Eliminate Distraction: How To Take Back Control Of Your Focus

00:00:00.000 | So today I'm going to argue that we misunderstand the impact of how we obtain information on

00:00:08.380 | the overall quality of our lives.

00:00:11.820 | So I'll start by explaining this current model and why it's broken.

00:00:14.660 | I'll then introduce a new philosophy that I call intentional information that I think

00:00:19.720 | promises to improve the quality and depth of your life almost right away.

00:00:24.480 | Alright, so I want to start by explaining our current understanding of information and

00:00:31.380 | how we use it.

00:00:32.380 | I'm going to try to draw this.

00:00:33.380 | For those who are watching instead of just listening, God help you because I'm about

00:00:37.860 | to try to illustrate a very complicated topic with a pretty simple picture.

00:00:43.340 | So what I'm drawing here, I'll narrate this for people who are listening, I'm drawing

00:00:46.500 | a representation of you or me, a person, right?

00:00:50.460 | So for those who are watching, you can see the picture.

00:00:54.340 | For those who are listening, Jesse, would we say that this picture reminds you sort

00:00:57.220 | of like a Caravaggio painting?

00:01:00.220 | Van Gogh.

00:01:01.220 | Van Gogh.

00:01:02.220 | Because I'm not familiar with Caravaggio.

00:01:03.220 | Well, I'm just talking about, I'm being pretty subtle in my use of charoscuro, which is the

00:01:08.340 | use of light and dark contrast to try to give volume and shape.

00:01:13.300 | For those who are listening, they don't really realize what I've drawn here.

00:01:15.460 | Alright, so here's us.

00:01:16.460 | I've drawn a picture of us.

00:01:17.460 | And over here, I'm drawing a picture of the world, expertly drawn circle.

00:01:21.740 | Everyone agrees.

00:01:22.740 | So there's like land in the world.

00:01:23.980 | Okay, so here's the, here's the world and this picture of the world, I wanted to stand

00:01:28.860 | in for an objective reality.

00:01:32.820 | This is our current model of information.

00:01:34.620 | We have us and we have this objective reality, the world that has people and events and things

00:01:41.420 | and theories that explain what's going on.

00:01:44.220 | So there's sort of this like objective world that's out there.

00:01:47.320 | The way we like to think about information is that what it does is it just gives us samples.

00:01:53.780 | I'm drawing like an arrow from this world over towards the person.

00:01:59.020 | It gives us sort of a sampling of what's happening in this objective world.

00:02:02.620 | And this is a thought bubble I've just drawn here.

00:02:04.940 | And inside this thought bubble, we sort of have constructed our own sort of lower quality

00:02:10.300 | model of what's happening in the world.

00:02:12.380 | So like, you know, as we get sort of samples of information, as I'm representing by these

00:02:17.080 | arrows, we learn things about the world.

00:02:20.200 | We use that to make our internal model of the world, people, places, things, and the

00:02:24.360 | theories that help explain how they all interact.

00:02:27.440 | It helps make that model fuller, right?

00:02:30.500 | And so then how does technology enter this, this picture, it is the, the medium by which

00:02:35.600 | this information gets to us.

00:02:38.040 | So like maybe we have like a newspaper expertly drawn, right?

00:02:42.720 | So the newspaper is sort of mediating some samples about what's happening in the world.

00:02:50.160 | Our image of the world gets more detailed.

00:02:53.840 | When we move on to more modern technology, sort of the standard techno optimist sort

00:03:00.680 | of perspective, I'm drawing here an expertly drawn smartphone.

00:03:04.720 | The idea is like, oh, this just gets more information available.

00:03:07.920 | So now that we have something like smartphones, we can have social media and the internet

00:03:12.560 | behind this all, we can get a lot more samples of this world.

00:03:16.720 | And so our internal understanding of the world becomes even more detailed.

00:03:21.380 | This internal understanding of the world then shapes how we, not just how we understand

00:03:24.400 | the world, but how we feel and we use as the foundation for our actions.

00:03:27.720 | So we act based on the conceptions in our mind.

00:03:30.200 | The conceptions in our mind are built up by getting these samples of information about

00:03:35.640 | what's actually happening.

00:03:36.640 | This is the model we currently have, right?

00:03:39.820 | So in this model, the sort of the techno optimist philosophy here is, well, more information

00:03:46.280 | is better than less because more information just gives you a more realistic and detailed

00:03:51.640 | understanding of what's actually going on in the world.

00:03:54.880 | And the more detailed understanding you have, then sort of like the more your actions can

00:03:59.280 | be based in reality.

00:04:01.160 | Why would you ever want a lower fidelity understanding of the world?

00:04:05.460 | More information can only be strictly better.

00:04:07.260 | This is like a standard sort of techno optimist or even like an enlightenment mindset.

00:04:10.920 | So in this idea, yeah, new technology that expose you to more information.

00:04:14.280 | Great.

00:04:15.280 | You get more detail to understand the world can only help you make more nuanced or correct

00:04:19.680 | or appropriate decisions about how to understand, feel and act.

00:04:24.080 | All right.

00:04:25.160 | So I'm going to argue that this model is quite broken.

00:04:29.540 | This is not actually the way information works.

00:04:32.880 | So it turns out that one of the most commonly occurring and deepest ideas in techno criticism

00:04:41.720 | is the notion that the tools we use to take in information impact the information itself,

00:04:49.680 | how we receive it and how we understand what it means.

00:04:52.280 | The tools are not just a neutral gateway that allows more samples from some objective world

00:04:57.980 | to get to us.

00:04:58.980 | The tools themselves shape how we understand the information that the tools deliver.

00:05:04.920 | So I want to sort of sample the world of techno critics that have talked about this before.

00:05:09.580 | So you have a deeper sense of where this comes from.

00:05:11.580 | A really cool, very old example of this comes from a book I'm reading right now by Jonathan

00:05:18.460 | Sachs, the late Jonathan Sachs, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.

00:05:22.180 | He wrote this really cool book in 2012 called The Great Partnership, Science, Religion and

00:05:28.340 | the Search for Meaning.

00:05:30.400 | And in this book, he has a great example of exactly this idea that technology itself shapes

00:05:34.980 | the information, shapes the way you understand the information that it delivers.

00:05:40.140 | So he talks about in this book, the very first alphabetic languages.

00:05:44.440 | So of course, the first languages that written languages were, were idiogramic.

00:05:49.880 | You have pictures that represent what they are, but we get the very first alphabetic

00:05:55.020 | languages where you have symbols standing in for sounds, right?

00:05:59.400 | That's what we think of as a modern language.

00:06:01.820 | The very first is Proto-Scianic, which basically evolves pretty quickly into ancient Hebrew.

00:06:06.080 | It's like sort of in the first phonic alphabetic languages.

00:06:11.780 | The interesting thing about Hebrew, Sachs points out, is in ancient Hebrew, there's

00:06:15.000 | no vowels, okay?

00:06:17.060 | So you have to use the, the context of the writing to figure out a particular word, right?

00:06:25.340 | So it would be like, if an English, if we think about like our alphabet without vowels,

00:06:29.260 | if you see HT, there's a lot of different words that could be dependent on what vowels

00:06:34.120 | you fill in.

00:06:35.120 | It could be hat, it could be hut, it could be hate, it could be hit, right, hot.

00:06:42.240 | So depending, HT by itself doesn't tell you what the word is, but if you, if you look

00:06:46.380 | at the, the full sentence or the full context, you can figure out, oh, this must be the vowels

00:06:50.820 | meant for this word.

00:06:53.220 | Now Sachs points out, at the same time, Hebrew is also read right to left, which engages

00:06:58.380 | your, your right hemisphere of your brain, which makes sense because you have to take

00:07:02.300 | in context of all the context of the writing to try to figure out what's being said.

00:07:06.940 | It's very holistic, contextual way of taking in information.

00:07:11.740 | And Sachs points out this is the mode of thought that's been captured in ancient Hebrew wisdom

00:07:18.340 | traditions, in particular in Torah.

00:07:21.660 | And then later when you look at like Mishnah, the sort of commentary on the Torah, it's

00:07:26.140 | all of this writing is written in a way that's very much based on context.

00:07:30.020 | It's not breaking things down.

00:07:31.580 | Here's, here's a six part understanding of this.

00:07:34.140 | It's stories, multiple stories about the same thing.

00:07:37.500 | The meaning of a particular story doesn't necessarily make sense unless you understand

00:07:41.460 | the broader context in which that story is made.

00:07:44.140 | So he's arguing that the mode of thought you get in the Abrahamic faiths is dictated in

00:07:49.260 | part by the structure of the language technology.

00:07:52.280 | So then let's compare this to what happens is the Phoenicians bring the, this alphabet

00:07:55.980 | over to Greece, it goes to ancient Greece where it evolves.

00:07:59.380 | And when this alphabet gets to Greece, they do two things.

00:08:02.320 | First they introduce vowels to it.

00:08:03.740 | So now there's no guessing.

00:08:05.260 | You know exactly what a word is because you have all the vowels, just like in English.

00:08:08.700 | And then they shift from left to right.

00:08:11.420 | And this is going to be, as Sacks points out, engaging the left hemisphere of the brain,

00:08:14.780 | which is much more analytical.

00:08:16.500 | So in Greek writing, like our modern languages, like, you know exactly what each word is as

00:08:20.460 | you finish it.

00:08:21.460 | So you have this sort of like precise building up of understanding as you move left to right

00:08:25.180 | across the text.

00:08:26.180 | You don't need to sort of take in the whole context and then try to figure out what it

00:08:28.620 | means.

00:08:29.620 | Sacks argues this is exactly a technology that gave way to philosophy and abstract reasoning,

00:08:35.900 | logic, and eventually science.

00:08:38.220 | So the way the language works impacted the way that we understood, went about understanding

00:08:45.300 | the world.

00:08:46.860 | So putting in vowels and going left to right made things like philosophy and logic very

00:08:51.940 | natural.

00:08:53.060 | Reading right to left without vowels made a more sort of holistic narrative contextual

00:08:56.620 | understanding of the world more natural.

00:08:59.260 | The technology through which you were getting the information dictated how you understood

00:09:04.700 | the world or made sense of the world, a very ancient example of this.

00:09:09.060 | In more modern times, we have, you know, Neil Postman is a great proponent of this perspective.

00:09:14.460 | He basically took this idea from his mentor, Marshall McLuhan, and he evolved it.

00:09:20.260 | His book from 1985, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

00:09:25.940 | is sort of one of the classic publicly accessible guides to this idea that technology shapes

00:09:31.280 | the way that we actually understand information.

