How Your Phone Is Changing You - What Happens When You Mindlessly Scroll

00:00:00.640 | So as most of you probably know, I am not a heavy phone user. I do own a smartphone,

00:00:06.800 | but I don't use any social media. So my phone just isn't that interesting to me. When I work,

00:00:12.320 | I time block my day. So the idea of just casually looking at my phone for distraction is also

00:00:16.400 | something that I'm just not that used to. That was until last week. A couple of things happened

00:00:23.600 | at the same time. First, I got sick. So I was home sick for about a week. You might still hear it in

00:00:29.280 | my voice today. So I found myself without much to do. I was off and bored and my phone was there.

00:00:35.920 | And suddenly I was looking at that thing much more than I normally would.

00:00:40.720 | Then, piling on, we had Hurricane Helene here in the States, which caused the disastrous flooding

00:00:50.240 | in Asheville. Well, I have a good friend in Asheville. And so I was really plugged in

00:00:54.400 | following the news, trying to piece together from various online sources, minute by minute,

00:01:00.240 | what was going on up there. And that also got me looking at my phone even more.

00:01:05.280 | So there was this period, it was less than a week, but it was a period in which I was constantly

00:01:09.120 | using my phone. It punctuated everything that was going on in my life. And I'll tell you,

00:01:12.560 | here's my review of that period. It was terrible. But the scary thing is, I think this is how a lot

00:01:19.040 | of people live basically all the time, with that phone just sort of always there, never that far

00:01:26.000 | away from their life. This concerns me based on my experience. So what I want to talk about today

00:01:31.680 | is what happens. Let's define and explore what happens when your phone plays a constant presence

00:01:41.440 | in your life. And then let's get to some solutions, what you could do if you want to get away from

00:01:45.920 | that. All right. So let's start with trying to explain what it is that happens when you use

00:01:50.240 | their phone that much. A statistic here I think is helpful. How often do we check our phones?

00:01:54.720 | According to one survey I found from reviews.org, which is roughly in line with other data I've

00:02:00.400 | seen, Americans now check their phone an average of 144 times a day. We're also spending an average

00:02:08.480 | of four hours and 25 minutes total each day on our phone. That latter statistic is up 30% from

00:02:15.200 | last year. If you do the math on 144 minutes of checks, rather, of your phone per day and assume

00:02:23.440 | roughly a 16-hour waking day, that's checking your phone roughly every 6.7 minutes is what that

00:02:29.920 | averages out to. This means the average American has the networked digital world essentially never

00:02:37.280 | far from their attention. It is a constant cognitive presence. I'm going to give a name

00:02:42.160 | to this state for the sake of our discussion today. Let's call it continuous partial participation

00:02:47.520 | in the networked digital. Most people, or at least a lot of people right now,

00:02:53.840 | exist in a state of this continuous partial participation in the networked digital. That's

00:03:00.400 | what I experienced last week. That's what I felt was terrible. Let's try to understand what goes

00:03:04.400 | wrong in this particular state. The first problem has to do with brain fog. I noticed this in my own

00:03:14.160 | experiments with continuous partial participation is that it was as if I was experiencing the actual

00:03:22.720 | world around me through a fog. I mean, I could see what was going on. I was having conversations

00:03:28.320 | with people. I knew where I was, but it was like you turned down the resolution on the video camera.

00:03:34.720 | The colors weren't so bright. The details of what was going on was not so bright. You were there,

00:03:38.880 | but only sort of kind of there, like you were remembering being there, not actually being

00:03:42.560 | in the physical situation that surrounded you. Now, this makes sense if we think about that

00:03:48.960 | statistic we looked at. When you're in this state of continuous partial participation in the network

00:03:53.120 | digital, you are never far from being exposed to this networked online world. There's a lot

00:04:01.200 | of information you've encountered, information that requires processing, especially since it's

00:04:05.680 | often highly salient information. Your brain is dedicating resources to processing and making

00:04:11.840 | sense of what you last saw when you looked at your phone. You put your phone away, your brain doesn't

00:04:17.440 | just snap and focus on the new thing you're doing. It's still trying to make sense of what it just

00:04:23.360 | encountered. You don't have 100% of the normal cognitive resources that would be dedicated to

00:04:30.160 | the world around you right now at your disposal. A non-trivial portion is still trying to process

00:04:34.880 | the digital world. Now, this is fine if you transition from the digital world somewhat

00:04:40.240 | permanently to the real world. Okay, I'm done watching this movie, and maybe for 10 minutes,

00:04:44.960 | I'm not completely present because my mind's making sense of the ending. But after about 10

00:04:49.120 | or 15 minutes, now you're present. When you're checking your phone every once every 6.7 minutes,

00:04:53.360 | you never actually get that freedom. So you see the world as if through a fog when your mind is

00:05:00.400 | never that far from encountering the network digital. The second problem has to do with your

00:05:06.480 | perception of the world itself, the way you understand the world and what's going on.

00:05:12.080 | I want to read a quote here. It's a little lengthy, but I think it's a good one. It's

00:05:16.880 | a quote from an important book that came out in 2009. This book was written by the science writer

00:05:23.040 | Winifred Gallagher, and it was called "Wrapped," R-A-P-T, with the subtitle "Attention and the

00:05:28.320 | Focus Life." I talk about it. If this sounds familiar, it's because it was influential to me,

00:05:32.160 | and I quote it somewhat extensively in my 2016 book, "Deep Work." All right, so let me quote

00:05:38.960 | Winifred Gallagher here. "That your experience largely depends on the material objects and

00:05:44.960 | mental subjects that you choose to pay attention to or ignore is not an imaginative notion but a

00:05:50.800 | physiological fact. When you focus on a stop sign or a sonnet, a waft of perfume or a stock market

00:05:57.120 | tip, your brain registers that target which enables it to affect your behavior. In contrast,

00:06:02.640 | the things that you don't attend to in a sense don't exist, at least for you. All day long,

00:06:08.000 | you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect,

00:06:12.480 | you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this

00:06:17.120 | and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being."

00:06:22.000 | So what Gallagher is saying here, and she summarizes it this way elsewhere in the book,

00:06:26.640 | your world is what you pay attention to. We tell ourselves this myth that there's just like an

00:06:32.880 | objective world around us that we see through our senses. It's not really what we are experiencing.

00:06:38.720 | We are experiencing a mental construction of the world inside our brains, and some of it is visual

00:06:44.160 | and some of it is auditory, and some of it has to do with what you smell, but some of it has to do

00:06:47.920 | with how you feel, and some of it has to do with like what it is particularly that you're focusing

00:06:52.560 | on. So your world, your perception of the world, is shaped by what you pay attention to. So what

00:06:59.680 | happens when we have this continuous partial participation in the online? Well, we are spending

00:07:07.120 | a non-trivial amount of our attention targeting at things that are highly emotionally salient.

00:07:13.440 | They're pushing buttons that makes it something we want to look at on our phone, and that could be

00:07:17.200 | fear. That could be outrage. That could be an emotional charge. It could be a sort of constant

00:07:22.960 | exposure to epicness, right? It's the surfer on the biggest wave. It's like the violent crime that

00:07:29.280 | is super violent, right? Things are exaggerated past scale online. It's also a world of deep

00:07:36.480 | cynicism, a world in which people are cutting each other and trying to take each other down and

00:07:42.160 | carefully looking for taboo violations or trying to police their own. This is a world that's not

00:07:49.760 | so pleasant. It is a world that is a mix of sort of Red Bull, MTV, and Orwell. And if you're looking

00:07:57.120 | at this network digital once every 6.7 minutes, the construction of the world that exists in your

00:08:04.000 | mind is going to overlap heavily with this amalgam of MTV, Red Bull, and Orwell. And your perception

00:08:12.560 | of yourself and the life that you lead in the world that is surrounding you is going to be

00:08:16.400 | dark. It's going to be exhausted. It's going to be strained out. It's going to be upset. It's

00:08:22.000 | going to be in a defensive crouch. It literally makes your world worse. What you pay attention

00:08:27.360 | to constructs your world, and we're paying attention to things that construct worlds

00:08:30.880 | that we don't actually like spending time in. I had a memory, a really strong sense memory,

00:08:36.960 | when I was thinking about this portion of this deep dive discussion. I don't know why I remember

00:08:41.600 | this, but it was a random day from my 20s, right? This would have been the 2000s. It was a random

00:08:48.960 | day when I was a doctoral student at MIT, because I remember being in the office. So this would have

00:08:54.000 | been like 2006 or 2007. And for whatever reason, I got this like really clear memory of that day.

00:09:00.320 | And what I remembered was, this was pre-smartphones. I mean, I don't use social

00:09:03.520 | media, but even if I wanted to back then, they didn't exist. I mean, Facebook was around,

00:09:07.120 | but I didn't have a phone and I didn't use anything. I have this memory of what a day

00:09:12.000 | was like back then. I remember on my way to the status center at MIT where my office was,

00:09:17.280 | stopping at the Au Bon Pain on, I think it was Main Street, as you went from the Kindle

00:09:23.120 | subway station on your way to Vassar Street and ultimately to the status center, and getting an

00:09:28.080 | egg sandwich, just being like, "This is great. I like the egg sandwich here. Isn't it great just

00:09:32.640 | to eat an egg sandwich?" I remember being in my office and I was probably working on a paper,

00:09:36.800 | giving that attention, and then working on a blog post. Back in that day, I was blogging

00:09:43.920 | three days a week. So I probably wrote a blog post. And what I remember about that day,

00:09:47.840 | it was sunny. It was April. I know this because it was Marathon Day. And I was like, "It's great.

