Today, I want to talk about a topic that we often overlook when we discuss building a healthier relationship with our phones, and that is messaging. I'm talking texting and iMessage and WhatsApp. We tend to worry more about flashy apps like TikTok and Instagram, into which we know that billions of dollars have been invested to try to keep us coming back to them again and again.

And by contrast, when we think about messaging, we tend to think of that as sort of simple and old-fashioned. It's getting a note from your kid that they need to be picked up from soccer. It's something that we were doing before smartphones existed. Those apps are plain. They're not flashy.

There's not a lot of money invested to them, and so we don't think much about messaging. But what if it's not actually something we can ignore? What if instead of being at the periphery of our issues with smartphone addiction, it is actually at our core, and we just haven't realized it, sort of like the digital version of Kevin Spacey's character in The Usual Suspects.

What I'm trying to say here is maybe texting was Kaiser Soze all along. So these are the claims I want to investigate in today's deep dive. I'm going to let this proceed in three acts. All right. So act one, I am calling the problem hiding in plain sight. Now, not long ago, I came across a study.

Jesse, I don't know if we can put this up on the screen here. It was published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior and was written by a group of researchers from the Netherlands. So there it is for those who are watching instead of just listening. As you can see, the title of this paper is sort of innocuous.

It's called Modeling Habitual and Addictive Smartphone Behavior, The Role of Smartphone Usage Types, Emotional Intelligence, Social Stress, Self-Regulation, Age, and Gender. It featured a pretty straightforward experimental design. They just surveyed 386 respondents. But what's interesting is what they found in these surveys, and it's going to set up our whole discussion of texting as this sort of hidden driver for some people of excessive smartphone use.

I'm going to read you three quotes from this study. Quote number one, people who extensively use their smartphones for social purposes develop smartphone habits faster, which in turn might lead to addictive smartphone behavior. Quote two, social stress positively influences addictive smartphone behavior. Quote three, men experience less social stress than women and use their smartphones less for social purposes.

The result is that women have a higher chance in developing habitual or addictive smartphone behavior. Those three claims, they might be stated sort of simply, but really have in them some really big ideas that I want to highlight for you right now. Here's the first idea we need to pull from those three quotes.

They're arguing that a big driver of phone use is not just the addictive nature of what you're using on the phone, but social stress, right? This is how this works. If you dive deeper in this paper, we are wired to be wary of ignoring or disrespecting other people in our social circles, right?

If we go back to our Paleolithic path in which the social circuits in our brains actually wired, if someone in our tribe is tapping us on the shoulder, you better turn around and see what they want. To ignore your tribe members, to hurt your pair wires, or what they would call dyadic social bonds between your tribe members, puts you in danger of not being supported by your tribe members.

You could be outcast from the tribe. Your reproductive success is on the line. So we take sociality very importantly. We're wired to be very socially aware. So here's the problem though. This means when we imagine in the modern context, messages arriving, a text message, an iMessage, a WhatsApp message from people in our social circles, our Paleolithic brain says someone is tapping on our shoulder.

Our survival of our genes are at stake. We better answer it. And if we're not, when our brain imagines that communication from our tribe is building up and we're ignoring it, and that this ignoring of it might be creating friction, what's the result? What the researchers call social stress.

And that is an acute type of stress because we're so social, it's not a very comfortable type of stress to feel. All right, so idea number two, once you start checking your phone a lot, because you worry about social stress, you get in the habit of using your phone for other things.

This is a huge concept that comes out of this paper, that it might be the social stress that drives you to your phone a lot. And now you get in the habit of looking at your phone a lot. This is what then allows those flashy apps with billions of dollars invested to make them really sticky and exciting.

This is what allows them to then get their hooks in your brain and become a big part of your phone usage routine. In other words, TikTok and Instagram and these type of apps are, in some sense, potentially monetizing your instinct to be loyal to your friends. So for some people, the social stress from texting is what drives you to your phone, and only once you're there do these other apps then become a part of your routine, and you end up with a more generalized feeling of smartphone addiction.

That's backwards to the way that most people think about it, which is, texting's not that important, but TikTok's really addictive. We might have that backwards. The third big idea I want to point out from those quotes is that women are more susceptible to social stress than men, on average.

This is because of just well-known differences in personality type and wiring. So they end up more likely to face smartphone addiction. In other words, there's a sort of unfair technology penalty here for being more socially conscientious. Men are more likely to be a little bit more loner, to be a little bit more antisocial.

It makes us a little less prone to phone addiction. So I think this is important because often if it's men talking about this issue, we don't realize that the relationship women might have to this issue could be different, that we might not feel the same level of social stress around texting that then causes these other issues.

And advice for improving your behavior with your phone that ignores those realities is not going to be complete advice. All right. So those are the big ideas. Let's go to act two here, diffusing the social stress trap. Now, I call this the social stress trap, the situation I just described, because we have sort of these two things that are in contradicting contrast to each other, right?

So on the one hand, it's hard for us to address or reduce other habitual behaviors that we don't like on our phone, sort of like the addictive use of our phone, if we feel social stress about messages that we're ignoring, but it's hard to avoid feeling social stress about messages we're ignoring unless we become significantly less social, but that could make us feel just as bad.

So either we have to feel bad about using our phone too much because social stress drives us there, or we have to eliminate social stress, but then we're lonely and we feel bad anyway. So it feels like a trap, like there's no way out of it. I want to talk about some concrete ways to escape it.

Basically, we need to find a way to rewire the social brain. So that long stretches away from messaging apps does not create that sense of really distressing social stress. As you will see, this is going to be just as much about rewiring your brain as it is rewiring the brains of the people that you know.

All right, let's get more specific about it. The concrete thing you're going to do first to try to work on this social stress trap is break what I call the constant companion model of phone use. This is an idea I first introduced in a New York Times op-ed from five or six years ago.