00:09:34.900 | The terminology he introduced was epistemic environment.

00:09:38.760 | So the tech information technology defines the epistemic environment, which in turn impacts

00:09:43.280 | how we understand the world.

00:09:45.620 | So in this book, he was talking a lot about television since that was the major information

00:09:50.400 | technology of the 1980s.

00:09:51.680 | But here's a couple of quotes from Postman.

00:09:54.040 | He says, each medium, so he's talking about communication, information mediums, each medium

00:10:00.500 | like language itself makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation

00:10:05.040 | for thought, for expression, for sensibility.

00:10:08.280 | So mode of discourse is like how we actually think and engage with the world is affected

00:10:12.200 | by the medium.

00:10:13.200 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:10:14.200 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:10:18.820 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:10:26.280 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:10:31.720 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:10:37.080 | I know you're going to like it.

00:10:38.880 | Check it out.

00:10:39.880 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:10:40.880 | He goes on to say, we do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology

00:10:45.820 | as it, as it is, but only as our languages are and our languages are our media.

00:10:53.560 | Our media are our metaphors.

00:10:54.760 | Our metaphors create the content of our culture, right?

00:10:57.560 | So he's directly pushing back against the picture I drew earlier.

00:11:02.120 | The picture that had this common understanding of there's an objective world, and we're just

00:11:05.000 | getting samples of that world and the more samples we get, the more we understand the

00:11:08.280 | objective world.

00:11:09.280 | But Postman's saying, no, no, no, there is no it, and he puts it in quotation marks.

00:11:14.640 | So we can't see things as it is, right?

00:11:18.100 | What we see is very much shaped by the media that we're using to actually get this information.

00:11:23.440 | So the, it, uh, what it is actually changes depending on the media through which we're

00:11:28.080 | getting this information.

00:11:30.360 | You're recording, you're writing about the world in ancient Hebrew is going to be a completely

00:11:33.940 | different conception of how to approach reality than if you're writing about the world using

00:11:38.160 | ancient Greeks.

00:11:40.920 | Another interesting book is from 2009 that gives us sort of a neurological explanation

00:11:45.960 | for some of this is Winifred Gallagher's book wrapped attention and the focused life I write

00:11:53.080 | about wrapped in deep work, I believe.

00:11:56.560 | It's an interesting book.

00:11:57.560 | It was influential for me.

00:11:58.640 | A lot of people struggle with it because it's more essayistic, not as Greek, let's say it's

00:12:04.360 | more Hebrew than Greek.

00:12:05.360 | If we're going to have more Jerusalem than Athens, if we're going to use our previous

00:12:08.520 | metaphors here.

00:12:10.040 | So it's more like essays and a little more flowery, flowery and literary than, you know,

00:12:16.000 | a lot of people are used to, but there's some fantastic ideas, including some pretty serious

00:12:20.240 | neuroscience.

00:12:21.500 | So a big argument Gallagher is saying in here is that your brain constructs its internal

00:12:27.680 | understanding of the world based on what it's paying attention to.

00:12:31.720 | So depending on what you pay attention to, your brain's actual internally constructed

00:12:35.440 | idea of what the world is like and how you should feel about it changes.

00:12:38.240 | So it's not like here's the, here's the objective world and we're just getting higher and higher

00:12:42.200 | fidelity pictures of it.

00:12:43.960 | We construct this specific world, neurologically speaking, based on what we pay attention to.

00:12:50.160 | Here's a quote from her book, all day long, you are selectively paying attention to something

00:12:55.120 | and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good

00:12:59.000 | effect.

00:13:00.000 | Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress this, that is the key to controlling

00:13:05.120 | your experience and ultimately your well being.

00:13:09.080 | So now she's getting down to the mechanisms here, what you're paying attention to impacts

00:13:14.820 | how your mind understands what's happening to you in the world.

00:13:17.360 | And that directly impacts your well being.

00:13:20.040 | Okay.

00:13:21.400 | So we put these ideas together, we get a completely different understanding.

00:13:24.680 | I'm going to draw a new picture here again with great trepidation.

00:13:28.520 | So going back, I'm going to, you know, let's draw our person again over here.

00:13:32.720 | All right.

00:13:34.320 | There's our person.

00:13:35.800 | This is the reality is there's lots of different conceptual worlds that we potentially that

00:13:45.700 | exist out here.

00:13:47.660 | And the specific world, the specific world that you're building an internal representation

00:13:54.200 | of in your mind depends on the technology you're using.

00:13:59.800 | So if we're using a particular technology down here, we get one world if we use a different

00:14:03.840 | technology that our understanding the world is different, there is no objective world.

00:14:08.320 | We sort of construct our understanding of the world and therefore our subjective sense

00:14:11.640 | of self beliefs and actions based on what information we're getting.

00:14:15.660 | And as we learned from postman and sacks, the technology through which we're getting

00:14:21.080 | that information is what really matters in terms of the type of world that it constructs

00:14:25.060 | for us.

00:14:26.660 | So that's the reality here.

00:14:27.920 | And so in this case, this person is looking at the world through like a smartphone and

00:14:32.960 | perhaps you know, this world is one I'm putting like a nuclear explosion and it's like a and

00:14:40.040 | I'm putting devil ears on it.

00:14:41.160 | It might be like a really bad world, you know, like, oh my God, right.

00:14:43.640 | So it affects kind of looks like the monster from monsters, Inc.

00:14:49.540 | The Billy Crystal says, anyways, that's the reality.

00:14:53.720 | So that matters.

00:14:54.720 | All right.

00:14:55.720 | So if we take this all into consideration, the conclusion is if your goal is to build

00:15:02.080 | a deep life in this current distracted high tech world, you have to care a lot about the

00:15:07.400 | information you take in and through what tool you're taking in that information, right?

00:15:12.120 | If our tools are not just these like neutral portals that just give us samples of the real

00:15:15.520 | world as it is.

00:15:16.520 | And so just the more samples, the better.

00:15:17.960 | So why not use as many tools as possible?

00:15:19.900 | We have to care.

00:15:22.000 | We have to care about how we take in information.

00:15:24.600 | I have a name for this philosophy, a tentative name.

00:15:27.240 | I call it intentional information.

00:15:31.360 | Intentional information is a philosophy that having intention about what information you

00:15:35.080 | take in and how you take it in is really important on the quality of your life.

00:15:41.560 | So I wrote down some potential principles here for intentional information.

00:15:45.480 | This is all just, this is tentative, right?

00:15:47.720 | I'm just writing down a few ideas here.

00:15:50.040 | We can expand this as needed, but just to give you a sense of the type of ideas you

00:15:53.440 | might put in place.

00:15:54.480 | If you adopt an intentional information philosophy, all right, number one, get non-local news

00:16:01.880 | typographically as boring as possible and sparingly, all right?

00:16:06.760 | So if you want to know about the world, be very careful about how you do this.

00:16:10.560 | Don't just be on Twitter or Instagram or Tik Tok and see what comes through.

00:16:13.960 | You have no control over the world that that's going to create in your head is probably not

00:16:18.000 | going to be a world that's going to be beneficial to you.

00:16:20.520 | So typographically, that's a technology that's going to give you a much, I'm not going to

00:16:25.120 | say accurate, but it's going to give you a much less manipulated or charged understanding

00:16:28.720 | of the world.

00:16:30.480 | Appealing news, just what's going on, bullet points of things that are happening.

00:16:33.680 | I just sort of want to know what's going on, but I don't want it to be appealing, trying

00:16:37.400 | to get me to click or follow or subscribe to something.

00:16:40.880 | And you don't probably need as much news about the world outside of your local environment

00:16:44.760 | as you might think.

00:16:45.760 | In your local environment, you do want to know what's going on, but you can actually

00:16:49.540 | get this information largely from actual people.

00:16:53.840 | Spend much more, this goes with that idea too, spend much more time paying attention

00:16:57.200 | to what's going on in the worlds in which you have agency.

00:17:01.240 | We're much more wired for this, the communities in which you are a part and actually have

00:17:05.920 | a say, your town, your school, your employer, your religious institution.

00:17:11.640 | That should be actually like the bulk of the information you're taking in about what's

00:17:14.240 | going on because these are the worlds in which you have agency.

00:17:16.720 | Our mind is better able to deal with that information because that's what information

00:17:20.960 | was until what, 300 years ago.

00:17:24.640 | It was just about the worlds in which we have agency.

00:17:27.480 | We have a really hard time hearing about the world beyond where we have agency because

00:17:32.680 | our mind is used to, if something bad is happening that affects us, we need to be worried or

00:17:36.800 | we need to be a part of it.

00:17:38.800 | And when the information is coming in from the entire billion, many billion person world,

00:17:43.640 | we can't actually do that, but our mind doesn't make that distinction.

00:17:47.380 | So focus more on the notion of the world our brain is used to, which is the world in which

00:17:51.920 | you live and the people are in it that you know, and you can make a difference and you

00:17:54.920 | can, you can be involved and less time, not no time, but the bulk of your consumption

00:18:01.360 | should not be.

00:18:02.360 | I just want to hear about things that I have no agency or impact or control on prioritize

00:18:07.460 | real people over characters, right?

00:18:11.120 | So again, I think social media does this, YouTube does this.

00:18:13.960 | You have to be careful that you kind of get these characters, these avatars of people

00:18:17.760 | designed to be interesting, and it messes with how we understand what people are like

00:18:23.560 | and what we should be like.

00:18:25.240 | So spend more time with real people that you actually talk to and know and can see and

00:18:29.200 | touch, especially if you're young.

00:18:31.080 | This is important.

00:18:32.080 | Being around real people gives you a better grounding in the reality of the human experience

00:18:36.440 | than paying, you know, spending most of your time with these avatars online, prioritize

00:18:41.560 | real action over watching action of others.

00:18:45.360 | So again, it's, there's weird, crazy stuff going on online and people doing these things

00:18:50.280 | on Tik TOK videos.

00:18:51.280 | And it's sort of a simulacrum of interesting activity and it can play weird things with

00:18:55.760 | our minds prioritize.

00:18:56.760 | Like I want to go do something myself.

00:19:00.160 | I want to be a part of this trail maintenance club.

00:19:02.480 | I'm part of the running club.

00:19:03.600 | I'm volunteering at this thing here.

00:19:05.360 | I'm writing in this writing group where we get together in a real place, prioritize real

00:19:08.920 | action over.

00:19:09.920 | Let me get a thrill out of watching vicariously over watching the actions of others.

00:19:16.120 | Try to have, I think of this like medicine.

