Dr. Cal Newport: How to Enhance Focus and Improve Productivity | Huberman Lab

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Dr. Cal Newport. Dr. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University.

He did his training at MIT and he is currently both a professor and the author of many best-selling books focused on productivity, focus, and how to access the specific states of mind to bring out your best in terms of cognitive performance and indeed in terms of performance in all endeavors.

One of his more notable books is entitled Deep Work, Rules for Focus Success in a Distracted World. Deep Work is a book that has had tremendous positive influence on my work life and indeed my life in general because it spells out how exactly to go about doing one's best possible work.

For me, that's in the context of science and podcasting but it includes tools that I and many others have extended to other aspects of their life as well and it's a book that I highly, highly recommend everybody read.

Cal also has a new book out now, it's one that I'm currently reading entitled Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

And as the title suggests, it gets into specific protocols to avoid burnout and to bring about one's highest quality work over the greatest amount of time.

Today's discussion starts off with extremely practical steps that any and all of us can use in order to enhance our level of focus, productivity, and creativity.

Cal shares much of his specific practices and also offers some alternative practices for those of you that perhaps do not want to disengage with social media or with smartphones or with email to the extent that he does.

I found the conversation to be extremely useful in the sense that I indeed amounted on social media, I use email, I use my phone and texting quite often so I'm not somebody who's willing to completely disengage from those tools but I share in the sentiment that those tools can often be an impediment to doing one's best work.

So today's discussion gets into not hard and fast rules for enhancing focus and productivity but a variety of different tools that you can select from in sort of a buffet to suit your particular needs.

We also of course discuss the specific research studies around focus and distraction, task switching and context switching, all of which support the specific protocols that Cal offers.

So whether you're somebody who has issues with attention and focus, whether you're somebody that's just feeling overly distracted by the number of things in your email inbox or the number of texts or what's happening out in the world.

By the end of today's episode, I'm confident that you will be armed with the best science supported tools that is protocols in order to access the states of mind that will enable you to do your best possible work.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

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And now for my discussion with Dr. Cal Newport. Dr. Cal Newport. Welcome. Dr. Huberman, it's good to see you.

I'm a huge fan. I've been a huge fan ever since I read Deep Work. I can't say that I've adopted all the principles, but that's on me, not you.

You provide incredible incentive for Y1, ought to pursue Deep Work and slow productivity in service to high quality, true productivity, etc.

Some of the protocols, as we'll call them, are incredibly easy to implement. Others take some discipline. So I'd like to talk about both sets today.

But the first question I have is, do you own a smartphone?

I do have a smartphone. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I don't use social media. So it turns out smartphones aren't that interesting if you don't have any social media apps on it.

Yeah, what's that like? So there's nothing if you have nothing that is engineered to try to grab your attention.

The smartphone actually goes back to 2007 Steve Jobs keynote address smartphone, which is this is a really nice phone.

And your music, you can listen to things on it and the phone interface is really good. And look, there's a maps app and you can like look at maps on it.

Like it's actually a useful piece of technology that you're happy to have, but you don't use it that much.

What about text messaging? Do you text message? And so do you get into conversations by text or is it more of a plan and meet type tool?

I try. Right. So I try. I do use text messaging. I mean, this is how like my wife gets in touch with me. But I'm notorious somewhat among my friends of my the ability to capture my attention with text message is really hit or miss because I'll go hours without looking at my phone.

So it's not this default appendage. I think for a lot of people, if you know someone, you can basically assume like, look, if I text them, they're going to get right back to me.

My problem is I'll go to three, four hours, you know, without looking at my phone. And then there'll be text messages on there from conversations that people were trying to start. And I typically just have to declare text bankruptcy a few times a day.

Like if they really needed me, I guess they would have called. So I do text, but I'm not considered to be very good at it.

If you have any other questions about your phone practices, this makes me nervous. Is your phone in a drawer on on the desktop while you're working? Is it face down face up? Is the ringer on? Is it off?