The constant companion model of phone use, as the name implies, is that you have your phone with you essentially everywhere you are. If I'm at home, it's in my pocket. If I'm at the gym, it's in my pocket. If I'm at work, it's right next to me on my desk.

If I'm in bed, it's right next to me on my bed. It is a constant companion. When it is your constant companion, it is very difficult to get away from habitual phone usage. So what we want to do is try to break that constant companion model. So let's talk about how to do that first, and then second, talk about how to deal with the social stress that might create.

So the easiest thing to do is to plug it in. And what I mean by that is in the primary locations where you operate and have a phone with you, you find a different location for the phone where you plug it in. So when you're at home, it's like in your kitchen or your foyer, you have it plugged in in that location.

When you're in your office, you have it on like a bookshelf or a chair across the room plugged in. It is not with you as a companion. When you're at the gym, you keep it in your gym locker, which means, and I know this is going to be shocking for people who go to the gym, you're going to have to bring a paper notebook with you to keep track of what you're doing, and you're going to have to have a simple music player if you want to listen to music, not your phone.

You can't just sit there and stare at your phone in between sets, all right? So that's the physical thing to do. Get some physical separation between you and your phone. What do you do about messaging? Well, now what you're going to do is batch check your messaging apps on a semi-regular basis.

You should let probably at least an hour go by between checks. It's something you can schedule. At the top of the hour, at lunch, I'm going to go check and catch up on my messages, my text messages, WhatsApps, et cetera. Now, when you do this, be ready for it to maybe take more time, right?

If you are social, you might have a lot of messages. You might not realize like how much you're tending to these conversations throughout everything else you're doing. So when you batch this more, it might take you more than a few minutes. Oh, I have a lot of messages I have to catch up on here.

This is going to take me, this is going to take me some time. Okay, how do we then deal with the social stress situation? Here, I think the idea is to manage expectations and emergencies. So based on experience, first of all, you do not want to explain to people in advance your new plan.

Oh, I'm checking my phone less often and here's why and I want to tell you and I want to apologize in advance. Do not preemptively apologize. Most people don't care. Some people don't know they care until you preemptively apologize and then they start caring. There's no reason to sort of waste people's time with that.

It's also a little bit self-focused. People don't really care what your texting strategy is as much as you think they do. Only explain what you're doing if people complain. So if someone is texting you, hey, where are you? Are you mad at me? How come you're not responding to text?

That's when you say, hey, you know, I've been having trouble with my phone use, so I'm trying a new thing where I keep my phone across the room for big swaths of the day. So I'm not always seeing texts anymore as they come in. Over time, people's expectations will change.

If they hear that enough times from you, the small fraction of people in your circle who care will adjust internally their expectations. Oh, this is someone who doesn't necessarily see text right away, so I'm not going to text and expect to have an immediate response. They just refile that away in their head.

There's lots of people who are in this situation. People are completely possible. It's very easy for people to refile in their head your availability. Like I think about like my youngest sister is an ER doctor. We just know when she's on shift, she's not going to be answering her text messages.

It's easy for us to adjust our expectations over time. And now we just know that. So people can adjust their expectations. The other thing you're going to have to do here is get better at batch responses. So when you're responding to a lot of text messages at once, because you're only checking every hour or so, you can't respond to these text messages in a way that just bounces to ping pong back to their side of the proverbial conversational net.

And they're going to have to bounce it back to you. And you're going to have to go back and forth. If you're not going to be on your phone all the time, you have to be much more definitive. You have to find a way to answer a text with enough detail and options and plans that it's okay that you might not see their response to that for another hour or two.

So instead of just being like, yeah, they say, do you want to grab dinner before the movie? Instead of responding, yeah, what are you thinking? Which is not going to work because you're not going to see the response to that. You might be like, yeah, we should definitely do that.

Let's plan to meet like roughly at this time. I might not see my text again for a little bit. So here's my, here's a couple of suggestions you choose, or we'll figure it out when we meet. Let's just meet at this location at this time. And then when we meet, we can figure out the dinner.

Like you do a little bit more time to transform back and forth into more just like, here's a response. And then we can take this conversation out of the text thread. All right. So I said, you have to manage expectations and emergencies. What do I mean about emergencies? Well, there's certain things that are time sensitive and emergency is one of them.

You know, what if someone needs to reach you? Not when you next check your phone for text messages 20, an hour from now, but they need to reach it right now. Or what if there is some sort of logistical thing going on, right? I need to hear from my kid when practice is over.

And I don't know when that's going to be. They're just going to text me when it's over, right? How do we deal with emergencies? This is often the thing that prevents people from batching or changing their texting or messaging behavior as they worry about logistics, time sensitive logistics or emergencies.

Don't let the existence of these force you back completely into a constant companion model. There's a couple of things here you should do instead. For example, set up a custom do not disturb mode that allows you to do that. It allows text from a certain number of whitelisted numbers to still come through.

If your kid's at sports practice, you can have a do not disturb mode in iOS that allows their text messages to come through. Now, they're not going to be texting you a bunch of stuff because they're at practice, but their text will come through when practice is over. So then you can have your phone's ringer on, still across the room, but you'll hear a text sound when they text you.

And it's like the only text sound you'll hear because everyone else, it's in a do not disturb mode. Do the same thing with calls, right? Tell people, if there's an emergency, call me. And that really works. In my book, A World Without Email, I call those an escape valve strategy.

If people know there's a way in an emergency they can get in touch with you, now it's high friction. They wouldn't normally do it, but they'll call you if there's an emergency. They feel better and you feel better because you say, I'm not taking something off the table. If there truly is an emergency, if my parent has an accident and is going to the hospital, people can call.

Most people don't call me normally, but they can call and I have my ringer on and I'll be able to hear a call. And so I don't have to worry about emergencies. So if you're a little bit careful, you can have something in place for emergencies and logistics that doesn't just let you go back to like, I better just have my phone with me all the time engaging in conversations with anyone that I see.