00:19:19.120 | When you get exposed, despite your best efforts to material that is very emotionally engaging,

00:19:23.920 | especially if the material gets you outraged about something, the medicine you want to

00:19:28.400 | try to take right away to, to dole the more insidious effects of this emotion that could

00:19:34.200 | really creep in.

00:19:35.200 | I mean, nothing really shapes that world in our head stronger than a sense of, of, of

00:19:40.040 | injustice or outrage, which injustice is important, but you want to make sure that if you're getting

00:19:44.640 | this through a format that is meant to amplify those feelings that you put a sort of a dampener

00:19:52.440 | on it.

00:19:53.440 | And the best dampener is steel Manning.

00:19:55.400 | Okay.

00:19:56.400 | I've, I've encountered this thing that's really making me upset.

00:19:59.640 | Let me go seek out and encounter the best, best faith sort of presentation of this from

00:20:05.880 | the other side of it.

00:20:08.600 | What you get here is not like, Oh, it's going to trick you.

00:20:10.960 | Oh, it's going to, it's going to trick you into not caring about what's important or

00:20:15.240 | it's going to, to dole your sense of needing to take action.

00:20:18.240 | Things are, that's not at all.

00:20:19.240 | What's going to happen.

00:20:20.240 | What this actually ends up doing is when you put the, the, the best steel man, that's what

00:20:24.080 | they call instead of a straw man, like the best, a good faith argument from the other

00:20:27.720 | sides is it sands off the, the, the really sharp edges that actually can make any reasonable

00:20:33.240 | action difficult and allows you to actually work with what's going on in this particular

00:20:38.880 | instance in a much more productive way.

00:20:40.880 | So take this dose of steel Manning for everything that outrages you, everything that really

00:20:45.200 | gets you going.

00:20:46.320 | It just changes the temperature of your internal world and makes you a, it gives you more options,

00:20:51.840 | gives you, gives you more agency.

00:20:53.580 | That one scares people.

00:20:55.080 | Interestingly, though, when I talk about this, it doesn't scare individuals thinking about

00:20:59.480 | themselves.

00:21:00.480 | Like, like, yeah, that's fine.

00:21:01.480 | I can see a good faith argument about something and it'll be good to know.

00:21:04.560 | It's not going to change what I think about, but they get worried about other people.

00:21:07.360 | They'll be tricked.

00:21:08.920 | It's important that they don't see the other side because they could be tricked into believing

00:21:11.480 | the wrong thing.

00:21:12.480 | It doesn't happen.

00:21:13.760 | You believe in something steel Manning, it just gives you a more nuanced, less emotionally

00:21:18.360 | charged understanding of it.

00:21:20.720 | That is the foundation for real action.

00:21:23.040 | When you really just pick up the outrage, that's the foundation for sending more tweets

00:21:26.360 | and doing more tick tock videos.

00:21:27.560 | You're basically serving the social media companies.

00:21:29.720 | You're not actually serving the world.

00:21:32.520 | Be wary about using social media for entertainment.

00:21:36.480 | You'll find a instead what I call slow entertainment consumption of information that slower and

00:21:43.360 | builds more richer, more rewarding worlds, books, good movies, seeing music in person,

00:21:52.160 | being around artists or creatives or seeing something awe inspiring in nature and person.

00:21:57.320 | Slow entertainment is going to be much richer for the brain and give us probably a better

00:22:01.540 | construction of a world than using social media for entertainment.

00:22:04.360 | If you do use social media for entertainment, be very focused.

00:22:07.240 | Like this particular thing I get from social media.

00:22:10.560 | It's not just a, I'm bored.

00:22:11.960 | Let me start scrolling.

00:22:13.840 | So it could be, I like to look at these baseball commentators during baseball game.

00:22:18.760 | They have like interesting comments about what's going on.

00:22:20.760 | That's fine.

00:22:22.440 | But I'm going to scroll tick tock when I'm just waiting at a red light.

00:22:25.720 | That's a whole different type of thing.

00:22:27.920 | Finally, seek a regular drip of content that's optimistic, exciting, or inspiring.

00:22:33.000 | So if the information we take in shapes our understanding of the world, then why don't

00:22:37.040 | we take in information that's going to shape an understanding of an immediate world that

00:22:40.040 | is a little bit more positive, inspiring, because we will feel better.

00:22:45.420 | So if this is what matters, then let's, let's be careful about the information we choose.

00:22:49.080 | All right.

00:22:50.080 | So that's some principles off the top of my head.

00:22:52.500 | But the bigger point here with intentional information is this notion that information

00:22:56.000 | is not neutral.

00:22:57.000 | The tool shapes what the information means to you.

00:22:59.400 | And a lot of the tools that exist out there now, these internet based attention economy

00:23:03.840 | tools tend to shape a version of the world that is not in our best interest.

00:23:08.800 | It's distracting.

00:23:09.880 | It's emotionally draining.

00:23:11.500 | It makes us feel bad.

00:23:12.940 | It cuts off our options for actually taking meaningful action.

00:23:16.540 | So a deep life is careful about its information.

00:23:19.400 | What information it takes in and critically through what medium or tool it takes in that

00:23:24.240 | information.

00:23:26.680 | Intentional information is one in where you're probably actually taking in a lot less digital

00:23:30.760 | information than you are now.

00:23:32.960 | You're putting more of that attention towards slower or in-person type of information.

00:23:38.100 | This is an immediate positive change to your understanding of the world.

00:23:41.460 | Intentional information can have you, as one listener said to me, feel like you're going

00:23:45.180 | from black and white to technicolor.

00:23:47.060 | It changes the world that you live in.

00:23:49.340 | It changes what Postman would have called your epistemic environment in a way that can

00:23:52.940 | be profound and almost immediately.

00:23:55.200 | So we have to care about the information we intake just as much as we care about the other

00:23:59.660 | aspects of our life.

00:24:01.020 | So there you go, Jesse.

00:24:03.940 | Intentional information.

00:24:05.140 | Not just two words now, but alliteration.

00:24:07.040 | So we're really rock and rolling.

00:24:08.740 | Reading right to left is like blowing my mind.

00:24:11.340 | I never even knew about that.

00:24:12.740 | Yeah.

00:24:13.740 | Yeah.

00:24:14.740 | So if you've never picked up a book in Hebrew, you start from the other end.

00:24:19.700 | I've never picked up a book in Hebrew.

00:24:21.140 | I had to do that.

00:24:22.140 | Yeah.

00:24:23.140 | Yeah.

00:24:24.140 | Yeah.

00:24:25.140 | It is really...

00:24:26.140 | It's a cool book.

00:24:27.140 | I like Sachs.

00:24:28.140 | I've been reading a lot of Sachs recently.

00:24:29.140 | He's one of these scholars who's very broadly read, but is very good at writing for popular

00:24:32.420 | audiences.

00:24:33.420 | He doesn't dumb it down, but he also doesn't trip up over his own complexity.

00:24:38.220 | He's not proud of, "Look how smart I am."

00:24:41.620 | And somehow he's just able to pull all these different things together, be really clear

00:24:45.660 | about it, summarize what matters, know that this is a simplification, make that clear

00:24:49.300 | and keep moving.

00:24:51.200 | Really good.

00:24:52.200 | Really smart thinker.

00:24:53.200 | Mm-hmm (affirmative).

00:24:54.200 | Rabbi Sachs.

00:24:55.200 | All right.

00:24:56.200 | Anyways, we've got some good questions now vaguely about these topics, deep life topics,

00:25:00.180 | information, et cetera.

00:25:01.180 | But first, let's hear from a sponsor.

00:25:05.860 | Speaking of information, I think it's a good time to talk about our friends at Notion.

00:25:12.640 | So you should know about Notion already.

00:25:14.180 | It's a tool that combines your notes and documents into one space that's simple and beautifully

00:25:18.540 | designed.

00:25:20.020 | It also allows you to create these sort of custom information spaces.

00:25:24.500 | We have used Notion-based tools here at the Deep Work HQ for various reasons.

00:25:29.060 | We had, for example, I believe we were using it to keep track of, with our advertising

00:25:34.300 | agency, all the different advertisers and when the reads were.

00:25:38.180 | And Notion makes it, you can build these beautiful interfaces and view the data in different

00:25:41.300 | ways and zoom in here.

00:25:43.000 | If you deal with a lot of information and what you do professionally, Notion is a tool

00:25:46.780 | for building these fantastic custom interfaces into that information.

00:25:50.140 | All right.

00:25:51.140 | So we've talked about Notion before on the show.

00:25:53.540 | One of the problems, of course, in general, is as information gets more voluminous, whatever

00:25:59.580 | operation you're running, it's more and more difficult to find what you need.

00:26:03.780 | So this is where I want to talk about this new tool that Notion has built right into

00:26:08.220 | its product, an AI tool built right into the product that makes it very easy to find whatever

00:26:16.740 | you're looking for.

00:26:18.780 | It's really cool.

00:26:19.780 | We've been messing around with this.

00:26:20.980 | It's a fantastic idea.

00:26:23.540 | You can use the Notion's AI-powered workspace to ask, where is this document on whatever?

00:26:31.620 | Where was it that we had the summary from the last meeting?

00:26:36.900 | It can also act on your behalf because Notion, these tools get you a place to interface with

00:26:42.260 | and mess with your information.

00:26:45.020 | So it can help you with this.

00:26:46.300 | Hey, can you summarize the notes from this meeting?

00:26:49.140 | I put in these meeting notes, summarize those for me.

00:26:52.500 | Can you generate action items based off this transcript of a chat that I just pasted right

00:26:57.620 | into our Notion interface?

00:27:00.100 | Asking questions.

00:27:01.100 | What did we say last week in the meeting about what we were going to do?

00:27:07.940 | The AI-powered tools in Notion can help you with all of these different things.

00:27:13.060 | So I love this idea that Notion has evolved from the tool to build custom interfaces,

00:27:16.820 | to deal with all the information you need to do what you or your organization does.

00:27:20.540 | And now with AI integrated deep in it, it's all the more easier to find what you need,

00:27:25.340 | to create the information you need, to summarize the stuff that you have in there.

00:27:28.800 | So it's made this tool all the more powerful.

00:27:31.280 | So here's the good news.

00:27:32.280 | You can try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/cal.

00:27:37.560 | That's all lowercase letters, notion.com/cal and start turning ideas into action.

00:27:43.740 | And when you use this link, you will be supporting our show.

00:27:47.180 | So go to notion.com/cal.

00:27:52.080 | Another cool sponsor I want to talk about, a relatively new sponsor to the show is Listening.

