Ep. 219: The Deep Reset And Intentionally Reconfiguring Your Life

00:00:00.000 | So to understand the deep reset, I want to talk about three different forces that exist

00:00:05.680 | in the world today that I think are going to converge together to create this new phenomenon.

00:00:18.160 | I'm Kyle Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 219.

00:00:29.600 | If you're new to this program, it's a show where I answer questions from my audience

00:00:35.080 | about the theory and practice of living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted

00:00:40.920 | world.

00:00:41.920 | I'm here in my Deep Work HQ joined by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:46.520 | Jesse, I have a long list of news items relevant to the show that I want to share, which makes

00:00:53.120 | me excited because this tells me we're actually doing things, that change is afoot.

00:00:58.240 | So it's nice to have several different things to share with our audience here that they

00:01:02.240 | can be excited about.

00:01:03.240 | Yeah, for sure.

00:01:05.080 | Number one, we've long talked about doing a live event, some sort of live recording

00:01:11.400 | of the Deep Questions podcast.

00:01:13.720 | And now we actually have an opportunity to do more or less that.

00:01:19.200 | On Monday, November 14th at 7 p.m. at the East City Bookshop down by Capitol here in

00:01:27.320 | Washington, DC.

00:01:29.640 | I will be doing an event with my friend, the author, David Sachs.

00:01:34.120 | You might know David because of his book, The Revenge of Analog.

00:01:38.840 | That's something I talked about in depth in my book, Digital Minimalism.

00:01:42.960 | David has a new book out called The Future is Analog.

00:01:45.720 | He's doing a book event at East City Bookshop.

00:01:48.720 | He asked if I would moderate the event.

00:01:50.360 | So if I would interview him essentially at the bookshop and I said yes.

00:01:55.680 | So this will be essentially a live episode of the Deep Questions podcast.

00:01:59.160 | It'll be me.

00:02:00.160 | Jesse will be there.

00:02:01.360 | I'll be interviewing David Sachs on stage.

00:02:04.560 | So it'd be great to see people who are in the DC area who only know our voice or have

00:02:08.720 | only seen our videos come to the East City Bookshop Monday, November or November 14th

00:02:14.800 | at 7 p.m.

00:02:15.800 | That should be fun.

00:02:16.800 | I also want to talk about our new weekly update videos.

00:02:23.640 | So as we mentioned last week, we're trying an experiment with recording each week an

00:02:29.600 | episode that looks a little bit closer inside my life as a writer, professor and podcaster.

00:02:36.120 | Talks about what I'm up to, my struggles, have a few sort of show and tells in there

00:02:40.800 | along the way.

00:02:41.800 | So last week we posted the first weekly update video where I gave a tour of the Deep Work

00:02:47.320 | HQ.

00:02:48.320 | So if you've been wondering what the HQ looks like, that long promised tour is now available.

00:02:53.200 | YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia.

00:02:56.320 | You'll find that weekly update number one.

00:02:58.360 | By the time this episode airs, our second weekly update video will be available on our

00:03:03.240 | YouTube page.

00:03:04.240 | I'm going to get into some more details about my writing schedule, some of the struggles

00:03:09.920 | I'm having to keep that writing schedule.

00:03:11.400 | And there's also a special surprise I have in store that I think Deep Questions listeners

00:03:16.400 | will appreciate.

00:03:17.400 | So go check out those videos.

00:03:20.080 | Finally, live calls.

00:03:23.960 | These are continuing to progress on track.

00:03:26.880 | Last week, Jesse predicted that by the end of October, we would have at least one live

00:03:31.800 | caller in these episodes where a listener actually calls and I can talk to him back

00:03:36.720 | and forth and we can get into it with their issue or hear their case study.

00:03:40.160 | We're still on track, I think, right, Jesse, would you say?

00:03:42.240 | Yeah, we're good.

00:03:43.720 | By the end of October, we should, you should start hearing live calls.

00:03:46.440 | I'm excited about that.

00:03:48.680 | We also have some interviews lined up.

00:03:51.560 | I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I want to integrate interviews into the show.

00:03:56.160 | I don't know if I want full episodes dedicated to long interviews.

00:04:00.320 | I don't know if I want guests to essentially call in and just talk about one topic for

00:04:04.520 | a little bit of time.

00:04:06.400 | I don't know if I want interview episodes to replace the normal q&a episodes or be separate

00:04:12.720 | episodes released each week.

00:04:13.880 | All this is up in the air.

00:04:15.760 | So for now, I'm just lining up a bunch of stuff talking to a bunch of people.

00:04:18.400 | We'll see what works and what doesn't.

00:04:20.080 | A couple of expert interviews on the books I'm pretty excited about.

00:04:23.680 | So just to give you a preview, a friend of mine who is a New York Times bestselling thriller

00:04:29.360 | writer, she's going to come on the show and talk to us about the reality of being a professional

00:04:35.560 | genre writer.

00:04:37.520 | How you do that, what's it like, how she got there, I think that should be fun.

00:04:40.440 | I also have a psychologist from Brown University lined up who is an expert on work with family,

00:04:50.400 | the impact of having a family being a parent on your ability to do work and how to balance

00:04:55.840 | out that issue.

00:04:58.080 | The fact that having a family reduces, notably the time available to actually work on things

00:05:04.640 | is something that not only do I struggle a lot with is actually one of the key motivators

00:05:08.960 | for my book, Slow Productivity.

00:05:10.720 | Slow Productivity in part is a philosophy that will be very applicable for parents to

00:05:14.680 | help us sort of make sense of this reality that we don't have as much time as we used

00:05:18.040 | to and not feel bad about it.

00:05:21.320 | It's something I hear about a lot from listeners.

00:05:23.640 | I get a lot of notes from this, people who are also struggling with parenting, how that

00:05:28.840 | drags on their time.

00:05:30.840 | Women talking about how they have this much worse than the men, how that drags on their

00:05:33.960 | psyche.

00:05:34.960 | So we have this Brown psychologist going to come on in a few weeks and she's going to

00:05:37.840 | help straighten this all out.

00:05:40.440 | I also have Jenny Blake, friend of the show.

00:05:44.000 | She sent me a note a little while ago about her Zettelkasten setup for capturing notes.

00:05:49.520 | She heard me talk about me needing a better note capturing system.

00:05:53.280 | She's going to call in an upcoming episode and walk me through setting up a more sophisticated

00:05:57.960 | setup.

00:05:58.960 | So a lot's coming up.

00:06:00.160 | A lot of this is fun.

00:06:02.080 | And to me, this is all good news.

00:06:03.640 | You know, I mean, Jesse, I like that we're experimenting.

00:06:06.760 | The way I see it is we have breathing room this fall because I'm not teaching, I'm on

00:06:12.000 | teaching leave.

00:06:13.000 | When we get to the winter and spring, my schedule's locking in.

00:06:17.120 | The podcast has got to be, we do it when we do it, it's going to be very locked in, kind

00:06:21.360 | of getting out of the way of Georgetown.

00:06:22.360 | So I want to be at a new steady state by the winter where we have the new segments really

00:06:27.360 | rock and rolling, our structure really rock and rolling.

00:06:29.080 | I think things are only going to get better from here.

00:06:31.240 | Yeah.

00:06:32.240 | You know, and one other quick thing, you sent out the Dracula article to your newsletter

00:06:38.280 | about Aberdeen.

00:06:39.280 | Oh, I did.

00:06:40.280 | Yes.

00:06:41.280 | Yeah, I golf there over the summer in Aberdeen.

00:06:44.560 | Oh, interesting.

00:06:45.560 | So I sent it to my golfing buddies and they thought it was really cool because it's right

00:06:49.720 | on the front on the water.

00:06:51.040 | So I knew exactly what the walk that he was doing.

00:06:54.600 | So did it feel Transylvania, Gothic sort of spooky?

00:07:01.200 | Oh, it kind of did because I was playing from the back tees and I was getting beat up that

00:07:04.440 | day.

00:07:05.440 | So you felt as if your golf playing ability was getting sucked out like a vampire sucking

00:07:10.160 | blood.

00:07:11.160 | Yeah.

00:07:12.160 | I love that.

00:07:13.160 | I think this gives me a new goal.

00:07:14.720 | I want to be perched on a rock like a bat near the golf course in Aberdeen.

00:07:19.120 | Oh, there are so many cool places over there.

00:07:21.120 | You could like think and get inspiration.

00:07:24.720 | All the courses are pretty much on the, they're all like Pebble Beach.

00:07:27.520 | This is great.

00:07:28.520 | So if you didn't, did I talk about that on the show?

00:07:30.440 | Yeah, I did.

00:07:31.440 | Right.

00:07:32.440 | Yeah.

00:07:33.440 | Okay.

00:07:34.440 | So if you don't know what we're talking about, go back to the mailbag segment of episode

00:07:36.560 | two 18 where I talked about an article from the guardian about how Bram Stoker retreated

00:07:42.560 | with his family up to the remote coast of Scotland and Aberdeen to be motivated or inspired

00:07:49.800 | to write Dracula.

00:07:50.800 | I also wrote in more detail about this in my newsletter.

00:07:53.280 | Hey, that's another plug.

00:07:54.880 | If you don't subscribe to my newsletter, you should just do so at calnewport.com and

00:08:00.400 | roughly once a week I send out essays on these type of topics.

00:08:03.240 | So I went deep on the Stoker story recently in my newsletter.

00:08:06.960 | All right.

00:08:08.320 | I think we're out of things to update or promote at this point, Jesse.

00:08:12.840 | So let's look ahead at the show that we have today.

00:08:14.680 | It's a good one.

00:08:16.040 | Here's the plan.

00:08:17.040 | Three segments, segment number one, a deep dive.

00:08:19.800 | I'm going to revisit a topic that is from the very early days of this show and I have

00:08:25.040 | a more pragmatic thought through take on it.

00:08:29.500 | Segment number two, questions.

00:08:31.080 | We have a good collection of questions and including at least one voicemail call from

00:08:36.560 | listeners, some nuts and bolts topics, some deep life topics, at least one technology

00:08:41.920 | topic.

00:08:42.920 | Segment number three, the mailbag returns.

00:08:45.520 | I open up my interesting@calnewport.com inbox and go through a selection of some of the

00:08:52.800 | more interesting things people have sent me, articles, videos, thoughts, pointers, etc.

00:08:58.680 | Over the past week.

00:09:02.280 | So that's our plan.

00:09:03.280 | So let's get started with the deep dive.

00:09:07.200 | So the topic of the deep dive today is the deep reset.

00:09:13.280 | Now the deep reset is a term I introduced in my email newsletter and talked about briefly

00:09:18.160 | on this podcast back in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

00:09:23.160 | I want to revisit it today and make it more structured, make it more pragmatic.

00:09:29.640 | So to understand the deep reset, I want to talk about three different forces that exist

00:09:35.100 | in the world today that I think are going to converge together to create this new phenomenon.

00:09:42.180 | So if you're watching instead of listing, so if you're watching the video of this segment

00:09:45.640 | at youtube.com/calnewportmedia, you'll see I have the tablet up here where I've listed

00:09:51.380 | three different forces and I'm going to write right in the middle here, deep reset, because

00:09:58.320 | these all handlers, beautiful, these all are feeding into the deep reset.

00:10:03.160 | All right.

00:10:04.160 | So what are the forces that I think are going to feed into this thing?

00:10:06.240 | I'm going to call the deep reset first, the fact that millennials are approaching middle

00:10:13.360 | age.

00:10:14.360 | So let's be precise about demographics here.

00:10:17.200 | People use these generation descriptions, I believe, too vaguely.

00:10:22.320 | We're in the bad habit, for example, of using the word millennial to mean young person.

00:10:25.840 | But let's be very demographically specific here.

00:10:28.560 | The millennials, by most accounts, are more or less people born between 1981 and 1996.

00:10:36.480 | So that puts Jesse and I at the older end of the millennials.

00:10:40.320 | So we're 40.

00:10:42.640 | The youngest millennials are in their late 20s.

00:10:44.360 | The bulk of this generation is in their 30s right now.

00:10:48.160 | So these are more or less the children of the baby boomers.

00:10:51.840 | All right.

00:10:52.840 | So the millennials are approaching middle age.

00:10:55.320 | Jesse and I are older, but the rest of them are going through their 30s.

00:10:58.440 | This is a very important cultural shift because the millennials is a very large population

00:11:04.680 | boom.

00:11:05.680 | The baby boomers was a very large population boom.

00:11:08.100 | So their children is itself going to be a very large boom.

00:11:12.560 | That's why our demographic was originally called the echo boom, because it was an echo

00:11:16.360 | of the baby boom.

00:11:18.000 | So we have this very large group population demographic that are now approaching middle

00:11:24.400 | age, which means those that are going to end up, let's say, getting married or starting

00:11:28.480 | a family, they're doing that right now.

00:11:31.120 | All right.

00:11:32.280 | Number two, second of three forces relevant in the world right now, is the philosophy

00:11:39.800 | of work as a means to an end that the millennials have developed over the past, let's say, 20

00:11:47.720 | years.

00:11:48.720 | So we got into this briefly in my deep dive from episode 218.

00:11:52.520 | So just to give you the short summary here, when the millennials were growing up, so this

00:11:58.440 | was the 1990s into the early 2000s, when the first millennials were growing up, their parents,

00:12:04.880 | the baby boomers, wanted to offer them advice about what to do with their career.

00:12:10.440 | Now the baby boomers had these two extreme experiences.

00:12:14.120 | When they were little, they had seen their parents had had this sort of corporate conformist

00:12:17.920 | experience.

00:12:18.920 | This was the era of the organization man.

