller.

01:15:36.640 | I got to keep that list of what's on my plate smaller.

01:15:39.520 | And it's gonna mean a lot of like, Nope, nope, we're not doing that.

01:15:43.160 | I'm not doing that.

01:15:44.240 | We're full right now.

01:15:45.440 | We're focused.

01:15:46.440 | Here's what we're working on.

01:15:47.760 | You have to start protecting how big that list is.

01:15:49.880 | Don't let people put those things on your plate.

01:15:51.280 | You say, I can't deal with that right now.

01:15:53.240 | You can bring that to me later.

01:15:54.240 | Don't put that on my plate.

01:15:55.440 | It's critical.

01:15:57.360 | We're actually having the blue space, the blue water, the free space to give things

01:16:01.380 | attention one at a time.

01:16:02.780 | The final and fourth point is through automation and process, you can give yourself more breathing

01:16:09.000 | room.

01:16:10.440 | So obligations that may be right now you just deal with as they come up.

01:16:16.080 | One of your reports just emails you and is like, I need approval of this.

01:16:19.360 | And you're like, Oh God, okay, that's something I have to do.

01:16:21.560 | And you have to give approval to this pretty soon.

01:16:23.880 | And it's sitting there on your plate and is a cognitive weight.

01:16:28.160 | You can take things like those.

01:16:29.280 | And if you automate them, this is how this type of work always gets done.

01:16:33.440 | Here's the here's the process.

01:16:35.120 | You put things for approval into this drop box.

01:16:38.120 | Monday after lunch, I go through the drop box and I mark approvals on it.

01:16:41.920 | Things that are automated, no longer weigh on your mind as an obligation that needs your

01:16:47.240 | attention.

01:16:48.240 | And so you can, in some sense, expand how many things you can have on your plate at

01:16:52.440 | a time before you cross that threshold of overload.

01:16:54.980 | If you take a lot of things from those plates, and you put them into automated systems that

01:16:58.040 | do not require you to make planning decisions that do not require you at some point to specifically

01:17:04.020 | put aside time on an ad hoc, individualized basis to get this thing done.

01:17:09.600 | These automation based processes gives you much more breathing room.

01:17:13.480 | So the stuff you do that happens automatically, happens every week happens every month.

01:17:19.560 | Find systems for that, that means you don't have to keep track of it.

01:17:22.800 | It's not waiting for you to put aside time to proactively put aside time to execute it,

01:17:27.260 | you know how that gets done.

01:17:28.840 | All right, so that can be really important as well.

01:17:31.880 | This is where hacks like office hours play a big role.

01:17:36.200 | Small questions, don't just let these pile up.

01:17:38.520 | Here's my office hours every single day, this hour, come by my office, call me, I have a

01:17:43.960 | zoom window open, whatever.

01:17:46.900 | That's where all the small questions go.

01:17:48.100 | And then that's not piling up on your plate that goes a long way right there as well.

01:17:51.480 | When building these processes, as I talked about, as you know, Dave in a world without

01:17:55.400 | email, minimize the amount of unscheduled messages they require.

01:17:59.280 | So you want these processes where you can execute commonly occurring work without having

01:18:04.160 | there to be ad hoc messages flying back and forth.

01:18:06.200 | It'll keep you back in your inbox.

01:18:07.480 | That will help as well.

01:18:08.480 | So if you want to look at the particular story in that book that really gets at these ideas,

01:18:14.880 | look at the story.

01:18:15.880 | I believe this is in chapter one of general George Marshall and how he completely reorganized

01:18:21.800 | the war department, the U S war department during world war two, when he took over as

01:18:25.400 | the army chief of staff.

01:18:27.040 | Cause he reorganized the whole thing so he could work on one thing at a time, the stuff

01:18:31.080 | that mattered, give it his full attention.

01:18:33.240 | And you know what?

01:18:34.680 | He would end at five o'clock every day.

01:18:36.480 | He was managing the U S army during world war two and would finish by five every day.

01:18:41.700 | He had a heart troubles, didn't want to have a heart attack.

01:18:45.920 | So that was his hard fix.

01:18:46.920 | Hitler productivity line.

01:18:47.920 | I don't work past five and he made it happen by using these type of ideas.

01:18:52.000 | So go back and read that story.

01:18:53.640 | If you a listener out there have not read a world without email, you should, and you'll

01:18:57.000 | like that story that's right there in chapter one.

01:18:58.680 | But just to summarize again, Dave, forget long unbroken periods of intense concentration.

01:19:05.140 | That's not your job, but to working on things one at a time with your full attention before

01:19:10.880 | you move on to the next is how you're going to Excel as a manager to make that possible.

01:19:14.560 | You have to avoid overload by saying no to things and by automating as many things as

01:19:19.560 | you can.

01:19:20.560 | They're already on your plate.

01:19:21.560 | You do all those things.

01:19:22.700 | You can like George Marshall win the proverbial war while getting home by five every day.

01:19:29.560 | All right, let's see.

01:19:32.280 | What do we add here?

01:19:33.280 | One 20.

01:19:34.280 | Let's do one more, you know, we're only doing weekly episodes now, so we can, we can fit

01:19:36.400 | in one more question.

01:19:39.140 | This final question comes from Domi who asks, where do you put your extended thoughts about

01:19:45.220 | your life?