00:27:59.340 | So Listening is this fantastic tool that allows you to take, I use it with academic articles,

00:28:05.260 | but basically written text.

00:28:07.460 | And Listening is a tool that uses AI-generated voices so that you can listen to written material.

00:28:17.820 | So now you can take in this material like you would a podcast or an audio book.

00:28:23.020 | Here for example is an academic article I want to read about whatever, I'm busy, Listen

00:28:28.580 | can now read this article for me while I'm doing the dishes, while I'm mowing the yard.

00:28:34.300 | So it's a way to take things that weren't originally recorded to be audio and allow

00:28:39.020 | you to actually consume them in an audio format.

00:28:42.980 | So you can listen to papers, books, PDF, websites, email, newsletters, et cetera.

00:28:48.980 | And the Listening app does this really well.

00:28:52.260 | One of the cool things about this is it has the ability to, it sounds like a real human,

00:28:57.020 | but one of the things I like about it is a one-click note-taking function.

00:28:59.860 | So like, "Oh, I need to jot something down about this that you're listening to."

00:29:03.980 | You press one button, boom, and you can throw in a note and it will remember, take the last

00:29:09.740 | things it read and put it, copy it over into this sort of notepad type feature.

00:29:14.180 | I don't know what they call it.

00:29:15.180 | So these notes are there.

00:29:16.740 | So like if I'm listening to an academic article or like a long form, you know, New Yorker

00:29:20.980 | piece while I'm doing the dishes, if there's something in that article, like, ooh, that's

00:29:25.540 | a key part, hit the button.

00:29:27.500 | It grabs the last few sentences, throws it in my notepad.

00:29:30.700 | And then later I can go in and be like, "Oh, here's the things I sort of audio highlighted

00:29:34.340 | from this thing I was listening to."

00:29:36.020 | So they know, the listening app knows that like you want to actually take notes or keep

00:29:39.760 | information or remember good stuff about what you were listening to.

00:29:43.960 | It's also really good about skipping through sections.

00:29:46.640 | So it understands like if you've digested a academic paper, what the sections are.

00:29:51.680 | So you can jump ahead to conclusions, jump ahead to results, and it'll start reading

00:29:55.240 | that to you.

00:29:56.240 | And I like the voices.

00:29:57.240 | I think they're the AI voice technology.

00:29:58.620 | I don't know.

00:29:59.620 | I feel like in the last six months, it feels like this has really changed where, you know,

00:30:04.580 | it sounds like someone is actually reading it.

00:30:08.320 | So your life just got a lot easier.

00:30:10.560 | Normally you'd get a two-week free trial, but my listeners are going to get a whole

00:30:14.920 | month free if they go to listening.com/deep or use the code deep at checkout.

00:30:22.040 | So go to listening.com/deep for a limited time, you can get a whole month free.

00:30:26.720 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:30:32.240 | That listening comes in handy, especially if you're driving too.

00:30:35.600 | Oh, yes.

00:30:36.600 | That's a fantastic use for it.

00:30:37.600 | Because there's so many times where I need to, and you can't write while you drive.

00:30:41.760 | Yeah.

00:30:42.760 | That's fantastic, actually.

00:30:43.760 | Right?

00:30:44.760 | Like, okay, I want to read this article that might be relevant for something I'm working

00:30:47.680 | on.

00:30:48.680 | Use the listening app and you can listen to it while you drive and you can hit the note

00:30:51.400 | taking button.

00:30:52.400 | Yeah.

00:30:53.400 | I agree with that.

00:30:54.400 | Yeah.

00:30:55.400 | All right.

00:30:56.400 | First question's from Mark.

00:30:57.400 | Do you have any book recommendations aside from your own that will compliment cultivating

00:31:01.340 | a deep life outside of work?

00:31:03.360 | So far from the past, I've heard you talk about Walden in Designing Your Life.

00:31:07.040 | I'd love to hear more you consider good reading before you release your next book, which is

00:31:11.080 | the Deep Life book.

00:31:13.600 | So Mark, I want you to read nothing until my book on the Deep Life comes out.

00:31:19.120 | Everything else compared to my book is garbage.

00:31:22.440 | No, there's a lot of good books.

00:31:24.960 | So I'm going to zig here, right?

00:31:27.040 | There's two ways of thinking about books about the deep life.

00:31:30.880 | There's books you can imagine to be actually instructive, right?

00:31:33.860 | So like Designing Your Life or Tim Ferriss is like the Four Hour Work Week, right?

00:31:40.140 | What's the Arthur Brooks book?

00:31:41.140 | We had Arthur on his book with Oprah, you know, building the life you want.

00:31:44.460 | So you have straight up instructive books.

00:31:46.580 | My book on the Deep Life will fall into that instructive bucket.

00:31:50.860 | Like here's the way to think about this.

00:31:52.300 | Here's what to do.

00:31:53.300 | Try this out.

00:31:54.520 | But I'm going to recommend something different for you now.

00:31:56.540 | The other piece about reading about the deep life is not the instructions about how you

00:32:00.880 | construct a deep life, but instead your internal exploration to understand what the deep life

00:32:05.120 | means to you.

00:32:07.520 | Like what is depth?

00:32:08.600 | This is actually the big question that people have now, you know, on the show, we say, first

00:32:12.920 | of all, life is too ambiguous of a term, break your life into the different areas that are

00:32:19.320 | important to you.

00:32:20.320 | We sometimes call these buckets.

00:32:21.440 | So let's do that first.

00:32:22.960 | And, you know, you might have craft and community and constitution and contemplation celebration

00:32:27.760 | at different ways.

00:32:28.760 | We talk about this, but the areas of your life that's important to you.

00:32:31.120 | So now life is something more general.

00:32:34.020 | Then what you want to do is seek out in each of these areas of your life, examples that

00:32:40.940 | resonate.

00:32:42.780 | So it could be something you read about, it could be something you, you hear on a podcast

00:32:46.920 | or something you see in a movie or a documentary or read in a magazine article, but you're

00:32:50.720 | trusting your own body's intuition.

00:32:53.200 | You're using your body as a depth detector.

00:32:57.320 | It knows like if it sees something that feels right in some way to me, I'm going to feel

00:33:01.800 | that.

00:33:02.800 | And so you start, you start to capture these examples.

00:33:04.920 | And then once you have these examples and you're categorizing them, like the different

00:33:08.760 | parts of your life, once you have these examples, then you can distill them into properties.

00:33:13.600 | Oh, so what are the properties that these examples have?

00:33:16.440 | Let me distill those.

00:33:17.440 | These are the properties I'm looking for in the working part of my life.

00:33:20.560 | These are what resonate to me.

00:33:21.560 | I've distilled at the properties.

00:33:22.760 | Here's the properties I'm looking for in the community aspect of my life.

00:33:26.440 | I had these sort of examples of people and things and these books I read that really

00:33:30.800 | spoke to me.

00:33:31.800 | What are the properties they all shared that I want in the community part of my life?

00:33:35.720 | Once you have those properties, now you have a portrait of your own goal as a deep life

00:33:40.640 | that you can start working on pursuing.

00:33:43.460 | And that's going to be sort of fundamental to the book I'm writing on the deep life,

00:33:46.320 | the sort of lifestyle centric planning.

00:33:48.160 | So with this in mind, though, this means this is another way to think about books is you're

00:33:51.360 | looking for things that resonate.

00:33:52.840 | Then you're recording the things that resonate under the right categories.

00:33:56.520 | And then later you tried to still prop properties out of them.

00:34:00.600 | So you don't necessarily need to just be looking for instructions, but instead the raw material

00:34:05.820 | you'll later need to construct a deep life.

00:34:07.640 | So Mark, that's what I might recommend.

00:34:09.100 | Read things that speak to you.

00:34:10.840 | And when you get that feeling of like I, whatever this person is doing, why I'm reading a book

00:34:14.960 | about Lincoln and something about Lincoln is resonating with me of what's happening

00:34:18.500 | with the way he's dealing with X.

00:34:19.600 | Let me write that down.

00:34:21.080 | I'm watching a documentary about Laird Hamilton, you know, big wave surfing on the North Shore

00:34:25.880 | of Maui.

00:34:26.880 | I don't know what about this is resonating, but something is I'm going to write this down.

00:34:31.600 | So think about books in that way as a source of intuition into what matters to you.

00:34:38.360 | And then, of course, we can later use that information to help construct a life that

00:34:43.240 | has those properties in it.

00:34:44.360 | And that's the whole lifestyle centric planning.

00:34:46.300 | It's its own thing.

00:34:47.300 | But anyway, I want to make that distinction.

00:34:50.520 | Books in the deep life is not just about how do I build this, but it's what do I want to

00:34:54.800 | build, discovering what it is you want to build.

00:34:57.080 | All right, what do we got next?

00:35:00.240 | Next question's from Scott.

00:35:01.920 | Do you think handwriting has a positive effect on cultivating a deep life?

00:35:05.800 | He provides a link that we'll take a look at.

00:35:07.680 | He also goes on to say, you use your remarkable tablet, and that implies that you like writing

00:35:12.440 | by hand.

00:35:13.440 | Do you use it for reasons suggested in the article?

00:35:15.800 | All right, Scott, so we loaded up the article you sent to us.

00:35:19.000 | I'll put it on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening.

00:35:22.800 | So the article that Scott sent us is titled Why Handwriting is Good for Your Brain.

00:35:29.320 | There's a picture of someone writing at some sort of like colonial looking desk.

00:35:34.480 | All right.

00:35:35.480 | Analysis.

00:35:36.480 | Research over the years has pointed out that there are many advantages and benefits to

00:35:40.120 | writing by hand.

00:35:42.440 | All right.

00:35:43.440 | All right.

00:35:44.440 | So there's some cool pictures in here.

00:35:45.440 | I'm just kind of scrolling through this thing.

00:35:47.000 | Look at that thing.

00:35:49.040 | This is like a writing device, Jesse.

00:35:51.200 | This weird thing here.

00:35:52.200 | It's a writing device that Nietzsche used.

00:35:54.880 | Okay.

00:35:56.640 | In a study carried out almost two decades ago, subjects were presented with words carrying

00:36:00.240 | a positive connotation, such as sweet, or negative, such as rubbish.

00:36:05.920 | Subjects had to indicate whether a word was good or bad by moving a joystick.

00:36:09.160 | Half the subjects were told to indicate that a word was good by pulling the joystick towards

00:36:12.680 | their body, and the other half were told to indicate good by pushing it away.

