I just got back from a month spent up at my undisclosed location up north. I went up there in part to cultivate a quieter mind so I could think deeply about the new book I'm writing and unwind. Our nation's political news, however, had a different plan for me. It was early in my trip that we had that fateful Joe Biden debate performance.

My trip ended with the current president bowing out of the ongoing race, and somewhere in between there was an assassination attempt. In other words, for a DC resident trying to go get away from distractions, the most distracting possible stuff was happening, and it all fit exactly within the 25 days that I was up in my undisclosed location.

So I thought this was a good excuse to talk about a topic that a lot of you have actually written me about in recent days, which is how do you focus during distracting times? So that's what I want to do today. I have six pieces of advice as well as two initial caveats for thinking about the role of focus and concentration in times where there's distractions that are crossing past the normal threshold and to a place where they can be almost crippling in their ability to grab and keep grabbing your attention and drain your energy.

So focus in distracting times. Let's get concrete about what to do here. I want to start with a caveat. So the goal is not to be an automaton grimly working deeply while Rome burns around you, okay? During an acute breaking news event, while the event is still unfolding, I think it is completely fine to say, "I'm not working today," right?

If the event seems highly salient or important or historic, be it something that's happening in the larger world or an upheaval happening in your own personal life, something is happening to someone you know or to where you live or it's a weather event or whatever it is, don't try to work while it's going on.

Don't do like, "I'm kind of working, not very well, but really this other disruptive thing is going on." It's completely fine to say, "I am going to figure out what is going on. I am going to follow the news. I'm going to spend some time just processing the information," okay?

This is where you might say, "I'm going to rabbit hole on everything I can read online while this is happening." This is where you might say, "I'm just going to disappear for a few hours to go for a walk and process my emotions based on some big disruptive news I just got." That is all fine.

And in fact, the very reason why we have a hard time with this notion of like, "Hey, if something huge is happening, don't work that day," the very reason we have a hard time with that idea comes back to a concept from my book, Slow Productivity, the concept that I call pseudo productivity.

This is actually an indicator of pseudo productivity's insidious grip. What is pseudo productivity? It is the idea that we use visible activity as our primary proxy for useful effort. It's endemic throughout office and knowledge style work. It is exactly that mindset that troubles us with the idea of, "I'm going to take a break from work because something big is happening." Because in a pseudo productivity regime, all that matters is visible activity, so it is very risky and visible to not be doing visible work.

However, if you embrace slow productivity, like I argue in my book, Slow Productivity, you care much more about quality results over time. And in that context, you realize, "I can't make any reasonable progress towards anything quality while this huge breaking news event is happening today, so why would I even bother trying?" When you care about productivity at a big time scale, it's not that difficult.

It's not that avant-garde or radical to say, "Something big just happened, so let me focus on that and not work at all." All right? So that's my first caveat. During the immediate aftermath of a big event or during breaking news itself, slow productivity says, "It's fine not to work," and in fact, you're just doing a show, you're putting on a show if you try to.

So all the advice I have going forward is not about when something's acutely happening, but the days after, right? It's not like in my example, oh, there's this disastrous debate happening. It's the three days after, four days after, five days after, where now it's just chatter, chatter, chatter. The acute thing's not happening.

Now it's just people making things up, people having ideas, prognostication, rumors, and leaks, right? That is where you can have this long-term destabilization of your focus. That's where I want to focus. All right. Now, let me, again, before we get to the six pieces of advice, let me give you a foundation for the six pieces of advice that are going to follow.

I want to give you two quotes from a book. It's influential to me. Winifred Gallagher's 2009 book, Wrapped, R-A-P-T. Two key quotes from Gallagher that are going to sort of set the foundation for the advice that follows. Quote number one, "Life is the sum of what you focus on." Quote number two, "Living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the time.

Rather, it's about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there." Gallagher is hitting the foundation of the advice that follows, which says, "Your experience of the world is determined by what you pay attention to." So especially during periods where there are many things to pay attention to that are going to give you a grim or urgent or anxiety-producing understanding of the world, this is when it's most important to be very careful about your attention, to treat your mind like a private garden and not let all of these diversionary weeds take root.

All right. So with that caveat and foundation in mind, six pieces of advice for focusing during distracted times. Tip number one, go into what I call newspaper mode. And what I mean by newspaper mode is I'm actually imagining, for the sake of an example, earlier time periods in which the printed newspaper was your only mode of receiving new information about anything happening outside of your immediate vicinity.

Let's think, for example, like colonial America, 18th century America, Benjamin Franklin times. There was newspapers, right? The news would come in, they would print what they had, you could read the paper, whatever the primary paper, maybe there was two competing papers in your colonial town. Now you knew everything you could learn that day about what was going on around the country and the world.

And there was really no new information to get until the next edition of the paper came out. That's the mode you should go into during distracting news periods in our modern times as well. Here is going to be my sort of daily ingestion of relevant information. Outside of that, I'll be okay.

I can let everything else aggregate, be filtered and thought about before that, and then the next day I can check in once again with what's going on. If that was good enough for Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson during the ultimate American breaking news event, which was incipient revolution against the Brits, then it's good enough for you today, trying to know what's going on with a presidential campaign.

People get nervous about this, but remember, you're not Anderson Cooper. You don't need to have like this up to the minute breaking news. I've heard this rumor I'm interviewing. I think people feel like they're cable news producers when these breaking news events hold. They're gathering all this information as if they're in front of an audience trying to help people make sense of things.

You're not Anderson Cooper. The world will be okay if you're not completely up to speed on what's going on with a presidential campaign to which you have no direct impact or control. So you'll be okay. Social media makes people feel like they can be breaking news producers. You don't need to be.

All right. Tip number two, move up the information food chain. So remember back in school, they used to talk about the food chain and it was sort of pyramidal. You had this sort of base of a really big base of algaes and plants that survive off of sunlight and convert it to energy.

And then you had smaller things like in the ocean, you would have smaller things like krill, et cetera, that would eat the algaes. And there's like a lot of them, but less. And then slightly bigger fish would eat those and a bigger fish would eat those. And as you moved up the food chain, you got less and less animals.

It was sort of like concentrating the original energy. I think about online information in the same way. At the bottom, the digital information equivalent of algae is just chatter on social media. It's just lots of information, a lot of angling for clout or for attention of all sorts of like mixed quality, huge amounts of redundancy.

