All right, so we got a question here, not really a name. This person's name is supposedly Deep Work vs. Study and Recall. So I don't know, maybe it's a foreign name. Oh no, here's a name, it's down here. Arnav. Okay, he signed the message. That's better. All right, Arnav says, "Hi Cal.

In the book Deep Work, you said that working for hours with high intensity is necessary for producing, thriving, and learning new things, but in your Red Book," which is How to Become a Straight A Student, "you said don't work for more than about an hour or 50 minutes at a time.

These ideas have confused me. I want to know when to use Deep Work in a student life." Well, Arnav, the key to understanding this discrepancy, the 50 minute to an hour suggestion from Straight A Student and all the case studies of people doing Deep Work for long periods of time is that Deep Work for long periods of time have a natural ebb and flow of intensity.

So there's periods in which you're like really locked in and then you let the intensity ebb, and then you lock back in again really hard, then you let the intensity ebb. I mean, if you sat there and could monitor the mental exertions of a computer programmer, for example, this is what you would see.

There's going to be periods where they're really trying to hold all the pieces of this algorithm together so they can, "I want this to work, right? So I've got to do this just right." And that's really high intensity. And then there's the, "I'm running, compiling the code, you know, waiting for the debugging messages and the intensity drops." And Straight A Student, that 50 minute to an hour rule is talking about the specific highly intense activity of doing active recall studying.

It's a really intellectually demanding thing where you're trying to replicate from scratch whatever the information is that you're trying to learn. You replicate it from scratch without looking at notes as if you were lecturing a class. That's at the core of how I recommend in that book cementing knowledge.

That's super high intensity. That's the computer programmer trying to get the, writing the algorithm, has to get it just right. And there I was recommending about 50 minutes to an hour because you have to give your brain a break. You would give it 10 minutes, then come back into it again.

So if you're a student that's studying for three hours, what you're probably doing is 50 minutes high, 10 or 15 minutes low, 50 minutes high, 10 or 15 minutes low. And that's how you put those two things together. So deep work in general ebbs and flows, active recall is a particular deep work activity that is incredibly focused.

And so you can only sustain that for so long without having to have a breather. The key thing to remember though, is what do you do when your energy, you're in an ebb, you've been doing active recall for 50 minutes. Now you're taking a 10 minute break, you're coding, you were focused in really hard, but now you're waiting for your code to compile and you have five minutes.

The thing I always come back to is if you're going to have to take a break from what you're doing, make sure that whatever you consume, whatever you encounter, make sure that it's not emotionally salient. So something that's going to get you emotionally activated and not very specifically related to the type of work you're doing.

So in other words, no Twitter, no email. If you go on Twitter or Instagram or Tik Tok or what have you, while you're waiting for the code to compile, you might see something that really activates your emotions and that's going to induce a much more severe context switch, which means it's going to take longer to get back to your code.

Similarly, if you go and check your email, you're going to see a lot of open loop obligations that are related to work, but not exactly what you're working on. And that's going to hijack your brain. It's going to take a long time to context switch away from that as well.

So during those ebbs, nothing that's emotionally salient, nothing that is sort of highly relevant, but not quite the same as the work that you're currently doing. I recommend looking at baseball news. That's been my go-to. I'm glad baseball is back and it is not emotionally salient and it is not related to work.

And that has been good for me for sure. Now, Jesse, I'm in the sort of news break right now because I have like a lot of work going on and sort of high like scheduling anxiety, but it raises my anxiety floor. And so I'm basically saying the only news I'm consuming right now is baseball news.

And it's been great. Actually it's really kind of helped tamp down the sort of anxiety floor a little bit. When you have that instinct of, I want to just see what's going on, they say, let me just go look at, you know, how this prospect is progressing. Actually, I want you, one of your guests online to be Scott Boris.

I want to hear you talk to him. We should get Scott. Scott should represent us. Scott Boris is going to represent us to our sponsors maybe. Like, Hey, this would be Scott. All right. All right. Monk Pack. I see your offer. You're offering 30 CPM. Here's my return offer.

$20 million. $20 million if you want to be on the show. And if you don't want to pay the $20 million to be on the show, we'll walk. I'm sure there's other bar companies out there that would gladly pay it. And so $20 million and also our only sponsor would be the Washington Nationals.

So that's basically just only moves clients to the Washington Nationals. Baseball insider chat.