00:09:52.880 | It's sunny in Boston. The spring is coming." And I left early and I went down to watch the marathon

00:09:59.520 | and I had the Red Sox game, which they play early on the day of the marathon. I had it on. I had

00:10:04.480 | one of these little radios you could plug in. I was listening to the Red Sox game and it was sunny

00:10:08.960 | and I was enjoying the sun. And I remember being like, "This is nice. And it's just nice that it's

00:10:12.960 | sunny and spring is great. Isn't it great? It's going to be warmer more and baseball season has

00:10:16.240 | started. I'm excited about that." And I was probably looking forward to like, "Hey, we got

00:10:20.000 | this Netflix DVD in the mail. I'm excited to watch." And maybe my wife and I were going to go

00:10:24.960 | to the farmer's market to get something for dinner. And it was just pleasant. It was just paying

00:10:30.080 | attention to what you were doing, appreciating what was nice about the day, looking forward to

00:10:34.320 | some things that were coming up. The world my mind created that day was a really nice world to be in.

00:10:39.920 | And it would have been very different if I had a phone and I was on social media and I was just

00:10:45.760 | constantly checking in on things. And because I would have had one foot in the digital world that

00:10:50.400 | wasn't nearly as pleasant as just wandering over. I went to the Federal Plaza, I remember,

00:10:58.000 | and there was a food truck. My doctoral advisor's son had a food truck and I got

00:11:02.480 | some food from the food truck and was walking over to watch the mayor. And I was like, "Oh,

00:11:06.720 | great. Just paying attention to the moment." It would have been so different if I had been in a

00:11:10.800 | state of continuous partial participation in the network digital. This is what Winifred Gallagher

00:11:16.400 | gets into in that book, Wrap. The motivation for that book about attention is a cancer diagnosis.

00:11:21.440 | And she learns that by paying attention to things that matter to her and to the positive,

00:11:26.560 | she was able to construct a world that was pretty sunny, even as she was going through,

00:11:33.680 | objectively speaking, some darker things. So it matters what world you're exposed to.

00:11:39.440 | Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video,

00:11:44.320 | then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment

00:11:50.320 | Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:11:57.680 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're going to like it. Check it out.

00:12:05.600 | Now let's get back to the video. All right. The third problem is lack of quiet, right?

00:12:12.880 | It is in the long pauses in life when nothing much is happening that your mind slows down and quiets

00:12:21.280 | and real insight can be had. The Catholics have a good term for this process. They call it

00:12:26.560 | discernment, right? So they discuss this in terms of turning your intention interior to try to

00:12:33.760 | understand the sort of will of God. But it's a concept that secularizes nicely, that it's when

00:12:40.960 | you are quiet and turned inward, it's you alone with your thoughts and looking at the world

00:12:46.960 | around you, that some of your most profound insights come when some of the sharpest clarity

00:12:52.720 | is identified, where you realize, here's where I am. Here's what matters to me. Here's what doesn't.

00:12:57.920 | Here's the path I want to be on. Here's how I have left that path, but how I might actually get back.

00:13:03.920 | This really maybe difficult thing has happened to me. This is where I process that. I make sense of

00:13:09.440 | that and I get resilient growth out of it. The quiet, cognitive quiet is so critical to a life

00:13:18.240 | that's not just rich and fulfilling, but a life that you can continually aim back towards meaning

00:13:22.880 | and depth. Obviously, if you exist in a state of a continuous partial participation in the network

00:13:29.360 | digital, you don't get that quiet. Because why do you tolerate that quiet when there is

00:13:34.640 | the perfectly distracting TikTok video just a second away? Pull that out, hit that button,

00:13:42.160 | and you'll be sort of taken away. And I got to say, my experience of living this way last week

00:13:47.920 | was it's not like these distractions are fantastic, right? The allure to your screen,

00:13:56.320 | that drive to go back to your screen, is stronger than the reward you actually get.

00:14:00.720 | I actually found the actual looking at the phone and the scrolling to be numbing in a sort of weird,

00:14:07.200 | kind of unsettling way. You felt just sort of vaguely uneasy and like the edges had been rounded

00:14:13.040 | off of your emotions, positive and negative. It's not like you're getting something wonderful,

00:14:18.400 | you're numbing yourself with it. That was my experience of it. So the quiet is actually where

00:14:22.400 | so much of life is actually figured out. All right, so if we don't want to exist in this

00:14:29.200 | state, what can we do? I'm going to give six ideas. You've heard some of these before, but

00:14:34.080 | let's just put them one after another. How do you escape a state of continuous partial participation

00:14:38.080 | in the network digital? One, make your phone less interesting. Take the social media apps off your

00:14:43.120 | phone. Stop using the social media if it's not vital to you. If it is vital to you, use it on

00:14:48.080 | your computer. Don't have it on your phone. Don't put games on your phone. Don't put the YouTube app

00:14:54.640 | on your phone. Make your phone less interesting. Your phone should now be dedicated towards

00:15:01.200 | phone calls, text messages, information like maps, and audio content. Remember the original vision of

00:15:10.160 | the iPhone that Steve Jobs laid out when he first introduced it in 2007 is that we made a really

00:15:15.600 | useful phone and we combined it with your iPod so you don't have to carry two. That's a great vision.

00:15:20.640 | I can scroll through my voicemail instead of having to dial into a voicemail system. I can

00:15:25.920 | listen to podcasts and music really well. If I need to look up something, there's a map.

00:15:29.760 | Three, treat your workspace like it's a phone-free school. There's this big push going on right now.

00:15:39.600 | We should talk about this in another episode, but a big push that I'm a fan of towards phone-free

00:15:45.280 | schools. Don't have your phone out in the classroom, but have it out in the hallway or at

00:15:50.720 | lunch, but the model of your phone goes away when you walk in the door and you don't get it again

00:15:56.960 | until you walk back out. We just have too much research in the context of phones that this is

00:16:01.920 | so much better when the mind of the kids can focus completely on what's happening in school and the

00:16:09.200 | people around them and not being distracted by the phone and knowing that they're going to see

00:16:13.040 | that phone soon and they want to see what's going on. We know it's a much better experience. Well,

00:16:17.120 | this holds for adults as well. Kids might be a little bit more susceptible to the distractions

00:16:22.720 | or the impact of these distractions, but it holds for adults as well. So treat your workplace like

00:16:28.160 | you're working in a phone-free school. And the way you do that is you put on a custom do not

00:16:33.200 | disturb mode on your phone that blocks everything but phone calls. You tell the people who are

00:16:38.240 | important to you in your life, if there's an emergency, call me. And they will if there's

00:16:42.640 | emergency, which won't really happen, so they'll rarely call. But you don't have to worry that if

00:16:47.920 | your kid's sick at school or something that you're not going to find out about it because the calls

00:16:51.840 | come through. Put your ringer on and put that phone in your bag. And just I don't use my phone

00:16:58.400 | while I'm working. Again, if there's a call, I'll hear it, but I don't use text messaging. I don't

00:17:03.360 | go on social media. It's a phone-free school simulated in my workplace. Now, if there's like

00:17:09.120 | messages you want to check in on, maybe you're trying to organize something, great. You can

00:17:12.000 | schedule time for that. Over my lunch break, I'm going to take out my phone, catch up with people

00:17:15.520 | on text. And what am I going to say at the end of those conversations? All right, I'm about to put

00:17:18.880 | my phone away for the rest of the day. But this is where we're leaving this. And we can check back

00:17:24.160 | in after. In fact, this would be a good time to say, I'll be leaving around five. It's a half-hour

00:17:28.400 | commute. So feel free to call me then too, if we really want to work it out. Just set expectations.

00:17:32.560 | I'm putting my phone back away. People will learn in about a week or so that you're not on text

00:17:36.560 | continuously during the day, that you'll check it midday, and you're accessible after the workday.

00:17:41.760 | They adjust to it. All right, four, treat online content browsing like you would watching television

00:17:49.600 | shows. Remember how it was in 2009? It was, I am excited to watch this episode of this show tonight,

00:17:59.040 | and I'm going to go watch that. The office is on right before Parks and Recreation on NBC on

00:18:05.120 | Thursday. It'll be great. We're going to get dinner ready, and we're going to watch those shows.

00:18:08.480 | That's very different than I'm going to watch clips of this episode spontaneously and randomly

00:18:15.280 | all throughout my day, no matter what else is going on, right?

00:18:18.240 | It's different. You should make your online entertainment more like TV shows in 2009.