It's just sort of these massive proverbial algae mats of just stuff. And then as you move up the information food chain, this information gets digested and reconstituted into larger sort of more highly caloric sources, if we're going to be sort of follow our metaphor here. So you have like everyone just, I saw this, what about this?

What's going on? A lot of people's opinions. And then maybe that gets aggregated in the people of more influence, but are still kind of making takes based on what they're seeing. And then that itself gets integrated into news articles to do all sorts of other sorts of verified fact checking.

And then there's sort of the analysis pieces that are reading those articles and you sort of move up this food chain and things get more processed and more clarified and more purified. Move up the information food chain during these periods of breaking news. Don't read the algae mass of just nonsense.

That means TikTok, that means Twitter, that's going to be Instagram, that's good. That you need higher quality, more concentrated calorie sources for what you're going to consume. All right. So go higher quality. So that's probably going to mean major newspapers. Maybe you have like an independent media source you really trust, like a particular commentator who has a newsletter or a podcast and you have a relationship with that independent news source.

So like you have one of those, maybe one or two major newspapers that you're sampling some articles from. You want the higher quality stuff during breaking news. Because it's smaller, it's more self-contained. You can't follow that like you can the lower quality, lower caloric sources that there's just endless.

If there's endless mats of this information, you can swim among that algae forever. There's only so many, you know, your independent news source that you trust. This is their newsletter they did today. That's it. The newspaper you're following, here's their three articles on this. That's it. So it's not as conducive to being lost for extended periods of time and consumption.

Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're going to like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. All right. Tip number three, seek out flow states. What I mean by that is seek out activities, both professional and personal, that you can get lost in.

Right? So like creative projects, going out on adventures, getting lost in a movie or a good book, playing board games with others, athletic pursuits and training, et cetera. Find ways to get lost in what you're doing, to enter what my Haley Chicks at Mihaly would call a flow state.

Why is this important? Well, part of what happens during these breaking news moments is that your mind has a sort of anxious rumination that creates chemicals. You feel it as like a background hum of anxiety. Getting lost in an unrelated activity is like a cleaning pass. You're cleaning out those chemicals, right?

It's like we're going to come in and power wash the brain here a little bit, reset what the chemicals are going on. It's very good for, especially to get out of the cognitive shock of something really big and anxiety producing happening. It really helps you keep on top of the negative chemicals that that generates.

All right. Tip number four, implement a hard day protocol, HDP. This is something I have used many times for many different occasions in my life. We've talked about it before on the show, but it's a very pragmatic combination of ideas from both cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance commitment therapy.

Here's how it works. So there's a thing that is this acute source of stress for you. Breaking news event is an acute source of stress for you in your life. It's the hurricane is moving up the coast and some of the tracks show it coming towards your city and it's, you know, I am so anxious about this, right?

Or whatever it is. Hard day protocol says you get two check-ins a day, right? So first one is earlier in the day. You do a check-in, you get the information you have, and then you do some cognitive behavioral therapy. So you go through and you actually identify what you would call the biggest distortions in your thinking.

Well, you know, you're predicting the future here. You're exaggerating. You're looking at the worst case scenarios. You're being black and white in your thinking. So you actually push back against your thinking, point out the distortions. You sort of end the session with like, here's the reality for better, for worse.

Here's what happening. This might, this might. If this happens, it's no problem. If this happens, here's what we would do. You sort of think it through in a non-distorted, calm way. And then you shut down the thoughts on it. Your next session will be later in the day where you can open back up, check back in and do similar thoughts, pointing out distortions and ending with like, here's where I stand on this.

Right. In between those two sessions. And here's the magic. When your mind ramps up chemical induced rumination, let's think about this. Let's go back through what might happen with a hurricane. Let's go back through with what's happening politically. You say, I feel that. I hear you. But we went through this during the morning session and we ended that morning session shutting things down, pretty okay with the way things stood.

Like we had a good plan and we're going to check back in this evening. So like, even if I got something wrong in that morning session, we should be more worried than we really are. We'll figure that out in our pre-scheduled evening check-in, but right now I'm not going back to it.

This is for five o'clock whenever I've scheduled my evening check-in. And so you're able to respond to the urge to ruminate without actually ruminating on the substantive details of the thing causing anxiety. This is highly effective, especially if you're doing this for an extended period of time because it allows you to get out of the ruminative grooves getting deeper and deeper.

It confines your thinking to smaller points of time. The urge to ruminate is past quicker and it can really get you out of a cycle, this sort of cognitive cycle of like, I can't escape thinking about it. I call that the HDP or hard day protocol and I deploy it when there's particular acute sources of stress.

But it's perfect for this breaking news, persistent distraction type setting that we're talking about here. If you're having a hard time turning your attention from it, HDP it. All right, tip number five, take a break from your phone. Clearly in these breaking news moments, it's that ability to kind of keep coming back to your phone and feeding the itch to get more information that really draws out the attention to stabilizing full impact of these situations.

So this is a time if there's any to say, I need to temporarily but drastically change my relationship with my phone. At work and at home, you need to go hardcore on the phone for your method. There's a place where your phone is plugged in. If you need to use it to text someone or check messages, you go to where it's plugged in.

You need to look something up, you go to where it's plugged in. This doesn't prevent you from using your phone, but it prevents you from having it next to you. So you can't do the knee jerk check. Ooh, I'm a little anxious. Bored. Boom. I want to search. What's going on with Biden?

Where's the hurricane? What happened? Any more rumors about Trump? It's not right there for the knee jerk. You have to get up and go somewhere else to do it. Just that friction is going to greatly reduce the amount of times you're actually on that phone. During these periods of breaking news, you're having a hard time focusing.

Take all your social media apps off of your phone. Make sure that you are not logged in on Safari on your phone's browser. If you are, log out and do not click save password when you log back in. So you really want to put a lot of friction in terms of a phone-based check-in on social media.

You would have to go to the website and remember your password. If your password is easy, make it a pain and write it down somewhere that's like up in your room somewhere. Like it really is difficult for you to log in to these services on your phone, at least during these periods.

And spend more time purposely without your phone accessible at all. Drive to go somewhere for a hike and leave the phone in your glove compartment. If your car breaks down, you still have your phone, but you don't have it with you while you're on your hike. Go work at a coffee shop and leave your phone at home.

