How Long Should A College Student Do Deep Work? | Deep Questions With Cal Newport
Chapters
0:0 Cal's intro1:0 Cal explaining difference in Deep Work
3:25 What to consume during breaks
00:00:00.000 | All right, so we got a question here, not really a name.
00:00:04.840 | This person's name is supposedly Deep Work vs. Study and Recall.
00:00:08.800 | So I don't know, maybe it's a foreign name.
00:00:11.600 | Oh no, here's a name, it's down here.
00:00:14.200 | Arnav.
00:00:15.200 | Okay, he signed the message.
00:00:16.640 | That's better.
00:00:17.640 | All right, Arnav says, "Hi Cal.
00:00:20.520 | In the book Deep Work, you said that working for hours with high intensity is necessary
00:00:25.560 | for producing, thriving, and learning new things, but in your Red Book," which is How
00:00:31.520 | to Become a Straight A Student, "you said don't work for more than about an hour or
00:00:36.520 | 50 minutes at a time.
00:00:39.400 | These ideas have confused me.
00:00:41.000 | I want to know when to use Deep Work in a student life."
00:00:45.080 | Well, Arnav, the key to understanding this discrepancy, the 50 minute to an hour suggestion
00:00:52.960 | from Straight A Student and all the case studies of people doing Deep Work for long periods
00:00:56.760 | of time is that Deep Work for long periods of time have a natural ebb and flow of intensity.
00:01:04.880 | So there's periods in which you're like really locked in and then you let the intensity ebb,
00:01:09.520 | and then you lock back in again really hard, then you let the intensity ebb.
00:01:13.680 | I mean, if you sat there and could monitor the mental exertions of a computer programmer,
00:01:17.480 | for example, this is what you would see.
00:01:18.880 | There's going to be periods where they're really trying to hold all the pieces of this
00:01:22.320 | algorithm together so they can, "I want this to work, right?
00:01:25.360 | So I've got to do this just right."
00:01:27.200 | And that's really high intensity.
00:01:28.660 | And then there's the, "I'm running, compiling the code, you know, waiting for the debugging
00:01:32.000 | messages and the intensity drops."
00:01:35.100 | And Straight A Student, that 50 minute to an hour rule is talking about the specific
00:01:38.680 | highly intense activity of doing active recall studying.
00:01:41.920 | It's a really intellectually demanding thing where you're trying to replicate from scratch
00:01:47.440 | whatever the information is that you're trying to learn.
00:01:50.480 | You replicate it from scratch without looking at notes as if you were lecturing a class.
00:01:53.860 | That's at the core of how I recommend in that book cementing knowledge.
00:01:57.760 | That's super high intensity.
00:01:59.920 | That's the computer programmer trying to get the, writing the algorithm, has to get it
00:02:02.920 | just right.
00:02:04.240 | And there I was recommending about 50 minutes to an hour because you have to give your brain
00:02:07.640 | a break.
00:02:08.640 | You would give it 10 minutes, then come back into it again.
00:02:11.720 | So if you're a student that's studying for three hours, what you're probably doing is
00:02:14.480 | 50 minutes high, 10 or 15 minutes low, 50 minutes high, 10 or 15 minutes low.
00:02:18.800 | And that's how you put those two things together.
00:02:20.460 | So deep work in general ebbs and flows, active recall is a particular deep work activity
00:02:27.100 | that is incredibly focused.
00:02:29.840 | And so you can only sustain that for so long without having to have a breather.
00:02:33.560 | The key thing to remember though, is what do you do when your energy, you're in an ebb,
00:02:38.120 | you've been doing active recall for 50 minutes.
00:02:40.560 | Now you're taking a 10 minute break, you're coding, you were focused in really hard, but
00:02:45.400 | now you're waiting for your code to compile and you have five minutes.
00:02:48.560 | The thing I always come back to is if you're going to have to take a break from what you're
00:02:53.480 | doing, make sure that whatever you consume, whatever you encounter, make sure that it's
00:02:58.680 | not emotionally salient.
00:03:01.360 | So something that's going to get you emotionally activated and not very specifically related
00:03:06.040 | to the type of work you're doing.
00:03:08.840 | So in other words, no Twitter, no email.
00:03:11.240 | If you go on Twitter or Instagram or Tik Tok or what have you, while you're waiting for
00:03:16.360 | the code to compile, you might see something that really activates your emotions and that's
00:03:20.040 | going to induce a much more severe context switch, which means it's going to take longer
00:03:23.320 | to get back to your code.
00:03:24.640 | Similarly, if you go and check your email, you're going to see a lot of open loop obligations
00:03:29.160 | that are related to work, but not exactly what you're working on.
00:03:31.560 | And that's going to hijack your brain.
00:03:33.200 | It's going to take a long time to context switch away from that as well.
00:03:36.960 | So during those ebbs, nothing that's emotionally salient, nothing that is sort of highly relevant,
00:03:42.800 | but not quite the same as the work that you're currently doing.
00:03:46.640 | I recommend looking at baseball news.
00:03:48.840 | That's been my go-to.
00:03:49.840 | I'm glad baseball is back and it is not emotionally salient and it is not related to work.
00:03:55.560 | And that has been good for me for sure.
00:03:59.720 | Now, Jesse, I'm in the sort of news break right now because I have like a lot of work
00:04:05.280 | going on and sort of high like scheduling anxiety, but it raises my anxiety floor.
00:04:11.720 | And so I'm basically saying the only news I'm consuming right now is baseball news.
00:04:16.040 | And it's been great.
00:04:17.920 | Actually it's really kind of helped tamp down the sort of anxiety floor a little bit.
00:04:23.880 | When you have that instinct of, I want to just see what's going on, they say, let me
00:04:27.160 | just go look at, you know, how this prospect is progressing.
00:04:30.960 | Actually, I want you, one of your guests online to be Scott Boris.
00:04:35.840 | I want to hear you talk to him.
00:04:37.600 | We should get Scott.
00:04:38.920 | Scott should represent us.
00:04:41.680 | Scott Boris is going to represent us to our sponsors maybe.
00:04:44.960 | Like, Hey, this would be Scott.
00:04:48.720 | All right.
00:04:49.720 | All right.
00:04:50.720 | Monk Pack.
00:04:51.720 | I see your offer.
00:04:53.440 | You're offering 30 CPM.
00:04:56.000 | Here's my return offer.
00:04:57.640 | $20 million.
00:04:59.200 | $20 million if you want to be on the show.
00:05:02.720 | And if you don't want to pay the $20 million to be on the show, we'll walk.
00:05:06.160 | I'm sure there's other bar companies out there that would gladly pay it.
00:05:10.120 | And so $20 million and also our only sponsor would be the Washington Nationals.
00:05:13.920 | So that's basically just only moves clients to the Washington Nationals.
00:05:19.120 | Baseball insider chat.
00:05:21.520 | [MUSIC]