00:18:24.880 | I'm going to put aside a half-hour, an hour. I'm going to load up my laptop, and there's a lot of

00:18:30.000 | sites I want to check. I want to get all of the online chatter about the baseball team I'm

00:18:36.160 | following. I follow these Instagram influencers that are fun or aspirational. I want to check in

00:18:42.720 | on all of them and see what's going on, what videos they've posted. I'm going to go down

00:18:46.080 | some rabbit holes of links, and I'm going to have some fun, and I'm going to do it from seven to

00:18:49.920 | eight. You can consolidate the experience of entertainment online and not make it something

00:18:56.960 | that you just have in the background as a constant thing you turn to throughout the day.

00:19:02.240 | All right, now here's the last two ideas, a little more non-digital.

00:19:06.160 | Five, actively practice presence and gratitude. Create an experience that you're going to enjoy.

00:19:16.320 | Look forward to the experience. When you're in it, force yourself to actually sit there and think

00:19:22.720 | and say, "This is great. I'm really liking this." When you're done, be like, "That was great."

00:19:26.880 | You know, like, "I am going to go for a walk in the woods after I do a shutdown, and I'm going to

00:19:34.000 | like bring my favorite tea with me, and I'm going to go and journal on this rock, and I'm going to

00:19:38.640 | look forward to the walk. I'm going to enjoy it while I'm doing it. I'm going to have some moments.

00:19:42.640 | Like, isn't this great?" It's just retraining your brain to pay attention to the moment and enjoy

00:19:47.200 | what's happening in the moment. I was much better at this back in those grad school days I was

00:19:52.320 | talking about, and it made a big difference. And finally, go analog in your activities.

00:19:56.240 | Journaling helps. It could be the structured journaling we talked about in an early episode.

00:20:01.760 | It could be you working through like a particular issue. It's analog, and it's interior,

00:20:06.080 | and there's no digital distraction. Read real books. Reading is great. It slows everything down

00:20:12.400 | because after five or 10 minutes, your brain is fully committed to constructing the world on your

00:20:16.160 | page, and it gets you out of that sort of brain fog, partial attention type existence. Read more

00:20:22.640 | and spend more time outside. Go for walks. Go for long walks. Go for runs. Go for rows, whatever it

00:20:28.400 | is. Analog experience. Heighten notable analog experiences where you get used to yourself,

00:20:34.240 | your interior, and paying attention to the world around you. All right, so there we go.

00:20:39.280 | I did not enjoy being in the continuous partial attention, given continuous partial attention

00:20:47.440 | towards the networked digital. I don't think you should be in that state either. You don't have to

00:20:52.960 | be in that state. It's not worth it unless you have a lot of stock and meta or a bite dance,

00:21:01.120 | some sort of steak and bite dance. That's who makes TikTok. If you don't, you don't need this

00:21:07.840 | in your life. That's what I'm saying. Reduce the footprint of your phone. Give yourself full

00:21:11.760 | attention to what you're doing, either all digital or you're all in the real world. Hopefully, those

00:21:15.520 | ideas will happen. Jesse, I was not a happy man. I was depressed. >>What were you scrolling?

00:21:21.040 | >>So for the Asheville News, I was finding a lot of stuff on Twitter. >>Oh, so you have Twitter

00:21:29.920 | on your phone? >>Browser. I don't have an app. >>Oh, okay. >>Is there an app? >>For Twitter?

00:21:35.840 | >>Yeah. >>Yeah, there is. >>Is that a dumb question? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. No, Twitter. So

00:21:41.120 | for most of the accounts, the issue is I have these burner accounts for doing journalism,

00:21:45.440 | right? Because you can't look at them without. So I have this longstanding burner account on

00:21:54.000 | Twitter that allows you, so you can go and look at, but for me, it's like going to individual

00:21:59.360 | people's things in the browser and then looking at their feed. So I don't have, because I don't

00:22:04.160 | use Twitter, I don't have a thing where, I don't have a feed. I don't have a timeline. >>Got it.

00:22:08.880 | >>Is that the word, right? Where it puts things into it from people you follow and stuff. I don't

00:22:12.480 | follow people. I don't have a timeline, but I go to individuals, right? So what I was doing was I

00:22:16.960 | would find, okay, here's someone who's on the ground there who has some cellular access, and

00:22:22.240 | then let me see what they're saying. Also a lot of stuff, news and web. Like, okay, there's an update

00:22:27.280 | on the city of Asheville, local news. So local news would post clips and updates, what they were

00:22:32.880 | seeing, what was going on. So it was like a lot of consolidating news. It actually served a purpose.

00:22:38.400 | Like I eventually found, so my friend got out of there, but it's not easy to get out of there.

00:22:45.520 | Almost all the roads were destroyed, right? Asheville's up in the mountains, right? Everything

00:22:52.240 | was flooded. But it's like, how do you get out of there? I found on Reddit, someone on Reddit

00:22:59.280 | had posted, I was Google searching, someone on Reddit had posted, okay, we made it out.

00:23:03.120 | I-26 is open south of Asheville, the only interstate open in all the four cardinal directions.

00:23:09.200 | But to get there, you have to detour. It's closed in Asheville. So here is this like very specific

00:23:15.280 | detour on back roads that will eventually get you to I-26, far enough south that you're below the

00:23:20.880 | flooding. And then you can get from there to 74 to 80, whatever, and get to Charlotte. So like,

00:23:26.000 | actually all that searching got an escape plan. - For your friend?

00:23:30.640 | - Yeah. - So you provided it to him?

00:23:32.560 | - Yeah, he got out. - Did he buy the map?

00:23:34.480 | - Yeah, it worked. - Oh, you saved him.

00:23:36.240 | - It's still the only way out of Asheville right now. It's a bad situation. But man, it's stressful.

00:23:41.920 | I mean, there's so many stressful things going on in the world that you could constantly be in that

00:23:47.520 | state. Like we're recording this the day after Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel.

00:23:55.200 | All right, there's something else you could do this all day long on. I bet tomorrow there'll be

00:23:59.920 | something else. There is a vice presidential debate. Okay, like you could probably rabbit

00:24:03.760 | hole that for two days. I mean, you could really be in a state of like continual emergency.

00:24:10.160 | And that networked world is not a nice world. All right, anyways, so now I'm done with that

00:24:16.240 | stuff and I'm great. So glad to be back, back more analog. All right, we got a good questions

00:24:22.400 | we want to get to. But first, let's hear from a sponsor. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

00:24:29.520 | Look, I was just talking about in the deep dive, the stress and anxiety and mental impact of

00:24:38.000 | everything you see online. That is a good reminder that the most important relationship you have is

00:24:43.920 | the relationship with your own brain. And if that relationship is strained, you need to fix that.

00:24:51.440 | And one of the best ways to fix that relationship is with professional therapy.

00:24:54.880 | Now, the problem with therapy is it can be hard from a logistical standpoint to find someone. Who

00:24:59.920 | am I going to talk to? Do they take new patients? What if I don't like them? This is where BetterHelp

00:25:04.560 | enters the scene. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely

00:25:11.440 | online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just fill out a

00:25:16.320 | brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and then you can switch therapist

00:25:21.120 | at any time for no additional charge. So get a better relationship with your brain

00:25:29.280 | with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/deepquestions today to get 10% off your first month.

00:25:37.280 | That's betterhelp.com/deepquestions. I also want to talk about our friends at

00:25:47.120 | ZocDoc. There are some things in life that are okay to be a total crapshoot, right? Like trying

00:25:52.640 | a different type of coffee or a new workout class or, God forbid, a new type of daily planner.

00:25:59.360 | But finding the right doctor should not be a crapshoot. And with ZocDoc, it won't be because

00:26:07.040 | you've got more options than you know. Now, ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search

00:26:13.760 | and compare high-quality in-network doctors, choose the right one for your needs, and then click to

00:26:19.280 | instantly book an appointment. We're talking about in-network appointments with more than

00:26:23.840 | 100,000 healthcare providers across every specialty from mental health to dental health,

00:26:28.720 | eye care to skin care, and much more. You can filter for doctors who take your insurance,

00:26:34.000 | who are located nearby, who are a good fit for your particular need, even those who are

00:26:38.720 | highly rated by verified patients. You can see their actual appointment openings,

00:26:44.800 | choose the time that works for you, and then click to instantly book that visit.

00:26:48.640 | Plus, ZocDoc appointments happen fast, typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking.

00:26:54.560 | You can even often score same-day appointments. So stop putting off those doctor's appointments

00:27:01.840 | and go to ZocDoc.com/deep to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C

00:27:11.520 | .com/deep, ZocDoc.com/deep. All right. And with that, let's move on to some questions.

00:27:18.800 | Who do we got first, Jesse? First question is from Trevor.

00:27:23.680 | I run a small business and have two managers that are disorganized. They always prioritize

00:27:28.480 | the urgent over the important. They love to talk about stress and overwork. What can we do to

00:27:33.760 | better evangelize the deep life? Well, I'm trying to decide if this is the right terminology to use

00:27:40.400 | here or not, right? So when we talk about the deep life, we're talking about the intentional

00:27:46.240 | construction of a life that focuses on the things that matter to you and minimizes the things that

00:27:51.360 | don't. So a bad job can get in the way of realizing a deep life. But what you're evangelizing to your

00:28:01.600 | bosses is not the deep life, but just having a sane way of actually working. They don't need

00:28:07.920 | to know about the deep life, but they do need to know about administrative overhead and the

00:28:15.600 | context switching. That when you have too many things on your plate, more and more of your time

00:28:21.440 | is dedicated to the servicing of those obligations as opposed to actually finishing things themselves.