It's very unlikely. Again, this goes back to my prior warning. You're not Anderson Cooper. People don't need you to jump onto the camera because of breaking news. You will be okay if people can't reach you for 60 to 90 minutes. All right. So this is a time to drastically reduce your relationship with your phone.

Tip number six, work on something delightful. This is a perfect time to begin work on a new project. It could be personal or it could be professional. That's just exciting. Like, I just love this. This is fun. It's sort of delightful to work on. Starting a project is great because that's like the fun part, the particularly fun part.

You're just planning and reading and researching. You know, you're thinking through like, what if I started, maybe you have some sort of fun professional idea. What if I made like a, had some sort of online portfolio of like the art I'm doing. In fact, is there a way to set up something on my tablet so that I could draw each day in this program and maybe I could use something like Zapier so that I just like press a button and that gets uploaded and automatically goes and then I could have this cool portfolio that's updated automatically or you have some personal project you're really interested in.

You're like, what if I built this like really elaborate type of animatronic for Halloween? Like, well, let me start thinking about what I would need and you can go down these rabbit holes, just have something that's delightful that is completely unrelated to the breaking news that's going on and is unrelated to any other sort of urgent or stress producing part of your life.

It just gives your mind again, a cleansing state to go into. The more of these cleansing states you get into in the day, the least you let these negative chemicals sit around and stagnate and cause larger corrosion within your sort of persistent cognitive state. All right. So those are my six tips.

I'll read all six real briefly here again for how to maintain some notion of focus and cognitive health during distracting periods of sort of distracting news periods. One, go in the newspaper mode to move up the information food chain, three, seek flow states, four, implement a hard day protocol, five, take breaks from your phone and six, start working on something delightful.

So I'm sure Jesse, now that I'm home from trying to quiet my mind up north, all breaking news is going to stop and we'll enter just an extended period. You know what? For like the last few years, it just happened year after year, just happened to time with when we'd go up north.

What consistently was the thing that would inject distracted into my life? It was always the baseball trade deadline. Like for the last three years, it's been the sort of dismantling of the Washington Nationals and the big trades that were going on. And for multiple years, it was like this major injection of distraction.

I'd be like, okay, I'm up here, I'm just thinking, I'm relaxed, I'm away from it all. And then boom, we're trading Juan Soto or boom, Scherzer and Trey Turner are gone. It was like years after years, that was my main source of distraction. And this year finally, I was like, we're well along in the rebuild.

There's no like tear down blockbuster trades going to happen. Like this will finally be a calm few weeks while I'm up there and in the political universe exploded. So it's impossible. It's impossible to get away. I think one of these vacations, it was like the Delta variant of COVID.

There's always something. There's something about the mid-summer. So these are well-worn tips for me. With the hikes, as you talked about in a previous episode as well, can you bring like a pet like your dog? Yeah. That'd be great. Okay. Yeah. Or I didn't add this tip, but another tip is like, hang out with people who just like are completely disconnected from the thing you're trying to get away from like, yeah, here's my mountain biking buddies.

Like what are they? Well, they want to talk about mountain biking and like what's going to, you're going mountain biking with them. That's all they want to talk about. That's all they want to do. That's good. Like unrelated socialization. That's difficult in Tacoma Park, DC. If you're trying to get away from political news, because everyone here is like involved in politics, you know?

I mean, it's like all around this are people who work at the white house. You have like Jamie Raskin lives down the street. The Obama's former chief of staff is the other way down the street. The head of the DNC is in the same town. It's very difficult to get away from politics in this town.

So you got to find people that's, I think that's another good idea. Yeah. So hopefully that's useful. A lot of people were writing me about this. Like I'm caught up in this political stuff and there's so much news and it seems really disruptive and, and I'll tell you the more time they spend in it, the more apocalyptic they get.

I think that's just the way these information sources go. And the people who manage their attention, Winifred Gallagher style during these times, they know what's going on, but they make it through this, like it'll be okay. And so why like waste those whole periods? It was like during the pandemic, the people who were like, I'll hear what I need to hear, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time thinking about it outside of that.

Like let me just focus on the things I can control. Like okay, my business has changed, so let me focus on like this new pivot that can work during this period. I mean, I want to know vaguely what's going on with like restrictions, but I'm not following it beyond that.

I'm working on this project. I got a dog and you know what, they were way less anxiety ridden and they, and in the end things were fine. They came out of it like nothing would have been gained for them to have been like completely lost in this like information echo chamber.

They hear the information they needed was like an hour a week. What's going on now? This is what we're doing. There's a thing. Okay, great. And then let me get back to like whatever. So, you know, controlling your attention has never been more important than this digital age where it is so easy to be completely hijacked.

All right. So we've got some cool questions coming up, but before we do, let's hear from a sponsor. We actually have a brand new sponsor of the show, which I'm happy about Oracle. So AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested.

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That's oracle.com/deepquestions, oracle.com/deepquestions. I also want to talk about our friends at Notion. Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It's a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired, right? So it's an AI powered workspace where every day, everything takes care of itself.

Meetings have summaries, docs find themselves, and every question has an answer. Notion has long been used by fans of the show as a place to build sort of custom web-based tools for managing information. You can have the information that's vital for whatever you do. You can build these really intuitive, useful, different views for the data, different ways to find or manipulate the data.

I have seen everything from really big companies using Notion to build out tools for like their mission critical information to, and I get a lot of emails from people that do this, people's just building their own sort of geeked out custom task management systems using it. Notion played a big role in our relationship with our ad agency here at DeepQuestions.

They built out this great tool with it for tracking ad reads, or we could see, for example, what ad reads are coming up week by week, or we could change the view and say, give me all of the ad reads for this particular company. It gave us, we could jump to an interface then to enter in the timestamps and downloads for that particular episode.

It just was a tool that super simplified dealing with all the data surrounding our ad reads. So Notion is like incredibly versatile, but what I really like what they're doing is integrating AI increasingly native to the tool, which really makes it fun to use and it upgrades its ability.

The Notion AI tools help you turn knowledge into action. You can have it like summarize the meeting notes you're storing in there, automatically generate action items. You can ask it questions about your data stored in your various views, and it will give you those answers back. So it's really upgrading Notion to the next level.

