So I think we should just get rolling and start as I like to with a deep dive. The title I want to use for today's deep dive is the question, did cavemen use to do list? I know caveman is an out of date term, but I like the way it sounds.

A little pithy title, so we'll be a little anachronistic there. This deep dive is about an article that I recently published in the New Yorker. I will put on the screen now for those who are watching the episode at youtube.com/CalNewportMedia at the very least so we can feature this really cool graphic that Calum Heath put together for the article.

They sent me a black and white draft of this when he was still working on it. I think it's cool. For those who are listening, it's a graphic where two knowledge workers have tipped the desk over and one of them is holding a spear and they're looking over the desk and it's a little bit like a paleolithic savanna type situation with some gear out there and it's all digitized.

It's a cool piece of artwork. Here's the official title of this latest article, What Hunter-Gatherers Can Teach Us About the Frustrations of Modern Work. The pub date on this is November 2nd, so it came out somewhat recently. This is a bit of a beast of an article. I think it weighs in at 5,000 words.

I'll talk a little bit about this in a second. It wasn't the easiest article to figure out how to structure, but once I did, I think it made sense. I want to hone in on this deep dive, though, at the heart of it. The motivating premise here was a thought experiment.

It went something like this. Humans existed in a hunter-gatherer style scenario for about 300,000 years until we get to the Neolithic Revolution, which brings in agriculture and animal husbandry. From there, we get surplus of crops, we get surplus income, we get capital growth, the cities, the modern civilization. Everything comes out of that.

That's 15,000 years. That's a very recent piece of our history. I had this idea, why don't we go back and look at what work meant for our ancestors? For that first 300,000 years before modernity as we know it emerged, because 300,000 years is a long enough period of time that we can assume there's some sort of adaptation going on.

The ways that we approached "work" during the Paleolithic were ways that we can argue that maybe we have some inclination towards as a species. My idea was, let's understand a deep history of work, what work meant for most of our species' history, then compare that to, in particular, knowledge work today.

That is the subclass of the working population that sits at computer screens most of the day. Where we find big differences between how we were adapted to work and how we're working today might be places where we find sources of frustration or stress. That when we find ways where our current work is really out of sync with what we did for most of our species' histories, this might be a great way of identifying pain points.

Places where we're generating friction with our fundamental nature. In other words, this is a high-concept premise. From the deep history of work, we might get some reform ideas for the way we work today. That was the premise. How do we figure this out? How do we figure out what work was through most of our species' history?

Here I make the argument in the piece, starting with the work of Richard Lee in the 1960s, "Journeying to the Dobie Region of the Northwest Kalahari Desert." I introduce this notion that, starting with that pioneering work in the 1960s, anthropology has learned a lot from extant hunter-gatherer groups, especially in the mid-20th century, before most of these disappeared.

With CARE, they were able to learn about the functioning of a hunter-gatherer socioeconomic group from extant tribes, anthropological study of extant tribes, and from that gain some insight into what life might have been like from a work perspective in the early history of our species. A whole lot of the beginning of this article is just getting into this movement within anthropology and establishing that this is something they figured out how to do in anthropology.

I want all of this to be taken with a big grain of salt. This is more a thought experiment than rigorous science. All of the anthropologists I talked to or read are very careful about... You're not seeing, for example, lost tribes from a Paleolithic past. Modern hunter-gatherer communities are their own thing.

They're modern. They have their own interactions with the world. This is not observing a time capsule of time past. But what you can figure out, this is what anthropology has uncovered, what you can figure out by looking at extant tribes is just getting down to the economy of how hunting-gathering works.

What's the effort involved? How does it break down socially? What is life like where you have to gather your calories not through agriculture, but through going out and hunting and/or gathering? There's some care to be taken here. But I thought it would be fun to do. I got into this.

I read a bunch of books, read a bunch of papers, talked to a bunch of people, and I ended up identifying three things to focus on, three places where the way we work today is quite different than the way we used to work throughout most of our species' history.

Let's scroll down. As you can see, if you're watching on the YouTube, it takes a lot of words to get to where we are now. Here are the three observations I made. The first has to do with what's known as the immediate return economy. This is drawing from the work of an anthropologist named James Woodburn.

This is this notion that in most hunter-gatherer context, the reward for a food-gathering effort was immediate. So the quote here, "People obtain a direct and immediate return from their labor. They go out hunting or gathering and eat food obtained the same day or casually over the days that follow." There's some argument if you look at the planning centers of our brain, we can see that reflected in the way that our planning action reward loops function in our brain.

Here's what we're going to do. Let's make a plan. Let's execute the plan. We get reward from that plan. We update the state of our brain. We move on to what's next. So our brain likely fits this pattern of, let's go do this. We're done with this. Here's the reward.

That, of course, is quite different than the way work unfolds in modern knowledge work. As I point out here, in office life, our efforts rarely generate an immediate reward. When we answer an email or attend a meeting, we're typically advancing in fits and starts. Long-term projects that may be weeks or months away from completion.