00:28:27.760 | So the rate at which you actually complete useful work goes down. It is not a linear

00:28:32.960 | function that the more stuff I push on my employees, the more stuff that will get done.

00:28:36.720 | That's not actually the way it works. And they need to know about the cost of having to jump

00:28:41.280 | back and forth your attention between different targets, like happens when you have bosses that

00:28:46.240 | demand instant responsiveness. Always emails, always calls. You always have to jump back and

00:28:51.120 | forth. It makes you dumber. You've invested in these brains and your knowledge work organization,

00:28:56.320 | and now you are reducing their ability to actually produce value. So in a perfect world,

00:29:02.160 | you make this case. And what would be the books? The books that I wrote to be relevant would be

00:29:07.760 | Deep Work, World Without Email, and Slow Productivity. You make this case. You give them

00:29:10.720 | those books. They say, I like the sound of this Cal guy. These ideas make sense. And then they're

00:29:17.040 | not bad bosses. Probably won't work. It's worth trying, but it probably won't work.

00:29:23.760 | So what do you need to do then? Well, you need to cash in your career capital to make your

00:29:28.640 | situation better. That could be either changing your setup as your employer, changing your setup

00:29:37.920 | so that you are willing to trade accountability for autonomy. Usually that means I'm going to

00:29:44.720 | focus on just this thing, which is much more self-driven, autonomously executed, as opposed to

00:29:52.080 | juggling a lot of easy things, being a general vessel for the to-dos your boss might have.

00:29:56.800 | You say, no, no, I handle this type of thing. So I'm not super accessible and I'm pretty autonomous,

00:30:01.920 | but in exchange, you can hold me very accountable. And if I'm not delivering objectively,

00:30:06.240 | the numbers are here, this thing is selling, the client dollars are coming through the door,

00:30:09.360 | however you measure yourself. If I'm not objectively producing value, then you can

00:30:15.200 | get rid of me or move me back to what I was doing before. That type of trade works well here,

00:30:21.360 | because often the thing these types of bosses fear is they're being taken advantage of,

00:30:27.520 | or you're not working hard or you want to get out, or why do you want to work from home? Why do you

00:30:31.200 | want to be less accessible? I'm worried that you're taking advantage of me when you're able

00:30:34.800 | to have accountability. No, no, you're going to look at this number. It's objectified. I'm creating

00:30:38.160 | this much value. It gets rid of that fear and it allows them to be like, okay, you're doing that.

00:30:43.280 | Great. And I'll go bother these other people with my email. The other thing you might do is just

00:30:48.320 | find better bosses. What should you be looking for when you're looking for a job? What should

00:30:55.520 | you be working for when it comes to these type of issues? I always say the main thing you should be

00:30:59.200 | looking for is not a particular idea that they subscribe to about management or work or time

00:31:04.720 | management. What you should be looking for is an interest in openness to systems. Bosses that say,

00:31:12.080 | okay, you have a way you want to organize your work. You have a reason you want to do it that

00:31:18.160 | way. Great. I love that initiative. Try it. Let's see how it goes. You want to have bosses that if

00:31:23.520 | you ask them, like, what's your time management philosophy, that they're going to go roll a white

00:31:27.840 | board into the room and be like, sit down. It's going to take a while. Like bosses who think a

00:31:32.400 | lot about the actual structure and organizational work because they are going to be more open and

00:31:37.280 | adaptable to you actually trying systems of work that's going to be less frenetic, less hyperactive

00:31:42.640 | hive mind, less overload, less context switching. I think anti-system bosses like the types of bosses

00:31:48.960 | you have are a real problem and we don't qualify or quantify the impact of that problem enough.

00:31:57.840 | I think bosses that demand responsiveness have no interest in systems, have no interest in good or

00:32:04.320 | bad ways to work, but just sort of see it more as like, do you respond to me? And I want to make

00:32:09.120 | sure no one's pulling a fast one on me. That's as bad as having a verbally abusive boss. That's as

00:32:14.720 | bad as having an incompetent boss. That's as bad as having a boss whose behavior directly conflicts

00:32:21.440 | with your ethical values. And we should treat it as such. I really care about, is this a workplace

00:32:28.320 | that respects the way the human brain functions and is open to people being critical and systematic

00:32:35.840 | about how they approach their day and their time and their work. And if it's not, I mean,

00:32:40.400 | I think you need warning sirens going. We should be more willing to see that as being a major

00:32:43.760 | problem. If more people push back about that, if more people chose employers based on that,

00:32:49.280 | if more people left employers based on that, I think employers will get better.

00:32:52.560 | So I think anti-system bosses, we should treat that as the problem that it is.

00:32:56.960 | So I emailed with Trevor a little bit. He's the overall boss, and these are two managers below

00:33:01.680 | him. But I think the same advice probably holds true in terms of. Oh, that's that changed. Yeah.

00:33:07.200 | That's interesting. Yeah. Oh, then you have some leverage there, Trevor. Give them the three books.

00:33:12.800 | If they don't do it, you can get rid of them. Yeah. And have systems like read the books,

00:33:18.800 | work with them. So how do you want to structure your workloads? How do you want to structure your

00:33:22.400 | communication? Like what's going on? Put the ideas from the books in place, have them read the books

00:33:27.520 | so they understand the underlying ideas. I think they'll come around because it's like a much

00:33:30.720 | better way to work. The people who have trouble with the more systematic way of working are the

00:33:35.360 | people who are leveraging the smoke screen of artificial busyness to get away with not actually

00:33:42.080 | doing work. Those are the people who have trouble. The people who say, wait a second, if I actually

00:33:47.200 | have to go and execute hard things on a schedule, it's going to require a lot of focus and

00:33:52.640 | organization. It's not going to be easy and it might not go well unless I give it my full

00:33:55.600 | attention. Some people look at that and say, I can't do that or I have no interest in doing that.

00:34:00.080 | Can't I just like jump back and forth on a bunch of emails and calls and be busy and be in the mix

00:34:03.760 | of things and kind of just give the pseudo productive sense that like I'm around. Right.

00:34:08.640 | Those people sometimes struggle when you try to get more systematic, but that's great because

00:34:12.640 | you don't want those people at least not in that type of position. If it's in a cognitive production

00:34:17.440 | oriented position, you need people who can actually do the hard cognitive work of producing value.

00:34:22.480 | Yeah. All right. So Trevor, you're in a better situation, I thought, but that other advice

00:34:26.400 | holds for anyone whose bosses above them are really being a problem. Now, what do we got next,

00:34:33.760 | Jesse? Next question is from Blake. I'm a physician. And as I understand it, my interactions

00:34:38.960 | with patients is considered deep work. The problem is that I have to contact switch all day between

00:34:44.480 | different patients. Physicians are evaluated by volume, quality doesn't matter. To my managers,

00:34:49.600 | I just need to avoid a lawsuit. How do I navigate this situation in a deep manner?

00:34:54.400 | Well, there's two related issues here. There's a specific issue of modern medical practice and the

00:35:00.800 | volume of patients. That's a big problem. Not a problem I'm going to be able to solve. That's a

00:35:05.360 | problem with medical care and reimbursement in this country. But your first issue is important

00:35:09.920 | because it gets to a general point that I think applies to a lot of people, which is what is the

00:35:14.320 | scale at which you're measuring deep work, right? So you're saying you're thinking about each

00:35:19.840 | patient engagement as a standalone deep work session. And it is deep work. You're dealing

00:35:26.480 | with a patient. What's happening? You're bringing in a lot of information. You're putting the

00:35:30.720 | context. You're trying to figure out what's going on. You're looking for subtle patterns and

00:35:35.920 | realizing like I think it's this, but this symptom over here maybe isn't really fitting with that

00:35:40.640 | type of diagnosis and maybe something more complicated is going on. It requires concentration

00:35:44.960 | of the application of hard one skill. But where I think you could change your view is you then see

00:35:50.720 | moving to the next patient as an unrelated deep work session. I'm going to say instead,

00:35:55.760 | why don't we expand the timescale of this deep work and say a morning spent dealing nonstop with

00:36:02.880 | patients is one long deep work session. And what happens in this deep work session is like I get

00:36:09.520 | different types of problems come at me and I have to kind of keep my focus steady and not get too

00:36:14.960 | distracted and be able to pivot from this to that and back to this. And it's all medical and it's

00:36:18.640 | all diagnoses. And I'm in that context. See that as your deep work session. Increasing the scale

00:36:24.720 | is often helpful in this way because what happens otherwise if you think, okay, this patient's one

00:36:30.800 | session, that patient is another session. You're going to release your focus in the two minutes

00:36:35.600 | in between. All right. I'm going to like look at my phone. What's going on with sports? What's

00:36:39.360 | going on? And you're going to introduce this concentration sapping distraction into your kind

00:36:43.920 | of cognitive context. Whereas instead you say like, okay, here's my three hour deep work session.