So you can try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/cal. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com/cal and start turning ideas into action. And when you use our link, you'll be supporting our show. So make sure you go to notion.com/cal. All right, Jesse, let's get on to some questions. Who do we got first?

First question is from Krishna. I'm a copywriter and work remotely. My boss demands that I be constantly available during work. This interrupts my deep work sessions as I'm constantly getting interrupted with notifications. How can I deal with this? It'd be funny if it turned out that Krishna works for me.

Krishna, Krishna, are you doing deep work right now? Why aren't you answering me if you're doing deep work right now? You need to answer me immediately to let me know if you're doing deep work. You know what, we're going to put a standing Zoom meeting so we can talk about why you need to check in with me about whether you're doing deep work right now.

Okay, Krishna, first of all, my condolences, man, I hate that. I hate that type of management. Anyone who has read any of my books on digital knowledge work knows that that type of management is annoying and counterproductive. I'm going to give you three ideas, Krishna, just like a menu.

So depending on the reality of your work and the particular psychological makeup of this particular boss, you can see which of these options seems more realistic. One of course is the long discussed deep to shallow work ratio conversation. This goes all the way back to my book, Deep Work, where you sit down with your boss and say, hey, here's what deep work is.

Here's what shallow work is. Both of these are important. Deep work is where I do the actual copywriting, but shallow work is where you and I can discuss and we coordinate what I should be working on and I get updates and there's other administration stuff that happens. Both are important.

What's the ideal ratio of deep to shallow work for me for my job that produced the most possible value for you and the company? Let's be positive here. What's critical when you're talking about deep to shallow work ratios is that you make it clear that a session does not count as a deep work session if there's context switched in the middle of it.

So for an hour to count as an hour of deep work, it really has to be an hour of you working without also answering slacks or emails or calls. You got to kind of make that clear. The right way to talk about this, and this is drawing more from a world without email and slow productivity to get more into this, the right way to talk about this is cognitive state.

So the deep work cognitive state is defined in part by sustained focus, which allows the relevant neural networks within your brain to be activated and unrelated networks to be inhibited. And this is when you produce good work. So if you're in a state where you're checking things or responding to things, you don't have that purity of focus within your brain.

So that's not deep work session. So deep work is not determined. This is key for this discussion. It's not determined by the primary activity that you're doing during that time period. It's determined by the cognitive state during that time period. So it's got to be uninterrupted. A lot of people have reported to me that they went into having this conversation with their bosses convinced that it would be a no go because they were in an office where it was just insisted upon that you're accessible.

Like I can't see this possibly changing. It's in the DNA of my boss. And then they have this conversation and the boss is like, oh, 50/50 would be good. And they immediately accommodate you being able to work when you work deeply and not be interrupted. That people are often surprised by the magnitude of changes that happen.

These cultures that you think are entrenched in your workplaces are often arbitrary, more malleable than you think if you have the right tool for dislodging them, which is something like this, a positive metric that's about optimizing value for the company and not about you just complaining about distraction. Second idea, suggest structured check-ins.

Like, hey, I do a lot of copywriting, but there's often updates and stuff that happens. There's a lot of interaction I need to do with you, boss. So here's what we should do. We should have beginning of the day and at two o'clock these pre-scheduled real-time check-ins on the phone.

So Krishna works remotely, so it'd be on the phone or on Zoom or something. We always check in. Here's what I'm working on today. What else do I need to know? Okay, great, let's check in back again at one-thirty or two. Hey, what updates do you have for me?

Let's talk them through. Let me talk to you about what just happened. And you can make the argument that these twice-a-day check-ins are going to very efficiently keep you coordinated and actually free the boss from the burden of having these ongoing back-and-forth email-based or Slack conversations that he or she has to keep track of and they're bouncing back and forth at random times.

Remember, from the point of view of the person talking to you, from the point of view of your boss, they probably dislike these drawn-out back-and-forth conversations as much as you do because they have to keep track of it. So it might be more attractive. Like we have this very concentrated check-ins.

If I have issues, I know exactly when we're going to talk and that I can get you. I don't have to just send it off in an email and just I don't know when the response is going to come. So twice-a-day check-ins might be a solution for both parties here.

The third idea, and you can actually add this idea onto the first two. This comes from my book, A World Without Email, add a safety valve. So for almost any type of more structured communication process that you suggest, it's often useful if you think there's going to be some resistance from other people involved to put in what I call a safety valve, a way they can always reach you if they need to outside of the system's rules.

The key is to add enough friction to this that it's not something that you would easily do. For instance, here is my personal cell phone number. Now, this is really critical. I have it in do not disturb mode when I work. So I don't see text messages, but calls come through.

So if, for example, there is something really urgent that comes up before our next scheduled check-in or when I'm in the middle of a deep work session, you can just call me on my personal number. The call will come through. It's not impossible, right? So it destabilizes the fears, right?

So often it's fears of particular rare outcomes that prevent bosses from agreeing to new communication processes. What if there's emergency X? It alleviates those fears. If there was emergency X, I could call you, right? But it's high enough friction that they're not going to do it unless it's a true emergency.

If you let it be text messaging, too low friction. Bosses will be like, "Let me just text you. That's low friction. There's no social capital costs for me. I can just do it and move on with my day." But a call is high enough friction that it has to be sort of more of a legitimate emergency.

So the safety valve method works well because it's what finally helps convince like your boss or your team we can do this more structured communication because the worst case scenarios can actually happen. You can always just call me. But the friction is high enough that they basically won't. So it's like a trick.

It's a trick to get the system you want. Your boss is thinking like, "Oh, I can get them whenever I need to. It won't be a problem." But no one wants to call people. And so you end up actually getting the system for the cost of like once a week you get a call.

All right. So safety valves is the third thing to suggest. All right. Who do we got next, Jesse? Next question is from Tian. "I'm comfortable with my current job, but it's risky. It's a startup and it might not make it. Should I change jobs?" I would say don't change jobs now, right?

Because actually the best way from a career evolution perspective to leave a startup to go to something else is actually the startup failing because that's not on you and it makes you very attractive. You're like, "Oh, this is someone who has been in other startups and has had this role before.