00:12:20.640 | This was the 1950s in which you moved to the suburbs and you dedicated your life to IBM

00:12:25.680 | and they would give you lifetime employment in return.

00:12:28.860 | As people left this urban cores of cities and small villages, these corporate loyalties

00:12:33.480 | became a substitute for civic engagement.

00:12:36.180 | So it was a time of conformity, but it also sort of made sense.

00:12:39.120 | These are the same people who had subordinated themselves to the larger cause of fighting

00:12:43.240 | fascism during World War II.

00:12:45.200 | So they were used to this idea, subordinate yourself to the larger cause as a source of

00:12:49.200 | meaning.

00:12:50.200 | The baby boomers didn't buy that because by the time you get to the 60s, you have all

00:12:53.560 | these social disruptions happening.

00:12:55.140 | You have the civil rights movement, you have Vietnam, you have the women's liberation movement,

00:12:59.520 | all of these social forces, these social disruptions are happening.

00:13:03.720 | And suddenly their parents ethos seemed stiflingly conformist.

00:13:09.320 | And so the baby boomers created the countercultural movement, which went hard the other way.

00:13:16.040 | So now we had, let's get rid of work altogether.

00:13:18.600 | It's an obstacle to self actualization.

00:13:22.720 | Let's go back to landless, move the communes.

00:13:25.040 | You know, you're going to find yourself outside of work.

00:13:28.360 | That fell apart too.

00:13:30.160 | So by the time the baby boomers were having kids, like how do we balance these two forces?

00:13:35.680 | And they came up with, I think at the time, a clever innovation.

00:13:39.440 | We'll tell our kids to follow their passion.

00:13:42.920 | See this is a tightrope act right here.

00:13:45.940 | The idea, the counterculture idea of forget work, you know, just go move to a commune

00:13:51.420 | and self actualize.

00:13:53.280 | That didn't work, but they also still distrusted pure corporate conformity.

00:13:57.640 | So they had this compromise.

00:13:58.800 | All right, you still need to get a job and pay your mortgage payments and make a living,

00:14:03.800 | but make it a job you love.

00:14:05.560 | So now the job itself can be a source of meaning and fulfillment.

00:14:10.660 | So this is what we saw as millennials.

00:14:14.460 | We were taught this idea of follow your passion.

00:14:17.560 | That then fell apart.

00:14:18.560 | Again, I talked about this last week, but that then fell apart in the early 2000s.

00:14:22.320 | We had 9/11, the financial crash after 9/11.

00:14:25.220 | We barely got back on our feet before the 2008 financial crash happened.

00:14:29.020 | This was the period when the bulk of the millennial generation was leaving college and entering

00:14:33.160 | the workforce.

00:14:34.260 | This idea that you should just follow your passion, that idea began to lose steam.

00:14:40.200 | Employment seemed much more precarious.

00:14:42.300 | The instrumental value of money to stave off hardship and support things that are meaningful

00:14:46.440 | became much more clear when people were going through hard times.

00:14:49.860 | And so the millennials in general moved past the follow your passion notion and began to

00:14:55.440 | work on an alternative philosophy of work as a means to an end.

00:15:01.620 | This is the hack work culture.

00:15:03.920 | This is what's captured in the minimalism movement.

00:15:06.080 | This is what's captured in Tim Ferriss' lifestyle design.

00:15:08.940 | This is what's captured in the fire movement.

00:15:11.120 | This is what's captured in early influencer videos on Instagram and YouTube where you

00:15:16.000 | see millennials focusing on lifestyle.

00:15:18.900 | It's the moms in the white linen dresses walking through the fields with their kids.

00:15:22.700 | It's the sort of impossibly ripped dads doing feats of endurance and YouTube videos.

00:15:27.860 | The lifestyles being pushed to the millennials by millennials, it was not about work.

00:15:32.820 | It was meaning in life.

00:15:34.060 | Work was a funding source for running endurance races and having only white dishes on white

00:15:41.740 | shelves in your walls at your house.

00:15:44.700 | So that's this big shift.

00:15:45.820 | The millennials are very attuned to this idea that follow your passion, forget that.

00:15:52.140 | Work supports other things that are important.

00:15:54.860 | It's a source of money.

00:15:56.380 | We can take it.

00:15:57.380 | Maybe you'll get some mean out of it.

00:15:58.380 | Maybe you don't like your job, but it's a financial backing for the systematic construction

00:16:03.660 | of a life that's meaningful.

00:16:04.660 | So we've adopted that.

00:16:05.820 | And this is very generational.

00:16:07.980 | Gen Z, for example, the generation born after 1996, who's just now entering the workforce,

00:16:13.540 | as we talked about last week, they have their own ideas.

00:16:16.460 | They're right now, they're stuck on this notion of quiet quitting.

00:16:18.660 | They're just taking the first basic steps of saying, what is work going to mean to us?

00:16:23.180 | But for the millennials, we've been through this work as a means to an end.

00:16:26.780 | All right.

00:16:27.780 | So millennials approaching middle age, millennials adopting a work as a means to the end philosophy.

00:16:32.980 | And then we add the third element, the catalyst to this particular metaphorical biochemical

00:16:38.580 | mixture, and that is pandemic disruptions.

00:16:42.860 | So the pandemic comes along, disrupts work.

00:16:47.740 | Everything goes remote.

00:16:50.020 | The pain points that people feel with their jobs are amplified.

00:16:55.420 | At the same time, the idea that you have more freedom and flexibility in configuring your

00:17:01.420 | work and your life was also amplified.

00:17:05.160 | People were moving.

00:17:07.220 | They were doing different schooling configurations with their kids.

00:17:11.100 | They were pushing back on things.

00:17:13.300 | People were leaving jobs.

00:17:14.620 | There's this spirit of, hey, anything can go.

00:17:18.180 | Things are so bad that there's really nothing off the table now.

00:17:21.580 | And it inculcated this idea of change is possible.

00:17:27.440 | So I think those three things are going to come together for this particular generation

00:17:31.020 | to lead to a lot of people to engage in what I call a deep reset.

00:17:36.740 | So I have a definition for this.

00:17:37.940 | I'm scrolling up if you're watching this online.

00:17:41.660 | Here's a definition of a deep reset.

00:17:44.180 | It's an intentional reconfiguration of your life to amplify the small number of things

00:17:50.820 | you've learned through experience that you value and minimize those things that get in

00:17:57.260 | their way.

00:17:58.260 | So a deep reset is saying, wait a second, let's step back and reconfigure our whole

00:18:04.020 | life.

00:18:05.480 | And I think at this moment, the millennials in particular, because of those three forces

00:18:10.420 | coming together, have begun doing these deep resets.

00:18:13.020 | And this is going to be a very important work trend in the next handful of years that are

00:18:18.340 | coming up ahead.

00:18:19.340 | Now, I want to point out, this is different than a midlife crisis, which is a phenomenon

00:18:24.720 | that afflicted our parents.

00:18:26.280 | The midlife crisis came at a similar point in people's lives as their 30s went into their

00:18:31.820 | 40s, but it was much more haphazard, self-focused, and less intentional.

00:18:35.620 | The midlife crisis was famously characterized by people realizing, oh my God, my life is

00:18:41.000 | halfway done.

00:18:42.180 | What am I doing?

00:18:43.540 | Let me respond haphazardly.

00:18:45.980 | I'll buy a sports car.

00:18:47.780 | I'll get divorced and married a 25 year old.

00:18:50.820 | I'll do a dramatic sort of visible narcissistic lifestyle changes to try to distract or stave

00:18:58.660 | off or avoid the inevitable conclusion that I'm getting older.

00:19:02.100 | That's very different than the deeper reset, which is much more intentional, much more

00:19:06.020 | focused on your whole life, your whole family, much more focused on amplifying meaning, not

00:19:12.380 | avoiding things that are distressing.

00:19:16.740 | So what might go into a deep reset?

00:19:18.180 | Well, here are some things I've seen.

00:19:21.640 | Work simplification is a big part of that.

00:19:25.300 | So people really rethinking the role of work.

00:19:30.300 | So we get a lot of, for example, ledge stepping.

00:19:33.420 | That's a term for where you've been going up the ladder at your organization and you

00:19:37.460 | say, you know what, I'm fine where I am right now for a while.

00:19:40.300 | Let me step off the ladder onto a ledge where I can just hang out.

00:19:44.760 | So without the need to strive to get to the next level, it reduces the pressure and the

00:19:49.460 | amount of work on your plate.

00:19:51.180 | So as you approach middle age as a millennial, you may already have a lot of career capital,

00:19:57.100 | have a really a job that's at that right balance.

00:19:59.300 | You have a lot of leverage, a lot of autonomy.

00:20:00.860 | It's probably a reasonable place where you could ledge step for a while without it being

00:20:06.460 | boring or as it would be if you tried when you're 22 and you're still in an entry level

00:20:10.700 | position.

00:20:11.700 | So we definitely see work simplification.

00:20:13.180 | People also going all remote could be a work simplification move, reduced hours as a work

00:20:18.220 | simplification move.

00:20:20.380 | Those are people running small businesses, eliminating streams of income, the focus on

00:20:26.580 | just a smaller number of things is work simplification.

00:20:29.220 | So it's all about reducing that work volume that's coming at you from your job.

00:20:33.960 | That's common in deep resets.

00:20:36.300 | A term that I just made up, but I'm trying to popularize, candle fire, capital F-I-R-E,

00:20:43.020 | goes along with this.

00:20:44.340 | So fire is this millennial movement, financial independence, retire early that we've talked

00:20:49.780 | about on the show before.

00:20:50.780 | And it was a movement that came out of the tech world about super aggressively saving

00:20:55.700 | while living aggressively cheaply so that you could achieve financial independence at

00:21:00.300 | a relatively young age.

00:21:02.500 | What I think we're seeing a lot more of now is what I call candle fire, the candle being

00:21:07.820 | referenced to a small flame in which the idea is not, oh, I need to be financially independent.

00:21:14.620 | That is, I can live entirely off of my saved assets, but instead let's bring down our cost

00:21:20.100 | of living substantially so that with a simplified work portfolio, we can still support ourselves.

00:21:28.700 | So it's not leaving work and living entirely off your investments.

00:21:32.860 | It's moving to the cheaper location, getting rid of one of the cars, moving to the cheaper

00:21:38.740 | location.

00:21:39.740 | We're homeschooling instead of private school.

00:21:41.580 | Our expenses are lower, so now I don't have to work as much, but I'm going to leverage

00:21:46.760 | the fact that I have a lot of career capital.

00:21:48.460 | I'm 35.

00:21:49.460 | I know what I'm doing.

00:21:50.460 | I'm in demand.

00:21:51.460 | It's not that hard for me to negotiate a part-time contractor position.

00:21:54.360 | It's half the money.

00:21:55.360 | We live on half the expenses and there we go.

00:21:58.180 | We have a nice life with a lot less work.

00:21:59.700 | So candle fire, we're going to see a lot of that.

00:22:01.860 | That's going to go alongside work simplification.

00:22:05.900 | Relocation is big.

00:22:06.900 | We saw a lot of this during the pandemic.

00:22:09.300 | I call it intentional relocation because it's moving for intentional value-based reasons.

00:22:16.820 | Two examples from my own life.

00:22:18.020 | We have friends who were kind of overwhelmed by the crowdedness and the stress of the Washington

00:22:26.020 | DC suburbs.

00:22:27.900 | Both their jobs were remote for the most part.

00:22:31.380 | They really like outdoor activities.

00:22:32.740 | They really like skiing.

00:22:34.900 | You know, God help them.

00:22:36.660 | They were trying to get their skiing in each year in West Virginia.

00:22:40.740 | There's only so many mountains around here.

00:22:42.440 | They're not that great.

00:22:43.440 | And so they moved to Colorado, right outside Boulder, half hour from a great ski slope,

00:22:48.980 | mount the bike all the time, intentional relocation.

00:22:52.680 | Another friend of mine worked for the government, was a lawyer for the government.

00:22:56.700 | They're enjoying life here, but his family was from Santa Fe and they're like a long

00:23:04.580 | running Santa Fe family, sort of like his family runs the town.

00:23:07.620 | They've been there since you were fighting off Indian raid type things.

00:23:11.860 | And they were all there.

00:23:13.200 | So he negotiated like, hey, in the height of the pandemic, when anything went, he negotiated

00:23:17.380 | a permanent remote work and they moved to Santa Fe.

00:23:19.380 | He sends me photos.

00:23:20.380 | He has a cool Adobe style house with a hill in the backyard.

00:23:23.140 | There's a gazebo at the top of it.

00:23:24.340 | He goes up there to watch the sunset, all of his family's there.

00:23:27.240 | It's all thickly connected connections, intentional relocation.

00:23:30.020 | You're going to see a lot more of that.

00:23:33.100 | We will also see deep community involvement.

00:23:35.240 | This is something else that happens in deep resets where people get deeply involved in

00:23:40.540 | communities that are meaningful for them.

00:23:42.980 | This could be family communities.

00:23:45.220 | Like my friend who moved back to Santa Fe is now deeply connected to all sorts of different

00:23:51.740 | relatives.

00:23:52.740 | They're in each other's lives.

00:23:53.740 | There's pluses and minuses, but generally we were a familial tribal familial tribal

00:23:58.900 | species.

00:23:59.900 | So that's usually positive.

00:24:00.900 | Sometimes it'll be, let's say like a faith based community.

00:24:02.980 | I'm going to get really seriously involved in my temple, right?

00:24:07.660 | In my, in my whatever, my mosque.

00:24:11.260 | Maybe it's a more like an activist community.

00:24:13.800 | This is a cause that's important to me and I'm going to get deeply involved in it.