00:36:17.720 | To indicate that a word was bad, they made the opposite movement to good.

00:36:20.520 | A consistent correlation was observed between meaning and movement.

00:36:23.920 | The quickest responses were produced by the subjects who were told to indicate good by

00:36:27.120 | pulling the joystick towards themselves and indicate bad by pushing it away.

00:36:31.320 | The direct involvement of the body and senses and mental processes can explain how writing

00:36:35.160 | by hand helps us learn letters and words.

00:36:38.160 | This is backed up by the results of various studies, which they then go on to summarize.

00:36:41.780 | All right.

00:36:42.780 | Well, that's a good question.

00:36:45.080 | Do I use a remarkable notebook specifically to get benefits of handwriting?

00:36:50.280 | Not really.

00:36:52.240 | Not really.

00:36:53.240 | There's two advantages I like to it.

00:36:55.000 | Portability.

00:36:56.000 | So handwriting is portable.

00:36:58.280 | You just need a surface, right?

00:37:01.220 | Keyboards take space, and I can type much faster than I can write.

00:37:06.160 | I take a lot of notes on my computer typing, so I can type much faster than I can write,

00:37:10.160 | but it's not portable.

00:37:11.160 | So I like portability of handwriting.

00:37:12.880 | I also like flexibility of formatting.

00:37:15.480 | So in my remarkable, I underline things, I draw boxes, I draw arrows.

00:37:19.620 | There's a lot of information that can be captured diagrammatically, right?

00:37:23.080 | Like I can draw things, captures information.

00:37:24.800 | I can underline things, box things, connect things with arrows.

00:37:28.400 | There's a lot of extra information you can add with drawing in addition to just pure

00:37:32.320 | text.

00:37:34.260 | So I like both those things about handwriting.

00:37:36.440 | I don't know that I understand or remember information better when I write.

00:37:40.520 | I'm frustrated that my writing is slow compared to my typing.

00:37:43.680 | My handwriting tends to get sloppy.

00:37:46.960 | Usually when I'm typing, just because my speed is better, I can get out more ideas.

00:37:50.120 | I can develop them better.

00:37:51.440 | I mean, I actually like typed thinking.

00:37:55.560 | I feel like it's more flexible for me than writing, speaking.

00:37:58.840 | But there's advantages to the handwriting, the portability, and the ability to add diagrams.

00:38:02.620 | So I'm not a big booster of these notions that it will change my understanding if I

00:38:08.200 | write it as opposed to type it.

00:38:10.080 | In my book, I talked about this, I'm remembering this now.

00:38:13.560 | I talked about this in my straight A student book from years ago about how to be a student.

00:38:19.040 | And I argued in that book, like, "Hey, if you're able to bring a laptop, if you have

00:38:22.200 | a laptop and are able to bring a laptop in the class to take notes, that's probably better

00:38:25.840 | because you can type faster."

00:38:28.240 | To me, it was all about keeping up, getting the information down that you can then later

00:38:31.760 | study from.

00:38:33.040 | And so I think from, if I'm thinking back, even from my early days, I was a big fan of

00:38:37.560 | speed, speed and efficiency.

00:38:40.880 | So I like typing, but I do handwrite because it has its advantages.

00:38:44.800 | If I had better handwriting, Jesse, I would do it more.

00:38:47.520 | Some people have beautiful handwriting, and there's like a draw, it's really nice.

00:38:51.520 | They have these bullet journals that look very artistic.

00:38:55.060 | My notebooks, if you looked at them, sort of look like you're capturing someone having

00:39:00.000 | a stroke in real time, just in terms of like the handwriting and the, so I get frustrated,

00:39:04.560 | like, "I want to go faster."

00:39:06.320 | Other than your $50 notebook back in the day.

00:39:08.520 | That one I wrote carefully in.

00:39:09.560 | That one slowed me down.

00:39:10.560 | That was in the book.

00:39:11.760 | I get frustrated I can't type faster.

00:39:13.680 | I type myself off of my keyboard.

00:39:15.560 | I go so fast, I type myself off my, I want to go faster.

00:39:18.280 | My thoughts move so much quicker than I can get information down, but that's true.

00:39:22.320 | So in my high quality notebook, which I talk about in slow productivity, I spent a lot

00:39:26.200 | of money on this notebook when I was a postdoc, so I would take my thoughts more seriously.

00:39:29.800 | My handwriting is very neat in there, so I did go slower in that notebook, and I did

00:39:33.440 | produce better ideas, so maybe there's something in that.

00:39:36.440 | How's your keyboard holding up that you bought over the holiday season?

00:39:39.400 | I like it.

00:39:40.400 | My mechanical?

00:39:41.400 | Yeah.

00:39:42.400 | Yeah, so it, by bouncing up the fingers, I'm faster.

00:39:45.480 | I can type faster, but I still type myself off that keyboard.

00:39:48.760 | I go faster than I can actually keep up.

00:39:50.840 | So you still use it all the time?

00:39:52.000 | All the time.

00:39:53.000 | Yeah.

00:39:54.000 | So when I use GHQ, when I use our new beastly studio computer setup, I'll bring my mechanical

00:40:01.120 | and plug it in.

00:40:02.120 | Yeah.

00:40:03.120 | I really do like writing on it.

00:40:04.120 | That's cool.

00:40:05.120 | All right, next question's from Josh.

00:40:07.960 | I have struggled with learning in school and work my whole life.

00:40:11.080 | I struggle with comprehension, and my analytical and communication skills are terrible.

00:40:16.280 | I'm 33, and this inability to move up in life and grow is affecting every aspect of my life.

00:40:21.840 | I feel like I'm always working hard to no avail.

00:40:24.320 | Should I get a brain scan to prove I have a low IQ?

00:40:27.520 | No, I don't think you need to measure your IQ.

00:40:32.360 | I don't think you need a brain scan.

00:40:36.680 | I think what we need to do here is lifestyle-centric planning.

00:40:43.200 | So this is my key idea about the deep life is instead of fixating on particular specific

00:40:49.280 | goals that are appealing to you and hoping that those goals, if accomplished, will bring

00:40:55.160 | in their wake and appealing lifestyle, focus directly on the lifestyle that's appealing

00:40:58.840 | to you and see how do I engineer it.

00:41:01.920 | When you focus on the aspects of your lifestyle that are appealing to you first and work backwards,

00:41:06.320 | it opens up many more ways forward.

00:41:08.520 | You have a huge diversity of ways forward, and most importantly, you can mix and match

00:41:13.880 | your ways forward towards this desirable lifestyle to actually conform to your opportunities

00:41:20.880 | and obstacles, which are very specific to you.

00:41:24.720 | So I think lifestyle-centric plans is what's going to be good here, because I think in

00:41:27.160 | your mind, it sounds like you probably have these particular goals.

00:41:29.920 | I don't know.

00:41:30.920 | I want to be higher up in this job, or I want to make this much money in this role, and

00:41:35.000 | there's obstacles to it.

00:41:36.000 | You're like, "I'm having a hard time getting there."

00:41:37.760 | Whereas in lifestyle-centric planning, you say, "Well, what do I actually want in the

00:41:43.000 | different parts of my life?"

00:41:44.000 | It's not the specific job.

00:41:45.320 | It's that I want to have this type of security and live in this type of place and have this

00:41:48.960 | sort of engagement with the community and spend this type of time.

00:41:52.520 | You build this image of your life.

00:41:54.320 | And now you can say, "What are my best ways to get there?"

00:41:56.400 | So if this particular type of work you're in, maybe it's involving certain types of

00:42:01.040 | very stylized business communication and lots of fast analytical thinking about analyzing

00:42:06.560 | things, and if that is not fitting well with your skills, okay, let's find a different

00:42:12.560 | way to get towards what you're looking for.

00:42:15.440 | The other thing you'll get out of lifestyle-centric planning is now you're working with your opportunities

00:42:20.120 | and obstacles.

00:42:21.120 | You can sort of work systematically to expand opportunities and reduce the obstacles.

00:42:25.600 | So if you're having difficulty with reading comprehension, for example, there are things

00:42:28.880 | you can do to make that better.

00:42:31.640 | Typically reading, building up a reading habit, starting with books that are incredibly appealing

00:42:36.440 | and easy and then sort of slowly pushing yourself on the complexity.

00:42:39.920 | That changes your mind.

00:42:41.520 | As your mind becomes a reading mind, it changes it.

00:42:44.400 | Spending a lot less time with really high-distraction, high-salient attention-economy tools like

00:42:50.520 | things on your phone, spend a lot less time with that and more time with slow information

00:42:54.760 | and slow entertainment like books, like watching full movies, that'll rewire your brain in

00:42:58.920 | a way that will help.

00:43:01.820 | If there's particular analytical skills, practicing those skills will help.

00:43:06.440 | I want to actually practice doing this type of analysis, getting feedback, doing it better

00:43:11.360 | next time.

00:43:12.360 | So you can actually reduce obstacles and increase opportunities.

00:43:15.100 | But all of this, I think, should be in the context of what do I want out of my life?

00:43:19.480 | Okay, what do I have available?

00:43:22.440 | What opportunities do I have available?

00:43:23.440 | What are my obstacles?

00:43:24.440 | How can I expand those, reduce those?

00:43:26.040 | Fine.

00:43:27.040 | But let me work with what I can do well and figure out how to get closer and closer to

00:43:32.080 | these properties and the various parts of my life that appeal to me.

00:43:34.360 | So I think the flexibility of lifestyle-centric planning is critical here.

00:43:39.000 | Because otherwise, you might lock in on this is what I need to do, this job and this position

00:43:43.240 | and this job.

00:43:44.440 | And if that's not working for you, all you're going to feel is frustration.

00:43:48.540 | So that's what I would suggest there, lifestyle-centric planning, LCP.

00:43:52.540 | You know me, LCP.

00:43:54.080 | That's a good question.

00:43:56.480 | All right, what else we got?

00:43:58.080 | All right, next question's from Esteban.

00:44:00.360 | Do you recommend using ChatGPT for reading recommendations?

00:44:04.280 | No.

00:44:05.280 | I mean, ChatGPT has just digested a lot of information from people.

00:44:11.500 | And then it is going to be remixing that in sort of arbitrary ways, unpredictable ways

00:44:19.040 | to try to produce a simulation of how like real people it encountered online would be

00:44:24.480 | recommending books.

00:44:25.480 | I think it's better just to go straight to the source material that ChatGPT trained on.

00:44:30.680 | People whose taste you find interesting or congruent, what type of books are they recommending?

00:44:35.040 | Trusting your own intuition, right?