All right. So my argument is if you manage expectations at emergencies, breaking the constant companion model of your phone is going to be, long-term is going to reduce the social stress you feel to check it as you get a sense of emergencies are handled, people's expectations have shifted over a period of a couple months.

They understand it now and I'm getting better at texting back to people so we don't need back and forth. Your social stress will die down. It will be pretty easy not to have to check the phone often for text. When you don't have to check it for that, it's much easier to deal with all the other habitual uses as well.

So all of these things are tied together. All right. The third act of this discussion, there is a couple of nuances I want to mention. In fact, I have three in particular I want to mention because there is some care that is needed when dealing with these issues with messaging.

Nuance number one, people worry if I'm less available like this, does this make me a worse friend or a worse sibling or a worse child? Is it because this ongoing back and forth digital conversation can feel like connection? I'm in these constant conversations with people I know on text messages.

Doesn't that mean we're really connected? Our brain, however, doesn't really think so. We don't know what digital text-based communication is. We don't recognize that as social. It's not really strengthening your connection. It's just on paper you feel like maybe this makes me social. So the solution here is with the people you really care about, couple this shift away from constant companion texting with reinvesting new time into in-person analog interact with that person.

Yeah, I don't text all day anymore, but we should start going on a hike every Wednesday morning. We should have a phone call. I'm going to call you for my commute twice a week. We should just check in, right? You have a more analog way of communicating, and you emphasize that.

So it's like a trade-off. I'm trading off this social snacking sort of lightweight connection for something that's more meaningful. I'm actually going to feel more connected to people. And if you do that at the same time that you cut back to constant companion model that has you on your phone all the time, that'll make a difference.

Right? Nuance number two. What about extenuating circumstances? Something's going on where you have to be on your phone, right? There's your parent is going to the hospital, your siblings are on this text thread, one is there, you're trying to handle logistics, and it needs to happen over text. What do you do in that situation?

You get on your phone. Yeah, there'll be extenuating circumstances. That's okay. We're just trying to change your normal relationship with your phone, your average case. Go easy on yourself. The key thing here is changing your relationship to this messaging. It's not like the alcoholic abstaining from alcohol. Whereas you really can't go back to this at all.

You don't know what's going to happen. It's not like that. If you need to be on your phone for an afternoon texting because of something that's going down, that's not going to necessarily make you back into a constant companion texter. You can just go back when you're able to, to your default.

All right. Nuance number three. If you're a parent, this is not just about you. It's also about what your kids see. This is the problem with the constant companion model, the phone driven by texting is, you know, as the parent, what I'm doing on this phone is actually somewhat noble.

I'm making logistics for the upcoming carpool. I'm checking in with friends. Like this is all good stuff. I'm not on TikTok. I'm not doing the stuff I don't want my kid doing on the phone. This is like meaningful, good old fashioned, like adult communication. Your kids don't know that.

They just see you're looking at your phone all the time. And now you're normalizing to them, regardless of what they say, see what they do. A phone is something to be using all the time. It's something very desirable. Look at all the attention it gets from my parent. So when you break the constant companion model and stop doing communication all the time on your phone, your kids will see that you're not on your phone all the time.

It will be modeling to them that the phone is a thing you go and use where it's plugged in when you need it, but it is not a companion that's with you all the time. So this is not just about you. All right. So when it comes to our ongoing efforts to reform our relationships with our phone, this might be one of the trickiest and most overlooked areas.

Messaging is a huge driver of habitual and unhealthy phone use. And it is so hard to shake because social stress is something we hate. But we can get around that if you understand what's going on, you can find ways to change your relationship to messaging that will over time change the expectations of the phone.

with the people you know, you can get away from constant companion checking without having to feel social stress. And if you do this, it really will, this is a classic digital minimalism move, will really improve your relationship with your phone. Not everyone has this issue, but a lot of people do.

And I think it's often ignored. So I was happy to have an excuse to talk about it. Now, the irony of this, of course, is this entire time that I was talking, Jesse's just been like texting me and name things. So Jesse, I don't think you understood. I do have a couple follow-ups.

Yeah. One thing that happens, like say you're doing the batching method and you said, all right, in your working memory file, like text so-and-so, and then you go to text so-and-so, and then you see like three other texts. Is there a way that you know of, I mean, sometimes I go into the contacts, but I rarely do this, like where you pull up the contact and just text them as a, so you can't see other people's texts?

If you're, I mean, maybe. Yeah. Maybe. But if you're batching, it doesn't really matter, I guess. But if you're batching, it doesn't really matter. Like the point is, you're like, I am waiting. I'm waiting into a lot of stuff right now. And I'm going to try to find my way to the other side.

But I'll tell you what, though. Here's the advantage of waiting is a lot of stuff gets worked out before you get there. Like if I had answered this initial text on this text group, I would have been in the mix of it. But because I waited an hour, like they kind of figured it out.

And so it actually, a lot of the stuff you might not have to actually answer. And other stuff you might just say, I'm just not going to answer. That's another expectation thing. Yeah. Is on your group threads, like don't always answer. And it just changes the expectation. You chime in when you can, but you don't chime in all the time.

And that takes a lot of social stress off the table as well. And then for other like non-group texts or whatever, do you delete texts or do you just keep a long thread history of texts? I guess I just keep a thread history. I mean, I'm bad at my phone.

I don't know how to delete a text. I'm going to say no. Got it. Probably not. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of like more complicated things you can do, but I'm like, eh, just check it less and manage expectations and it works itself out. All right. Well, we got a bunch of good questions coming up.

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Upgrade your routine with Caldera Labs and see a difference for yourself. Go to calderalab.com slash deep and use deep at checkout for 20% off your first order. So that's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-A-L-A-B.com slash deep and use that code deep. I also want to talk about a product that we just recently started using here at my media company.

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And on this board, you can put any sort of information. You can put sticky notes. You can put tables. You can put links and images and arrows pointing between different things and so much more. Here at my company, we use it to build our schedules of upcoming podcasts and newsletters.