Yeah, most startups don't work, but now they're available. Let's grab them." So you actually have more, I think it looks better and you have more leverage in the technology startup world if you came out of a startup that didn't make it as opposed to, "I left a startup when it was still rock and rolling." Then people are like, "What's going on there?

Were you not cutting it?" They're like, "We need to get someone better in here." So I would ride it out. However, take advantage of the flexible or sort of building the plane while it's in the air nature of startups to max out your career capital acquisition while there. So career capital, for those who don't know it, is a concept from my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

It is my term for your rare and valuable professional skills. Career capital is your primary tool for crafting your working life towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. Startups give you a lot of flexibility. Don't squander that flexibility by being Captain Slack. What I'm offering here is a jack of all trades.

I answer everyone's questions at all hours of the day, and it's all sort of small stuff, but I'm kind of like this useful glue that kind of helps everyone else do what they're doing. No, you want to be building up demonstrative skills. Hey, why don't I take on our API architecture?

Because that is a really valuable thing to know how to do, and I'm going to dive into that and know how to do that. I'm not going to be bothered by a lot of it. I'm doing the API architecture. I'm going to learn how to do our digital marketing.

Why don't I take that up? So use the flexibility and autonomy of startups to build up skills you think are going to be very valuable with whatever comes next, because the more rare and valuable skills you have, the more control you're going to have about the nature of your work.

All right, Jesse, who do we got? Next question is from Brendan. I'm a journalist working on my second book. My days are largely time-blocked, and I do stuff like transcribing recordings, phone interviews, some in person, research, reading, and writing. My problem is dealing with source phone calls. How can I prevent unpredictable source phone calls from interrupting my focus on other tasks?

You know, I've heard this question before. I have this issue a little bit as well. Not so much incoming source phone calls, but for a lot of my journalism, I have to set up calls and interviews, right? And what happens, this is what this reporter, I believe, is talking about.

What happens is it becomes very disruptive, because your instinct when you're asking someone to call you or do an interview with you is to be as flexible as possible. Hey, when can you do this next week? And just sort of everything that's not currently booked with a meeting or appointment is on the table.

But then you get this sort of scattershot of meetings and trips that eats up your time to consistently make deep work. Like, I can't write every morning because three mornings out of five, I have a call this morning and I have to go see this source this morning. The best thing you can do is have what I think of as like very granular ranges for when this type of stuff happens, both outgoing and ingoing.

So for example, you might say Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, any time in the afternoon is loosely left open for interviews and calls. You can tell sources, you're like, "Hey, yeah, just let me know. In fact, I'm usually always around Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday afternoons. You can just, here's my personal number.

Call me." So you're kind of directing the incoming towards those periods. And when you were scheduling meetings, outgoing meetings, "Hey, when can we talk about this?" Instead of just saying, "When are you free next week?" You say, "When are you free Tuesday through Thursday in the afternoon?" That's when I typically do this type of stuff.

This now constrains the sort of range, the territory within your schedule in which these type of disruptions happen, which means Monday and Friday, you can really go in an autonomous, undistracted way. Every single morning, you can work in an undistracted way pretty predictably. So it's not a super narrow range, like I do my calls from 3 to 3.43 on Thursdays.

And if you cannot do it then, then we will not talk. If you get that restrictive, you're going to have no sources. But if you're talking like half the week, half the days, you would be surprised, right? And sometimes maybe people have to go forward a couple of weeks for that work, but people don't care.

In fact, people like having a little bit of constraints, right? What do we really dread worse from a cognitive effort standpoint than when you get that email from someone, you're like, "Yeah, we can talk." And they say, "When is good for you next week?" You're like, "I don't know." You're talking to like 40 or 50 possible available hours, like, "Do I just pick a couple?

Do I give you every single hour that's free?" It's actually nice to have some constraints, like, "Which afternoons, Tuesday through Thursday, when in that are you free?" And now you're like, "Oh, there's two times in there I'm free." You've made my job in answering your question easier. So have those rough ranges.

That helps. I mean, I'll be doing something similar with my upcoming temporary administrative role. I will have these sort of rough ranges where I'm like, "This is when we set up. Let's meet, pick a time. When in here works for you. This is when I normally meet. You can call me any time during these periods if you have a question." I'm definitely gonna be trying something similar because I need every morning, I really want every morning, if I'm not teaching, I want every morning free for writing, and I want at least one day a week where like I'm gonna get that full day pretty autonomously working on stuff.

So I'll report back how that works, but that would be my suggestion. All right, who do we got next? - Next question's from Carolina. "At the start of every month, I look forward to your review of the books you read. I can't come close to reading five books per month, but I do enjoy reading.

My question is about reading difficult and long books. How do you suggest I read those? What's the ideal ratio of reading difficult to easy books for someone in my shoes?" - Well, first of all, Carolina, I think you probably could read five books a month. You know, again, the easiest thing to do here is stop using your phone so much.

Most people's phone usage is already right there, about five books a month worth of reading. The second thing you can do is just integrate reading as a default activity to more parts of your day. It's like what you do when you eat lunch, it's what you do at the end of the day.

I have a pretty busy schedule, but the books still sort of add up. All right, but to get to your specific question, long books, we say hard books, I'm thinking long books. They can take a lot of time. A couple things I would suggest is when it comes to difficult books, pick those that delight you.

If you make it a chore, it's gonna be very hard to get through. So if you're reading a big book, it's because you're fascinated in what that book is about. That will really help. Big books, hard books, it's good to have a regular time for those. I often do this where, you know, like I need to read a big book on like AI policy or like right now I'm reading for an intellectual biography of Thoreau, which useful context for the introduction of my new book, we're gonna be talking about Thoreau.

And like when I was on vacation, it was, that's just what I do first thing in the morning even before like my kids wake up is like get in a reading session of this book. And it's like the slow and regular, like now you just do that. And you got the slow and regular pace.

Combine the big books like shorter, funner stuff. If you're just only reading the big book and you can't read anything else till it's done, its footprint is too big and you go too long without being able to read anything else. And you encounter new books you hear about that seem fun or exciting.

You don't get to them because you're waiting for this big book to end and you're going to abandon the big book. So just have that like steady time for reading the difficult book and be okay with it taking a very long time and then like still have like fun books you're reading outside of that.