00:44:37.080 | Like, what am I interested in right now?

00:44:39.100 | What are the parts of my life I want to understand better?

00:44:41.600 | What are the parts of the world that seem interesting to me that I want to know more

00:44:44.240 | about?

00:44:45.240 | What are good books there?

00:44:46.240 | I feel like choosing nonfiction books, it's like this, especially nonfiction, it's this

00:44:49.360 | really subtle act.

00:44:52.080 | You know, I'm constantly, it's a very subtle act when I'm choosing what I want to read

00:44:56.240 | next.

00:44:57.240 | And a lot of different things in my life come together to choose this book versus that book.

00:45:01.480 | And it's really enriching to me.

00:45:03.000 | And even the selection process itself is an act of self-development, self-definition.

00:45:09.280 | So there's certain things like, yeah, this is great.

00:45:10.840 | We can use a language model to make faster.

00:45:12.760 | This is not something we need to make faster.

00:45:15.900 | The more you have to define and understand what you want to read and why you want to

00:45:20.280 | read it as you get better at finding and making these selections, you are going to improve

00:45:24.040 | your own understanding of yourself.

00:45:25.600 | So do not fall back on chat GPT for this because again, you're just getting, right, it's a

00:45:29.880 | token generator.

00:45:30.880 | So it's like, what would people that I've seen talking about books, what are the types

00:45:34.220 | of things they would say here?

00:45:36.080 | That's not going to be better than just actually going to people who talk about books and seeing

00:45:39.460 | what they're saying.

00:45:40.460 | Because there you have a real mind with coherent agency on the other end of it that you can

00:45:44.820 | actually relate to as a human being and figure out how to place the recommendations in some

00:45:48.800 | sort of larger sociocultural context.

00:45:50.560 | It's a very human thing.

00:45:52.120 | I think it's something that's worth keeping more human.

00:45:55.640 | All right.

00:45:57.440 | Let's see.

00:45:58.440 | Oh, we got another one.

00:45:59.440 | Who else do we have here?

00:46:00.440 | Next question is from Anna.

00:46:01.960 | How should I plan my gap year to ensure I don't waste a year?

00:46:05.320 | I want to experience the world, but fear I'll waste this opportunity.

00:46:08.520 | Well, Anna, first of all, I just want to give you a little bit of reassurance.

00:46:14.480 | I think relative to the length that you've been alive so far, the gap year feels like

00:46:19.000 | a large portion of time.

00:46:22.480 | This will be like one 19th of my life so far.

00:46:26.480 | So I understand when it seems like such a big part of your life, you don't want to waste

00:46:32.880 | it.

00:46:34.200 | But from another perspective, I'm looking at this from the other side of 40.

00:46:37.880 | That year is actually a much smaller piece of your life when you're looking backwards

00:46:41.480 | from mid-age back to it.

00:46:42.720 | So this idea that if I waste this, I'm wasting a big part of my life, you're not.

00:46:45.600 | This is a relatively small part of your life during your earlier year.

00:46:50.160 | So I just want to take the pressure off a little bit.

00:46:52.040 | You can enjoy yourself.

00:46:54.080 | You can embrace serendipity, discover yourself, but also just catch your breath, get a little

00:47:00.440 | bit older before you start the next part of your life.

00:47:03.680 | And that you will do no matter what, so you're not going to waste this.

00:47:06.720 | Don't worry so much about it.

00:47:08.960 | Now getting a little bit more specific, to me, what's important during a gap year?

00:47:14.880 | I think it's about better understanding yourself and what's important to you and what you're

00:47:19.560 | looking for in life.

00:47:20.940 | Now these answers are very contingent and they'll change.

00:47:24.680 | What you come up with when you're 18 will be different than when you're 22, which will

00:47:27.440 | be different than when you're 25, different than when you're 35.

00:47:30.120 | But you have to begin asking these questions.

00:47:33.200 | Gap year is great for that because when you're in high school, especially in the American

00:47:36.680 | context, it's not a time for self-reflection.

00:47:40.360 | School is my job.

00:47:41.360 | I don't have a ton of autonomy because I still live at home under the care of my parents

00:47:45.560 | and I'm just trying to do well and get into college.

00:47:47.520 | So your gap year might be your first real exposure to, "I want to seek out information

00:47:53.400 | and experiences.

00:47:54.400 | I want to process them and use them to better understand who I am and what it is I want

00:47:57.600 | to do in the world."

00:47:59.600 | That's really what's important about the gap year.

00:48:02.520 | Getting to novel places in this context are important largely because it helps you have

00:48:08.680 | more fresh insight.

00:48:11.480 | You're out of normal routines and rhythms so that you're more likely to take the whatever

00:48:15.800 | Hemingway you're reading, John Williams you're reading, and see it fresh because you're in

00:48:20.920 | a completely new context and your brain is not in some sort of just standard pattern.

00:48:25.280 | But what matters to me is the information you encounter during your gap year.

00:48:28.880 | Trying to understand who you are, how the world works, and what you want to do in it.

00:48:32.480 | That's what you want to come away with.

00:48:33.480 | So you want journals with you, you want to take notes, you want to refine these notes,

00:48:37.080 | you want to have a lot of time alone with your own thoughts to make sense of this information.

00:48:41.920 | Wherever you go, walk a lot, do not have your earbuds in all the time, maybe don't use social

00:48:48.360 | media for this year.

00:48:49.600 | So you really want your mind to be kind of starved of inputs except for what's going

00:48:54.040 | on around it and inside your own head.

00:48:57.040 | It's a time of process, process, process, process so that when you go to college the

00:49:00.920 | next year, I kind of have a sense of identity, I kind of have a sense of what I'm about,

00:49:05.360 | what's important, what's not.

00:49:06.400 | So what am I doing here at college to get towards those things or to make sure my life

00:49:09.600 | at college reflects those things?

00:49:11.640 | That's what you want out of your gap year.

00:49:15.240 | So it's really going to be about taking in information experiences and thinking about

00:49:18.800 | them and processing and taking notes.

00:49:20.860 | You should go through a bunch of notebooks on your gap year and they're going to be embarrassing

00:49:25.400 | because they need to be because you're trying to work through these sort of deep thoughts

00:49:28.480 | and so maybe you want to hide them when you're done, but you should be writing and thinking

00:49:32.160 | all the time.

00:49:33.160 | So a gap year to me is about cognition much more than it is about location or specific

00:49:38.920 | places you are.

00:49:40.520 | It's cognition that matters, having time for self-reflection, learning what the interior

00:49:45.000 | cognitive contemplative life actually feels like, jump-starting that early in your adulthood

00:49:50.000 | so you can draw from that deposit throughout the years that follow.

00:49:54.640 | It'll be fun.

00:49:57.400 | Gap years weren't as big when we were young, were they?

00:49:59.840 | Did you take a gap year?

00:50:00.840 | No, I did not.

00:50:02.920 | I got accepted to Middlebury, but it wasn't until the February or the second semester,

00:50:08.720 | but I didn't want to do that because I would have had to stick around for a semester at

00:50:11.480 | home and I wanted to play lacrosse and I felt like I'm going to be at a disadvantage when

00:50:16.360 | I get there in the spring.

00:50:17.360 | If you missed the fall.

00:50:18.360 | Yeah.

00:50:19.360 | Interesting.

00:50:20.360 | That was the only thing that was somewhat similar.

00:50:21.360 | Interesting.

00:50:22.360 | So we might've been nearby if you had actually taken that because Dartmouth is not far.

00:50:26.360 | That's a good point.

00:50:27.360 | It's not far from Middlebury, though.

00:50:28.360 | I didn't play lacrosse.

00:50:29.360 | Yeah.

00:50:30.360 | I was the same way.

00:50:31.360 | I was like, I wanted to get out of that house.

00:50:32.680 | I mean, my house was great, but I just was, I wanted to be on my own.

00:50:35.920 | Yeah.

00:50:36.920 | Like I was so like, I am ready to be on my own.

00:50:39.360 | And then when I got to college, like pretty soon I was like, okay, I'm ready to be done

00:50:43.520 | with college.

00:50:44.520 | You know, I was just prematurely like a 37 year old.

00:50:48.080 | My parents also owned a store, so I would have to work the whole fall and I wasn't really

00:50:51.680 | appealed to that.

00:50:53.080 | Yeah.

00:50:54.080 | I know.

00:50:55.080 | I worked a lot.

00:50:56.080 | Yeah.

00:50:57.080 | I had a lot of money.

00:50:58.080 | I was doing computer programming.

00:50:59.080 | Like I worked a lot, you know, and yeah, I was excited to, and I went to a school in

00:51:04.320 | the quarter system, which means you don't start to like pretty late in September.

00:51:08.080 | So even that, I was like, I'm the only one here.

00:51:10.680 | Yeah.

00:51:11.680 | Everyone had gotten to college and were like telling me these stories and yeah, so I was

00:51:15.920 | a gap year would have been okay.

00:51:17.480 | I just wanted to like be an adult.

00:51:19.120 | Yeah.

00:51:20.120 | So I don't think I even wanted a gap year.

00:51:21.120 | All right.

00:51:22.120 | Do we have, oh, we have a call.

00:51:24.080 | Yep.

00:51:25.080 | And the call it looks like is going to be our slow productivity corner question of the

00:51:28.920 | day.

00:51:29.920 | Yep.

00:51:30.920 | Our slow productivity corner.

00:51:31.920 | If you don't know is we try to have at least one question per day that per episode that

00:51:36.640 | relates to my new book, slow productivity, which I highly recommend if you like the show,

00:51:41.040 | you need to read this book because it's sort of the source guide to everything we say about

00:51:45.640 | digital knowledge work.

00:51:47.540 | But so it's our slow productivity corners, questions, a call.

00:51:50.800 | Let's get some theme music.

00:51:55.600 | Hi, Carol.

00:52:04.440 | My name is David.

00:52:05.440 | I work in marketing and I'm calling from Perth, Australia.

00:52:09.720 | I'm listening to your book, slow productivity, and I was struck by how some of the examples

00:52:15.240 | you give like Robert McPhee and Anthony Zyka, and also the slow food movement reminded me

00:52:22.240 | of some interviews I read recently with a Korean born philosopher, Byung-Chul Han.

00:52:30.960 | Now Han came to prominence with a 2015 book, the burnout society, and it's, it's really

00:52:37.200 | struck me that you want to hear kind of describing similar things about the present moment.

00:52:43.000 | I'm new to your podcast and your work, and I wondered if you'd covered anything about

00:52:46.800 | Han.