The modern knowledge worker also tends to juggle many different objectives at the same time, moving rapidly back and forth between them throughout the day. So this idea of, I have nine or ten ongoing conversations in my hyperactive hive mind inbox, servicing seven or eight ongoing projects, is really out of sync with the immediate return economies of most of our past, where it was, we need some food.

All I'm doing now is hunting or gathering. Now I'm done with that activity. Here's the reward. Here is the food. So juggling many different things at the same time, constantly switching back and forth without immediate rewards, like we do in knowledge work, that is out of sync with the planning reward, the planning action reward loops that most of our species history we were using.

All right, let's look at the next point out of the three. Right here, another place where work and hunter-gatherer societies differs from our modern efforts is the degree to which the intensity of our work varies over time. So here I'm quoting Mark Dybul from University College London, who did a study in 2019.

They went to spend time among the Ajta people of the northern Philippines. It's an interesting community because it split at some point in the relatively recent past. Some of this community is rice farming. Some of this community persists with hunting and gathering. So you can do this apples to apples comparison, the same people in the same environment with the same culture.

And so they're really good target for studying how much work is required, for example, how much effort is required in hunting, gathering versus farming, because all these other variables are head constant. So that's why Mark Dybul and his team went out there. But one of the things he pointed out in his paper and confirmed to me or elaborated to me when we talked, is that the amount of time the hunter and gatherer spent versus their rice farming brethren is not the full story.

What also matters is how work and leisure was distributed throughout the day. And so the farmers, he pointed out, engaged, and I'm quoting him here, in monotonous, continuous work. The foragers, by contrast, had many more breaks interspersed throughout their daily efforts. Dybul talked about spending time with a group that was fishing from among the forager group.

And he said, there's long breaks. You know, the fish aren't biting. Let's take a nap. OK, now we're going to fish some more. Now we're resting. Hunting excursions. It's not like you were hunting all day. They would go into the forest at the heat of the day. You might just rest.

Maybe you weren't finding a good trail. So he really emphasized with the hunting gatherer group, intensity was up and down. Intense periods, non-intense periods. If we compare this to modern knowledge workers, we, of course, find something very different. Modern knowledge workers, and I'll quote myself here, adopt the factory model in which you work for set hours each day at a continually high level of intensity without significant breaks.

So we are used to this idea that we have work hours. During work hours, we're always going. If there's not a meeting to attend, there's an email to answer or a task that we're behind on. So like the rice farmers from that study, we're constantly working all day long at an intensity level that's that's remains consistently high.

Our ancestors for 300,000 years had intensity levels go up and down, up and down. My final point of difference, concerns, and I'll quote myself here, the nature of work, of the work occupying our time then and now. So I go into a lot of detail here about how skilled hunting and foraging activities were and how much training would go into mastering the art of, let's say, hunting big game.

Or that the knowledge you would have to have a horticulture in your area to successfully gather enough calories to be useful for the effort. And so a lot of the activity, the work activity in our past would have been highly skilled. So we'd be used to that. This is something hard and I did it and I can feel proud about it.

And I pointed out in modern knowledge work, though modern knowledge work is skilled in the sense that it requires high levels of education, and skill we are, and I'm quoting myself here, increasingly drowned the application of such talents in a deluge of distraction. So though we maybe have all these skills we were trained with, more and more of our day is doing, let's say, communication.

It's in meetings, it's sending emails back and forth, ad hoc messaging, administrative work for other units within our organization. And when we do get a chance to try to do something skilled, we're going to try to write that code or put together the strategy memo. We can't enjoy the feeling of pure application of skill like we would have in our past, because we also have to interrupt that once every six minutes to send a message over here or to join into a Slack message over there.

So I said, this is a big point of difference. We were used to back then, I'm going to go start a fire and it's wet, and I'm just use a string bow and I just really know the materials in the woods and how to make this work. And it's this hard thing and there's a satisfaction and completion.

We just don't have that nearly as much anymore in our modern work. All right, so we can summarize those three points. We can say, what's the difference? We do more stuff now. So we're working more, we have more stuff on our plate than we did in our ancestral past.

We work at a continually high pace as opposed to a very natural pace like we did in our past. And we don't prioritize skill or quality or producing really hard things at the height of our skill today in the way that a lot of the efforts we would have done in our past would have been much more intense application of well honed skills.

And so if we want to make our work today, closer to what it was there, and that's a really fraught statement. So let's put a pin in that for now. You could summarize that as we should work less at a natural pace while obsessing more over the quality of what we produce.

And so the goal here in this argument is not that we want to be like our paleolithic ancestors. This is not like paleo productivity, though I do think that's a catchphrase you could probably sell a lot of books with. What it is instead is about being careful about how we shape our modern world, that we don't have direct friction or points of conflict with our fundamental adaptation.

So, for example, you don't have to try to eat exactly like we would have eaten 300000 years ago to recognize that our body is not used to or adapted to tons of refined sugar. So maybe I shouldn't eat tons of refined sugar. We don't need to go obsess about exactly what nuts our paleolithic ancestors would have eaten or eat meat raw or something like this, but maybe not eat a lot of sugar.

That makes a lot of sense. Well, it's something similar here. If we can find big points of conflict between what work was and what it is today, it's not that we're going to go dress in furs and work in caves, but we can try to excise from our modern work particular properties or attributes that are in conflict with our fundamental adaptation.