So we have a table of ideas for these by date, but then off to the side, we have all sorts of like sticky notes and pictures and ideas and arrows connecting back and forth to them. You can even directly embed Google Docs into this. So my scripts or the newsletters will embed them straight in the Miro.

So you can just jump in and read it right there. It's been incredibly useful for us. So we're only using some of the features. Miro has been working more recently to directly integrate AI-powered tools into this product, which is making it even more useful. You can now, for example, and this is cool, take an idea from a sticky note on a Miro board and have AI turn it into a diagram or use it to populate a table.

You can auto-generate head headline ideas, mixed with your text. Like all this is built right into the Miro tool. You don't have to leave the workspace, no switching tabs to an AI tool. It's all integrated. Jesse, you probably remember that before we used Miro, our method for keeping track of podcast ideas was to chisel notes into giant stone slabs.

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Check out Miro.com to find out how. That's M-I-R-O.com. All right, Jesse, let's move on to some questions. Hi, first question is from Michaela. I have an administrative sales role involving routine tasks like emailing clients and reviewing campaigns. It's monotonous. How can I structure my mornings if I don't have two hours for deep work?

Well, I got a couple of questions here. Follow up. One, what are you doing deep work for? You know, concentrating for the sake of concentrating doesn't do anything. Deep work is useful if you have a particular professional task that will benefit from such focus. And then you want to make sure that you're giving it to it.

So to me, your problem might not be one of scheduling, but one of evolving your job to find a way to take on some responsibilities from which deep work will help. Once you have, hey, here's the thing you want me to do. This is valuable for the company, but it requires deep work to do it well.

Now you have something to fight for. Now you can go back and say, hey, I don't have time, the uninterrupted time to do this well. Like, so let's put aside two hours a day that's protected. Let's not start my day at this time. Let's in, I'll do communication in the morning and then the afternoon is deep work.

However you want to work it out. Once you have a particular thing that clearly benefits from concentration, you can then fight for that concentration. But if you're thinking about deep work abstractly, like I should just be doing deep work. Concentration is good. My job is distracted. That's not going to help.

So you've got to have a particular thing you're fighting for. But then once you do, you'll be surprised by how much innovation is possible. All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Michael. I'm an electrical engineer working in the aerospace industry. We are about to have a 20% mandatory overtime.

I currently do my eight-hour job in about three hours. How should I handle this mandatory overtime? I have a quick update. He can do the 20% one day and he's also getting paid. Or he can do it, spread it out over the hours each day. Okay, so here's the thing.

If you're doing your work really efficiently and they know that, but they're not giving you more work and for whatever reason, they're like, we just were in this mindset of you're supposed to be your eight hours and here's what I want you to do. And now we're doing overtime.

So we need you to come for these extra hours. We're going to pay you for these extra hours. If you're doing well at a high level, all the things they're asking for, and you're not pretending like you're overworked or can't handle, you're not saying no to new things, I think it is justified to use some of that time to work on other things.

I don't think it's dishonest. As long as you're doing the work well, you're not lying about what you're doing and you're not turning down the opportunity to do more work if they offer it, it is okay if you have a great, I am going to do some other things during these work daytimes.

Maybe I'm going to slow down my work and I'm going to do a other interest I'm looking into. I'm learning something new. That's like maybe vaguely professional related, maybe not. I'm learning how to repair like small outboard motors for ships, or maybe I have a stealth second job. I'm sort of like working on an idea that could eventually be a new job or whatever it is.

That's probably where you are. Like they're not making good use of their asset, which is your brain. So you got to find something to fill that time. Now, if what you want is even more money, you could use this extra time to say like, hey, I want to take on huge new responsibilities and try to get promotion.

You could do that. But if you're happy with the job and it's not completely filling your time, do something else with the time. I think it's completely honest. As long as you're not, you know, breaking your contract, as long as you're not turning down new work, pretending like you're too busy.

If they ask you, you could do some other stuff with that time. This just happens in knowledge work because knowledge work is not like cranking a wrench on an assembly line where this is what you're doing. We can watch you do it. And we want you to do it for this many hours.

We're paying you for this hours. Knowledge work, as I talk about in my books, a little productivity. It's up and down. There's intense period and non-intense period. Some things happen faster than others. It's difficult to know who's working on what or how it's actually unfolding. So you have extra time.

I say you can enjoy that. All right. Who's next? Next up is Natasha. What should I do about my shutdown rituals taking too long? During my ritual, I process all the open loops I made during the day, generally notes and reminders to myself about work, my studies, and my personal obligations.

I accumulate so many open loops. I have trouble processing them all in a reasonable amount of my time. So I leave some left open and inevitably things pile up to the point where I get overwhelmed. All right. This is a great question because it points out an important nuance about shutdown rituals.

So the goal of a shutdown ritual is to close open loops so that your mind can have peace after work and not have to ruminate over things that you need to do or might need to do or might have forgotten. But what does it mean to close an open loop?

This is where I think, Natasha, the problem is emerging. You are thinking, based on this question, that closing an open loop means dealing with it. Like, what is this thing? What's the next step? Let me try to move this forward or make sure we're on the same page or get this fully accounted for into my system.

And that can take time, right? It's like going through an email inbox, as a classic example, to actually empty everything out of your inbox takes a long time. But all closing an open loop really means is that you no longer have to trust just on your brain to keep track of it.

This is something that I don't have to just keep track of in my brain. So this could be way simpler. If you don't have to actually process it, you just have to make sure that you don't have to think about it. This could be way simpler. Like, for example, you could have a big text file called loops to process.

And at the end of the day, you're looking in, like, your inbox and the notes you took during the day and things you're thinking of. And, like, you're like, here's seven or eight, like, open, here's seven or eight open loops. Like, I don't know what to do with these, but there are things I need to make progress on.

Instead of processing them, imagine instead you just write them all down in that text file. You check to make sure that there's nothing urgent here. Like, oh, my God, if I don't deal with this tonight, it's a problem. So you reassure yourself, okay, I'm okay shutting down work right now.