00:24:17.620 | So we're seeing more of investment of amplifying time spent in things like that that are useful.

00:24:22.340 | And then finally, deep play and self-development.

00:24:25.920 | People dedicating serious time to, it might be leisure activities.

00:24:29.820 | I mean, I think my brother is an example of this.

00:24:33.060 | Outdoor activities in particular, mountain based activities are really important to them.

00:24:37.660 | And they've really built a lifestyle that involves lots of trips to the mountains, hiking,

00:24:42.460 | Alpine, Mike, skiing, mountain biking, trail running.

00:24:46.540 | And he's built the way his life works, his schedule to do a lot of that.

00:24:51.520 | But you might see this with other types of self-development as well.

00:24:54.740 | Someone, you know, I'm really going to invest in philosophy.

00:24:58.080 | I want to become an expert on this type of philosophy, health and fitness.

00:25:01.980 | I'm going to spend a lot of time outside.

00:25:04.740 | I'll give you one more example.

00:25:05.980 | There's a writer who wrote the book.

00:25:08.660 | His name's Christopher McDougall.

00:25:10.420 | He wrote the book Born to Run, which was a surprise bestseller that started the barefoot or vibram shoe running craze.

00:25:22.780 | And it's a cool book about a New York based reporter who runs a lot and just was

00:25:27.740 | trashing his knees.

00:25:29.220 | And he goes and spends time with this native tribe in Mexico that do these long endurance runs.

00:25:36.580 | It's a tradition and they do it barefoot.

00:25:38.820 | And he goes down this rabbit hole and finds out that, OK, actually barefoot movements, what we're meant to do.

00:25:44.300 | And you put in these big cushioned shoes, you get hurt, et cetera.

00:25:47.300 | Anyways, he writes this book.

00:25:48.500 | New York based reporter ends up really getting into this type of stuff, relocates to a farm.

00:25:55.020 | I believe he's in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

00:25:57.260 | So in Amish country, it's this farm with this barn.

00:26:00.780 | And there's these videos of him that Outside Magazine did.

00:26:03.260 | You can find where he's he's out there now, barefoot doing these Rocky Four style physical training activities, climbing

00:26:12.460 | ropes in his barn and throwing hay bales around.

00:26:14.900 | Then he built this life that has a huge amount of physical activity in it.

00:26:19.180 | Outside, interesting physical activity.

00:26:21.500 | All these are examples of the same point.

00:26:24.260 | Investment, almost a radical investment in this case, in deep play or self-development.

00:26:30.980 | These are the type of things that you're going to see when people conduct a deep reset, simplification, amplification,

00:26:37.180 | usually with a couple of these changes made more radical.

00:26:41.540 | You can have some radical moves in here, typically as part of a deep reset.

00:26:46.060 | Now, how does this connect to our discussion of the deep life and the systematic pursuit of the deep life?

00:26:52.220 | The pursuit of a deep life will probably lead you to something like a deep reset.

00:26:56.300 | A lot of people are coming to this more haphazardly.

00:26:59.020 | It's Christopher McDougal moving to that bar and my friends moving to Colorado.

00:27:04.020 | People are coming at this a little bit more haphazardly.

00:27:06.180 | We try to be more systematic about it here on the show.

00:27:08.660 | But my point is, regardless of what we talk about here, I think deep resets are something we're going to see as a defining

00:27:14.860 | characteristic of the millennials in their 30s and early 40s.

00:27:18.740 | And I, for one, think it's a positive trend.

00:27:21.460 | I think it's a nuanced and sophisticated approach to thinking about life, the relationship between work and other elements of life.

00:27:28.460 | I think our parents' generation struggled more with this.

00:27:31.540 | We got more of this, oh, my God, what happened to the first half of my life?

00:27:35.180 | Let's buy a Corvette type reaction because this new generation had this long period of developing a work as a means to an end ethic.

00:27:44.020 | They were ready for the disruption of the pandemic.

00:27:46.020 | They were ready for the distress and wake up call of middle age.

00:27:50.780 | So we have a bit of perfect storm of forces coming together to create a phenomenon that I think is going to be quite positive,

00:27:59.460 | actually, when we look back at it for for my particular cohort.

00:28:06.300 | There you go, Jesse, I wrote an essay on the deep reset in my newsletter, so you can find it at Cal Newport dot com real early on in the pandemic,

00:28:14.740 | but it was way more sort of poetic and emotional.

00:28:18.980 | So it was just feeling it's an interesting document to go back and read because it was projecting this feeling that was in the air of,

00:28:26.580 | I think changes are coming, people are going to make big changes, but it was clearly not really worked out yet.

00:28:31.500 | And I think two years or whatever it's been now since then, two and a half years starting to see the shake out into something that's a little bit more clear, a little bit more systematic.

00:28:39.700 | So, yeah, I'm a big fan of the deep reset.

00:28:41.260 | I think a lot of people want to do this.

00:28:42.660 | So hopefully having some terminology helps.

00:28:44.620 | This will probably be a chapter in the next book, right?

00:28:48.820 | Yeah, I mean, the deep life book is all kind of about this.

00:28:52.900 | Yeah. Yeah.

00:28:53.460 | In fact, the deep reset was one of the early titles for the book.

00:28:58.580 | So it was going to be more prescriptive, like here's how to do a deep reset and then we change the deep life.

00:29:06.380 | I'm not quite sure exactly how I'm going to tackle that book.

00:29:08.860 | And I like that. Like I'm not I'm just letting ideas flow as I work on slow productivity and then a slow productivity finishes.

00:29:14.900 | I'm going to laser lock and see like, what do I really want to do here?

00:29:18.980 | So with the definition, an intentional reconfiguration of one's life to amplify the small number of things that you've learned, is that to.

00:29:28.940 | Benefit your work.

00:29:31.500 | So when I say, OK, I have it up here, amplify the small number of things you've learned through experience that you value.

00:29:36.380 | So what I'm trying to emphasize there is that the millennials are old enough now to have a experience based answer to the question of what's important to me.

00:29:46.140 | Outside of work, outside of work, in work, in life in general.

00:29:50.700 | Whereas I think if you're twenty three and you're trying to say what's important to me, you're basically making some guesses.

00:29:57.860 | You don't really know. You haven't gone through the ups and downs.

00:30:00.660 | You haven't gone through the various challenges.

00:30:03.900 | So really, by the time you get to, let's say, thirty five, you're you're probably pretty well equipped to make a good deep reset because you have a pretty stable understanding at this point.

00:30:14.700 | You're far enough along in your career that you know what works and what doesn't, what you like about work, what you don't.

00:30:20.420 | You have leverage, you have career capital.

00:30:22.300 | So it's it's a it is kind of a critical age.

00:30:25.300 | You'll have to get your friend Mr.

00:30:27.220 | Money Mustache and tell him about your new term, Candlefire.

00:30:30.740 | Yes, we should have Pete on.

00:30:32.980 | I like him. Yeah.

00:30:34.980 | Let's do that. I'll talk to him.

00:30:37.700 | Yeah. Yeah. Be cool to see what he's.

00:30:39.380 | So from what I understand, I was just talking to someone yesterday who's friends with him and some of the other fire characters.

00:30:44.660 | A lot of them live in Longmont, Colorado.

00:30:46.380 | It's probably building.

00:30:47.500 | They're building. Yeah.

00:30:49.660 | They have that co-working space there.

00:30:52.180 | We should yeah, we should get an update on what's going on.

00:30:54.300 | And then tell him about your new term.

00:30:56.300 | Candlefire. Yeah.

00:30:59.300 | I don't know if that's going to stick.

00:31:01.140 | There's a lot of fire terms, by the way, fat fire, light fire, thin fire.

00:31:05.300 | Oh, man. OK, it's moving on.

00:31:08.620 | We've got a great block of questions coming up.

00:31:12.820 | I'm looking at them now.

00:31:15.340 | Got some nuts and bolts about tasks.

00:31:18.260 | We've got some stuff about metrics.

00:31:20.060 | We got something about Facebook kids and video games.

00:31:22.540 | We got something about, oh, a case study I'm particularly exciting about

00:31:26.340 | because it involves the melding of knitting.

00:31:29.820 | And time blocking, you thought there was no connection, there is.

00:31:32.860 | Before we get to all that, I want to talk briefly about one of the sponsors

00:31:36.700 | that makes this show possible, and that is eight sleep.

00:31:41.660 | Now, the eight sleep pod is a a cover.

00:31:47.540 | It's like a mattress pad cover.

00:31:49.020 | You put it under your sheets and it hooks up to the eight sleep machine,

00:31:53.460 | and it allows you to control the temperature of your mattress.

00:31:58.660 | I am a big believer of eight sleep.

00:32:01.180 | I use eight sleep.

00:32:02.620 | I want to give you an endorsement now that comes from my actual use of this product.

00:32:07.540 | I am a big believer now.

00:32:09.460 | And here's how I know I'm a big believer and not just a user is a true story.

00:32:13.540 | This was probably two weeks ago now.

00:32:16.260 | I'm in bed, you know, I'm trying to sleep and it doesn't feel right.

00:32:21.980 | Like, I mean, I'm kind of uncomfortable.

00:32:24.100 | I don't know about this.

00:32:25.580 | And so I asked my wife, I was like, what's going on with with my eight sleep set up?

00:32:28.900 | Because it's you can set each side differently.

00:32:31.500 | So she gets the app out. It's on the phone. You can control it.

00:32:33.940 | I had accidentally had my side turned off.

00:32:37.380 | And I I know I'm an eight sleep zealot now because when that side

00:32:41.740 | of my mattress was actually turned off, I was unhappy.

00:32:43.860 | I immediately noticed that I was immediately uncomfortable.

00:32:46.620 | So I'm a big believer that this really is helping me sleep.

00:32:50.540 | And so what is it like?

00:32:51.820 | Well, I'm a minus one.

00:32:53.780 | If you're an eight sleeper, you'll know there's a there's a minus five,

00:32:56.780 | the plus five scale. I'm a minus one on the scale.

00:32:58.900 | So it's slightly cool.

00:33:00.620 | It feels slightly cool when you lay down, which is nice, but not cold.

00:33:04.140 | But the real magic of the eight sleep is not that, oh, I'm sleeping on something

00:33:08.700 | cold, is that all of these capillaries with all this liquid going through it,

00:33:11.660 | pull the heat out of you that you're generating and get it out of your bed.

00:33:16.140 | So it's less about it's making you cold than it is.

00:33:18.300 | It's preventing you from getting hot.

00:33:20.620 | This is why I sleep better with this thing.

00:33:24.140 | And I've become a big fan is because you never get hot throughout the whole night.

00:33:28.380 | You feel like you feel when you first get into bed, you know, it's like a little bit

00:33:31.580 | cold. You haven't generated the body heat yet.

00:33:34.220 | You get that all night long.

00:33:35.700 | So I'm a big I'm a big believer of it.

00:33:37.500 | I mean, they gave me a lot of notes here, but I'm just giving you my anecdote here,

00:33:40.860 | which is I 100 percent use this eight sleep pod.

00:33:44.500 | I'm a fan of it.

00:33:45.580 | So if you want some details, there's clinical data.

00:33:48.260 | All right. 19 percent increase in recovery, 32 percent

00:33:51.020 | improvement, sleep quality, 34 percent more deep sleep.

00:33:53.820 | I believe all of that.

00:33:55.020 | They have a new generation of this, the pod three.

00:33:58.860 | It tracks stuff. I don't really know how this works.

00:34:01.180 | My wife shows me.

00:34:01.860 | It'll tell you like how much you slept.

00:34:03.780 | I guess there's sensors in the pad.

00:34:05.100 | I don't know the futures now.

00:34:06.580 | But let me tell you this.

00:34:08.100 | If you're a hot sleeper, get the sleep pod.

00:34:10.180 | You will sleep better. I use it every night.

00:34:12.060 | So go to eight sleep dot com slash deep

00:34:16.180 | to save one hundred fifty dollars on the pod.

00:34:20.020 | So remember, eight sleep dot com slash deep.

00:34:22.180 | Don't forget the slash deep if you want to get that one hundred fifty dollar savings.

00:34:25.980 | Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK,

00:34:29.620 | select countries in the EU and Australia.

00:34:32.580 | Another product I want to quickly mention, because it is one that I use

00:34:36.860 | every single week, and that is our friends at Rhone.

00:34:40.900 | R H O N E.

00:34:43.980 | As I mentioned before, I've long been a fan of the Rhone

00:34:49.620 | moisture wicking exercise t shirts are very nice looking high quality,

00:34:53.820 | but do a really good job of keeping you cool.

00:34:56.380 | This is why I was so excited to find that they now produce a dress shirt.

00:35:01.700 | The commuter shirt from Rhone is a very nice looking button up shirt,

00:35:07.620 | but made with the same magic material as the other shirts I like from them.

00:35:11.820 | It's cool. It's flexible.

00:35:14.260 | It's moisture wicking and key.

00:35:16.660 | It does not wrinkle.

00:35:18.860 | I have a white Rhone commuter shirt, which I can wear with jeans.

00:35:23.540 | It looks really nice.

00:35:24.300 | I can wear with nicer pants and a jacket, and it looks really nice.

00:35:26.820 | I use this when I have to speak in front of people

00:35:30.380 | because it's lightweight and it's flexible and you generate a lot of heat

00:35:33.820 | when you're up there speaking and you're not going to feel hot

00:35:36.980 | and you're not going to have sweat build up on your shirt.

00:35:40.540 | So it looks great. You can wear it all day.

00:35:44.580 | And with that magic fabric, Rhone does so well.

00:35:48.100 | A couple of the things they've told me here,

00:35:50.460 | they call their odor free technology gold fusion.