01:19:46.220 | I know you have a moleskin that you carry with you for capturing the ideas about your

01:19:50.040 | life that come to you, but where do you flesh out the thoughts that don't directly apply

01:19:53.320 | to your semester or annual objectives, such as things in the contemplation bucket?

01:19:59.800 | Well there's two places, Domi.

01:20:01.160 | So one, a lot of things just live in the moleskin.

01:20:04.220 | If it's something I think is important, but it's not being acted on.

01:20:10.080 | So there's not a plan in place.

01:20:13.760 | So it doesn't live in my semester plan of like, Hey, we're making progress on this thing

01:20:17.480 | now.

01:20:18.480 | So remember that when you build your weekly plan.

01:20:19.480 | So you'll remember when you build your daily plan, if it's, if it's important, but I'm

01:20:22.160 | not taking action on it yet, I don't quite know what to do with it.

01:20:25.680 | It'll just live in the moleskin.

01:20:26.680 | And when my moleskin fills, you copy the important ideas from that one to the new one.

01:20:31.440 | And it's that transference of ideas that are still important that really helps emphasize

01:20:36.320 | like what is sticking around, what requires your attention, it helps refresh those things

01:20:39.800 | in your mind.

01:20:40.800 | So that's where non acted on big ideas tend to live for me is in the moleskin.

01:20:47.200 | And what about things that are in action that's going to live in those semester plans.

01:20:51.440 | And we've talked about this before on the show, but I will go way more broad in timescales

01:20:56.360 | than just semester on my semester plans.

01:21:00.480 | Annual objectives will be on there.

01:21:02.100 | Like the projects I build around the objectives I build around my birthday each year.

01:21:08.000 | Notes will live on their heuristics, things I want to do like every week or every day,

01:21:11.800 | new habits that will live on there.

01:21:13.680 | So I call it the semester plan because for sure, at least once a semester I update it,

01:21:19.000 | for sure that plan is going to look at the semester ahead and give me my guidelines for

01:21:24.640 | what to do with it.

01:21:25.640 | But it has all this other stuff on it as well.

01:21:27.840 | I use the semester plan very fluidly.

01:21:29.880 | So that's where you can have a lot of different ideas and projects.

01:21:33.140 | The book you're writing over a two year period, that's living in there.

01:21:36.420 | Your reminder, they'll be working on it and what you're trying to accomplish this semester

01:21:39.360 | versus next.

01:21:40.360 | The fact that you're going to wait till next summer to make progress on this, all of that

01:21:43.640 | can live in the semester plan.

01:21:44.720 | I think that's the right place to be.

01:21:47.000 | So at least for me, again, big ideas that are important, but I don't know what to do

01:21:50.640 | with live in the Moleskine and I will transfer it from Moleskine to Moleskine as needed.

01:21:55.020 | Big ideas that are being acted on live in that semester plan, even if their timescale

01:21:59.680 | is broader than just the current semester.

01:22:06.820 | So again, in the end, for me, what does that mean?

01:22:08.560 | That means I have a Moleskine, a semester plan, a weekly plan, the daily plan.

01:22:15.720 | That's really the I think that's really everything when it comes to the organizational element

01:22:19.680 | of my life.

01:22:20.760 | Then I have extensive notes for books and articles and content based.

01:22:26.800 | That's a whole other whole other issue.

01:22:29.800 | I use Rome and I use Scrivener and there's a lot of other tools when it comes to just

01:22:35.200 | where I keep track of information that's relevant to specific projects.

01:22:38.000 | But in terms of organization, those four things get me a far away.

01:22:41.320 | Those those four things get me pretty far.

01:22:44.600 | I think the only one we're leaving out there is the value plan, which is where you have

01:22:47.560 | your big picture summary of the things you value and that mutates more slowly.

01:22:51.360 | The type of things Dami is talking about might eventually migrate to there if you're really

01:22:54.520 | changing your list of what you value, what it means.

01:22:56.640 | So that could change as well.

01:22:58.000 | So we got Moleskine value plan, semester plan, weekly plan, daily plan.

01:23:03.320 | And those planners have my block block planner on the media stand, have my forty nine ninety

01:23:09.680 | five a month world breaking productivity software, which is just a link in an email that opens

01:23:16.240 | up notebook or working text.

01:23:18.880 | Those are all the tools you need.

01:23:20.640 | You simply have those tools.

01:23:22.400 | I think I think you'll be fine.

01:23:24.960 | All right, Jesse, it's been almost one thirty.

01:23:29.840 | It's been a while since we've gone this long, which is good summer.

01:23:33.840 | Yeah, we've got more energy, but we should probably wrap things up.

01:23:38.680 | So thank you everyone for listening.

01:23:41.640 | If you like what you heard, you will like what you see on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/calduportmedia

01:23:49.600 | videos of these full episodes, as well as videos of individual segments and even some

01:23:53.920 | videos that are not from the show at all.

01:23:57.480 | You'll also like what you read if you sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com.

01:24:00.360 | I took a one month hiatus from the newsletter, but I'm back.

01:24:03.720 | I wrote an article just the other day.

01:24:06.720 | So sign up for that newsletter at calnewport.com.

01:24:08.720 | We'll be back next week.

01:24:11.400 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:24:13.840 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

Ep. 195: The Social Media “Algorithm”, Deep Walks, and Cal’s Simplest Productivity Tool

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