And you stretch out that text file really big on your laptop screen before you close it down. You say, it's the first thing I'm going to see in the morning when I open it. And then, you know, I can put aside a half hour and deal with that in the morning.

That works because you've accomplished a problem of assuring your brain there's nothing you're missing, there's nothing you're forgetting, and there's nothing that is just being held in your brain. So there's a difference between getting something out of your head and processing and actually dealing with the thing. And some people's days just end fast, right?

Like, I have to leave at five because I have to pick up my kids from daycare, and a lot of stuff tends to happen at the end of my day. Like, things come in hot and heavy like that last hour. I just don't have time to really sit down and handle things.

It's fine. Like, I just have a very quickly, I'm serving my inbox, my calendar. I'm jotting down on my working text. TNT, like all these different things. I just want to make sure I'm not forgetting anything. There's nothing due in the morning. There's nothing urgent. There's no emergencies. It's all written down.

And if I wait till the morning to deal with this, nothing bad is going to happen. Great. Schedule shut down complete. You can move on and go home. So you don't have to process things in your shutdown. You just have to reassure yourself that there's nothing that's just being kept track of in your head that you have to remember or might remember later on.

And if you have a busy end of day, I think dealing with stuff at the beginning of the day is fine as long as you've written it down in a place you trust, you'll see right when the next day begins. I often do this, Jesse, with my time block planner.

I'm doing a shutdown ritual, especially like during a busy part of the school year. I will often, there'll be some like open loops that are popping up towards the end of the day. I will write them on the page for the next day because now my brain trusts, well, the one thing I know I'm going to see is my time block planner page tomorrow when I build my time block plan.

And in particular, if I've already done my shutdown ritual and I, I remember something during the evening, oh, what about this? I go and I write it on the next page of my time block planner. I've done no work on it. I've made no attempt to process it or act on it.

I haven't gone to my systems. I haven't gone to Trello and found the right board and created a card and put the stuff in there. I just jotted it down. I keep it on my dresser upstairs. But that is enough because I know the next day I will see that page when I build my time block plan.

So that is enough for my brain to say, I don't have to worry about this tonight. So don't process, just get this stuff down to a place where you know you'll see it. Now, if you have a lot of time processed, that's fine. Like I'm going to get stuff in the Trello.

And if you have a slow end of the day, like that last caller that is working like 19 minutes and then the rest of his day he's bored, he can shut everything down. But Natasha, if you can't process it, that's fine. Just get it somewhere where you are not relying on your brain to remember it.

You don't have to deal with it. You just have to make sure that it will be dealt with. All right, who do we got? Next up is Courtney. How can I organize and streamline email communications with my students? I teach at a university and over the years, the amount of student emails keeps increasing.

How can I better organize communications and expectations? Well, I'll tell you what I do with my students at Georgetown. I've devised a series of increasingly difficult and dangerous physical challenges that if they can make it through all of them, they will make it to a place where they can actually send me an email.

So that's worked out pretty well. We've had a few hospitalizations, but I got to tell you, my inbox volume has been lower. So I think that's the way to do it. If you don't do that, there's another strategy, which is I would suggest if you have a lot of this coming in, like you're teaching a large class or multiple classes that are, some classes just have more student interaction than others just based on the material.

I would hold office hours three times a week, right? So you're never that far from an office hours. I would introduce a virtual option to those office hours. So maybe you would say this is just for the second half of or through the whole where they can message you.

The kids these days, I don't know if you know this, Jesse. The kids these days are sometimes worried about in-person conversation and the friction it involves and feel very comfortable if they can type things. That's why they want to send you an email. It's safer socially than having to go and actually talk to you in person.

Have a messaging option for your office hours. Here is a messaging app, a WhatsApp, a Slack thing for my class where during those office hours, I will see things and interact with you on there as well. So no email, you don't send me an email that's going to sit in my inbox.

I eventually have to answer, but you can during office hours, come by my office or message me. It used to be you would say you can call me, but no one wants to call. So you have to do messaging. All right. Anything that can't be answered with a single response.

You say, look, if it can be answered with a single response, what time is the test going to be? Can you sign this thing, right? If it's not something you can answer with a single response, you say, this is for office hours. And when they email you anyway with something that just can't be answered with a simple response, needs some back and forth or whatever, some extra work, you say, bring it to my next office hours.

You can make it virtual in person. They adjust. Students adjust, right? They just need to know. I have an issue I want to solve. How do I solve it? Oh, this is how I solve it. I have to go to your office hours. There's one. You do three a week, so I'm never far from one.

Good. I don't have to worry about what to do about that. What's next? And they move on. It's minimal extra overhead for them. For you, it makes a huge difference. And now all these things that are coming in emails and all these back and forth emails go away. The only emails you're getting are ones that, like, actually, it's a good use of email.

Like, oh, I have the answer, and I can send it back when I have time. And now you're doing much more sort of in-person synchronous interaction during these office hours. And boom, boom, boom, you get through a lot of things. And you're not having to, like, constantly be going back and forth in emails.

So I think that's the easiest thing to do. If you're a professor, you have some autonomy here. It's you're in charge. Historically, professors are in charge about how you talk to them. And you can tell your students, this is how you interact with me. That will work. That method does make a big difference.

Harder in companies works in academia. All right, who do we got? Next up is Sarah. I'm starting my Ph.D. at MIT in nuclear engineering. I was recently asked also to serve as committee chair for a student organization. I worry about my ability to manage my first-year studies and research simultaneously with these tasks.

Should I follow the principles from slow productivity and do less? Yes. Yeah, your first-year Ph.D. student, MIT is tough. It's a tough program, known for experience. You don't know what to expect. Don't do the student committee chair. Say like, look, I'm starting my Ph.D. program at MIT. I don't know what to expect.