00:35:54.260 | So there's something in this magic fabric to make sure

00:35:57.540 | even if you're at it all day long, the shirt is not going to smell bad.

00:36:01.620 | Also, let me just mention this. It's 100% machine washable.

00:36:04.740 | You throw this thing in the washing machine, put it on a hanger to dry.

00:36:07.700 | You don't have to go to the dry cleaner. Very convenient.

00:36:10.460 | So I've long been a fan of Rhone, and I am now a fan of the Rhone commuter shirt.

00:36:15.540 | So the commuter shirt can get you through any workday

00:36:17.460 | and straight into whatever comes next.

00:36:18.980 | Head to Rhone.com/Cal and use the promo code Cal to save 20%

00:36:24.820 | off of your entire order.

00:36:27.660 | That's 20% off your entire order when you head to R-H-O-N-E.com/Cal

00:36:34.340 | and then use the code Cal.

00:36:37.460 | It's time to find your corner office comfort.

00:36:42.460 | It's a good tagline corner office comfort.

00:36:44.780 | Maybe one day we'll get a replacement for the famous blue shirt made by Rhone.

00:36:51.300 | Yeah, it's a good idea.

00:36:53.140 | It'd be a great shirt for podcasting because it gets I mean, it's hard.

00:36:56.420 | We do like an hour and a half of just like rock and rolling in here.

00:36:59.100 | You know, like it's not a.

00:37:01.740 | You get hot.

00:37:02.900 | Maybe I need a Rhone podcasting shirt.

00:37:06.700 | Maybe we should get logos like you already have a TDL.

00:37:11.180 | No, I mean like sponsor logos like NASCAR drivers all over.

00:37:14.700 | Oh, yeah. All over my shirt.

00:37:15.700 | Yeah. Eat, sleep.

00:37:17.060 | Could go across here.

00:37:18.580 | I'm going to wear a visor that says Rhone across it.

00:37:22.180 | And then for enough money, I'll also eat.

00:37:27.060 | What's that magic spoon?

00:37:29.980 | Between.

00:37:31.460 | Yeah, I'll tell you, if I've learned anything about audio and audio production,

00:37:34.780 | nothing pleases a listener more than a carefully

00:37:39.340 | mic sound of someone eating cereal.

00:37:42.260 | Just

00:37:43.380 | would just

00:37:45.300 | be a wash in the list.

00:37:47.700 | All right, let's do some questions.

00:37:49.420 | We got a good block here.

00:37:51.020 | Jesse, what is our first question of the episode?

00:37:53.180 | OK, it's from Maria.

00:37:56.900 | She says, I'm about to start a professorship and I'm thinking of applying

00:38:01.580 | the don't break the chain method to my research, for example,

00:38:05.660 | resolving to always do two or three hours every day.

00:38:09.260 | Do you think this is a good solution?

00:38:10.740 | So for those who don't know, don't break the chain

00:38:14.500 | is a piece of productivity advice that's often attributed to Jerry Seinfeld.

00:38:19.380 | It was his advice about joke writing.

00:38:22.100 | Do it every day.

00:38:24.020 | Have a calendar every day that you do it.

00:38:26.980 | Mark that day with a big X.

00:38:29.100 | And he says this is effective because you don't want to break the chain

00:38:33.420 | of day after day marked with the X's, which means even when it's hard

00:38:37.180 | or you don't feel like doing the work, you'll do the work

00:38:39.340 | because you don't want a blank spot on your calendar,

00:38:41.620 | a break in that chain of X's.

00:38:44.260 | So does that apply for something like doing research as a professor?

00:38:49.460 | But we can think of other similar obligations for non academic positions,

00:38:52.980 | writing a book, maybe you're writing a book on the side while you have another job.

00:38:57.340 | Maybe you need to do business strategy thinking even as you move into,

00:39:02.780 | I don't know, another type of more managerial role in your company,

00:39:05.660 | some sort of important, demanding work.

00:39:07.780 | That requires the aggregation of a lot of time.

00:39:11.180 | Well, my advice for Maria would be actually don't use that method.

00:39:16.180 | I don't think you have a enough control,

00:39:21.340 | enough of the year as a professor to succeed with the don't break the chain method,

00:39:26.060 | and that's going to be frustrating.

00:39:27.300 | I think this is true with a lot of higher in professional positions.

00:39:33.340 | There's just going to be unavoidably periods and within those periods,

00:39:37.500 | days where your two hour or three hour research block or writing block

00:39:42.020 | or business strategy block can't occur.

00:39:44.220 | I mean, I can look at my calendar right now and find these type of days pretty easily.

00:39:48.260 | I think about this Friday.

00:39:49.420 | That's Wednesday today, so two days from now,

00:39:53.460 | I have to go to campus relatively early.

00:39:56.740 | I'm helping start up this new technology ethics major,

00:40:01.220 | and there's a fair and I'm actually going to be at the fair talking about this major.

00:40:04.540 | And then I have a phone call and I got to get back in time to pick up my kids.

00:40:07.860 | I'm looking at that day.

00:40:09.420 | My normal writing is not going to happen.

00:40:12.020 | My normal two to three hours of writing in the morning is not going to happen.

00:40:14.460 | These type of days just happen.

00:40:16.260 | We had another day like this coming up where there was

00:40:18.380 | a reporter was going to come at the same day that we were recording a podcast

00:40:23.860 | and the prep had to happen.

00:40:24.780 | You do the math and the time disappears for writing.

00:40:27.020 | This happens a lot.

00:40:29.660 | So what I recommend for these type of jobs,

00:40:31.420 | when you have a lot of these uncertain demands on your time,

00:40:34.180 | much more so than a comedian has is instead

00:40:37.340 | rely on a season specific autopilot schedule.

00:40:41.860 | So autopilot scheduling is a strategy we talk about often on this show.

00:40:47.420 | It's where work, you know, has to happen on a regular basis.

00:40:50.980 | You schedule to happen at the same times on the same days every week.

00:40:54.580 | So you get in the habit.

00:40:56.740 | It's Wednesday morning.

00:40:58.180 | This is when I go do whatever work.

00:41:00.500 | So when I say season specific autopilot schedule, you look at what you're

00:41:05.300 | in this case, semester, and if you don't have an academic job,

00:41:08.700 | quarter season looks like and you figure out an autopilot schedule

00:41:12.180 | that makes sense for that particular period of time.

00:41:15.260 | So, Maria, you probably want to factor in your teaching schedule.

00:41:17.540 | If on Monday and Wednesday you're teaching multiple classes,

00:41:22.260 | you might just say, look, I don't do research on those days,

00:41:25.620 | but on Tuesday and Thursday, I protect up to noon and I do a really big block.

00:41:30.340 | And on Friday, I move my

00:41:33.780 | child care later and do from two to the five or five.

00:41:38.220 | 30 is another research block.

00:41:39.460 | You're building a autopilot schedule.

00:41:41.620 | This is when I do the work that is attuned to when the demands fall

00:41:44.660 | or don't fall in the particular upcoming season.

00:41:47.420 | So that's what I would do.

00:41:48.260 | Build an autopilot schedule for your research that makes sense for your semester.

00:41:53.180 | Finding the times that are much less likely to get disrupted than others.

00:41:56.540 | And then that's the chain you don't want to break is sticking to your autopilot

00:42:00.220 | schedule, not working every day.

00:42:02.860 | I mean, in some sense, just think about that as one possible autopilot schedule

00:42:06.940 | that probably isn't going to work for your schedule.

00:42:08.780 | All right, what do we have as question number two?

00:42:14.020 | OK, next question is from Kyle.

00:42:18.340 | Do you have a task board and a weekly plan for your personal life?

00:42:22.660 | Yes and no.

00:42:24.500 | So task board, yes.

00:42:26.780 | So I keep my tasks, as I've talked about on Trello boards.

00:42:29.940 | I have different boards for different roles.

00:42:32.340 | I like the column.

00:42:33.500 | Paradigm, because I can have tasks under different categories,

00:42:38.620 | different columns, you know, waiting to do back burner, waiting to hear back

00:42:42.340 | specific project specific, and I like the ability to attach

00:42:45.420 | file and information to the cards.

00:42:47.780 | So one of my multiple Trello boards is labeled literally personal.

00:42:52.220 | So, yes, I keep track of stuff that's non work related.

00:42:54.820 | I don't want in my head.

00:42:56.020 | So I have a task board for that.

00:42:58.140 | If you're a task list person, you can have a task list for it.

00:43:00.140 | I do not, however, have a distinct weekly plan for my personal life.

00:43:04.820 | I have one weekly plan for my week.

00:43:06.340 | In that weekly plan, I talk about professional things I need to do

00:43:10.780 | in that weekly plan, I talk about relevant things to my personal life as well.

00:43:14.540 | So I have one weekly plan.

00:43:18.220 | And when I time block each day.

00:43:20.820 | I'm usually time blocking the working hours in detail

00:43:24.540 | and then in that time block plan, have a less structured

00:43:28.060 | plan or strategy for the time after work.

00:43:31.820 | So like, remember, tonight we got to do this.

00:43:33.700 | I want to get a workout in.

00:43:35.180 | Need to catch up on this reading.

00:43:37.140 | So I can structure every minute of my evening.

00:43:39.340 | But my daily time block plan is going to have notes for what's going to happen

00:43:43.700 | in in the evening ahead.

00:43:46.900 | So I have a weekly plan that covers everything.

00:43:48.740 | My time block schedule I make each day is going to have time blocks

00:43:51.940 | for the professional part of my day and notes for the personal part of my day.

00:43:56.060 | So so that that gets handled.

00:43:58.780 | I'm not winging it in my personal life.

00:44:00.820 | The only thing that's different and what we've talked about before on the show

00:44:03.740 | is, again, I don't time block every minute of my personal life

00:44:07.540 | because then every minute of your life will be time blocked.

00:44:09.660 | And that's too much.

00:44:11.900 | So I'm a little bit more informal, a little bit looser

00:44:15.540 | with my personal scheduling, but it's the same ideas are applying

00:44:18.420 | to both parts of my life.

00:44:19.660 | So then when you go to the task board, you just pull out

00:44:22.020 | some things and stick them in your weekly plan every week.

00:44:25.020 | Yeah. Or daily.

00:44:27.220 | So, you know, when I look at my

00:44:29.300 | task boards, when I'm doing my daily plan each day, I'll say, OK,

00:44:32.900 | what can I knock off from my personal list today?

00:44:35.740 | Now, the nuance here is if there's a personal task

00:44:39.740 | I'm going to do during the work day.

00:44:41.700 | Then it will be included in my time block schedule

00:44:44.820 | because I time block my work day. Right.

00:44:46.580 | So I might say, hey,

00:44:47.900 | after lunch and before this phone call,

00:44:51.580 | I can do a 30 minute task block because that's a good time.

00:44:55.100 | I can't really do anything else in 30 minutes.

00:44:56.460 | And then I might list a few things there, you know, go mail this, go refill,

00:45:00.020 | fill the car with gas.

00:45:01.660 | So then personal things can make it into a time block plan

00:45:04.060 | if they're happening during the work day.

00:45:06.380 | But if it's the evening, if it's like, OK, I need to remember to go,

00:45:09.380 | you know, talk to talk to Julie about this and go pick some things up

00:45:12.900 | from the office, I'll just list them for the evening on my plan.

00:45:16.260 | I won't necessarily say, oh, at six forty five, I'm going to go do this.

00:45:19.220 | And then if you exercise, it's usually before or after work, right? Yeah.

00:45:22.940 | Yeah, I usually do what I usually for me is like right after work

00:45:28.180 | or maybe like right before, right after I pick up like my kids from the bus stop.

00:45:32.140 | And like that, that'll mark.

00:45:34.420 | I mean, often like my plan will kind of go through there, like in by here

00:45:37.460 | to go get the kids from the bus stop, work out and then evening notes.

00:45:42.460 | Mm hmm.

00:45:43.420 | Yeah, we'll see tonight, however, I'm trying to

00:45:47.180 | I'm going to have to do a late night workout.

00:45:49.860 | What time?

00:45:50.940 | Not late night, but after seven.

00:45:53.500 | Because I'm going from here.

00:45:55.820 | My oldest has a makeup baseball game.

00:45:58.020 | It's going to start at five.

00:46:00.900 | And by the time that's done, those things last two hours because kid pitch.

00:46:04.380 | And so, you know, it's the first the first season, a kid pitch.

00:46:08.820 | So there's a lot of walks.

00:46:11.340 | So they usually takes up the full two hours that they that they allot to it.

00:46:14.380 | So that's seven.

00:46:15.100 | Yeah, I'll be like seven thirty.

00:46:17.460 | Plus when I get home, but I don't want to break the chain on that.

00:46:20.140 | So I'll do a light workout.

00:46:21.140 | Could just do like jump rope the whole time on the sideline.

00:46:23.460 | I could just run around the field.

00:46:25.740 | I'm going to bring weights. Yeah.

00:46:28.340 | OK, that's all.

00:46:29.140 | I'll be the dad who's doing concentration curls.

00:46:31.220 | I always thought about that.

00:46:32.540 | Like, I mean, there's a lot of tracks behind us.

00:46:35.100 | Surprise, more parents don't do that.

00:46:39.260 | My coach all the time.

00:46:40.740 | I should. I'm just not a bad idea.

00:46:42.580 | Yeah, not a bad idea.

00:46:44.460 | You jump a ton of rope.

00:46:46.140 | You jump a ton of rope. Yeah, I probably should.

00:46:47.980 | I probably should.

00:46:49.020 | Instead, I just kind of like chill with the other dads I know.