You need if I'm writing or what it's no or near me. Yeah. And it could be anywhere. It's just not going anywhere near me. So I have in my house. Two different offices basically. Right. So there's a home office.

The printers there, the filing cabinets are there, like the nice big monitors there, you pay taxes, that type of thing. Then I have a library. And there's no permanent technology into library, no computer in there, no monitor, no printers, nothing like this.

I have to sort of custom built desk I had made by a company from Maine that makes desks for college libraries. Like that's what they do. So I had this like custom fit desk to fit into. It's not that big of a space.

I'm just trying to go to write it. I'm surrounded by books that I've really carefully curated. What's where each shelf like what type of book it has on it so I can look different ways for different inspirations. I got a fireplace.

So I can just turn on a fire if I need it. I'll bring my laptop in there to write if I'm going to write on a computer and my phone doesn't come in there.

You don't look at you don't look at a phone in that room and it just helps me. It's a ritual right if I'm in there. I'm thinking I'm creating with the sort of same patterns of cogitation that we would have been using for hundreds of years when people have been thinking professionally.

If I want to be near a printer and I want to go on to a web browser and pay my taxes or whatever have a different place for that.

I'm curious about the fireplace. I have this theory based on my understanding of visual neuroscience and the fact that when we're looking at visual scenes that have some degree of predictability to them.

We get into a mode of anticipation or thinking is at least somewhat linear and so forth. When we are looking at say ocean waves or

in a skyscraper we're staring down at the street of say New York City and the cars are moving in obviously not random fashion but at least to our visual perception pseudo random.

You're not tracking any one thing that the mind goes into this sort of state where our thoughts become nonlinear.

They're not anchored to any kind of if then kind of what I call DPO duration path outcome kind of trajectory. It's not a lot of neuroscience on this but there's a little bit same thing happens when you're looking at aquarium by the way.

So I wonder whether not staring at the fire which is something that humans have been doing for many many many thousands of years.

Because it has that random aspect to it does it tend to spark creativity linear thinking at what point in your writing do you turn to the fire and stare at it.

That's interesting actually that there's a neurological explanation when I used to fire is actually when I read right so chairs by the fire but I think for exactly this reason right because when I'm reading I'm looking to spark ideas right like okay what am I what's my take away from this what's the connection you're making between this thing you're reading here.

This idea over there that type of connection making a lot of my brainstorming I read by the fire when the weather allows it I also walk a lot so I want to do something similar going on like when I'm trying to work through an idea for an article or a math proof or something like this almost always I'm going to do that on foot.

And there might be something similar going on there where your encountering is not entirely exotic stimuli right so it's not oh my god you know my attention is being drawn but it's you don't quite know what you're going to see and you also have that that circuit quieting effect of the walkings your motor neurons are going you can tell if I'm getting this right or not.

Yeah, the motor neurons are going and you get some inhibition going on in some of these key networks which allows you to actually maintain the internal focus on a concept a little bit better so I do a lot of my original focused ID 18 on foot but a lot of my serendipitous ID 18 will be with the fire going right it's the way I read by the fire and it's when I read that I get a lot of my original ideas.

I have this theory that the two opposite states of mind that both facilitate creativity and productivity looks something like this and you can tell me whether or not this maps anything that you know one is just as you described our body is in motion.

And could be running walking might even be in the shower or something that sort but we aren't trying to direct our mind toward a specific linear trajectory or outcome it's not it's not like working out an equation or a theorem the same way we would if we're at a piece of paper or writing out a sentence a structured paragraph so it's body and motion mind not channel toward one specific target.

The opposite extreme to me is body still mind very active which resembles rapid eye movement sleep when we learn a lot and no rewiring occurs and dreaming but for which there's also a lot of examples of very accomplished creatives using that sort of thing of meditative like.

And approaches you know forcing oneself to be still and thinking so it sounds like you incorporate both and I'm curious as a computer scientist who writes code does theorems does a lot of math where you can't just kind of wing it yeah there's a right and wrong answer involved what is your mode for sitting down and working through something that's linear and hard.