00:52:47.800 | The connection just, it seemed to me to be obvious and kind of important.

00:52:53.480 | So yeah, just a small niggling question.

00:52:58.720 | Cheers.

00:52:59.720 | All right.

00:53:00.720 | Well, thanks for the question, Mark.

00:53:03.080 | No, I did not know about Byung-Chul Han until recently.

00:53:08.240 | A couple people actually, after slow productivity came out, sent me a pointer to his book, the

00:53:14.320 | burnout society, which I haven't read yet, but I want to.

00:53:18.400 | I've loaded it here.

00:53:19.400 | So I loaded it up here on the screen.

00:53:21.180 | I looked it up after your call.

00:53:23.400 | So, so here's the book and let's read a little bit more about it because this is interesting

00:53:26.600 | to me.

00:53:27.600 | It's called the burnout society.

00:53:29.840 | Here's the, let's read about the author first, Byung-Chul Han.

00:53:33.560 | Berlin born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han teaches philosophy and cultural studies

00:53:39.160 | at Berlin's university of the arts.

00:53:42.000 | In the past few years, his provocative essays have been translated into numerous languages

00:53:46.600 | and he has become one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe and beyond.

00:53:50.160 | His work is presented here in English for the first time.

00:53:54.920 | So this book is categorized, Stanford university press published this book.

00:53:59.760 | So it's a, it's a academic press book, not a pure trade book.

00:54:05.480 | It's categorization is philosophy, social theory, philosophy, post-structuralism and

00:54:10.680 | phenomenology sociology and culture.

00:54:13.320 | So this is more of a sort of academic book.

00:54:15.600 | So it sounds like what's going on here is Byung-Chul Han is, has a really big following,

00:54:19.680 | especially in Europe.

00:54:21.200 | And it's a little bit more recently that he's coming in translation over to the sort of

00:54:26.560 | the English speaking market.

00:54:27.760 | So he probably, his ideas have probably, I'm going to guess are big in certain parts of

00:54:32.520 | the world and are just probably expanding their footprint here in the U S which might

00:54:36.560 | be why I hadn't heard about him before.

00:54:39.800 | Let's read a little bit about the book itself.

00:54:42.000 | This is from the description on the publisher's website.

00:54:45.320 | I'm going to read just a few quotes here.

00:54:48.800 | Our competitive service oriented societies are taking a toll on the late modern individual

00:54:53.880 | rather than improving life, multitasking, user-friendly technology, and the culture

00:54:58.000 | of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit

00:55:02.360 | disorder to borderline personality disorder.

00:55:06.680 | Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences

00:55:12.880 | in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and

00:55:19.440 | goods.

00:55:21.640 | He looks, I'm now I'm going to paraphrase a few things.

00:55:23.760 | He looks at stress and exhaustion as not just personal experiences, but social and historical

00:55:28.040 | phenomenon.

00:55:29.240 | He denounces a world in which against the grain response can lead to disempowerment.

00:55:34.240 | He draws on literature philosophy and the social natural sciences to explore the stakes

00:55:37.440 | of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.

00:55:40.720 | All right.

00:55:41.720 | So it sounds like there's sort of a lot going on in this book.

00:55:45.120 | So there's an economic argument lurking in here that a consumer economy that's based

00:55:49.960 | on low friction and availability of information and goods and services changes our engagement

00:55:55.440 | with difficulty and hardship.

00:55:57.080 | And so, you know, hey, I'm just used to everything being easy.

00:55:59.960 | So when things are hard, I have a hard time actually dealing with that.

00:56:03.960 | So I think that's an interesting point.

00:56:06.100 | There also seems to be something in here about lack of intellectual reflection.

00:56:10.220 | So what he calls intermittent intellectual reflection, lack of time for that and instead

00:56:15.880 | having constant neural connection through technology is also having some sort of negative

00:56:20.760 | impact.

00:56:22.520 | So these are obviously ideas that are congruent with the things I talk about, especially that

00:56:28.400 | last one, intermittent intellectual reflection.

00:56:32.400 | This comes back to, I think, digital minimalism, where I talk about solitude deprivation, like

00:56:37.000 | you need time alone with your own thoughts or there's negative consequences and technology

00:56:40.920 | makes it possible to avoid time alone with your thoughts.

00:56:44.160 | So I think that's there.

00:56:46.240 | Taking an economic lens, I think, to try to understand some of our psychological or philosophical

00:56:53.680 | ennui, I mean, that's something I do as well, though I think we focus on different ideas.

00:56:58.680 | So for example, it sounds like he's focusing here on easy availability of goods and information

00:57:07.080 | as making us ill-suited for hardship.

00:57:09.820 | Using slow productivity, by contrast, I talk about pseudo productivity as leading to a

00:57:15.560 | real problem.

00:57:16.560 | So this idea of redefining productive labor as visible activity is causing a lot of problems,

00:57:22.600 | both economically and personally and psychologically when it comes to the knowledge work.

00:57:27.400 | So it's a similar lens, but it's looking at different aspects of it.

00:57:31.000 | Multitasking, we both dislike that.

00:57:33.680 | Anyway, so it sounds like, yes, Myungchul Han, like a lot of authors right now, we're

00:57:39.160 | tackling these problems we have in our sort of technological world.

00:57:42.400 | There's a lot of these.

00:57:43.400 | We are not as happy as we used to be.

00:57:46.660 | And there's problems.

00:57:47.660 | And it sounds like he has some interesting angles, some interesting things I agree with,

00:57:51.920 | some interesting things that are different than what I talk about.

00:57:53.880 | I talk about some things that are different.

00:57:55.040 | There's a bunch of other books like this, but this one looks cool.

00:57:57.400 | And I like that it's a little bit more academic.

00:57:59.220 | So I will check it out and then I will report back about what I learned.

00:58:03.640 | All right.

00:58:04.640 | So there we have our Slow Productivity Corner question of the day.

00:58:09.520 | I also want to do a case study.

00:58:19.880 | This is where I read an account sent in from one of our listeners about how they put the

00:58:25.120 | ideas we talked about on the show into practice in their actual life.

00:58:30.080 | Today's case study comes from Ashley.

00:58:32.760 | Ashley says, "I was listening to your episode on the Deep Life Stack 2.0, and you mentioned

00:58:39.080 | putting your phone on the charger right when you get home from work.

00:58:43.080 | This is something I have been wanting to do for a long time, but for a lot of dumb reasons

00:58:46.440 | have never actually committed to it.

00:58:48.640 | I finally committed and put my phone in our council table drawer so it will be out of

00:58:53.800 | sight when I am home with my kids.

00:58:56.400 | Yesterday was my first day doing that, and I was doing well until I put my baby down

00:59:00.720 | for her nap.

00:59:02.000 | My 4-year-old is still awake at this time, so usually I will put a show on for him, but

00:59:06.960 | I am too tired to do anything productive because the baby still isn't sleeping through the

00:59:11.160 | night.

00:59:12.160 | So I will watch YouTube videos or listen to a podcast and generally just waste this time.

00:59:17.560 | I was debating getting my phone out or maybe watching a movie with my son, but didn't want

00:59:21.600 | to go against the spirit of the rule around putting my phone away.

00:59:27.960 | As I am deliberating this choice, my son comes up to me and tells me something that has been

00:59:32.120 | going on at school.

00:59:33.960 | Normal kid drama, but something that has been really bothering him and that he has been

00:59:37.320 | struggling with.

00:59:38.320 | I am convinced he wouldn't have told me this had I put on a show for him.

00:59:41.760 | It was only because he had the space to sit and think and I was available and distraction

00:59:46.600 | free that he thought to talk to me about it, and it was a really important conversation

00:59:51.240 | for us to have.

00:59:52.240 | I am grateful for the reminder to focus on my relationships and to remove the distractions

00:59:57.260 | that are getting in the way of me connecting with my kids.

01:00:00.100 | I still wasn't productive during that time, but I had probably the most important conversation

01:00:04.920 | I have ever had with my son up until this point.

01:00:07.640 | So thank you.

01:00:08.640 | I think that's a great case study.

01:00:12.040 | So she's talking about the, Ashley's talking about the phone foyer method where when you're

01:00:16.120 | at home, you don't keep your phone as a constant companion, but instead something you can go

01:00:21.180 | to look stuff up or use if you need it for a very specific purpose, like I can put on

01:00:24.840 | a podcast to listen to or take a phone call, et cetera, but not something you pull out

01:00:28.880 | at the slightest hint of boredom.

01:00:31.280 | Ashley is emphasizing one of the advantages of this method when you have kids is that

01:00:37.240 | the device really can be a boundary that goes up between you and your kids, mom, dad, they're

01:00:43.080 | looking at their phone.

01:00:44.540 | They're not engaged with me or my world.

01:00:45.880 | I guess I'll go do my own thing.

01:00:47.100 | It's a boundary that does sit between us and our kids.

01:00:50.020 | It's a boundary that does eliminate those sort of boring stretches where sometimes something

01:00:55.000 | really interesting comes out of it, where the kid just wants to start.

01:00:58.480 | My sons will do this all the time, just start downloading something they're thinking about.

01:01:01.540 | And this leads to something else.

01:01:03.120 | And then you, and soon you're like learning something important or you go and we're going

01:01:07.560 | to play a game.

01:01:08.560 | We're going to go throw the ball around and interesting stuff comes out of it.

01:01:11.560 | A lot of good comes out of just sort of informal structuring of time with people in your family.

01:01:17.360 | And then the phone can sort of get in the way of that, especially if the kids themselves

01:01:20.040 | have phones too.

01:01:21.240 | And now you've essentially dissolved any of these sort of strong in the house type of

01:01:26.120 | social connections.

01:01:27.120 | There really is a cost to that.

01:01:29.060 | So I do appreciate that.

01:01:31.400 | And one thing I want to clarify, Ashley, Sue, well, two things, one, as you know, because

01:01:35.440 | you have other kids, I have full empathy about the kid not sleeping through the night phase.

01:01:41.000 | And just a reminder that goes away because that's a terrible phase.

01:01:44.240 | I mean, it's a good phase because it's a phase where like your baby's really young, but man,

01:01:48.400 | that's also a hard phase.

01:01:49.400 | So that does, that does get better.

01:01:51.280 | I always, I always say that when a parent writes it, that the sleep does get better.

01:01:56.160 | But two, you said, I still wasn't productive during that time.

01:02:00.360 | Well, there's no reason to be productive during that time, right?

01:02:04.800 | So it's not so much about productivity when we say, I don't want to always be distracted

01:02:08.960 | about my phone at home.