00:46:51.540 | And we watch.

00:46:53.580 | Yeah, I'm a baseball fan.

00:46:55.500 | And even though it's nine year olds playing baseball, you get kind of into it.

00:46:59.220 | Yeah. Well, you can still do that.

00:47:00.780 | I mean, jump rope doesn't take that much space.

00:47:02.180 | No, I mean, I'll bring the jump rope.

00:47:03.860 | But you're saying not the not the dumbbells, not the concentration.

00:47:06.220 | Well, you could, too.

00:47:06.940 | I mean, you could still talk to them and do curls and they'd probably join in.

00:47:09.340 | Yeah, definitely.

00:47:11.340 | But not weird people out.

00:47:13.180 | Don't mind me.

00:47:15.540 | You don't if you don't polish the guns, you don't know if they're going to fire

00:47:19.860 | a lot of that, a lot of kissing on my biceps.

00:47:22.500 | All right. What do we got next?

00:47:26.540 | All right. Next question is from Cam.

00:47:28.500 | How do you track your metrics over the long term?

00:47:31.220 | Do you record them in a digital spreadsheet you can review throughout the year?

00:47:36.420 | I don't. Cam, I don't track my metrics long term, so I track them daily.

00:47:42.220 | You know, I use my own time block planner.

00:47:46.060 | Time block planner dot com that has a metric tracking space.

00:47:48.820 | I do and I do daily tracking of my metrics.

00:47:51.700 | When I do my weekly plan, I tend to sort of look over how things went.

00:47:56.300 | And that kind of influences what goes into the week ahead.

00:48:00.140 | So, for example, if I notice, hey, I'm not.

00:48:02.340 | Doing this that often, like I'm supposed to be doing this every day,

00:48:06.380 | I'm looking at my metrics, I did it.

00:48:08.060 | Then I might in my weekly plan for the next week have an extra reminder, like,

00:48:11.900 | hey, look, we're falling behind on this discipline.

00:48:13.700 | Like you got to focus on that.

00:48:15.180 | And then I'll see that every day when I look at my weekly plan.

00:48:17.220 | It'll help keep me on track.

00:48:18.220 | I don't really look at the metrics at any larger scale than that.

00:48:22.500 | And it's not that I am ignoring that information or that I think

00:48:26.300 | that information is not important.

00:48:28.820 | It's instead that I don't need to review it because humans are pretty good

00:48:33.820 | at integrating observations about their life.

00:48:36.500 | If they're accurate observations, if they're observations on relevant things,

00:48:40.860 | we're pretty good at integrating that into a narrative about how things are going.

00:48:45.500 | So when I get to, for example, my next semester plan,

00:48:48.300 | I have a pretty nuanced understanding of how things were going,

00:48:52.020 | that this aggressive metric I had for exercise was rarely being met,

00:48:57.500 | that this was going really well.

00:48:59.100 | I remember that. I know that I've lived it every day.

00:49:01.660 | I've written those metrics down every night.

00:49:03.260 | I review them every week.

00:49:04.460 | The information is there.

00:49:05.860 | I have a gestalt of how my life is unfolding

00:49:08.500 | that I can then use to make future decisions.

00:49:10.860 | I don't have to look at a spreadsheet

00:49:12.860 | and do some sort of analysis over the last 95 days

00:49:16.740 | and then to learn how my life went.

00:49:20.140 | And I found this with a lot of of self-improvement or self-tracking

00:49:23.420 | is that more tech focused people

00:49:25.900 | have this big data paradigm that says insights are hidden in data

00:49:30.620 | until analysis extracts them.

00:49:33.180 | This is the the defining idea of the big data revolution

00:49:36.860 | is that there is additional intelligence to be gained

00:49:39.300 | beyond what you have through your own experience.

00:49:43.060 | Through data analysis, and this is true in many domains,

00:49:46.980 | I don't find it to be that useful for the domain of of self-improvement.

00:49:50.340 | Now, if you're not tracking anything.

00:49:51.940 | This information is essentially hidden to your brain.

00:49:55.660 | But if you're tracking things every day and you're writing it down every day

00:49:58.500 | and maybe reviewing every week,

00:50:00.460 | those data points are being integrated by your brain.

00:50:03.060 | It is adding them into a relatively sophisticated model of how things are going.

00:50:06.900 | So I don't bother, Cam.

00:50:09.020 | I think it's too fiddly to try to do tracking beyond that that level.

00:50:12.340 | So that's my advice.

00:50:13.060 | Track every day metrics that matters.

00:50:16.300 | Look at them when you're doing a weekly plan that matters.

00:50:18.860 | Beyond that, I think you're good.

00:50:21.260 | I think you're good.

00:50:21.740 | I don't need I don't think you need few additional tools

00:50:24.500 | to really gain bigger insights.

00:50:27.460 | And this was big, Jesse, when we were

00:50:30.780 | Godwin was like the first decade of the 2000s, like when we were in our 20s.

00:50:34.140 | The whole quantified self was like an offshoot of the productivity

00:50:38.260 | prong movement where it was we're going to quantify every element of our life

00:50:42.740 | and algorithmically, we will gain all these insights and,

00:50:47.180 | you know, become superhuman.

00:50:49.340 | And the end, it was like a fun hobby to do all these tools

00:50:53.260 | and do all these tracking, but it didn't necessarily make a huge difference like.

00:50:56.140 | Surfacing realities of your life and the numbers of metrics

00:51:01.140 | in the moment is very useful.

00:51:03.660 | You know, how much weight did I lift?

00:51:05.180 | How much do I weigh today?

00:51:06.060 | Like that is very useful.

00:51:08.460 | But finding higher order trends, I feel like our brains

00:51:12.580 | are really good at analyzing ourselves.

00:51:15.220 | Well, a lot of people have those tracking, you know, instruments that they whether.

00:51:20.260 | Yeah. But if you have like a Fitbit, for example, like say step tracking,

00:51:23.420 | what's really important there is that, you know, it's being tracked

00:51:26.140 | and you see each day how many steps you took.

00:51:27.820 | Like that's the important information.

00:51:30.020 | You don't necessarily need to see a graph of how these steps move.

00:51:32.820 | You know, over time, you kind of know, like, am I hitting my goal?

00:51:35.100 | I haven't been. Now I am usually, you know,

00:51:39.020 | and I don't really need the graph over time.

00:51:41.340 | It's just the seeing that number every day, knowing that number is coming

00:51:45.300 | changes your relationship to movement.

00:51:47.700 | I mean, obviously, there's places where data is important.

00:51:53.180 | If you're weight training, you know, OK, here's where my numbers are.

00:51:57.620 | And I want to try to push those up.

00:51:59.180 | I mean, that could be important.

00:52:00.460 | But also even there, people typically know,

00:52:02.940 | like I know where my bench has been and I think I'm ready to go for higher.

00:52:08.340 | Like you don't necessarily have to see some chart of how things move over time.

00:52:11.540 | So that's always been my my compromise position.

00:52:14.940 | So I don't know the trends.

00:52:16.740 | Yeah. Like quantification is important in the moment.

00:52:19.140 | Complicated analysis of what was quantified is less important.

00:52:24.060 | I'm sure there's exceptions, though.

00:52:28.100 | All right. Let us keep rolling.

00:52:31.580 | Who do we have next?

00:52:32.780 | All right. Next question is from Allison, 30 year old lawyer.

00:52:36.140 | This year, Facebook and Instagram have started flooding their users

00:52:39.540 | feeds with suggested posts from accounts they don't follow.

00:52:42.340 | Many users are frustrated and angry about these changes.

00:52:45.740 | What impact do you think these changes are going to have

00:52:48.500 | on the future of Facebook and Instagram?

00:52:50.660 | All right. Well, Allison, I've I've talked about this before,

00:52:54.260 | so I'll be short, but add a new twist to it.

00:52:57.300 | But the source document to look at here

00:53:00.300 | is the article I wrote for The New Yorker on TikTok.

00:53:04.380 | This probably came out.

00:53:06.420 | God, I mean, this was the summer, early fall.

00:53:08.740 | I don't know when that was, Jesse, but I'll look it up.

00:53:10.140 | You look it up. OK.

00:53:11.060 | Anyways, and I talked about it on the show, I believe at some point.

00:53:13.740 | In fact, it was an article that came out of ideas we first introduced on the show.

00:53:17.860 | And basically, my premise was Facebook and Instagram

00:53:21.500 | following TikTok's lead.

00:53:25.100 | To having more and more information selected algorithmically

00:53:28.060 | and having no connection to people that you follow

00:53:31.060 | or to the things that people you follow share, and I said, ultimately,

00:53:33.620 | this is going to be the doom of those services.

00:53:38.700 | So I'll briefly recapitulate my argument, why?

00:53:42.660 | The way I think about TikTok now, my shorthand for TikTok right now

00:53:47.380 | is that it's blues clues for adults.

00:53:53.180 | So blues clues is a children's program

00:53:56.580 | that became really popular in the 1990s.

00:53:58.820 | And I know about it because Malcolm Gladwell.

00:54:01.500 | Wrote a chapter about blues clues in his seminal book, The Tipping Point.

00:54:06.980 | And what he argued in The Tipping Point is compare blues clues to Sesame Street.

00:54:12.580 | And you see something very different.

00:54:15.220 | I mean, Sesame Street is legible to adults.

00:54:18.820 | You see what they're trying to do.

00:54:19.740 | It's educational content.

00:54:21.820 | It has these interesting puppets.

00:54:23.540 | It's there's some in jokes for the adults.

00:54:25.820 | It's funny. There's some good writing in it.

00:54:27.980 | And so they're trying to help children learn.

00:54:32.060 | And it's but it's a kind of an interestingly crafted thing.

00:54:35.060 | You can have it on as a grown up and not hate it.

00:54:37.380 | And it's a it's a well done show.

00:54:39.700 | Blues clues, if you've ever seen this, baffles adults.

00:54:43.100 | It's repetitive. It makes no sense.

00:54:46.340 | They'll the characters will just look the camera and repeat themselves

00:54:49.660 | four or five times.

00:54:50.820 | They'll just they'll pause for a while.

00:54:52.940 | It seems insipid.

00:54:54.940 | It seems arbitrary.

00:54:56.300 | It seems almost nihilistic in its incoherence.

00:54:59.180 | And it was incredibly popular.

00:55:01.140 | And what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in The Tipping Point is

00:55:03.980 | what they did for that show was they basically studied kids.

00:55:08.780 | And worked entirely off the metric of what grabs their attention and what doesn't.

00:55:15.300 | And so they built a whole TV show around just the simple goal

00:55:19.380 | of how do I keep kids attention on here?

00:55:22.620 | And the result was this incoherent to adults

00:55:26.580 | audio visual assault mishmash.

00:55:29.820 | And there was actually a lot of this that arose in the 90s.

00:55:32.180 | Barney's gave way to Teletubbies.

00:55:34.220 | These shows that were so weird to adults.

00:55:36.380 | Sesame Street was funny.

00:55:39.020 | And be like, hey, here comes, you know,

00:55:41.540 | Stalker Channing is going to come on and do a skit with garbage.

00:55:45.460 | Whatever his name was, Oscar the Grouch.

00:55:47.100 | And it's about letters.

00:55:48.060 | And it's also kind of funny.

00:55:48.980 | And there's some good writing is kind of winking at the audience.

00:55:51.420 | And then it's Teletubbies.

00:55:53.940 | Your eyes are melting.

00:55:55.340 | It's Blue's Clues like what's going on?

00:55:56.860 | Why is it just staring at the screen, waiting for the kids to repeat a word

00:55:59.780 | or whatever?

00:56:00.140 | And it's because it was engineered to a simple metric.

00:56:02.700 | What's going to keep kids looking?

00:56:05.260 | In the world of social media.

00:56:07.380 | Facebook and Instagram is Sesame Street.

00:56:10.300 | TikTok is Blue's Clues.

00:56:12.300 | They got rid of any of the potentially good stuff,

00:56:15.860 | the connection to other people, the scene, what people, you know,

00:56:18.660 | are up to the the expression, the discovery of interesting things

00:56:22.740 | and made it just what gets your eyes.

00:56:25.260 | A fix to this as long as possible.

00:56:28.740 | And the the result is this format that, again, to a non-TikTok user is incoherent.

00:56:33.900 | Is mind melting, is these weird short videos with cuts and movements?

00:56:38.780 | And all it is is Blue's Clues.

00:56:40.900 | It is what happens when you push a content

00:56:42.980 | to its logical extreme in the context of attention maximization.

00:56:47.580 | And so just like adults looked at Blue's Clues like this feels just

00:56:52.580 | I think a lot of adults look at TikTok like this.

00:56:55.500 | We're not even pretending anymore.

00:56:58.540 | That this is unlocking the power of the web.

00:57:00.900 | It's just the logical terminal space of when you're saying,

00:57:04.740 | let's just maximize eyes, eyes, eyes.

00:57:07.660 | OK, so TikTok is Blue's Clues for adult.

00:57:09.660 | If Facebook and Instagram follow that path.

00:57:11.740 | They're getting rid of all the stuff that's quality.

00:57:14.700 | They're getting rid of all the potential value proposition

00:57:17.100 | of connecting the people, you know, discovering things from people like you.

00:57:20.580 | And it just becomes what's going to keep my toddler

00:57:22.780 | slack jawed at the screen while I'm trying to get something done.

00:57:26.140 | Once they move into that arena, they have lost their main competitive advantage,

00:57:30.140 | which is their social graphs.

00:57:31.540 | As I argued in that New Yorker piece, it is too hard at this point

00:57:35.300 | to build a social graph of the same size and of the same value

00:57:38.940 | as a Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.