It's interesting the way you talk about it right because when I'm walking and this is actually something you can train you know I talk about this one of my books once that you can actually train yourself to maintain your internal eye of focus more stable while you're walking right so I call this productive meditation in deep work actually.

I practice this in grad school right okay so I'm going to work on a particular problem while I walk and then you actually practice bringing your attention back to the central problem and I don't know exactly what's happening but you get a little bit more facility working with your working memory a little bit more efficiency with bringing stuff in and out of the working memory.

So I train myself that I could actually write a couple paragraphs in my head maybe not word for what basically word for word like figure out how I'm going to do it or figure out enough steps of a math proof to capture like a key insight like okay now I'm going to get around this then you have to sit down and actually formally capture that yeah for me that's still working with notebooks.

Though I was coming up in grad school and I was just excavating these thoughts recently we were talking for the we recorded that you know I just wrote this essay about what I learned as a grad student that impacted all my writing as a grad student in the theory group at MIT which was just purified concentration this is where all the deep work ideas come from right I mean it was just world class concentrators there the method was very still more than one person whiteboard so if you have two or three people staring at me.

So you're three people staring at the same whiteboard you're actually going to up to level of concentration you achieve because if you let your attention wander you disengage that attention there's a social capital cost because now I've fallen out of the whiteboard effect discussion that's going to be a problem so you actually maintain your focus at a higher level and then when someone else is making their move okay you know what about this and they're working math it's all math on the board.

And even that the highest attention you're capable of because you want to keep up right you don't want to fall behind so it was like this hack that was figured out in the theory group that if you put two or three people at the same whiteboard to try to alchemize these insights into actual mathematically precise proofs you get 20 30% boost in your concentration level and that could make all the difference right if you're working on a very hard proof 20 30% boost could be the difference between solving it or not.

In one of these situations where you're at the whiteboard or chalkboard and there are two other individuals facing it are they interrupting you or is the etiquette in that scenario to just let the person go until their natural inclination to raise a hand and scream help

whoever has to mark around the board they're the ones talking so you go okay what about this you say and now you're working you're writing down equations or drawing your diagram and everyone is just watching and then when they're done they're one steps back and looks at it then you can step forward okay but what if we did this and you still work on it so so when I got built some offices or worked out some offices near my house like one of the first things we put in there was a whiteboard so they could have computer science collaborators come because we can't work on theory otherwise like it is the thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to do a little bit of work and I'm going to do a little bit of work and I'm going to do a little bit of work and I'm going to do a little bit of work and I'm going to do a little bit of work and I'm going to do a little bit of work and I'm going to do a little bit of work and I'm going to do a little bit of work and I'm

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to move proofs out of a notebook and into formally marked up like you would for a paper, you know, as soon as I would. So this idea, this is something I've been leaning to more is capture the notes in the tool you're going to use take out the middle man in some sense, right. So it's reducing friction but also puts you in the right mind space like, okay, this idea I'm going to put it where I'm going to need it later as opposed to a more elaborate third party system that you construct that you then later pull everything out of as needed.

So let's just get straight to the tool I'm eventually going to use with maybe a high quality notebook intermediary if I'm actually literally working out thoughts. So math, you have to work out thoughts, but I'll get that into an actual paper format pretty quickly.

Tell me what you think of this what I always call protocol. If I want to learn something from a manuscript I read or a book chapter, I used to highlight things and I had a very elaborate extracted from my university days system of stars.

An exclamation marks and underlined that mean a lot to me that can, yes, bring me back to a given segment within the chapter.

But a few years ago I was teaching a course in the biology department at Stanford and for some reason we had them read a study about information retention.

And I learned from that study that one of the best things we can do is read information in whatever form, a magazine, research article, etc. book.

And then to take some time away from that material, maybe walk, maybe close ones eyes, maybe leave them open doesn't matter and just try and remember specific elements.

How much does one remember then go back to the material and look at it. And I've just been positively astonished at how much more information I can learn when I'm not simply going through motor commands of just underlining things and highlighting them but stepping away and thinking, OK, yeah, I don't I don't remember how many subjects there were.