00:36:47.760 | I'm going to get through 15 patients. Let's keep our focus. See if we can do this. It's going to

00:36:52.800 | be much more sustained. I think the scale idea makes more sense when you look at other types

00:36:58.240 | of examples. It's more obvious. So if you're a math student, you have a problem set, right?

00:37:05.760 | 10 problems. You wouldn't say, well, my problem is I keep having to switch my context because

00:37:13.280 | first I'm working on this problem. And then I have to work on this problem, which is a different

00:37:17.440 | problem. And then I'm working on this third problem and it's dealing with something different. And my

00:37:22.320 | context switch is like, no, no, working on the problem set is one context. You're in the world

00:37:27.680 | of doing math problems. It's like a radio host, like what I'm doing now. I see answering these

00:37:33.440 | five questions I'm answering as a deep work session, not five deep work sessions that are

00:37:37.920 | kind of unrelated. So in general, think about this. If you worry that your deep work is too fragmented,

00:37:43.600 | but what's happening is you have one deep work requiring thing after another,

00:37:49.040 | start treating that whole thing as one big session. It changes your mindset.

00:37:52.560 | You pace yourself, you maintain better concentration. And I think it just works out better.

00:37:57.520 | All right, who do we got next? Next up is Laura. I have a remarkable two tablet and why I love it.

00:38:05.360 | I'm still drawn to using other planners and single purpose notebooks. How do I merge these tools? I'm

00:38:10.960 | feeling a bit of notebook overwhelmed. I think of my remarkable to as like a stack of a bunch of

00:38:18.480 | notebooks put into one. So however many notebooks you have in your remarkable two, you're saving

00:38:25.280 | yourself having to carry or keep track of that many notebooks. I also don't have everything in

00:38:31.520 | my remarkable two. Mainly I do single purpose notebooks. I still do those. Almost everything

00:38:37.760 | else. I guess I do have my remarkable two. I've got my planner, obviously time block planners

00:38:41.840 | paper. I don't do that in my remarkable. I have single purpose notebooks. I don't have any going

00:38:46.640 | right now. But when I'm working on a new big project, I'll pull that out to really get into it.

00:38:52.160 | Small field notebook just for working on a single project. And most everything else I keep in my

00:38:57.120 | remarkable. So I think it's okay if you have some other notebooks. If you have other sort of

00:39:03.520 | physical notebooks that aren't single purpose, you just sort of are using pages of some normal

00:39:09.680 | notebook or legal pad to work on something. You might want to bring that back to your remarkable

00:39:14.400 | two. I kind of like the discipline of like, this is just like my general purpose notebook for

00:39:19.600 | working out anything that needs to be worked out because now you have a nice copy of everything.

00:39:22.880 | You only have to bring one thing with you. But I think a planner plus remarkable plus single

00:39:27.040 | purpose notebooks, that's a completely fine combination. To me, that makes a lot of sense.

00:39:30.720 | Remarkable. All right, here we go. Next up is Natasha. Have you considered adding the category

00:39:39.120 | creativity to the deep life buckets of craft contemplation community in celebration? I guess

00:39:44.880 | this could fit into craft category, but I think it goes deeper than that. Well, when it comes to deep

00:39:50.000 | life buckets, the key is having buckets. The particular collection of buckets you have is

00:39:55.600 | somewhat arbitrary, right? So like the whole idea here is just to make sure that when you are

00:39:59.840 | reflecting on what matters to your life, that you're not getting myopic, that you're not having

00:40:05.280 | all of your attention snap into just one aspect of your life, such as your career. And so having

00:40:10.480 | the different areas broken out allows you to look at each of those areas separately and have a part

00:40:17.360 | of your vision for the life well lived that touches on each of those areas, right? So when you're

00:40:22.000 | creating that master narrative, your ideal lifestyle, these buckets are going to help you

00:40:27.680 | be sufficiently broad in that thinking. When you're trying to take action to get closer towards your

00:40:33.440 | ideal lifestyle, these buckets will help you divide those actions among different areas that

00:40:37.760 | are important, right? So having buckets is critical. The specific buckets you use, it

00:40:43.520 | doesn't really matter. You'll probably change them. So for example, I've been experimenting

00:40:48.240 | recently with a different set of bucket definitions that are based off of a body metaphor.

00:40:55.120 | So I'll run this by quickly. I should do a whole episode on this, but just to give you a sense,

00:40:59.840 | like something I've been messing around with, because it actually works kind of well. It's not

00:41:03.840 | alliterative, but it's based on the body. So think about this. You have, when thinking about your

00:41:11.520 | ideal life, the head, so this is where you're thinking about your mental life, your intellectual

00:41:18.640 | life. It's things like ideas and reading and what quiet and what role your phone plays in your life

00:41:24.720 | and like the type of stuff we were playing in the deep dive. That's covered in your head in this

00:41:28.800 | metaphor. You have the heart, that covers relationships, connection to community, to

00:41:35.360 | family, to other people, right? So that's where you deal with like the role of other people in

00:41:39.200 | your life. Hands, this is sort of corresponds to craft. Your work, like what it is that you're

00:41:47.840 | actually creating, but also like skilled pursuits that may be non-professional, like hobby type

00:41:52.640 | pursuits, but it's craft in general. We think about like what you're building things with your

00:41:57.280 | hands. So it's like producing new things of value in the world and enjoying the process of doing it

00:42:02.000 | yourself. This is kind of stretching the body a little bit, but we could say the soul, the deal

00:42:07.600 | with philosophical, theological type of issues that are critical to your conception of your life

00:42:13.360 | to well live. And then here's a new one I added. So Jesse, this didn't fall under the alliterative

00:42:18.160 | buckets that had the C's in it. Feet, and I don't know if you can guess, but what I'm thinking about

00:42:25.280 | for feet is the places you live in exist. So that's thinking about on the big scale, like where

00:42:33.520 | I live, you know, what city do I live in? What type of house door in that city? Where do I live?

00:42:40.240 | Like it could be those types of decisions, but it can also be the spaces in the place you already

00:42:44.800 | live. So like the renovation I'm doing on the maker lab of the HQ, that would also be something

00:42:49.680 | that would fall under the feet, the feet component of this type of deep life decomposition. It's like

00:42:55.600 | where you, the places you stand. That's one it's coming up and I'm working on my deep life book.

00:43:02.480 | It's coming up that we didn't deal enough with that probably in the show, but like the places

00:43:08.800 | in which you exist play a big role in like your perception of a life, like where you live, what

00:43:13.920 | type of place you live in, what your spaces are like. So like I'm messing around with that. It's

00:43:17.600 | a body metaphor, you know, I don't know, maybe something else works as well. I, what I'm trying

00:43:22.640 | to emphasize there is you do need categories for understanding the parts of your life that

00:43:26.880 | are important to you, but my categories might be different than yours and your categories might

00:43:31.680 | change over time. Just like now I've moved on from the alliterative C's to trying out body metaphors.

00:43:37.520 | All right. Ooh, are we up to the slow? It looks like the slow productivity corner.

00:43:43.360 | We are. All right. So let's hear that theme music for those who are new. The slow productivity

00:43:59.120 | corner is where we take a question that is relevant to my most recent book,

00:44:02.320 | slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment without burnout. If you have not yet read that

00:44:09.280 | book, you should get it wherever books are sold. A large fraction of what we talk about on the show

00:44:15.360 | is based at least in some part of what we talked about in that book. So it's sort of like the user

00:44:18.480 | guide to deep questions. All right, Jesse, what's our slow productivity corner question of the week.

00:44:22.080 | It's from Susan moving away from pseudo work makes me feel very vulnerable. I went from being

00:44:28.160 | able to tell my bosses about 15 teeny incremental updates to only being able to talk about one or

00:44:32.960 | two projects at a time. Nobody has jumped on my throat about this, but I'm feeling guilty.

00:44:38.160 | My friends are also judging me because I'm not putting in a solid eight hours at the desk.

00:44:42.480 | They believe in sit still and look busy. I'll do things like take a nap, hopefully to think better,

00:44:48.480 | wander around outside or sit in a comfy chair and journal about a work project to help me come up

00:44:52.960 | with solutions. Well, Susan, I like the direction you're going. I'm going to give you some

00:44:57.360 | reassurance here. First of all, your friends aren't judging you. They don't care. They don't

00:45:02.000 | really care about your work habits. Maybe someone made a comment once. I wouldn't worry too much

00:45:06.800 | about it too. I want to advertise too much. This is like the hidden secret of people who

00:45:13.440 | follow the slow productivity philosophy. You know, you can construct these very sustainable,

00:45:19.200 | energizing, productive, professional lives. You're doing stuff that matters,

00:45:23.680 | but your life is very sustainable and interesting. We don't advertise it much

00:45:27.680 | because again, you're right. A lot of people don't get it. They are caught up in the cult of pseudo

00:45:33.120 | work, which as I explained in the book is where you believe that visible activity is the best

00:45:37.920 | proxy for useful effort. And to that mindset, anything that reduces work in the moment is

00:45:44.400 | dangerous. So just don't advertise, take your naps, sit in your comfy chair, but maybe just

00:45:50.240 | don't tell people that's what you're doing. They're probably not going to reassure you

00:45:53.680 | because they don't understand. And also they probably don't care that much. Third, you need

00:45:59.680 | to focus on part three of the slow productivity framework. So you're doing the first two parts,

00:46:05.760 | doing fewer things, working at a natural pace. Excellent. To make that work in a way that is

00:46:11.360 | sustainable, that doesn't make you feel guilty or similarly build up like a resentment towards

00:46:16.560 | work in general is quality. You need to become obsessed with the quality of what you produce.