00:57:41.140 | So any surface whose service that's mainly based on one of those social graphs

00:57:45.380 | is not going to compete with those.

00:57:47.500 | But as soon as they move away from their social graph, here's friends and links.

00:57:50.500 | And just to algorithmically select the content,

00:57:52.980 | they're just in the competitive mosh pit with everything else

00:57:56.020 | is trying to grab your attention.

00:57:57.740 | And Blue's Clues isn't on TV anymore because there's other cartoons

00:58:01.100 | that came along or even more insipid and even more attention capturing.

00:58:04.460 | So that's why I think, Alison, the move of Facebook and Instagram

00:58:08.500 | towards a Blue's Clues TikTok model

00:58:11.740 | maybe is trying to stave off some user

00:58:14.500 | user loss in the short term, but is going to expose them

00:58:18.500 | the competition that they can't hope to win at long term

00:58:20.980 | when they left the advantage of their social graph.

00:58:23.340 | They left their protection.

00:58:24.740 | And I think that's going to be the end of them, ultimately of them

00:58:27.780 | as some sort of giant culture shaping monopolistic platform that everyone uses.

00:58:34.140 | Your article came out July 28th.

00:58:36.780 | July 28th. OK, so that's the TikTok. What's it called?

00:58:38.900 | Let me pull it up one more time.

00:58:43.060 | July 28th.

00:58:46.540 | TikTok and the fall of social media giants.

00:58:49.380 | TikTok in the fall, the social media giants. All right. So.

00:58:52.100 | You'll hear more about their. All right, let's do a call.

00:58:56.500 | Sounds good.

00:58:57.460 | Hi, Cal. My name is John, and my job for this question is being a father.

00:59:02.020 | I have four kids ages nine, seven, four and 10 months old.

00:59:07.220 | The question I have is regarding the productivity of children.

00:59:10.340 | We are an unschooling family, a form of homeschooling, and therefore

00:59:14.140 | video games do not interfere with school hours or homework.

00:59:17.140 | I know you are against social media, but I am curious

00:59:20.780 | what your thoughts are on video game benefits and problems in general.

00:59:24.180 | My wife and I originally decided to keep screens from our kids.

00:59:28.020 | Our oldest didn't use screens until she was five.

00:59:30.980 | Strangely enough, after allowing screen use, her emotional expression,

00:59:34.380 | previously very cool, suddenly warmed up.

00:59:36.340 | She began to dance and sing and talk about her feelings

00:59:39.420 | more than she had in the last five years.

00:59:42.140 | After reading several articles and books, including several by Jane McGonigal

00:59:45.620 | and multiple articles by Dr.

00:59:47.140 | Peter Gray, we decided to let our children use screens.

00:59:49.660 | We've gone back and forth over the last few years,

00:59:52.860 | sometimes letting them use screens as much as they wish,

00:59:55.420 | and limiting their use or banning them completely.

00:59:58.980 | They're not using social media and we're not planning to let them anytime soon.

01:00:02.460 | Though each child is different,

01:00:04.500 | what are your general thoughts on video games for children?

01:00:06.940 | Are they a useful learning tool, as Dr.

01:00:09.060 | Gray would argue?

01:00:10.260 | Do they teach skills quickly, as Jane McGonigal has stated?

01:00:14.060 | Are there benefits that are difficult to comprehend,

01:00:17.460 | or do they interfere with children's development

01:00:19.460 | as well as depleting the dopamine in children's brains?

01:00:22.140 | Or I could restate that in a less negative way and ask if they simply take up time

01:00:26.260 | that would be better spent elsewhere.

01:00:28.580 | Many gamers are successful in many different industries,

01:00:31.180 | and many gamers are seemingly addicted

01:00:33.460 | and cannot function in a healthy way in the real world.

01:00:35.860 | There are surely hidden benefits and hidden dangers

01:00:39.100 | we're still learning about.

01:00:41.060 | There are definitely two strong opposing views when it comes to gaming,

01:00:44.260 | especially in children, and I would love to hear your views.

01:00:47.500 | Well, all right, John, there's a lot going on in that question.

01:00:51.540 | We're talking about video games, we're talking about social media,

01:00:54.100 | we're talking about screens and trying to navigate all of that with kids.

01:00:58.740 | My three kids are the same age of your three older kids,

01:01:01.860 | so all this is familiar, all this is relevant.

01:01:04.980 | There's a narrow path, a complicated path to try to navigate here.

01:01:09.540 | I'll tell you where I currently stand based on what I've seen and read,

01:01:13.100 | that this is a tentative proposal.

01:01:16.140 | This can change over time.

01:01:18.340 | All right, so video games.

01:01:20.660 | There, I believe the danger is multiplayer online games,

01:01:24.540 | massively multiplayer online games.

01:01:26.860 | This could be things like Roblox, this could be things like Fortnite,

01:01:30.100 | this could be things like World of Warcraft.

01:01:32.460 | Those I would steer clear of.

01:01:35.340 | These massively online games are the primary vectors of addictive behavior.

01:01:41.380 | They're massively time consuming,

01:01:43.900 | especially with things like World of Warcraft.

01:01:46.580 | They play with your brain in a way that can be very discouraging.

01:01:50.460 | In fact, some of the strongest examples of digital addictions

01:01:53.620 | that exist over all digital technologies come from massively online video games.

01:02:00.220 | So no multiplayer, single player video games.

01:02:04.700 | Playing Minecraft, I'm playing the new Legends of Zelda on a Switch,

01:02:09.100 | I'm playing Mario Party or whatever.

01:02:11.740 | I don't think that's inherently bad.

01:02:13.700 | And I think it's fine for kids that have video games,

01:02:17.100 | have access to play them, the time should be controlled.

01:02:19.700 | This is when you get to play them.

01:02:21.180 | It's not a default. It's not every day.

01:02:23.940 | But you can do an hour here, hour there.

01:02:25.580 | It's a completely fine activity.

01:02:27.260 | I think modern video games are beautiful, they're fun.

01:02:30.380 | And as long as it's not a default activity,

01:02:32.140 | something the kids can just do whenever they want in their room, why not?

01:02:36.780 | Now, the final thing I'll say about video games is,

01:02:38.940 | no, I don't fully buy McGonagall's argument.

01:02:41.820 | I'm saying McGonagall like from Harry Potter.

01:02:44.020 | It's I know exactly who you're talking about, the gamification.

01:02:47.420 | McGonagall, I believe, which is different to Harry Potter.

01:02:52.220 | That'd be interesting if--

01:02:53.500 | It's the-- she does research with the chimpanzees and stuff, right?

01:02:58.060 | Yeah.

01:02:58.820 | So she does like the gamification of life work.

01:03:01.660 | Are we thinking about the--

01:03:03.460 | I'm thinking of Jane Goodall.

01:03:04.940 | You're thinking of Goodall.

01:03:06.060 | Yeah.

01:03:06.580 | Yeah, if Jane Goodall wrote a book about video games,

01:03:08.220 | it'd be interesting.

01:03:10.020 | If Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter wrote a book on video games,

01:03:14.380 | that I would read.

01:03:16.460 | I don't fully buy McGonagall's view of this being beneficial.

01:03:21.100 | Stephen Johnson wrote a book like this in the early 2000s,

01:03:23.540 | Everything Bad is Good for You.

01:03:25.700 | And it was trying to make the argument of you're

01:03:27.860 | going to get great hand-eye coordination.

01:03:30.620 | OK, I mean, sure.

01:03:34.020 | So I know I'm not like, oh, this is-- these games are giving you

01:03:37.220 | these secret life skills.

01:03:38.260 | I also don't think single-player video game playing

01:03:42.060 | or in-person multiplayer, so three, two people in the same room,

01:03:45.100 | I have no problem with that.

01:03:46.660 | I think of it as like TV.

01:03:48.140 | It's like, how much do you want your kids to watch TV?

01:03:51.020 | Some, not all the time.

01:03:52.620 | So you meter out that time.

01:03:54.900 | What about other types of screens?

01:03:57.820 | YouTube, I would treat like television.

01:04:01.820 | So YouTube is another danger.

01:04:04.060 | If YouTube is just something that the kids, especially a 9-year-old

01:04:07.820 | or a 7-year-old or even like an 11 or 12-year-old,

01:04:10.260 | if it's something that kids just have unrestricted access to,

01:04:13.060 | so it's like their video game time, they can just be on YouTube.

01:04:15.740 | That's hard for their developing brain.

01:04:17.700 | It can bring them into weird places via the recommendation algorithm.

01:04:22.300 | Also, the content, it can get kind of weird there, right?

01:04:25.500 | This sort of just playing at what the algorithm likes

01:04:28.100 | can bring you to sort of weird places.

01:04:30.740 | So I think YouTube should be thought of as like a TV channel.

01:04:34.780 | Oh, we're going to watch TV now.

01:04:36.180 | There are certain channels that we know about as parents that we say,

01:04:39.100 | yeah, let's go watch.

01:04:39.980 | You can watch some videos of that or we'll put some of those videos on.

01:04:42.220 | I mean, that's how we handle it in our household.

01:04:45.180 | There are certain channels we know about that we're like, OK,

01:04:49.020 | if you want to put on one of those videos instead of watching a show

01:04:52.940 | during TV time, that's fine.

01:04:54.340 | So if you want to play like a Mark Rober video.

01:04:57.580 | Fine, go ahead, if you want to watch like, you know, Adam Savage,

01:05:01.860 | we'll allow Mr. Beast.

01:05:03.740 | They like, well, I'm like a Mr. Beast or so.

01:05:05.540 | Those are kind of, they're fine, right?

01:05:07.780 | Yeah. So YouTube, though, think about it like TV.

01:05:10.220 | You don't let the kids of that age have a TV in their room and you say,

01:05:13.020 | hey, just rock and roll.

01:05:13.900 | We don't know what you're up to.

01:05:14.740 | You're like, yeah, you can have TV time, but we want to know what you're watching.

01:05:16.980 | So treat YouTube like TV where you have a say

01:05:20.460 | and complete visibility on what they're watching.

01:05:22.980 | Do not let YouTube rabbit hole falling be something that you allow your kids

01:05:27.060 | to do at a young age.

01:05:29.940 | Social media.

01:05:31.460 | At least 16, at least, I mean, no earlier than that,

01:05:35.860 | especially with if you have girls, the data there, I just believe

01:05:39.740 | is very, very worrisome.

01:05:41.820 | Unrestricted Internet access on a phone.

01:05:44.740 | So like a smartphone with unrestricted Internet access.

01:05:47.180 | I think that needs to be late high school at the earliest.

01:05:49.460 | People think that's wildly unrealistic.

01:05:51.860 | I think people are wildly wrong about that.

01:05:53.660 | I it's just not good.

01:05:56.020 | Half of the kids are going to give a smartphone to at 14

01:05:58.580 | are going to have problems with it.

01:05:59.580 | And so I'm just a believer, you can have a dumb phone,

01:06:02.900 | you can text your friends and text you when you need to get picked up.

01:06:05.020 | If that's taking you out of some social stuff, then let's make sure

01:06:08.260 | that you're involved in at least one or two groups or activities,

01:06:10.900 | be it a sport or theater or a robotics team that is a team of people

01:06:14.900 | you really like and you're really involved in and you have ways

01:06:17.740 | to connect to people that don't require you to be involved in like Tik

01:06:21.140 | Tok or something like this.

01:06:22.100 | But I am just a believer.

01:06:23.460 | Smartphones and a 15 year old smartphones and a 14 year old.

01:06:26.420 | It's no bueno.

01:06:28.460 | It doesn't lead anywhere good.

01:06:29.380 | So that's where I fall now.

01:06:30.580 | No massively online video games.

01:06:32.060 | YouTube is treated like a TV channel.

01:06:33.540 | It's only done where you are around and you control what they're watching.

01:06:35.900 | Single player video games are fine.

01:06:37.980 | Just control the time like you would TV watching social media

01:06:41.660 | or unrestricted smartphone access really has to come as late

01:06:44.340 | as you can possibly push it, even if they say, you know,

01:06:47.460 | we won't have any friends and everyone else is doing it.

01:06:50.020 | Teenagers have been saying that ever since there were teenagers.

01:06:52.780 | Yeah, it works.

01:06:56.940 | Our video games are so primitive, Jesse.

01:06:59.460 | Yeah, my kids were playing it the other day.

01:07:01.700 | Their friend has a Nintendo Switch and they got 64 classic

01:07:06.620 | 8-bit NES games on it, and they're not impressed.

01:07:09.500 | They're not impressed.

01:07:11.140 | I don't know if you've seen these modern video games.

01:07:13.860 | My son plays Legends of Zelda something, something.

01:07:17.300 | I don't know some Switch game.

01:07:18.860 | It's a it's a beautiful world.

01:07:21.460 | It's done in like a it's not photorealistic.

01:07:24.380 | It's almost like it's a hand drawn.

01:07:26.580 | Yeah. And it's a you just explore this world and go on adventures.

01:07:30.300 | And it looks better than like most TV shows look.

01:07:33.460 | Ten years ago. Mm hmm.

01:07:35.420 | So I was like, all right, you can do an hour of that.

01:07:37.380 | But they have no yeah.

01:07:38.540 | He's when they see the Super Mario Brothers like, come on.

01:07:40.580 | Yeah. What is this thing?

01:07:43.060 | All right, let's do a

01:07:46.020 | little case out here, let's do one more question

01:07:48.060 | and then I have a cool case study I want to read.

01:07:50.420 | Sounds good.

01:07:51.700 | This question is from Adam, a 40 year old,

01:07:54.540 | 40 year old from New York.