And so in the piece, I do get into like what those adaptations might look like. Shifting, for example, here's examples from the article, shifting towards pole systems of task allocation where you work on one thing at a time. And then when you're done, you pull a new thing in to work on.

Cavemen didn't have pole systems, right? But that would be a approach to workload that is much more compatible with our wiring because in our past, we typically did one thing at a time. We didn't have 30 things ongoing. So offloading all of this concurrent work to an external system and having individuals work on one thing at a time is a thoroughly modern way of working.

But it is attuned to our thoroughly old wiring as humans. What about working at a more natural pace? Well, that would require breaking free of the factory surveillance model of here is your hours to work. During those hours, you need to be working. We will be surveilling you either in person.

Are you at your desk or digitally? Are you answering my emails? Are you answering slacks to make sure that you're not slacking off? We would have to move away from that model to get to something that's more natural and varied. There are people and places that do this in modern knowledge work.

In this article, I point to an article I wrote last year for The New Yorker about results only work environments. It's a work philosophy where you're only evaluated on what you produce. There are no expectations about when and where you work. In fact, it's encouraged for you to be self-optimizing in that way.

Maybe the afternoons you're off doing soccer games with your kids and it's Sunday mornings, you like to work, whatever. It doesn't matter about it. These type of philosophies exist. I think one of the reasons why they're successful where they're applied is because it allows the pace of your work to be more natural.

Some days more intense than others. Some part of the days you're going hard. Some days you're taking off the afternoon because the focus is on the results that's allowed. That puts us more in tune with our ancient wiring. I mean, again, it's not let's have a schedule like a caveman.

It's let's have a thoroughly modern approach to work that doesn't directly conflict with the way that we're wired. What about the skill? Well, this comes down to, again, the constant distraction. So when we move towards a notion of work like the types of notions I write about in a world without email, where we have structure around communication and collaboration, it's not ad hoc back and forth messaging, thereby freeing up long periods of time where you can actually focus at the thing in front of you without having to tend to ongoing conversations.

So all of these type of changes take modern work and make it, again, much more compatible with our brain because now it's I'm doing this hard thing till I'm done and I can get that satisfaction. All these type of changes, of course, are hard. Switching to a poll system, that's a big deal.

That feels eccentric in most contexts, but I think it's a good idea. As I documented, results only work environments are difficult to get right. They take a huge amount of training and buy in from people at the top. And as I write about in a world without email, moving away from the hyperactive hive mind is no easy task.

It's a convenient way to collaborate. To replace it with alternatives is a pain. So this article is meant to maybe give us one more point of motivation for actually making these type of hard changes. I'll leave you with the way I end this article. So I say we're built to work, but not this way.

In the conclusion of his paper and his time spent among the Johansi, Lee argued that through most of our species histories and most of the environments in which we have lived, hunting and gathering was a well-adapted way of life. Perhaps the time has come to demand something similar from the types of work that take up so much of our time today.

So there we go, Jesse, 5,000 words of lots of stuff. Yeah, cool image. Yeah, isn't that cool picture? Yeah. Yeah. So you don't go on social media. When you're in deep work sessions, do you get the urge to check your texts or check email? Yeah. So you get that?

Yeah. Do you get it a lot? Yeah. Well, it's typically at the beginning of the sessions versus like once you get going, it's okay. But I think it's the same as resistance to going to the gym or exercising. Right. Our brain, rightly so, is a jealous protector of energy.

We've got to be careful about our calories and how we expend it. So, you know, why do we feel procrastination about going to the gym or exercising? It's often because our brain is thinking, what are we going to do? We're going to go over here and like move these heavy things and burn all these calories for no reason.

Like we're not building something. We're not hunting something. Nothing. We just have a tangible outcome and we have to overcome that natural instinct. And then once we get going and exercising, we feel good about it. Deep work is the same way. Our brain is like, I don't want to expend all of these calories cogitating.

Like what are we thinking about here? Like we're not figuring out a plan to get away from the tiger. So I think we feel a real resistance to deep work. And that's why my arguments for what you do to be better at deep work sessions is you have to have a steadfast rule.

There's just no context switching. If you want a context switch, you want to look at email, you want to look at text. It's not deep work. So do something else or don't pretend like you are. Don't even have exceptions. Like that's just what it is. So don't even give yourself the option.

And then have a scheduling philosophy. So it's this is when I do deep work. And we have a question about that coming up later. And then add rituals around the two. Get this coffee, go to this room. I have a different location. All of that is basically trying to trick our instinct, which is not in this article, but I think it's a good point.

We are not wired for deep work. That's pretty artificial. I mean, we are hijacking sophisticated components of our brain that were meant for doing things like constructing and evaluating plans or simulating the minds of other people so we can do complex social interactions. We're hijacking that to do symbolic abstract thinking.

And this was not a big part of the Paleolithic, trying to figure out a complex abstract strategy. Right. Yeah, I've heard you say that stuff a bunch, but I always like hearing it more. Yeah, it's hard. Deep work is hard. But maybe these type of things will make it easier.