00:46:23.040 | Now that you're doing fewer things at a natural pace, you need to get obsessed about the quality

00:46:26.800 | of what you produced in a way that you didn't have to bother and you're doing 15 things. It's

00:46:31.440 | impossible to do anything that well. Anyways, you're doing 15 things. You're getting credit

00:46:34.640 | for being busy. Now you're going to get credit for doing things well. And as you start delivering

00:46:39.920 | things that catch people's attention as being unusually good, the scrutiny on you will go down

00:46:45.200 | and your self-scrutiny on your behavior is going to reduce as well. You're going to feel more

00:46:49.040 | confident in this new approach to work. So be careful about your time, time block plan,

00:46:56.880 | make sure that you're giving large blocks of focused work on the things that matter.

00:47:01.520 | Adopt a deliberate practice mindset where you're trying to deliberately get better at the skills

00:47:07.200 | that you're applying in your work. You're like an athlete training to get a better free throw

00:47:12.400 | percentage or to cut some time off of your mile run times. You want to be practicing systematically

00:47:17.360 | to get better. Get obsessed with quality and then you'll feel much better about the other

00:47:24.480 | parts about your life that are now getting more sustainable. That's the whole mix that makes this

00:47:28.640 | whole thing work. You're not doing too much. Your pace is varied, but the stuff you're doing is very

00:47:31.920 | good. You have to have all three. I think as you obsess over quality and as you see the tangible

00:47:37.840 | results of that obsession, you're going to feel much better. So you're on the right track. Slow

00:47:44.640 | productivity is such a better way to approach the working world. So keep it up, but get the quality

00:47:50.080 | in your crosshairs as well because that's going to make this whole thing work. All right. Let's

00:47:55.600 | hear that music one more time. All right. Usually around this time in the show, we like to take a

00:48:08.480 | call from a reader or listener, I suppose. It's hard, Jesse. I have so many different ways that

00:48:14.080 | people encounter me. They watch me, they listen to me and they read me. So I have to kind of get

00:48:18.880 | that straight. We'll say listeners. All right. So do we have a call from a listener this week?

00:48:22.720 | We do. All right. Hi, Kel and Jesse. My name is Nancy and I live in Brussels,

00:48:30.800 | Belgium, in Europe. I have a question about episode 319. You tell us that when you do deep

00:48:38.560 | work and you've been disturbed, it takes about 20 minutes to refocus to do deep work again.

00:48:44.960 | But what about the Pomodoro technique? Because then you work for 25 minutes and you take a 5

00:48:51.280 | minute break and then you work again for 25 minutes. How does it match with the 20 minutes

00:48:58.560 | it takes to regain focus? Thank you. Bye. That's a very good question. Actually, interestingly,

00:49:06.240 | you know, the 20 minute, that specific quantity, I was having a hard time remembering exactly where

00:49:14.320 | that particular number came from. Now, the fact that it takes a long time on the scale of many

00:49:20.400 | minutes to return your focus after a distraction, that is well known in multiple different studies.

00:49:26.400 | You can look, for example, at Sophie Leroy's work on attention residue, among others that have

00:49:32.480 | quantified this. But if you go back and read Sophie's papers, for example, she doesn't quantify

00:49:38.080 | exactly how long it takes. But I had this 20 minutes. I've always used this 20 minutes. I

00:49:41.520 | couldn't remember where it came from until I was researching for the deep dive at the beginning of

00:49:47.840 | the episode. I was going back to Winifred Gallagher's book, Wrapped. And I discovered,

00:49:53.680 | oh, that's where it's from. She talks to a cognitive scientist in that book who's talking

00:49:59.920 | about the distraction and bringing your attention back. And he gives that exact number. It takes

00:50:04.880 | about 20 minutes to get your attention back after you're distracted. So it's like I rediscovered

00:50:09.280 | where that specific value came from. Clearly, it's not so precise. It could be 7 minutes. It could be

00:50:14.320 | 27 minutes. It kind of depends. But it's many minutes. OK, so back to the Pomodoro technique.

00:50:18.880 | For that to work, so you're talking about 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off. For that to work,

00:50:25.840 | you can't initiate a significant context switch in the 5 minutes off.

00:50:30.960 | Back in the old days of my newsletter and blog, I had a term for this. I called it deep breaks.

00:50:38.080 | What you're doing if you want the Pomodoro technique to succeed, what you're doing during

00:50:41.520 | that time off is you're giving your brain a breather, but you're not distracting your brain.

00:50:46.480 | So it's like, OK, I bring the intensity down, but then I walk to get coffee and come back. I go down

00:50:54.400 | the hallway and back. I stretch out and then do my next Pomodoro. What you can't do is expose

00:51:01.600 | your brain during that short break to highly salient distractions that are unrelated to the

00:51:06.800 | task at hand. So if you look at your email, if you look at social media, right, or start a

00:51:14.320 | conversation with a colleague about an unrelated project during that break, your next Pomodoro is

00:51:18.560 | going to be much worse. You probably won't, as you said in the call, you probably won't get your

00:51:24.320 | full concentration back towards the end of that Pomodoro. A couple of things I would say, though,

00:51:29.600 | in addition to deep breaks, is if you're going to do a Pomodoro type technique, I call it interval

00:51:33.520 | training, concentration interval training. I would probably start, I guess, 25 minutes is a good place

00:51:38.640 | to start, but you want to increase that duration as you get comfortable, right? Once you can hit

00:51:45.600 | those 25 minutes without it being too much of a cognitive strain, make it 35. Once you can do 35

00:51:51.120 | minutes without it being too much of a cognitive strain, make it 45. So maybe you want to do a week

00:51:57.120 | or two at each duration. You want that duration of comfortable focus to get pretty close to about

00:52:03.440 | 90 minutes, then you're set. If you can keep focus on something for 90 minutes, it's not easy,

00:52:09.360 | but without it being like a real impossibility where like your attention just wanders off and

00:52:14.320 | you run out of steam and your mind can't tolerate it, if you can like consistently do 90-minute

00:52:18.080 | blocks, think about that as like you have trained the fitness of your brain to a level that like you

00:52:25.360 | can do some damage now with deep work, all right? So the first part of my advice is if you're taking

00:52:30.400 | short breaks in between sprints, you can't expose yourself to highly salient distractions. I mean,

00:52:35.440 | if you really need to look at something, make it non-super engaging and super unrelated to your

00:52:42.800 | work. Like you could look at baseball trade rumors on a break from like academic work because it's,

00:52:51.200 | you know, it's just like kind of interesting, but it's not something that's going to capture

00:52:55.360 | your attention or create a lingering sense of distraction, all right? So that's my advice. Take

00:53:01.120 | deep breaks, expand those Pomodoro sessions over time until they're much longer than 25 minutes.

00:53:06.400 | All right, I think now we have a case study. This is where you, my listeners, send in your own

00:53:12.640 | accounts of putting the type of things we talked about on the show in the practice in your own life.

00:53:16.720 | Today's case study comes from Yael. Yael says, "I've been a longtime reader and listener,

00:53:22.720 | and your advice has guided me well. I wanted to share some recent developments in my life

00:53:26.880 | as a case study. I'm a 39-year-old social psychologist, and as my children grew older,

00:53:32.000 | I felt the need for a career change. This led me to enroll in a master's program in

00:53:36.720 | counseling psychology at a prestigious university in New York. Your voice kept echoing in my mind,

00:53:41.200 | encouraging me to build on the skills and abilities I've developed over the years,

00:53:44.720 | which influenced my decision. During the first semester of the program, I used a time-blocking

00:53:50.800 | method. I even bought your journal, though I never wrote in it. I still plan my days on a

00:53:54.880 | simple notepad with your journal as inspiration. My grades were all As. I submitted every assignment

00:53:59.840 | ahead of time and received excellent feedback. But that's not all. During this first semester,

00:54:04.480 | I conducted meaningful research, built connections with a well-known professor,

00:54:07.840 | and presented our preliminary findings at a major conference in New York City. I also used to run a

00:54:13.840 | large Facebook group where I shared my thoughts and interesting discoveries from my reading and

00:54:17.600 | research. I loved how quickly I could jot down ideas and receive immediate reactions. However,

00:54:23.840 | it eventually became too time-consuming without much tangible benefit. I've often heard you

00:54:28.240 | explain how we like to believe things will work a certain way, like gaining popularity through

00:54:33.120 | social media and being discovered, but that's not how things usually unfold in the real world.