And above all, don't sweat the timing. I mean, unless you have a podcast where you actually have to report on your reading each month, no one's tracking it. So what's important is that like you're constantly engaged in books you like. Sometimes you make more progress than others, but that you're enjoying the time you're spending doing that intellectual activity as opposed to shallower intellectual activities like just looking at your phone.

So for that morning session where you read the Thoreau book, how long would, like half an hour? Yeah, like 20 minutes, half hour. Yeah, stuff adds up. So when I first got up there, I finally finished reading The Coming Wave, which is just like an AI book that everyone's reading, written by the co-founder of DeepMind.

And then I moved on to Thoreau book, yeah. And I'll probably ramp it up a little bit, you know, it just depends on the day. It'll take me a while to read, but I don't really care. I want that background though, so I can talk with more confidence about Thoreau and just sort of finishing this whole book is going to give me, give me that confidence.

All right, let's see what we got here. Oh, is it our next question, our slow productivity corner? Yes. All right, let's get some theme music. So for those who are new, we have one question every week that is relevant to my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

We call this a slow productivity corner. If you haven't checked out that book, do so. It's like the source Bible for 60% of what we talk about on this show. So check out slow productivity if you haven't. Okay, Jesse, what is our slow productivity corner question of the week?

Hi, it's from Josh. I just turned 30 and I'm getting worried. I feel like my mind doesn't fully trust the slow productivity approach. I feel like I've started too late and should have adopted these strategies five to 10 years ago. I still have high ambitions for my professional and creative life, but deep down I worry that I'm still not good enough and I'm too late.

Oh my, if 30 is too late, Jesse, we're in trouble. Yeah, we're dinosaurs. We're old men. We're old men. Look, you're not too late. The way I think it's useful to think about career and your age is the decade approach. You've got your 20s, you have your 30s, you have your 40s, you have your 50s, et cetera, right?

For most people, your 20s is just about getting on your feet, becoming an autonomous adult, having a job, holding down a job, saving a little money, having a place to live. You buy your first car, right? It's just, hey, I want to, while still just like enjoying being an adult for the first time, your 30s really, especially in like a knowledge work context, right, where jobs are more fluid and the potential promotion ladders or advancement ladders are long and go far into the distance.

Your 30s then are about, okay, now I want to like figure out my professional life, figure out, make my, like this is where I want to live, this is where I want to do, I want to be able to support myself and support my family. I want to be sort of like comfortable.

Like this is where I figure out what I want my life to actually be like. So you're 30. This is perfect. Perfect time to start thinking about slow productivity. New to it, in your young 30s, I'm going to highlight a couple of things to focus on right off the bat.

I would really start with actually principle three, obsess over quality. This is the right time to change your mindset towards. I'm going to figure out something that is really important in like what I do or what I want to do. And I'm going to master this like Jiro the Sushi Chef and Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

Reference to those who know that movie. Like now I'm going to start really caring about mastery because that obsession over mastery of something that is valuable, it could take one to three years so you really get the full rewards for that. But that's perfect timing to start this in your 30s.

That's going to be the engine for everything else. For one thing, as I talk about in my book, as you really obsess over mastery of something that's valuable, you're going to find more meaning in your work. It's a key time to find more meaning in your work because if you don't, the excitement of just I have a job from your 20s has worn off and you might stumble towards a sort of nihilistic existentialism.

So this is a good time to find meaning in your work. Two, it is going to make pseudo productivity, it's going to make this potentially sort of crippling addiction to activity for the sake of activity seem increasingly absurd. So it's just going to change your mindset. So a slower productivity approach is not going to be something you're convincing yourself to try and you're afraid of.

A slower productivity approach is instead going to become self-evident. And three, as you get good at things in your early 30s, there's your career capital, there's your flexibility. You are now in demand. Your employer doesn't want to lose you, other employers want you. Now you can start getting interesting as your 30s go on.

Where do I want to live? Now I have choices. I want to be in the countryside. I want to be, you know what, I want to live up by like the White Mountains in New Hampshire and do my job remotely and do it at 75% time. This is where if you've become excellent at what you do, people are like, okay, sure, that's what we'll do, right?

Like this is where you gain your autonomy. This is where you gain more options. So obsess over quality right now is going to give you lots of advantages. If I was going to point towards a second thing to do right now, I would say this is a great time to do lifestyle-centric planning.

If you haven't tried this exercise yet, figure out where for like, think of the second half of your 30s. Think of the right timeframe if you're 30 even right now. What do you want your day-to-day life to be like in the second half of your 30s? All aspects of your life, like where you live, the rhythm of your day, who's around you, how you're spending your time, the general characteristic of your work as well as the general characteristic of your time outside of work.

If you have specific examples of real people that you've seen in magazine profiles or documentaries or videos that resonate, integrate them into this. Get this really clear vision of your ideal lifestyle for the second half of your 30s. This is the time to do it and start working backwards from that vision.

All right. So what different things can I be moving towards now that's going to move me closer to aspects of this vision? And that's when you start building up these interesting, nuanced, bespoke, evidence-based lifestyle plans. This is a very different approach than what most people in our culture lean towards, which is working forward to a singular grand goal.

It's our instinct as Americans. I have a singular grand goal. If I do this, then my whole life will be better. And it doesn't work out that way. You're much better off having your ideal lifestyle in your 30s is the time to figure this out. And then say, okay, how am I going to work towards the aspects of that lifestyle?

That works hand-in-hand with the career capital you generate by obsessing over quality. Works hand-in-hand with that, that you begin to have some pretty interesting options that maybe are very specific to your exact job and situation. It's not some big thing, like I'm going to write a screenplay or I'm going to sell my novel.

It's very specific and boring to the outside world. But for you, it's what allows you to transform these aspects of your life to really get closer to your ideal lifestyle. So your 30 is the perfect time to think about this. But I'm glad you asked. If you haven't read it yet, though, definitely pick up Slow Productivity.

Also pick up So Good They Can't Ignore You. That will also be really useful to you right now. And with that, we'll leave it with some more theme music. All right, now we have a case study. This is where people write in to talk about them applying the type of advice we do here on the show to their specific life.

So we can see what do these ideas look like in practice. This case study comes from Old Coder, who says, "I have two scenarios to share. First, over the last few years, my job has been transitioning away from coding to management. There are also changes in the leadership of the company, and I found myself disagreeing with many of the new directions.