I need to get my full-time. I can't do it. They'll be like, oh, no. Okay, great. We'll ask someone else. Like, you're a solution to their problem. They're probably someone who's like reliable. Like, oh, this person would be good. Maybe they'll do it. And then you're like, oh, I can't because I'm starting my Ph.D.

program. Like, that makes sense. They move on to the next person. That was like a nothing in their life. You just saved yourself potentially from a huge amount of pain. Super asymmetrical. So I think starting something new is a perfect time to do less, a perfect excuse to do less.

You'll be okay, I think. I don't know the nuclear engineering program, but I've talked about like the doctoral program in computer science. The coursework is really not that bad. If you're, I mean, I'm sure those courses are hard, but if you're in the program, you're not going to find them that hard.

But just might as well give yourself some breathing room. I want to get used to being a doctoral student in the classes. And MIT is this cool campus. And it's very intimidating with these like old school classrooms with the chalkboards going up and down. And, you know, there's scientists on jetpacks shooting freeze rays at each other, as at least people assume happens at MIT.

And there's like all sorts of craziness going on. So do less. This isn't urgent. Say no. There was something. I can't remember what it was. There was something like this early in my time at MIT. I saw a program and I don't remember what it was. So I apologize for that.

But it was some sort of extracurricular whatever. And they were looking for students, grad students to be a part of some sort of pilot program or whatever. And I had this moment of inspiration where I was like, oh, this sounds cool. This matches some interest. I was like, hey, I want to volunteer.

Like, hey, yes, you've been selected. This would be great. You should do it. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. I wasn't thinking straight. I got ahead of myself. I really need to be focusing on what I'm doing here. I probably shouldn't bring on something else. And I sort of backed out of it.

And that was the right decision. You don't need a lot of extracurriculars. Now, here is a warning I want to give to you and any sort of graduate student. There is something I call graduate student overload syndrome that you have to be very wary of, but particularly if you're a doctoral student.

Because here's what happens. If you're a doctoral student in a lot of programs, your friends of that age have normal jobs. And they're probably smart if you're going to like MIT or something. So they have hard jobs. They're all like lawyers and bankers. And they're talking about like how much they're working and how hard it is.

And let's be honest, being a graduate student is kind of a fake job. It's hard in certain ways, but it's also you're rolling in at 11 and you have all this sort of flexibility. Some new graduate students get uncomfortable. Like I'm not doing enough stuff. I feel like I'm not somehow using my potential.

And so they overload with a bunch of extra, are going to be on the graduate student committee for this and the student government. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that because they find comfort in busyness. It's pseudo productivity writ large. I want to be doing a lot of stuff.

So I feel like what I'm doing is worthwhile. This is hard and I'm busy. But that's not how graduate school works because it's an academic intellectual pursuit. And academic intellectual pursuits need space. And they need time. And sometimes you need to just spend hours and hours trying to figure out a problem set problem or trying to make sense about an experiment.

You are not supposed to be busy when you're training your mind to do things at high levels. So you have to make peace with this idea of I am not busy in a traditional sense. And yet what I'm doing is still hard and important. So be worried about graduate student overload syndrome as well.

But short answer, don't do the committee chair. At least that'd be my advice. All right. Do we have a call this week, Jesse? We do. All right. Let's see if we can make this work. Hi, Cal. Clemens here. Long time listener. Love all your books and read your newsletter.

Listen to every podcast episode. Quite some time ago, you introduced the general household chores task list as a separate piece from your general Trello boards. You mentioned you were experimenting with that. So I am curious how that experiment has been going. If you had any additional tweaks and insights to it, or if you have discarded it altogether for something new.

Household chores are a constant source of interfering with my attempts at a deep life. So I'd really be grateful for additional insights and tips there. All right. Good question. Yes, I still find it useful to maybe have a simpler place where household chores or family related tasks are kept.

Now, part of this is if you're in a family like I am, you have to share this with other people and other people might not want to be brought into your Trello madness. But there's two other things I find in general are helpful when it comes to sort of the never ending crush of there's just stuff that needs to be done around the house and for the family or this or that.

In addition to just having here's my list of household chores, two things also help. One, I think is having a general heuristic that's like, I do one thing a day. I have to do one thing a day. It could be in the morning or in the evening, but just like I have to get 10,000 steps, I have to take something off that list.

And if it's a really busy day, it might be a small thing. And if I have more time, I might do the taxes. But you just get in this habit of like, I do something every day. That really adds up and it puts you into a mindset of like, yeah, like one of the things I do is I work on my house.

But that like simple heuristic allows you to get through these sort of personal chores. Like what's my one I'm going to do today? That alone makes a really big difference. The other thing that's helpful is integrating the sort of personal household chore list into your weekly planning. Because a lot of these things require time that's put aside and protected in advance.

And if you don't do that, you'll never get to them. If you need to take the car into the shop because it's oil change time, you have to find when you're going to do that. And you have to look at the whole week as a whole and be like, okay, when does this make sense?

Okay, it's going to make sense Friday. You know what? I could do it Friday midday. I kind of have like a 90 minute circle there. And then you can start thinking, okay, if I'm going to do that, if I'm taking a car to the shop, what's around there that I could get done as long as I'm, there's some store, let me take care of this, this, and this.

And you make a plan in advance to get some of these like bigger things done. Weekly planning is the right time to do that. So in addition to having like a good list, a low friction list, a shared list that just like has the stuff for your house. And it seems easier and less overhead than your complicated system for all your like professional things.

In addition to that, integrate into weekly plan, have a do one thing a day heuristic. That I think for most people gets you to, I don't know, 90%. Like right now I would, I would say on when I weekly plan household stuff and I'm not on vacation, if I'm being conservative, I'm probably like blocking off 18 to 20 hours a week thinking about skeleton placement for my Halloween decorations.

And without weekly planning, I'm just not going to have that 18 to 22 hours free each week. And so it really makes a difference when you add those two things to it. I'm very interested. I might do a longer episode on sort of household management. There's a couple of systems out there people swear by.