01:02:10.400 | It's not because if I'm distracted by my phone, I can't be producing more widgets.

01:02:14.320 | I can't be producing something useful.

01:02:17.680 | Now the issue with the phone distracting you is that it keeps you away from things that

01:02:21.160 | are even more meaningful.

01:02:22.160 | It's not a lack of productivity we're fighting here.

01:02:26.200 | It's a reduction of meaning.

01:02:27.920 | It's a reduction of more intentional activities.

01:02:29.640 | There's nothing productive about using like the, we have this little loom that like my

01:02:35.520 | five-year-old likes.

01:02:36.520 | You kind of make, you kind of knit things on it.

01:02:38.360 | There's nothing productive about that, but it's like a meaningful or intentional activity

01:02:42.120 | that the phone could get in the way of.

01:02:43.560 | So yeah, we definitely don't want to think about our at-home behaviors through the perspective

01:02:47.120 | of productive or nonproductive, but meaningful and intentional versus arbitrary or out of

01:02:52.720 | our control.

01:02:53.720 | So that's a great case study of the phone foyer method in action.

01:02:57.160 | And thank you for sending that in.

01:02:58.160 | All right.

01:02:59.160 | So we have a cool final segment coming up where I have some entertaining news about

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01:07:13.240 | All right, Jesse, let's go on to our final segment.

01:07:18.080 | And I'm calling this final segment Slow News, three different things from around the world

01:07:23.900 | that involve the notion of slow in an interesting way.

01:07:26.920 | So this is sort of a tribute to my book, Slow Productivity, which again, if you like the

01:07:31.360 | show, you need the book because it's sort of the source code to my thoughts about how

01:07:35.680 | to manage digital area knowledge works.

01:07:38.040 | You can find out about the book at calnewport.com/slow.

01:07:39.840 | All right.

01:07:41.320 | So I have three things I want to show you.

01:07:43.760 | The first thing comes from Switzerland, I have it on the screen here for those who are

01:07:49.040 | watching instead of just listening.

01:07:51.860 | This is the slow watch that moves at half the speed of a normal watch.

01:07:59.160 | So let me show you a picture of these watches.

01:08:00.840 | So as you can see, Jesse, what's missing on these watches, and I'll zoom in, what's missing

01:08:07.080 | on these watches is a minute's hand or a second hand.

01:08:10.840 | It has 24 hours and one hand that just moves slowly through all the hours of the day.

01:08:19.320 | So that is the slow watch.

01:08:21.480 | These are 300 bucks if you're wondering.

01:08:24.960 | Let's read about it here.

01:08:26.000 | They have some text about this.

01:08:28.320 | So what's the idea?

01:08:31.720 | So slow they can't even get their website to work.

01:08:33.800 | Here we go.

01:08:35.320 | It is ironic the website was slow when I was working with it earlier.

01:08:38.280 | All right, so here's their explanation of this concept.

01:08:41.840 | All right, a 24 hour one hand watch allows you to see the entire day in one view and

01:08:47.440 | experience time in natural way.

01:08:49.880 | This fundamentally changes the way you look at your watch and it will give you a much

01:08:52.960 | better consciousness about the progression of your day.

01:08:56.200 | This way of showing the time is inspired by the original clocks that were based on the

01:08:59.600 | sun clock.

01:09:01.120 | Those early clocks indeed had only one hand that displayed all 24 hours.

01:09:05.000 | You can still see them on some old church towers.

01:09:07.560 | Only when people's lives became busier and busier did they feel the need to create this

01:09:10.760 | unnatural split of the day into two 12 hour halves and break each hour down into 60 minutes.

01:09:17.560 | That's when we started to chase the minutes and get stressed by time.

01:09:20.680 | So let's turn back time and be slow again.

01:09:24.880 | Time and timekeeping as a technology and how it impacts our understanding of the world

01:09:28.720 | is a well-worn topic in technology criticism.

01:09:34.200 | If you go back to like Lewis Mumford's book, Technics in Civilization, he sort of opens

01:09:37.760 | that book talking about the monastic orders inventing sort of usable clocks so that they

01:09:43.960 | could time their prayers and talks about how this changed our conception of the world.

01:09:50.760 | That time was broken into discrete evenly spaced units and so just inventing this technology

01:09:55.620 | changed our understanding of the world.

01:09:57.640 | My understanding about minutes and seconds was the railroads made this useful.

01:10:01.000 | So like for large scale international railroad networks to make sense, we needed time at

01:10:08.480 | just finer granularities because we actually had to know when a train arrived so that you

01:10:12.040 | could get from that train to another train and that completely changed the way we understood

01:10:15.320 | time as well.

01:10:16.320 | There's a lot of cool discussions.

01:10:18.600 | Oliver Berkman has a good discussion about this in 4000 Weeks.

01:10:21.760 | Anyways, it comes up a lot.

01:10:23.840 | It's a cool topic.

01:10:25.440 | All right.

01:10:26.520 | Next example from slow news.

01:10:29.040 | I'm going to read something here.

01:10:30.400 | It looks like the slow watch is still on the screen, Jesse.

01:10:32.440 | I don't know if that's...

01:10:33.440 | There we go.

01:10:34.440 | All right.

01:10:35.440 | Let me read this letter from a listener.

01:10:40.340 | I really love slow productivity.

01:10:42.360 | It's a fun read.

01:10:43.760 | So much of it really resonated for me as an author who has embraced the slowness of a

01:10:47.640 | creative life, especially one away from social media.

01:10:50.840 | I know that I write better books when I take my time with the stories.

01:10:54.920 | My next book is perhaps an interesting slow productivity case study.

01:10:59.240 | I wrote the first draft in 2012 and it got a book deal in 2014.

01:11:04.960 | Then because of getting pushed by other books I had coming out first and then my editor

01:11:08.740 | moving to a different publishing house, the book sat for years.

01:11:12.360 | In the meantime, I kept writing other things and would occasionally take another stab at

01:11:15.560 | editing the book.

01:11:17.000 | I wasn't happy with the ending.

01:11:18.520 | About eight years after I wrote the initial draft, I realized I had the skills to completely

01:11:21.940 | rewrite the book and make it better.

01:11:23.960 | Almost a year after that, the ending finally worked itself out.

01:11:27.580 | This is a picture book.

01:11:28.680 | It's not very long, and yet it still took over 10 years to get right.

01:11:33.960 | All right, and it turns out this picture book, which I'll load up on the screen here, Help

01:11:39.760 | Wanted, One Rooster, here's the picture here, comes out in June.

01:11:46.600 | So 10 years later, this book is coming out.

01:11:48.440 | I thought that was a cool case study, this idea of spending 10 years to get a book right.

01:11:53.500 | Not a long book, right?

01:11:54.500 | But just let me come back to it.

01:11:55.760 | It's not quite right.

01:11:57.060 | This really resonates with the third principle of slow productivity, obsess over craft.

01:12:01.760 | You want something to be good.

01:12:02.760 | You want to get better at what you do.

01:12:05.200 | Completely changes your relationship to work.

01:12:08.000 | Something like this, like spending a decade working in the background on a book, makes

01:12:11.400 | a lot of sense in the slow productivity mindset in a way that it might not otherwise in a

01:12:17.320 | pseudo productivity mindset, which is focused instead just on activity.

01:12:21.480 | So Julie, thanks for sending in that entertaining example and informative example of slowness

01:12:26.680 | in action.

01:12:27.680 | All right, so my final thing is, it's actually from England, and this is going to be something

01:12:35.080 | about me.

01:12:36.580 | So a couple of people sent this to me.

01:12:38.520 | I guess there's a satiric literary magazine in England called something, Private Eye,

01:12:47.640 | I believe.

01:12:48.640 | And they have a literary review section.

01:12:50.960 | Anyways, they had a comic I put here on the screen.

01:12:54.360 | This is from a literary magazine and it's a satirical comic called First Drafts.

01:12:59.760 | All right, so here's the, I'll explain this cartoon.

01:13:01.880 | I appreciate this cartoon.

01:13:03.460 | For those who are listening at home, it's a three panel comic.

01:13:07.920 | In the first panel, there's someone staring at a blank screen on the computer.

01:13:12.000 | And the next panel, they press one button and the letter C goes up on the screen.

01:13:17.260 | And in the third panel, they're leaning back, satisfied, drinking a cup of coffee.

01:13:21.480 | The caption for this comic is Slow Productivity by Cal Newport.

01:13:27.040 | So there we go.

01:13:28.040 | I think it's a satire of slow productivity.

01:13:31.040 | You write one letter after great contemplation and consider you've done your work.

01:13:35.600 | I'm really just happy, Jesse, that whoever drew this comic thought that me in that book

01:13:40.780 | is well enough known that people would understand the comic.

01:13:43.680 | That's the good news, I think, that there's an assumption that enough people in the UK

01:13:50.000 | have seen this that they'll actually understand the comic.

01:13:51.720 | Well, you had that big profile in the Financial Times like last year.

01:13:54.760 | That's right.

01:13:55.760 | Yeah.

01:13:56.760 | And I was on the bestseller list over there.

01:13:57.760 | So it's me.

01:13:58.760 | And I'm going over there.

01:13:59.760 | I've got mid-May, I am going to London and doing a few days of publicity activities over

01:14:05.680 | there.

01:14:06.680 | I wish I had a, this would be nice.

01:14:07.680 | We should get a copy of this comic.

01:14:10.400 | Would be nice to frame for the HQ.

01:14:12.040 | Yeah.

01:14:13.040 | Private Eye.

01:14:14.040 | All right.

01:14:15.040 | Maybe I'll have to grab a copy of that when I'm over there.

01:14:16.800 | I don't know how often it comes out, but maybe I'll try to find a copy of that to bring back

01:14:20.880 | from England.

01:14:21.880 | It'd be funny.

01:14:22.880 | It's the first time I've been featured/satirized in a cartoon.

01:14:26.360 | So good, I suppose.

01:14:28.480 | All right.

01:14:29.480 | Well, anyways, that's all the time we have for today.

01:14:30.480 | Thank you for listening.

01:14:31.480 | We'll be back next week with another episode of the show.

01:14:34.640 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:14:37.840 | Hey, if you liked today's discussion of intentional information, I think you'll also like episode

01:14:43.480 | 287, where I discussed how to take notes on the information you choose to take into your

01:14:50.240 | life.

01:14:51.240 | I think you'll like it.

01:14:52.240 | Check it out.

01:14:53.240 | The system I use for keeping notes on information for all parts of my work and life.

Eliminate Distraction: How To Take Back Control Of Your Focus | Cal Newport

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