I had a strong urge to resign and search for a perfect job that I would truly enjoy. However, I resisted this temptation and decided to use the lifestyle-centric career planning approach instead. I reflected on my long career at this company and realized that I enjoyed coding more than management.

I was able to interview for a couple other jobs within my company. I was selected for one as a remote developer, no more managing the people, and hardly any direct communication with top tier management, much better work balance to address my priorities outside of work. Second, ever since I started listening to your podcast, I have undergone many changes in how I look at and live my life.

Over the last 10 months, with discipline, I have learned and started progressing in playing the flute. For the initial three to four months, there was almost no progress, but I kept at it. While I'm far from being a musician, I'm also not as bad as I thought I could be.

This gives me a lot of confidence that I could put discipline efforts into a hard thing and keep doing it." All right, Old Coder, this is a great example of many ideas from the sort of deep life questions that we deal with often here on the show. I'm going to point out two things here for the audience.

Notice lifestyle-centric planning, working backwards from your ideal lifestyle, not forwards towards a singular grand goal, opens up these really interesting possibilities. Now, I just talked about this in the question before this, and we're seeing an actual practical case study of these ideas in action here. What most people would do in Old Coder situation, where they're like, "Ah, man, I don't like this job," right, "I'm in management, I don't like the upper-level management, I just don't like my job," they would try to do a grand singular goal.

Like, "Let me start from scratch and become, you know, a genre book writer." You have some grand plan for how you're going to change everything and make it better all at once. What Old Coder did instead was lifestyle-centric planning, and when thinking about the professional aspects of their life, he didn't fixate on specific jobs, but on the characteristics of the work life.

And what he realized was, "I'm solitary, kind of introverted, I do like coding, I don't really like managing people, and there's a lot of friction when I have to deal with other like top-tier management people. I get really caught up on their ideas, whether they're good or not, but I don't actually have much control over them because they're a higher level.

So really, for me, more ideal work would be something where it's much more solitary and it's much more sort of focused, intellectually demanding, and sort of flexibility about how you do that work." Once he realized that, he's like, "Looking at my options, I see, 'Oh, here's a great option to move closer to that lifestyle,' I change my job away from management towards this remote developer position, I see it's available.

This might be less money. It's probably less prestigious." So it's not what shows up when you take the grand goal methodology of like, "Well, what's something cooler or impressive I can go after?" But it comes up blaring with neon lights around it when you take the lifestyle-centric approach. The other cool thing I want to point out here, which comes up in almost every discussion of the deep life, is that discipline, by which we just mean the ability to consistently work on hard things, things that are hard in the moment, but that deliver important results down the line.

That type of discipline is to fuel for everything else. Everything that goes into transforming your life requires as an input to the system that type of discipline. It's thing after thing that are kind of hard in the moment, less exciting than your phone, but you need to do long-term to move towards a deep life.

What we see here is you get better at discipline if you practice it. What a cool example. He began playing the flute, and by doing so was like, "Oh, I can learn hard things." Ten months later, I'm pretty excited where I was, even though in month one, every session was hard, I could see no results.

He is absolutely right that that translates over. That translates over to your general sense of what psychologists would call efficacy, your ability to pursue hard things and accomplish them. This is like a fantastic case study of ideas of our practical approach to the deep life in action. For those who are wondering how do I know it's a he, it's because we have parts of this.

We have correspondence to go along with these case studies and questions often that we don't read on the air. I'm not making assumptions, actually, it is a he. Let's see here. Now, Jesse, do we have a call or are we going right to the function? >> Yeah, we do.

>> All right. Let's hear it. >> Okay. >> Hi, Cal. My name is Justine from Australia, and I'm about to start a new role in a new team, but in the same company, so doing a similar role as a senior data analytics lead. I'm moving from a team that is quite structured and follows an agile ways of working with quarterly planning, two-week sprint planning, and everything's quite methodical in how the work that we do is planned out.

So I'm moving into a new team that I've heard is reactive, it's frazzled, doesn't have a structured way of planning future work. So what advice would you give to someone in my position who wants to find the right balance between being seen as a strong performer in the new role who delivers high-quality work within the required time frames without allowing myself to get sucked into the stressed out, reactive, frazzled, last-minute rush hive mind that I've heard the new team can be like just due to the lack of overall structure in how they plan their work.

Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks, Cal. >> All right, Justine, I like this question. This is also sort of a stealth, slow productivity corner question because the ideas here come straight from my book. The key thing I want you to think about here is that there's two different factors at play.

There's you wanting to produce really high-quality work that you're known for, and then there's separately from that not being socially difficult in terms of your responsiveness. These are two unrelated things. You being super responsive and really leaning into the hyperactive hive mind frazzled workflow of this team, that might be important from a I don't want to be annoying or difficult to them perspective, unrelated to whether or not you get known as a top performer that produces really good work.

So first of all, let's keep that in mind. As time goes on and you're able to produce really good stuff when you said you're going to do it, you're going to gain more and more idiosyncrasy credits in terms of how you structure and approach your work. So these are two separate things.

So what you do in the meantime to walk this balance between I don't want to be fully frazzled in the hyperactive hive mind, but I also don't want to be super obnoxious. This is a social issue, not a productivity issue. What you can do is a ramp it up over time.

So again, as you produce more, as you finish more and more stuff, that's great. You get more leeway in how you interact to, and I think this is super detailed in especially principle one and slow productivity. But two, you can move a lot of this structure that your team adopted in your last team.

You can move it onto yourself. And again, I have a whole big long book chapter about this, so I won't get too detailed now, but there are ways to move a lot of this structure from the team to the individual so you can gain some of its benefits. So this is where you get things like, for example, your own work tracking cue.

You're kind of simulating a Kanban board of waiting for working on done within just your own life and you make it transparent for everyone else. Well, my WIP, my works in progress limit here, I work on two things at a time and here they are and here's the other things you guys have brought up and here's where they are and you can see their order and I'll tell you when I pull them over there and it's transparent and you can see it so you know what I'm doing.

You can really push a lot of office hours, structure communication, lots of just again and again you're deflecting like, "Next time you're free, these hours, I'm always here. Grab me. We'll talk this through." Completely deflecting again and again ongoing conversations. You have meeting planning software where you have a bunch of little short blocks, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday afternoons.