01:07:58.300 | Can you describe your decision rule for entering a task

01:08:01.100 | either onto a travel board versus directly into a weekly pant?

01:08:05.260 | I'm finding it tempting, easier to put time sensitive items

01:08:08.740 | and links directly into my weekly plan, but then it gets a little cluttered.

01:08:12.660 | Well, Adam, I'll tell you my best practice on this issue,

01:08:16.380 | which is not something I always follow, but I'm always happier when I do.

01:08:19.940 | And that best practice is the following.

01:08:23.580 | So you have, you know, something pops up, a task, an obligation,

01:08:27.660 | you jot it down and your whatever you use for capture in the moment.

01:08:30.780 | So for me, it'll probably be my time block planner

01:08:33.380 | on the daily pages, there's a section for capturing these things.

01:08:36.660 | And then you get to the end of the day, you need to process it.

01:08:38.860 | My best practice is there's two places where that new task can go.

01:08:43.260 | Onto an appropriate task order list or onto your calendar.

01:08:48.340 | All right, so task order list onto your calendar.

01:08:52.140 | What would qualify it for going onto your calendar

01:08:54.460 | if it's connected to a specific day in which you've decided

01:08:57.980 | it needs to be executed?

01:08:59.700 | So the calendar is for time specific tasks.

01:09:03.540 | So let's say I need to do a book blurb and it's due on Thursday.

01:09:07.340 | I might put an all day event on that calendar day.

01:09:09.580 | You know, book blurb is due for whatever.

01:09:11.540 | Oftentimes, I'll actually find the specific time

01:09:15.140 | for one of these time sensitive activities and put it on my calendar

01:09:17.860 | like an appointment.

01:09:18.740 | Give you a real world example.

01:09:21.780 | Friday of this week, department merit reviews are due.

01:09:26.100 | It's a administrative task where you have to go through a spreadsheet

01:09:29.140 | and sort of fill in all the academic activities you did during the year.

01:09:32.340 | And it helps generate your raise for the year.

01:09:36.020 | I have the specific time when I'm gonna do that

01:09:38.300 | on my calendar for Friday.

01:09:40.620 | So if a task is associated with a particular day,

01:09:43.340 | it can go on your calendar.

01:09:44.180 | It doesn't have to be on your task list

01:09:46.540 | because your calendar is obviously a productivity tool

01:09:48.460 | that you trust when you get to each day,

01:09:49.740 | you see what your appointments are and you do those things.

01:09:51.700 | So I trust my calendar as a productivity tool.

01:09:54.380 | If it's not tied to a specific day, it goes to a task list.

01:09:57.820 | In my case, those lists are kept on Trello boards.

01:10:01.060 | Now I look at my Trello boards each morning

01:10:03.340 | when I build my daily time block plan.

01:10:05.020 | So if you're actually following the system,

01:10:06.700 | if I actually am in the groove of looking at my task board

01:10:09.900 | every day when I do my weekly plan,

01:10:11.780 | I can trust that stuff that's important will get done

01:10:14.340 | because when I look at the relevant task board,

01:10:16.100 | I'll see those tasks and I'm not gonna be dumber tomorrow

01:10:19.260 | than I am today.

01:10:20.100 | So if I know today, this thing is important,

01:10:21.980 | when I see it tomorrow, I will remember,

01:10:24.100 | oh, this is important and see if I can fit it

01:10:26.220 | into my time block plan for the day.

01:10:28.260 | So that is my best practice.

01:10:30.980 | I sometimes don't follow it when I feel like my schedule

01:10:35.260 | is disrupted enough that I don't trust myself

01:10:37.540 | to look at my task list every day.

01:10:38.740 | And that's when I begin adding an extra reminder

01:10:41.820 | to my weekly plan, emailing myself an email

01:10:44.580 | where it's a reminder in the subject line.

01:10:46.460 | But that is all a, that's all an artifact of lack of trust.

01:10:51.460 | I don't trust that I'm gonna see this in my list

01:10:53.660 | and make sure it gets done.

01:10:55.220 | That makes me nervous.

01:10:56.100 | So I'm gonna add these extra reminders.

01:10:57.500 | But when I am on track, executing my system properly,

01:11:02.500 | that's how I like to do it.

01:11:04.780 | If it needs to be done a particular day,

01:11:05.980 | put it on that day, otherwise put on the list.

01:11:08.220 | Even if I know it needs to get done this week,

01:11:10.260 | I don't really need to write that down somewhere

01:11:12.460 | because when I see that task in my list every single morning,

01:11:15.740 | I will remember this is something

01:11:18.180 | that needs to get done this week.

01:11:20.300 | Like I'm not gonna forget tomorrow what I know today.

01:11:22.220 | So that's my best practice, calendar or task list,

01:11:24.460 | check the task list every day.

01:11:26.980 | That moves smoothly.

01:11:28.500 | And that's how I know that I'm out of sorts by the way,

01:11:30.540 | is when I start emailing myself reminders,

01:11:32.180 | that's when I step back and say, I'm off my system.

01:11:35.460 | I need to get back to my system.

01:11:36.780 | And I always feel better when I do.

01:11:38.580 | - Do you do that process in like the same spot every day

01:11:40.980 | or is it very?

01:11:42.300 | - I do now.

01:11:43.140 | So in my study at home,

01:11:46.020 | which we'll have to in an upcoming weekly update video,

01:11:49.340 | Jason's gonna bring the camera over to my study at home.

01:11:51.740 | I go to my study at home each morning

01:11:55.540 | and I have a desk, my custom built desk

01:11:58.340 | that's made to fit the kind of weird space of the study.

01:12:00.940 | And it has a one drawer.

01:12:02.660 | I had it built in this one drawer.

01:12:04.340 | And I open up that drawer and here's my time block planner.

01:12:06.980 | I take that out, I put it on the desk,

01:12:08.820 | I turn on my laptop.

01:12:10.620 | And it's the first thing I do

01:12:12.820 | is I'll make that daily plan for the day.

01:12:15.300 | And I try to do this if I can

01:12:16.540 | before I walk my kids to the bus stop.

01:12:18.220 | If not, immediately after I get back from the bus stop,

01:12:22.100 | I'll do this, but I load up my computer.

01:12:24.180 | And so my weekly plan will be,

01:12:26.940 | and I was looking to see if I,

01:12:27.980 | I don't have my backpack in here.

01:12:30.220 | My weekly plan will be printed and in my time block planner.

01:12:34.300 | So I open this thing, I read the weekly plan,

01:12:37.700 | I open my computer, I read my calendar,

01:12:41.140 | I read my task list in Trello

01:12:43.340 | and sketch out that time block plan for the day.

01:12:46.820 | So when I'm on the ball, that's what I do.

01:12:48.740 | And so having this set location

01:12:51.500 | that I come to every morning at the same time to do this,

01:12:54.900 | that really has helped keep me in it.

01:12:56.380 | So during the period when we were renovating that study

01:12:58.980 | and I didn't have a set location, I might work outside,

01:13:01.500 | I might work at the kitchen table, I might work upstairs.

01:13:03.860 | I fell off the system more.

01:13:05.220 | And so it's a good question.

01:13:07.100 | Having a great location where this is where I do,

01:13:10.320 | that's how I start my day

01:13:12.180 | has really made a big difference to me.

01:13:14.140 | So we'll get that, we'll do a weekly update video.

01:13:16.820 | I'll show you that whole setup sometime soon.

01:13:19.980 | I wanna do a quick case study here.

01:13:21.740 | One of the things I like when people send in

01:13:24.660 | in the question survey, which by the way,

01:13:27.460 | Jesse, make sure that link is in the show notes,

01:13:30.300 | but to submit questions or case studies,

01:13:33.580 | you have to go to a SurveyMonkey survey and enter it.

01:13:36.240 | And that link is right in the show notes.

01:13:37.580 | Here's a case study that someone sent in.

01:13:40.300 | This came from Anna,

01:13:41.500 | who was an anthropologist in her mid forties.

01:13:46.060 | All right, so here's what Anna says.

01:13:48.560 | In January, 2021,

01:13:51.040 | I started to document my time for each day

01:13:54.260 | in a knitted scarf.

01:13:56.160 | I broke up each day into how much time I spent writing

01:13:59.420 | emails, grant proposals, teaching documents, social media,

01:14:02.460 | admin and research related writing.

01:14:05.060 | And I knitted a proportional number of rows in my scarf

01:14:10.060 | using different colors for each of these activities.

01:14:13.480 | My days used to be all over the place.

01:14:16.180 | Then I started listening to your podcast in June of 2021

01:14:19.680 | and really put some of your systems into place,

01:14:21.780 | time blocking, getting off Twitter and Instagram,

01:14:23.400 | working out, working on my values and priorities, et cetera.

01:14:27.060 | So she saw in her scarf,

01:14:29.320 | the social media stitches disappeared.

01:14:32.160 | There were fewer email stitches and the research

01:14:34.480 | and proposal writing stitches lengthened

01:14:36.880 | as the scarf grew through the end of the year.

01:14:40.360 | The result of this shift was research papers got submitted,

01:14:45.760 | two books got completed and a grant of almost

01:14:47.760 | 5 million euros got submitted

01:14:49.620 | and went through to the final round.

01:14:51.980 | The scarf is both knitted data

01:14:54.200 | of the effects of your deep work interventions,

01:14:56.620 | as well as a relaxing way to unwind.

01:14:59.340 | So thanks for sharing with us all your systems

01:15:00.960 | and inspiring us to find more time for the things

01:15:02.700 | we enjoy about our work.

01:15:03.620 | Keep it coming and I will continue to listen to you

01:15:05.600 | as I knit.

01:15:06.840 | I thought that was really cool.

01:15:10.200 | So she elaborated,

01:15:11.640 | let's basically at the end of the day

01:15:12.760 | is when she would do this.

01:15:13.600 | She would look at how she spent her time for the day

01:15:15.380 | and that would be her pattern

01:15:17.880 | for the knitting she did in the evening.

01:15:20.840 | And so the scarf is a colorful like data visualization

01:15:25.600 | of not only how she spent her time,

01:15:27.480 | but how that shifted after she got into

01:15:29.680 | the Deep Questions podcast.

01:15:31.220 | So I sent her a note and I said, we need a picture.

01:15:35.120 | So that's coming.

01:15:35.960 | She's gonna send us a picture of the scarf.

01:15:37.520 | I'm kind of excited about that.

01:15:38.560 | So Jesse, we'll put that on the show.

01:15:40.280 | - Yeah.

01:15:41.120 | - We'll put that on the show and get that.

01:15:41.940 | I love that idea of knitting a record of your time

01:15:45.880 | and the idea of having a relaxing activity you do

01:15:48.320 | at the end of each day to help reset your mind

01:15:50.560 | as sort of a good shutdown ritual activity.

01:15:52.920 | So Anna, thanks for that.

01:15:55.560 | I look forward to seeing a picture of the scarf

01:15:58.640 | and keep knitting.

01:15:59.540 | All right, so coming up, we have the mailbag segment.

01:16:05.300 | Look at some stuff that people have sent

01:16:06.720 | to my interesting@calnewport.com address recently

01:16:09.700 | that have caught my attention.

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01:17:29.160 | So if you need life insurance, just do this right now.

01:17:33.720 | Go to ladderlife.com/deep,

01:17:36.720 | and you can put in your information

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01:17:48.340 | So if you have a family

01:17:49.180 | and you don't have enough life insurance,

01:17:51.140 | just go do that right now.

01:17:52.440 | Put that on your to-do list, do it,

01:17:55.960 | and then get on with the rest of your day.

01:17:58.060 | Also wanna talk about our friends at stamps.com.

01:18:03.820 | The holiday season is coming up.

01:18:05.220 | I'm already stressed even just imagining

01:18:07.940 | waiting in the interminable lines

01:18:10.200 | at the Tacoma Park Post Office.

01:18:12.540 | It's right down the street from us here at our Deep Work HQ.

01:18:16.700 | This is why I am happy that stamps.com exist.

01:18:21.700 | Stamps.com is your one-stop shop

01:18:24.880 | for all your shipping and mailing needs.

01:18:28.820 | For more than 20 years,

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01:18:40.240 | right from your computer,

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01:18:47.160 | So you can use stamps.com to print postage

01:18:49.720 | wherever you do your business.

01:18:51.040 | All you need is a computer and a printer.

01:18:53.360 | If you need a package pickup,

01:18:54.480 | you schedule it right there through the stamps.com dashboard.

01:18:57.760 | You print the postage right on your home computer.

01:18:59.900 | You just tape it right on there.

01:19:01.120 | It's the way to do all of your mailing needs

01:19:03.140 | without having to go to the post office.

01:19:06.640 | This is useful even if you're doing a small amount

01:19:08.560 | of mailing your company or running a big online business

01:19:10.600 | that sends a lot, stamps.com is what you need.

01:19:13.000 | So this holiday season, trade late nights for silent nights

01:19:17.040 | and get started with stamps.com today.

01:19:20.000 | If you sign up with promo code DEEP,

01:19:23.100 | you will get a special offer that includes a four-week trial

01:19:25.760 | plus free postage and a free digital scale,

01:19:28.060 | no long-term commitments, no contracts.

01:19:31.320 | Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone

01:19:34.260 | at the top of the page and enter the code DEEP

01:19:37.440 | to get those special offers.

01:19:39.640 | All right, final segment of the show

01:19:43.700 | is the mail bag segment.

01:19:45.980 | So for over a decade now,

01:19:49.200 | I've maintained this email address,

01:19:50.500 | interesting@calnewport.com,

01:19:52.520 | where I've solicited my readers and listeners

01:19:54.240 | to send me interesting things they think I might like.