00:54:36.720 | Instead, I've shifted my focus to writing my thoughts more coherently, and I've started

00:54:40.720 | publishing them in a widely-read newspaper. I like this case study for a couple reasons.

00:54:46.720 | One, there's a good reminder here for students, which is that being systematic about the job of

00:54:54.480 | being a student will make you a very good student. Most students are terrible at being a student.

00:55:00.400 | They don't manage their time. They don't have a realistic plan for how they're going to get

00:55:05.120 | their things done. They give no foresight to how they're going to approach their assignments,

00:55:09.440 | what techniques work, what don't. They don't adjust their approaches based on what they learn

00:55:13.680 | in practice. And because of that, if you are focused and systematic, it's a major advantage.

00:55:22.720 | And I hear from especially students coming back later in life, because students come back later

00:55:28.240 | in life are much more likely to treat it like a job. I hear from these type of students again and

00:55:31.280 | again, "I'm crushing it, right? Because I'm treating this like a job. I'm an adult." So

00:55:35.920 | all students out there, take this lesson to heart. If you apply the type of advice we talk about here

00:55:40.720 | to student life, you are going to seem like a superstar. I also like the point here about the

00:55:46.000 | Facebook group. It's easy to write stories about something and what it's going to do and why it's

00:55:52.080 | good, but the story isn't necessarily true. And you have to be willing to act on what you discover.

00:55:58.080 | So like, yeah, you're like, "I'm on this Facebook group and I'm publishing stuff and I get feedback

00:56:02.160 | and I have a story that this is important for my ideation because it's kind of fun.

00:56:06.000 | And I have a deeper story that maybe I'm going to be discovered and go viral and it's going to

00:56:11.040 | lead to all these great things." But the reality you discover is like, "It's distracting me.

00:56:15.920 | It takes a lot of time. Maybe it strokes my ego, but it's not helping me get better at what I do."

00:56:20.880 | And so Yale said, "No, enough of that. I'll do something harder and more traditional,

00:56:24.320 | like trying to publish in a newspaper, push myself to get better." As she points out,

00:56:30.000 | we often tell this story to ourselves about social media. We often tell ourselves a story about how

00:56:34.320 | what we're doing professionally on social media is critical

00:56:37.920 | to our success. We have this big audience and we would disappear without it.

00:56:42.320 | And the reality is often that's not true. The sense that you have an audience that cares is

00:56:47.760 | something that is carefully constructed by these platforms to keep you using it.

00:56:51.120 | But for 99.9% of people and jobs and companies, it's not at the core of doing what you do better.

00:56:58.560 | So Yale, I appreciate that case study. All right, what we got for our final segment,

00:57:04.240 | we'll be talking about the books I read last month. But first, hear from another sponsor.

00:57:09.280 | We actually have a new sponsor today. It is a game-changing product that you can use before

00:57:18.400 | a night out that will include drinks. The product is called Pre-Alcohol. Let's be honest,

00:57:25.520 | people like Jesse and I, we're older than we used to be. The 20-year-old Dartmouth student in my

00:57:33.040 | path probably had an easier time having a few drinks with friends than the 42-year-old version

00:57:39.760 | of me, where now you get two beers in and the next day you're on a stretcher.

00:57:47.120 | Can't party as hard as we used to there, Jesse. But sometimes it's nice to go out and celebrate

00:57:54.480 | an event or to go catch up with a good friend. And that's where the idea of Pre-Alcohol comes in.

00:58:00.640 | In particular, the product I want to talk about here is Z-Biotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink.

00:58:06.800 | It's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists

00:58:11.360 | to tackle rough mornings after drinking. So here's how this works. When you drink,

00:58:16.240 | alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It is this byproduct, not dehydration,

00:58:23.120 | that's to blame for your rough next day. Pre-alcohol produces an enzyme to break that

00:58:29.040 | product down. So what you do is you drink the pre-alcohol before you start, before you have

00:58:36.800 | your drinks. You remember to make Z-Biotics your first drink of the night, then you drink

00:58:41.760 | responsibly and feel your best the next day. So, hey, I think this is something that's invented

00:58:50.240 | is a godsend for those of us who no longer rage like we once were able to, and now can actually,

00:58:56.400 | again, have that night out, catching up with a friend or a birthday party,

00:58:59.840 | throw down some Z-Biotics first and lessen the impact of having that fun night out, right?

00:59:07.280 | So I kept hearing about pre-alcohol and wonder what it was actually like. I've tried this out.

00:59:11.280 | I get what people are talking about. It's a good idea. And with their GMO technology,

00:59:15.680 | Z-Biotics is continuing to invent probiotics that will help with everyday challenges of

00:59:19.600 | modern living. So go to zbiotics.com/cal to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use

00:59:28.080 | Cal at checkout. Z-Biotics is backed with 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied

00:59:36.080 | for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com/cal

00:59:42.080 | and use that code cal at checkout to get 15% off. I also want to talk about our longtime friends at

00:59:50.560 | Shopify. When you think about businesses where sales are rocketing, right, like Feastables by

00:59:55.840 | Mr. Beast or Thrive Cosmetics or Silicon Valley's new mandatory weekend uniform supplier, Cotopaxi,

01:00:03.360 | you might think about their innovative projects, sure, like their progressive band or their

01:00:07.680 | button down marketing. But an overlooked secret to their success

01:00:11.280 | is the businesses behind the business of making selling simple. And for millions of businesses,

01:00:19.360 | that business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. They're the home of the

01:00:26.560 | number one checkout on the planet. And the not so secret secret that Shopify boost conversions up to

01:00:33.600 | 50%. That means there's way less of your shopping carts are going to be abandoned,

01:00:37.040 | and you're going to get way more sales. So if you're growing your business, your commerce

01:00:43.280 | platform better be ready to sell whatever wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the

01:00:48.080 | web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between, Shopify helps you at every one of

01:00:52.080 | these places. When we open up our long, I was gonna say like long anticipated, but probably

01:00:58.160 | Jesse, the right phrase is like our long feared online deep question store. Of course, Shopify is

01:01:04.560 | what we're going to use. It's easy, it's a great experience, conversions are going to go up,

01:01:08.720 | you should consider it too. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that you

01:01:13.760 | see at Thrive or Feastivals or our long feared deep question store that will be here soon.

01:01:18.880 | Get the same checkout they all use. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at

01:01:24.240 | Shopify.com/deep, but type that in all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling

01:01:32.640 | today, Shopify.com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's get to our final segment.

01:01:38.720 | All right, it's the first episode in a new month, I want to review the five books I read

01:01:44.000 | in the month before. So we'll be talking now about the books I read in September 2024.

01:01:51.840 | The first book I read was The Devil's Teeth by Susan Casey. I am a big Susan Casey fan. I'm

01:01:59.200 | actually trying to find a way to interview her because I want to interview her for my new book,

01:02:02.320 | maybe even get her on this podcast. If you know Susan, let me know. But I'm going back and

01:02:07.520 | rereading some of the Susan Casey catalog. The Devil's Teeth I think was her, I think it was

01:02:12.480 | her first book. It takes place, so The Devil's Teeth is referring to the Farallones or Farallones,

01:02:19.360 | I don't know how to pronounce it, islands off the coast of California, right beyond San Francisco.

01:02:24.000 | It happens to be the place that has one of the most consistent largest populations

01:02:29.120 | of large great white sharks. And it's a typical Susan Casey book, so it is adventure/science.

01:02:36.880 | So she goes out there and she spends time on the island and on a boat off the island,

01:02:40.800 | and the boat almost sinks. But you learn about the people on the island and the sharks and what

01:02:46.240 | they're learning about the sharks. And Casey does, she's a great writer. It makes sense,

01:02:52.080 | I mean, she was the editor at Outside during the John Krakauer era, so she really understands how

01:02:57.520 | to do adventure writing. I'm actually rereading The Wave right now, so I'm kind of in a Susan Casey

01:03:02.960 | trip. Her most recent book, which was about deep ocean, what's it called? The Underworld,

01:03:10.000 | also fantastic, I recommend it. All right. And then I read The Outrun by Amy Liptrott.

01:03:16.720 | It's a memoir. So Amy Liptrott, she grew up on one of these small Scottish islands,

01:03:25.040 | sort of like beyond the Shetland Islands. I don't know the UK geography well, but I think this is,

01:03:29.040 | you go north from Scotland and they have these islands that people live on. Grew up on a small

01:03:35.280 | island, escaped to London, kind of loved the city life, but became a really serious alcoholic.

01:03:40.560 | Returns to this island where she grew up, this is a memoir. Returns to this island as part of

01:03:48.320 | her process of getting sober. So it's kind of a memoir of that return to the island and

01:03:52.240 | rediscovering herself and finding sobriety. She's a very good writer. I think I was attracted to it

01:03:58.720 | because I was attracted to these islands. And it was cool to hear about what life is like

01:04:03.120 | on these small windswept North Atlantic Scottish islands.