You're like, "And if you need to grab me just individually, boom, grab any time on here that works, whatever works for your schedule." So you're just again and again deflecting them away from just, "Can't we just go back and forth now because in the moment it's easy for me to say, to send this email, then it's off my plate, obligation, hot potato, you're it." You again deflect these type of back and forth the real time.

This is not necessarily a bad thing from their perspective. People just want clarity like, "Okay, whatever. The thing is I'm stressed because I have this question about this thing we're working on. And if I send you an email, it's off my plate and that's great until it comes back to me, then it's on my plate again.

Then I'll send you another email and it's off my plate and I'll be happy again. That's fine." Or if they get back from you like, "Talk to me at three." Or here's a link and click a time and then it's on your calendar. You've solved the same problem. They no longer have to keep track of this thing.

There's a next step that's scheduled out there. So you could be structured about how you organize what you're working on and have a work in progress limit that's constrained and just be super transparent about this with everyone else. You can deflect more back and forth asynchronous conversations to more structured real time sessions.

You can just do that even if your team doesn't like it. If you're careful about it, they'll be annoyed, but it won't be insufferably annoyed. And as you deliver again and again, then they'll just be like, "Justine's super organized. It's really impressive. She gets stuff done. She has these cool systems.

How did that work? What's this work in progress cue? Tell me about that again." They'll be kind of impressed by it. The key is you do have to produce, but you can put some structure on yourself in the meantime. All right. So we have a final segment coming up, but first take a quick break to talk about another sponsor.

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We were messing around with it before. Yes, we were. Yeah, so we are good to go with Shopify. All we're missing is something to sell that's not going to terrify or horrify people countrywide. Lots of big companies use Shopify. It powers over 10% of all e-commerce and has award-winning help to help you at every stage because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify.

So sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep, but you got to type that all lowercase letters, that's shopify.com/deep to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com/deep. All right, Jesse, we're now moving on to our final segment. Okay. So we've got two, I just had two sort of fun sightings of the book, Deep Work in Unexpected Places.

I'm going to bring something up on the screen here. So if you're watching instead of listening, you can see what we're talking about. All right, first let's talk about, you know, the New York Times just released their list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. Now the way that they generated this list is they sent out surveys to about a thousand notable people from the world of books and asked them for their 10 best books.

What do you think the 10 best books are of the 21st century? And then they aggregated those votes and did a little magic and got their list of 100. They put up here, and I have this on the screen now, a list of some of these ballots. So some of the people they asked, give us your 10 best books of the 21st century, said, yeah, you can put my ballot on here, right?

So this list that they have here, they have the ballots of Stephen King, Minjin Lee, you have R.L. Stein, Junot Diaz, Sarah Jessica Parker, Stephanie Graham Jones, Annette Gordon-Reed, et cetera. All right. So this is a bunch of people, known literary figures saying, here's my thoughts of the 10 best books of the 21st century.

Here's where we get involved. One of the people that they asked and who allowed them to put their ballot live was our good friend Ryan Holiday. So let me just click on Ryan Holiday here. Here is his ballot of the 10 best books. And what do we see? Deep work is in that list.

So he gave 12 books, his opinion for the 12 best books of the 21st century. So I think we have to figure out how to state this carefully, Jesse. But maybe we can say officially nominated as one of the 10 best books of the 21st century. There was somewhere around 5,000 books that were mentioned.

But I mean, technically, maybe that's true. Officially nominated. Or we just be like, potentially one of the 10 best books of the 21st century and attribute that to the New York Times. So the problem is, they do give the vote totals on here if more than one person chose it.

So we see in Ryan's choices, he had like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. And there's an emblem that says 13 people picked that as one of the 10 best books of the 21st century. So deep work, he was the only one to actually suggest that. But I think it counts, Jesse.

It does. At least in the opinion of some, it is one of the best books of the 21st century. All right, we have another sighting here I'm going to load up of deep work. Listener sent this in. Pretty cool. It is a license plate. Here's a picture of his California license plate, vanity license plate.

And his license plate is deep work. Missing the O. But anyways, he sent that to us. So there we go. Our super fan in California has a deep work license plate. If you see his car on the road, because it has a distinctive license plate. If you see his car on the road and you see the driver looking at his phone, you need to ram his car off the road.

Good. Hit it in the back corner so it spins out and roll. Because, you know, you got it. He's representing deep work. Actually, what I want to see is you see this car on the road. You know, he's on the 405, 80 miles per hour. What I want to see is that driver is reading a thick book while he drives.

Because he has a Tesla so I can self drive. That's what I want to see. It's a Tesla. Is that what it is? Yeah. Oh, that'd be fantastic. There's another picture in there. You can see it. All right. Let's see. Where do I go? Just in the note in the.

It's another post. Oh, it's another post. OK. I didn't realize. Oh, there it is. Oh, it's on a Tesla. Oh, man. I want to see a picture of a video. I want to be a video. You're pulling up behind the Deep Work Tesla. Right. And then you pull off to this.

You kind of come up to its side and you panned the camera over. And what you see is the driver just with, you know, a thick Thoreau biography with reading glasses on, just reading in the driver's seat while the Tesla drives. I feel like our lawyers have to get involved and say disregard everything that Cal just said.

Be fantastic. There we go. So Deep Work is making its impact. I thought those were both both fun to see. One other quick note. We have a fan, Zach, who's sending us some VBLCCP hats. Oh, he made them. Yeah. Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. All right. I'm excited. I will wear it.

I will wear my VBLCCP hat. It should be in the mail soon. I will wear it on air when we get it. I need a new hat. My Nationals hat got too beat up. I had to buy a different hat when I was up north. But I remember thinking, I wish I just had my own hat.

I was like, I should just design my own hat. Like why go buy about some Patagonia hat in a outfitter so I had something to wear while we hiked. I was like, why not just have my own hat? So, OK, I'm excited about this VBLCCP. That's how we'll know who the true fans are, Jesse, if they recognize the hat.

That probably fits on a license plate, too. All right, everyone. Well, anyways, thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another normal in-person, in-studio episode of the podcast. But thanks for listening. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you like today's discussion about finding focus during distracting times, I think you'll also like Episode 307, where we talk about ultra-processed content and improving the quality of what you consume online.

Check it out. So today, I want to talk about digital distraction.