I think it's a key thing. As you get older, it gets more complicated. So maybe, maybe we'll revisit that. All right. We got a case study this week. This is where people write in to talk about how they've used the type of advice we talked about on this show in their life.

Today's case study comes from Mike. Mike says, as a creative being on social media, as a creative being, oh, not a creative being, as a creative, comma, being on social media felt like a necessity, but it was often a chore. So I finally did a 30-day digital declutter. I don't know why I waited so long.

Here are my takeaways. Just as other people have described, the first day or two, I felt very antsy, like I should be checking something, but I quickly subsided over the next few days. I got used to the slower, luxe, anxious life. I felt like I had more time in my day because I did.

I realized how little value I actually got from being on social media. I started to enjoy physical conversations with people as I knew I didn't have social media to check on their lives. And just as you said, no one even noticed I wasn't on social media that month. As an unexpected benefit, I started making decisions faster and with more certainty.

I stopped letting folks on Instagram tell me what to do. Now that the 30 days I've ended, I'm going back to establish rules for future social media use. Well, I love this, Mike. Great digital declutter where you step away for 30 days, aggressively focus through reflection and experimentation on what's more meaningful.

And then when you're done, say, what do I really need in my life? What did I really miss? And what are my new rules going forward? So I'm glad you had some success with that really consider now that you are trying to decide what are my rules for social media going forward, really give the null hypothesis.

What if my rule is doing no social media still give that a good look. Like you said, it was fine. So why, why stumble back into that world where they're desperately trying so desperately to hook you if it didn't really matter that you were off from a professional standpoint, keep that option in mind, if you do add it back, make it on your desktop, make it boring and be very specific about what you're doing on there.

Stay tuned. Here's my preview. Stay tuned for, for the next segment, because I have something, an article I read, I want to talk about from a creative talking about exactly this point. So stay tuned for that. I think you'll like it. I also want to point out from this case study where Mike says, I started to enjoy physical conversations with people as I knew I didn't have social media to check on their lives.

That's just what we were talking about in the deep dive, that one of the nuances to trying to reduce messaging in your life was to compensate by adding more analog interaction in your life. That's what really matters. Mike did that and it did get better. At least I think he did.

The other way I think, Jesse, to interpret, I started to enjoy physical conversations is that he gets really physical people when he talks to them. He just sort of like grabs and bear hugs them and it's like really awkward, you know. And you might enjoy that too, Mike, but maybe I won't recommend that.

Anyways, good case study. Thanks for seeing that in. All right. We've got a great third segment. Two things I want to talk about that I've read. But first, another brief word from a sponsor. Now, I know from experience that there is nothing small about starting your own small business.

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Did you say that's about right? Like 600 to 100 pages? Yeah. This is why you need Grammarly. The essential AI. The people who don't know about my skeletons are really weirded out right now, I think, Jesse, let's be honest. I probably should have used Grammarly to check the tone.

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Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com slash podcast. That's grammarly.com slash podcast. Jesse, Halloween to me is close. I mean, it's almost August. I got to start thinking. I'm thinking about this. Well, you told us in a prior episode about how you've been coding your lights. I've been doing some, well, I recoded them for 4th of July.

So I brought out, I threw up the lights, some, I have a light controller I made for some programmable LEDs and I hung them up like bunting and programmed virtual bunting, red, white, and blue. So it's like red, white, and blue, and then it all shifts over and all shifts over.

So it was like I, for night, I wanted like virtual bunting. And because I took the time to, I've built multiple microcontroller driven custom light controllers. It was the matter of, you know, 10 minutes of coding to get that thing running. So I'm thinking about it. I'm working on motion sensors too, building some custom motion sensor controllers.

More to come. But again, this is like two thirds of my time. And then like one third of my time is like my family and my jobs and my health and everything else. All right, let's move on now, Jesse, to our final segment. I often like to talk about in our final segments, what I'm reading.

I got two things to talk about today. The first is a book, a book that just came out, but that I blurbed and I liked the book. And I also like what it represents. I wanted to call it out. The book is called North to the Future, an Offline Adventure Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska.

This is by Ben Wassenbach. And this is a book of the old school. Marcus, in their review, I think called Ben like a worthy successor to John McPhee, who, you know, wrote Coming to the Country, Back to the Country. I don't know, I read it a few months ago.

He wrote a big famous book about Alaska. But Ben actually goes on these adventures in Alaska with scientists, these weird, quirky scientists. And he goes and he finds them and they explore. And it's narrative, but there's bigger themes and the setting is fantastic. And he grapples with the fact that he's in the real world and not online.

I love that style of like big idea adventure writing. We don't get enough of that anymore. You know, we don't have enough of these books anymore. I'm glad people are still writing them. I really like this one. I gave it a good blurb. So check it out. It just came out, North to the Future by Ben Weissenbach.

Weissenbach, I should say. I also want to talk about an article that someone sent me that I think is interesting because it gets at a common belief that drives people to social media use in a way that makes them unhappy. Now, this article, I don't know if you can bring it up on the screen or not, Jesse.

It's called I'm Done With Social Media. And it is from a writer named Carolyn Crampton. And it's on a blog. Oh, I love blogs. Look, isn't this great, Jesse? Blogs you can have. It's clean. There's like lots of text. You can take your time to explain something and it doesn't have to be in an app.

And there's very few people dancing on here. I love blogs. All right. So I'm just going to read a couple excerpts from this and then I want to give you my more general thoughts. All right. So here's the setup. Caroline says, I started last year with a clear goal.

It was going to be the year that I finally did social media. Regular posting and content calendar, a strategy, a plan for growth, all of that. And yet I ended the year pretty certain that I never wanted to open those apps again, let alone post my photos and words on them.

All right. That's the setup. Why was she making this year the year of social media? She's a writer. She had a book coming out. And she wanted to do everything she could. This is very typical for creatives. She wanted to do everything she could to help this book sell.