01:04:06.560 | All right. Then I read The Amateurs by David Halberstam. This is about rowers, scholars,

01:04:16.480 | preparing for '84 Olympics, I think. I don't know. Which ones did we boycott, Jesse? Was that

01:04:26.640 | 1980? I can look it up. Well, anyways, it follows a group of scholars

01:04:32.960 | who are preparing to compete for the spots on the Olympic team for one of the Olympics in the '80s.

01:04:40.400 | It's called The Amateurs because the point was, scholing was one of the last truly amateur sports

01:04:46.320 | at the Olympics in that there is no professional career in it. These are people doing it in their

01:04:52.000 | own time. And Halberstam follows four or five of these characters. They're all ex-Ivy League

01:05:00.880 | rowers who are basically scholing full time and trying to compete for these spots. And

01:05:04.240 | it's good. I mean, clearly, he was influenced by John McPhee. There's definitely a levels of the

01:05:11.600 | sense of the game type vibe to this book. Maybe more detail than you really want to hear. I guess

01:05:19.520 | if I'm going to critique, it's a famous book. These people aren't that interesting.

01:05:23.200 | The story is kind of the same. They went to Yale. They wanted their dad's approval because they

01:05:31.040 | weren't playing football like their dad and their grandfather and their great grandfather did.

01:05:34.400 | They get in the rowing. They have freak bodies for rowing. They get really good at rowing. All

01:05:40.480 | they do is row. Rowing really hurts. They want to win the Olympics. And you kind of hear this story

01:05:46.480 | again and again. The main variation is, I think, one of them went to Harvard. But that's the thing.

01:05:54.800 | He really gets into the pain of competitive scholing, though, too. Part of it is just pain

01:06:00.640 | tolerance for the last 500 meters when it's all lactic acid. But it's a classic book. And it

01:06:06.640 | really gives you a sense of rowing. It actually got me-- I'm back on a rowing program. So it had

01:06:12.720 | that effect. I'm getting back in rowing shape because I have this dream of, when I take my next

01:06:18.960 | sabbatical, getting back on the river. Yeah, there's a couple of boathouses around. Do you

01:06:24.480 | know there's a real serious boathouse in DC? Yes, I do because--

01:06:28.720 | The Potomac.

01:06:29.440 | --my buddy's rowing in college. And I think he was--

01:06:33.040 | Yeah, I think it's the Potomac Boat Club. It has some Olympians that train there.

01:06:36.400 | Oh, OK.

01:06:36.880 | Yeah, it's interesting. All right. Then I read-- and this has turned out to be timely,

01:06:40.400 | but I didn't know it at the time-- The Machine by Joe Poznanski, the baseball columnist. The

01:06:46.960 | Machine is about that famous 1970s-era Reds team with Pete Rose and Johnny Bench that went on to

01:06:57.760 | win the World Series. And it's a baseball book that follows that season. And it's good. I mean,

01:07:03.840 | it's a well-covered season. Poznanski had a lot of sources to pull from. He's a classic baseball

01:07:08.480 | columnist, so you're going to get that kind of classic baseball column style, which is like a

01:07:14.000 | very-- if you haven't read these type of classic baseball books, be prepared. It's a very specific

01:07:19.840 | way of writing. It's high energy. It's sort of in the room. It's kind of like psychologically,

01:07:27.520 | like you're inside the minds of the players, like how they're feeling about things. And it moves

01:07:32.000 | around. But it also has a sort of old-timey feel. It's a real stylized thing, but a well-written

01:07:36.640 | book. But anyway, Pete Rose just died a couple of days ago before recording this, so it's kind of

01:07:41.600 | sad. But it's a good look at that team. The one flaw from a baseball perspective

01:07:47.520 | is-- I mean, look, this team, it's called the Big Red Machine, they used to call it.

01:07:52.000 | It had a fantastic offense. But it doesn't matter how good your offense is. You win the World

01:07:59.040 | Series, you have to have your pitching just working. And in this book, man, the pitching

01:08:05.680 | doesn't come up that much. Like, we're pitching. It's fine. But it's like Pete Rose and how he was

01:08:11.280 | hitting or this or that. The other thing that seemed to have caught my attention is the way

01:08:17.440 | Posnansky talks about hitting. It seems to be just a force of will. Like, Rose was mad and

01:08:26.400 | wanted some hits and tried really hard and got a lot of hits, as opposed to the reality of hitting,

01:08:30.400 | which is like a game of timing and adjustments and trying to figure out what's going on with

01:08:35.920 | my swing and what do I need to adjust it, what are the pitchers trying to do with me.

01:08:40.720 | Modern hitting is a cat and mouse game where you are studying that pitcher in the dugout and trying

01:08:47.520 | to understand, OK, here's what they're going to come at me with, and here's my strategy to go

01:08:51.040 | after it. It's not just I got mad and I'm going to have a big game, and then you hit it. You can't

01:08:56.000 | force yourself to hit. The last book I read, this is kind of crazy. I count books in the month I

01:09:03.840 | finish them. I've been kind of slowly reading this book in the background for a long time.

01:09:08.080 | It's not really a book you're supposed to read through, but I did anyways. It's called You Shall

01:09:14.480 | Be Holy by Joseph Telushkin. This is a book on ethics, and it's like a reference book. I mean,

01:09:22.640 | it's 600 pages, doorstop, and it's like topic by topic, and then with each topic, it's broken down

01:09:30.320 | in the numbered subtopics. Here's the ethical thing, here, here, here's what citation for this,

01:09:36.640 | citation for that. It's kind of like a manual. But look, I'm a member of the Center for Digital

01:09:42.960 | Ethics at Georgetown. I'm the director of the Computer Science, Ethics, and Society Academic

01:09:48.160 | Program at Georgetown. I'm more involved in my academic life at the intersection of ethics and

01:09:53.600 | technology, and I was thinking, "I need to know more ethics." Now, there's the sort of formal

01:09:59.280 | study of ethics, like coming out of philosophy, and you can study Kant and all this sort of

01:10:03.440 | normative thinking. But I was like, "I just need to brush up on what our ancient sources tell us

01:10:10.160 | about what's good and what's bad in certain situations." So I figured, "Okay, if you want

01:10:15.280 | to keep going back, you're eventually going to end up at Jewish sources." So much of the ideas

01:10:19.840 | of modern Western ethics originate in ideas that go all the way back to the oldest books of the

01:10:26.960 | Hebrew Bible, which then influenced Christianity, influenced Islam, and then influenced Enlightenment

01:10:32.720 | human right-based thinking. All of that goes back to ideas that were being worked out in the second

01:10:40.160 | millennium BC. So I said, "Great, I'm going to read a book. This is Jewish ethics." So it goes

01:10:45.600 | through just super systematically, like, "Well, here's what we know about this from Torah," or

01:10:50.320 | what Talmud says here, what a medieval commentary says here. It's just systematic. At some point,

01:10:54.480 | I was like, "I'm just going to read this whole thing. I'm just going to load into my head a

01:10:58.000 | whole bunch of pre-classical sort of ancient ethical thinking, the kind of foundations that

01:11:04.560 | develop into the ways we think about these things today." So I read the whole thing.

01:11:07.760 | >> Do they give scenarios? >> Yeah. No, and it gets super precise.

01:11:15.520 | Like, okay, gossip, right? We're talking about gossip. It's going to really break down in the

01:11:21.920 | subcategories. Like, okay, but what happens if, what about the situation in which you're

01:11:28.320 | gossiping about another person, but that gossip could prevent the person you're gossiping to

01:11:35.760 | from being defrauded? So it's like the prohibition of gossip or the need to help your friend from

01:11:41.440 | being defrauded, like, what takes precedence? Well, in that case, you should help your friend

01:11:46.960 | from being defrauded, but minimize the information you give so that it's sufficient to avoid that,

01:11:54.480 | but no more than that, because then you're reveling in the gossip. It's always like,

01:11:58.560 | you know what I'm saying? It's like category, subcategory, subcategory, and it's meant as a

01:12:02.560 | reference book. Oh, I want to know about what does Jewish ethics say about this issue. I'll

01:12:07.920 | go to the chapter and then go to the subchapter and you look it up. But I just read the whole

01:12:11.280 | thing through. And I just did it at night. I just read 20 pages. And then it became a nice meditative

01:12:19.360 | background. I don't even know when I started that, but I finished it last month, so I count it.

01:12:26.800 | Here's the bad part, though. It's volume one. How many volumes? I don't know. I think two or three,

01:12:34.480 | but I think I got it. I think I got a lot of ethics out of volume one.

01:12:41.040 | All right. Well, anyways, those are the books I read back in September. I'll report back in October

01:12:51.040 | what I'm reading right now. Okay. I think that's all the time we have, Jesse. Thank you, everyone,

01:12:54.320 | for listening to the show. We'll be back next week with a new episode. And until then, as always,

01:12:59.840 | stay deep. Hey, so if you enjoyed today's discussion about what happens when you're

01:13:03.680 | looking at your phone all the time, I think you'll also enjoy episode 298, which is titled

01:13:09.280 | Rethinking Attention. Check it out. So today I'm going to argue that we misunderstand

01:13:16.880 | the impact of how we obtain information on the overall quality of our lives.

How Your Phone Is Changing You - What Happens When You Mindlessly Scroll | Cal Newport

Chapters