01:19:57.880 | I feel bad that there's so much cool stuff that comes in,

01:20:00.400 | so much more than I have time to actually write about

01:20:02.480 | or turn into articles or book chapters.

01:20:03.960 | So we introduced this segment so we could walk through

01:20:06.420 | a selection of some of the cooler things

01:20:07.840 | that have come into my interesting inbox in recent weeks.

01:20:12.440 | All right, let's get started with item number one.

01:20:15.000 | Now, again, if you're watching this on YouTube,

01:20:17.160 | youtube.com/calnewportmedia,

01:20:20.160 | you will see what I'm talking about.

01:20:21.960 | If you're listening to this,

01:20:23.760 | links to everything I'm talking about are in the show notes.

01:20:26.920 | And the first thing I wanna talk about

01:20:29.280 | was sent to me by Chris,

01:20:30.820 | and it has to do with augmented reality.

01:20:35.220 | So on this show, I had made this prediction

01:20:38.400 | that the major upcoming technology revolution

01:20:41.840 | that not enough people are talking about

01:20:43.280 | is gonna be the elimination of physical screens in our life.

01:20:48.280 | Augmented reality tools are going to put digital screens

01:20:51.640 | into our world.

01:20:52.480 | The computation behind what we're seeing on the screens

01:20:55.400 | is gonna happen in the cloud.

01:20:57.520 | The entire consumer electronics industry as we know it

01:21:00.240 | is going to be drastically reduced.

01:21:03.240 | We don't need laptops, phones, televisions, desktops.

01:21:08.240 | When all of that can be done

01:21:09.720 | with a single augmented reality device,

01:21:13.760 | you're gonna have a small number of companies

01:21:15.380 | become more valuable than anything in the history,

01:21:18.800 | probably, of the economy,

01:21:19.760 | and huge companies go out of business.

01:21:21.440 | All right, so Chris sent me an example from Twitter.

01:21:25.120 | So this is a screenshot from a video that was on Twitter

01:21:28.400 | of some of the next steps towards this reality coming true.

01:21:32.160 | So if you're looking at this online, watching the video,

01:21:35.680 | the picture you'll see on the screen is of a laptop,

01:21:38.780 | but surrounding the laptop

01:21:40.480 | is three very large monitor screens.

01:21:45.000 | And this is all in a sort of standard office environment

01:21:48.320 | with fluorescent lights or what have you.

01:21:50.860 | In this scene, those giant monitor screens

01:21:53.880 | do not exist in the real world.

01:21:55.480 | They're added there through augmented reality.

01:22:00.240 | Now, what this is is a demo of the new Oculus product,

01:22:03.280 | the Quest 2 Pro.

01:22:05.680 | And this is a early form of augmented reality,

01:22:10.560 | which is not directly adding these screens

01:22:14.960 | into your field of vision

01:22:16.440 | in the way that a Microsoft HoloLens

01:22:19.080 | or a Magic Leap goggle would do.

01:22:21.680 | This is actually using the Quest 2's

01:22:24.080 | pass-through, real-time pass-through camera feature.

01:22:26.200 | So actually the user here

01:22:28.220 | has a full virtual reality helmet on.

01:22:31.320 | There's a camera in front of this virtual reality helmet.

01:22:34.040 | They are seeing what's in front of them

01:22:36.680 | filmed by this camera.

01:22:38.280 | So there's a helmet that's blocking their view

01:22:41.960 | of what's in front of them,

01:22:42.800 | but the camera is showing what's in front of them

01:22:45.000 | virtually on the virtual reality screen.

01:22:47.240 | So it's as if they're not wearing the helmet itself.

01:22:50.160 | And then the Quest is adding these virtual screens

01:22:53.280 | onto that real-time video feed.

01:22:55.460 | This of course is not practical, right?

01:22:59.360 | We're not in the office or walking around

01:23:01.200 | gonna put on a full virtual reality helmet

01:23:03.720 | when we wanna add screens to the world around us.

01:23:06.200 | But as Margaret Zuckerberg has explained

01:23:08.560 | in recent interviews,

01:23:09.840 | there is a lot of logic behind what they're doing here.

01:23:13.660 | It is much, much easier to add virtual elements

01:23:16.420 | to a video stream than to actually literally add them

01:23:19.280 | using a wave guide into what you're seeing right now

01:23:21.360 | through transparent glasses.

01:23:22.560 | So they're mastering this technology

01:23:25.700 | in this much easier context

01:23:27.480 | of their virtual reality helmets,

01:23:29.520 | but their goal, and he's very clear about this,

01:23:31.320 | is to move from this into actual glasses

01:23:34.400 | where these elements are being added to what you see.

01:23:36.600 | So you're seeing the world

01:23:37.920 | and these are being added to what you see.

01:23:40.320 | Facebook has a big collaboration with Ray-Ban right now

01:23:42.760 | as they're working on the physical form of these glasses.

01:23:46.040 | So don't sleep on what Zuckerberg is up to over there.

01:23:49.460 | They talk a lot about the metaverse,

01:23:51.120 | but this is where the real money is gonna be.

01:23:53.320 | And he knows it, and I think the strategy

01:23:55.160 | of using virtual reality as a way

01:23:57.020 | to master augmented reality

01:23:59.140 | while waiting for the augmented reality hardware

01:24:01.760 | to get viably usable by most people

01:24:04.560 | is a smart strategy that will probably give them a leg up.

01:24:08.120 | So as this picture captures, that future is coming.

01:24:13.440 | All right, item number two, let me switch over.

01:24:18.440 | This comes from Sten.

01:24:19.880 | So we talk a lot on the show,

01:24:22.600 | like with the Bram Stoker piece from a couple of weeks ago,

01:24:25.840 | about the impact of environment on cognition.

01:24:30.020 | Environment can affect your cognition.

01:24:33.320 | This is why we shouldn't be so casual, for example,

01:24:35.880 | about just saying, "Hey, everyone, work from home now."

01:24:38.400 | You're like, "Great, my laptop technically has access

01:24:41.000 | to all the features I have at work,

01:24:42.600 | and so I can just sit in the laundry room

01:24:44.200 | or at my kitchen table and do my job."

01:24:45.960 | It's not so simple.

01:24:47.680 | Environment matters, setting matters.

01:24:49.800 | It's why my "New Yorker" piece from 2021

01:24:53.400 | about work from near home,

01:24:55.320 | I talked about all of these writers

01:24:57.120 | who technically were working from home,

01:24:59.640 | but found really eccentric locations near their home

01:25:02.080 | to actually do their work, because setting matters.

01:25:05.760 | So Sten showed me, or what he sent me here

01:25:08.000 | was an article by Andrew Huberman,

01:25:11.520 | Stanford neuroscientist, Andrew Huberman,

01:25:13.560 | who's often cited on this show.

01:25:15.960 | He wrote an article that included a short paragraph

01:25:20.960 | on the cathedral effect, which is a scientific notion

01:25:26.000 | that captures some of what I'm talking about

01:25:28.020 | with setting affecting cognition.

01:25:30.280 | Gonna read here part of this excerpt,

01:25:32.800 | which I have up on the screen.

01:25:34.000 | So here's from Andrew.

01:25:35.100 | There is an interesting effect of workplace optimization

01:25:38.260 | called the cathedral effect,

01:25:39.480 | in which thinking becomes smaller,

01:25:42.720 | more focused on analytic processing,

01:25:45.220 | when we are in small visual fields.

01:25:49.200 | The opposite is also true.

01:25:51.320 | In short, working in high ceiling spaces

01:25:53.320 | elicits abstract thoughts and creativity,

01:25:55.260 | whereas working in low ceiling spaces promotes detailed work.

01:25:59.080 | Even relatively small differences,

01:26:00.720 | like a two foot discrepancy in ceiling height

01:26:02.840 | have been shown to elicit such differences.

01:26:05.520 | The takeaway, consider using different rooms,

01:26:08.120 | or buildings, indoors and outdoors

01:26:09.720 | to help access specific brain states

01:26:11.060 | and the types of work they favor.

01:26:12.480 | Cool effect.

01:26:13.320 | A couple of takeaways.

01:26:16.080 | Maybe this is why when I brainstorm,

01:26:18.900 | I'm trying to find the new angle to solve a proof

01:26:20.720 | or a new idea for an article or book,

01:26:22.760 | I tend to do it on foot outside.

01:26:24.980 | Now I often attribute that to the motion,

01:26:28.800 | the locomotion helps me clarify, reduce the noise

01:26:33.000 | to get to original thought,

01:26:34.120 | to recognize the signal of original thought.

01:26:36.080 | Huberman would say, yeah, but also the sky is high.

01:26:40.120 | And so you're in a better physical environment

01:26:42.000 | for brainstorming.

01:26:43.040 | And when it comes time to write,

01:26:44.660 | you know, I write in my study,

01:26:45.920 | which is dark colored and books all around me,

01:26:48.200 | maybe that's better for trying to get the details just right.

01:26:51.520 | It's a cathedral effect, I like that.

01:26:53.360 | All right, one more.

01:26:56.200 | We can't do an interesting mailbag feature

01:26:59.280 | without some obligatory focus porn.

01:27:01.880 | It's my term for finding examples

01:27:05.040 | of beautifully aesthetic, deeply aspirational examples

01:27:08.200 | of people going to radical means

01:27:10.760 | to find concentration and peace and quiet

01:27:12.880 | to actually focus and do work.

01:27:14.360 | So today's example of focus porn was sent to me,

01:27:18.240 | look, I have his name here, from Andrew.

01:27:23.160 | And, you know, I feel bad, I forgot the name of,

01:27:26.080 | I think it's Alistair Humphreys

01:27:28.160 | is I think who these examples are from.

01:27:30.400 | There's a link, there's a link in the description

01:27:34.160 | of where this comes from.

01:27:35.200 | These are some stills I took from a video,

01:27:37.120 | a beautifully shot video that this writer produced.

01:27:40.840 | And the video starts with him in his home office,

01:27:44.440 | overwhelmed and distracted.

01:27:46.480 | You know, it's edited, so he has phone calls coming in,

01:27:48.600 | he's being real distracted, and he's writing a book.

01:27:51.320 | And so he goes and retreats to this,

01:27:54.680 | I guess you would call it a shed,

01:27:56.840 | in the middle of nowhere mountains.

01:27:58.000 | The video follows him hiking.

01:27:59.320 | And the picture you're seeing now on the screen

01:28:00.820 | is of a man leaning against a house.

01:28:04.200 | It's a rock fall on a deserted mountain.

01:28:06.240 | And the rocks have been stacked to make a rock house

01:28:10.560 | or shed or whatever you would call it

01:28:12.160 | in the middle of nowhere with one window.

01:28:13.840 | And he's out there writing.

01:28:15.040 | And then the second picture I have

01:28:16.520 | is him inside this rock house.

01:28:19.360 | And it's dark except for the light

01:28:21.240 | from the one window illuminating him.

01:28:23.160 | And he has a coffee mug and a notebook

01:28:25.680 | on which he's doing his writing.

01:28:27.460 | Anyways, I recommend watching the video

01:28:30.040 | 'cause it's beautifully shot.

01:28:31.120 | I don't know what type of cameras he's using.

01:28:32.720 | It's beautifully shot, and it's gonna make you want

01:28:35.300 | to go to Iceland before you write that next report

01:28:39.040 | or try to write that next algorithm.

01:28:42.240 | So check out these pictures or that video

01:28:45.920 | if you want just a weekly burst of that nice,

01:28:49.600 | ah, feeling you get when you see people,

01:28:52.520 | at least for a little while, escaping from all the noise

01:28:54.760 | that sit in the rocks with coffee and a notebook,

01:28:58.400 | as we all wanna do from time to time.

01:29:00.300 | Jesse, if our studio was in a rock shed like that,

01:29:06.040 | I think that would be the big move right there.

01:29:09.040 | That'd be the big time move,

01:29:10.320 | is if we hiked up to a mountain like that,

01:29:12.320 | and that's where we recorded from.

01:29:14.600 | I think that's what would make this show,

01:29:16.400 | I think, really sink in for the audience.

01:29:18.960 | Like these guys are for real.

01:29:19.900 | I mean, it'd be inconvenient

01:29:21.080 | 'cause we'd have to hike for hours every day.

01:29:22.680 | - Yeah, bring up firewood during the wintertime.

01:29:24.720 | - Just a fire going.

01:29:26.280 | I have a fire in my study.

01:29:27.640 | - Oh yeah, you've mentioned that.

01:29:28.960 | - Yeah, I got a gas fireplace,

01:29:30.200 | so I can turn on flames when I wanna be in winter mode.

01:29:35.200 | But this guy is big time to me with his rock.

01:29:37.240 | - It is Alistair Humphreys.

01:29:38.560 | - Alistair Humphreys, okay, excellent.

01:29:40.720 | All right, everyone, well, that's enough for today.

01:29:43.360 | That's the end of our episode.

01:29:44.880 | Thank everyone who sent in your questions.

01:29:46.280 | Go to the survey link in the show notes

01:29:48.420 | if you wanna submit your questions

01:29:50.720 | for consideration on the show.

01:29:52.840 | YouTube.com/CalNewportMedia

01:29:55.700 | to watch videos of full episodes

01:29:57.400 | and select segments like the mailbag we just did.

01:30:01.080 | We'll be back next week with a new episode of the show.

01:30:04.280 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:30:07.200 | (upbeat music)

01:30:09.780 | (upbeat music)

01:30:12.360 | (upbeat music)

01:30:14.940 | (upbeat music)

01:30:17.520 | (upbeat music)

Ep. 219: The Deep Reset And Intentionally Reconfiguring Your Life

Chapters