And she said, okay, I'm not a big social media person, but I will do all the things. I'll get all the advice. I'll do all the things because this, I'm told, helps. And I want to make sure that I'm doing everything that I can. So Caroline goes on in the article and talks about, you know, all the stuff she has to do.

The videos, the updates, every accomplishment, posting it multiple times so people could see it. And so she really was working on this and giving this a lot of time. Here's what she learned. It didn't matter. She says, look, on Twitter, where I had nearly 10,000 followers that had mostly been accumulated during my previous work as a political journalist, the figures were even worse.

So let's see here. Most of my TikToks barely made to views in three figures. On Twitter, those numbers could be even smaller. So basically, no one was, even her followers weren't reading the stuff she was doing. So what she figured out was books mostly weren't gaining, I'm reading here, books mostly weren't gaining momentum on TikTok because her authors were making top-notch viral videos, but because readers and bookish influencers were recommending them to each other and posting about their experience.

So this, I think, is a key point about social media that I've tried to make before. It's not that it's not helpful for spreading the word about things. Certainly, there are books that their entire success is owed to a big push on social media. You've got BookTok, you've got Instagram, to a lesser extent Twitter.

But as Caroline learned, it's not because the author was good at social media. It's not because the author had a lot of followers. It's because people like the book. And if people really like your book, they want to talk about it. And people use social media, they'll talk about it on social media.

So social media can be really helpful for your efforts as a creative. But the best thing you can do to gain those benefits is to write something that is of the moment, that is really good, that you're the right person to write, and it touches a chord. If you do that, social media might be a big part of that book blowing up.

But not because you posted properly about it, but because other people were spreading the word. But in the end, what's going to matter, and this is a key idea for my book, Slow Productivity, is the quality of what you do. So I like Caroline's experience. I often say social media has helped a lot of my books sell.

It's just not for me posting on it. It's other people posting about it on those mediums as well. So it's a good nuance. I've mentioned it before, but it is worth emphasizing again. You don't have to play the game of the small number of people with these massive companies that want you to do to come and give your time and attention and data to them so they can monetize it so that they can buy the other half of Hawaii.

You don't have to play that game. The whole history of social media has been one argument after another about why you have to use their weird product. It was, you won't know what's going on with your friends. You'll be isolated. Then it was like, this is where clubs talk, and you're not going to be able to be a part of organizations.

And now it's like, you can't have a career or be a successful creative. It's always one thing after another if you're not on these apps, which if you think about them objectively are really weird. It's all these weird rituals of how you put things on there and type about it, and you have to do the vertical video and not the horizontal video, and you have to do this and that.

And all these weird sort of cultish rituals, it's essentially the sort of modern digital version of I'm making a burnt offering at the Near Eastern altar. It's kind of the same type of thing. If we do all these sort of things and shake the rain stick just right, then I'll be spared being attacked by the monster, right?

It's weird, and it's kind of arbitrary, and maybe it feels good in the moment, and it's very distracting. But good work sells because good work sells. And if people have new places to talk about good work, they'll talk about it on those new places. When magazines came around, they helped sell books.

It was a new way to sell books. Why? Because it was a place where people could write about books and talk about books and help books take off, not because the authors, like, I'm going to write a bunch of articles and magazines about my own books, but because there was a new place people could write.

Radio could help sell books when radio became a big thing. Not because authors were like, I will go on the radio and talk about my book, but because there's shows that talk about books, and they would talk about your books. Like, the idea is new communication mediums might help people talk about stuff that's good.

Your job as a creator is still to produce things that are good. How people are talking about it doesn't necessarily matter a huge amount to you. So, anyways, I like that article. It's Caroline Crampton. Check it out. She has a whole long thing about the experience. Every writer or creative should read it.

But my bigger point here, again, is there's always some reason we're being told why we have to be looking at these weird, shiny, digital baubles. And it's okay at some point to be like, I'm done hearing it. Until you come back and say, you're going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars of this without too much work, or this is what's going to keep your pacemaker running.

Until it's like that compelling, I'm kind of done hearing from yet again why I need to be using these things. Give me a good reason until I have it, I'm going to be moving on. So, I appreciate that article, and I love that it was on a blog, just a simple blog.

Some technologies are the best. All right. Oh, look at this. We have an update here. Uh-oh. About Hanson. Oh, that's just for, yeah, you can read it. I'm curious, though. Yeah. Did I imply that the band Hanson, now I'm trying to remember, because we got an update. Someone sent us an update to say all the brothers of the band Hanson are alive and well.

I don't remember what I said about Hanson, but I must have implied that they ended up dead in some sort of, like, They were just brought up in a prior episode, and a fan reached out. That was just kind of for your FYI. I think I might have joked about Hanson getting, like, grizzly, you know, dying in some sort of terrible, like, grizzly weird way.

So this is my, I don't remember what I said. I'm glad to hear that Hanson is alive and well. I will listen to Mbop later today. This may be, this could be, talk about social media. This is my plan. Okay, I've got it, Jesse. This is how I'm going to sell so many copies of my next book.

Imagine this. Vertical frame TikTok. All right, stay with me here. Vertical frame TikTok. Skeletons. Dancing to Mbop. With your book. With holding your book. Holding my book. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to have a good cover. That's 300,000 copy sales easy. Mm-hmm. Easy. It could be even more. So I take it all back.

It's all about social media. It makes a lot of sense. And I should spend a lot of time making skeletons to Mbop. Actually, that would be cool in some way. All right. Enough nonsense. It's good weather today. I want to go enjoy it. Thank you everyone for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode of the show.

And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you enjoyed today's discussion about why texting might be doing more harm than you think, you might also like episode 347, which was called The Forgotten Phone Harms, which looks at some other issues with your phone that you might not have been thinking about.

Check it out. I think you'll like it. This specific rule is going to highlight a much more general issue that I think is afflicting our current discourse surrounding phones. It's an issue that I think is a problem and that we need to fix.