So we're all go back and check that maybe make a note and OK, they did this and then like and then it's crystallized.

And when as I say this, I realize of course this should work. This is the way that the brain learns.

But somehow that's not the way we are taught to learn.

Yeah, well, I'm smiling because when I was 22, I wrote this book called How to Become a Straight A Student.

Right. And the whole premise of the book was I'm going to talk to actual college students who have straight A's and who don't seem completely ground out, right, like not burnt out.

And I'm just going to interview them right in the protocol was how did you study for the last test to do study for how did you take notes for the last.

So I was just asking them to walk through their methodology. The core idea of that book was active recall.

That was the core idea that replicating ideas, ways to say is replicating the information from scratch as if teaching a class without looking at your notes.

That is the only way to learn.

And the thing about it was it's a trade off. It doesn't take its efficient doesn't take much time, but it's incredibly mentally taxing right.

This is why students often avoid it. It is difficult to sit there and try to replicate and pull forth.

OK, what did I read here? How did that work? It's mentally very taxing. But it's very time efficient.

Right, if you're willing to essentially put up with that with that pain, you learn very quickly. And not only do you learn very quickly, you don't forget.

It's almost like you have a pseudo photographic memory when you study this way, you sit down to do a test and you're replicating like whole lines from like what you what you studied.

I the idea is sort of come out fully formed good is such a fantastic way to actually learn.

It was my key like the whole premise that got me writing that book is I went through this this period as a college student where I came in freshman year was like a fine student, not a great student, but a fine student.

And I was rowing crew and I was sort of like excited to do that. And then I developed the heart condition and had to stop a congenital wiring in the heart, a true flutter thing.

I couldn't row crew anymore, so prolapse some sort. It was a circuitry circuitry issue that would lead to extremely rapid heartbeat.

It's like a really rapid like to cardio, right, you get to 250 beats a minute just and it can be exercise induced, right, which is not optimal.

You could take beta blockers, which would moderate the electrical timing, but beta blockers reduce your max heart rate. And if you're an athlete where the entire thing that matters is your max heart rate. So you're doing something like 2000 meter rows, your performance on beta blockers just goes down.

It makes no sense. It's like being a basketball player that weighs weighted shoes is too frustrating.

It also makes you super malo. I was pretty milo guy, but I was a worse rower. So so I stopped that I was like, OK, I want to get serious about my studies. I was able to get serious about my studies and writing, right. That's when I actually made the decisions they didn't stuck with for the next 25 years after that.

But one of the things I did to get serious about my studies is I said, I'm going to systematically experiment with how to study for tests and how to write papers. And I had I would try this how did it go deconstruct experiment try this how to go deconstruct experiment.

And active recall is a thing to term you all around. And so I went from a pretty good student to for every single quarter sophomore year junior year senior year, I got one a minus between my sophomore year through my senior year. It was like this miraculous transformation. It was active recall.

I rebuilt all of my studying. So if it was for a humanities class, I had a whole way of taking notes. It was all built around doing active recall for math classes. My main study tool was a stack of white paper. All right, do this proof white piece of paper and just can't I do it from scratch. If I could I know that technique.

If I don't, I'm going to come back and try it again later completely transformed. You know, I did so well academically. It's why I ended up writing that book. The basically spread that message to other people. So I'm a huge advocate for active recall. It's really hard.

But it is the way to learn new things.

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And as you pointed out, is this very time efficient?

Oh yeah.

I mean, it was a problem. It was a social problem for me that I would have to pretend during finals period that I was going to the library to study because I would be done studying.

This act of recall, it's brutal, but it's incredibly efficient. You sit down there, I would have my cards, I would mark it. Okay, I struggled with this. I'd put it in this pile. I got it done. I'd put it in this pile.

And so then you would just go back to the I struggled with it pile and work on that and then make a new I struggled with a pile and these would exponentially decay.

And so in like a few hours, you could really master, you know, with a few other tricks that worked, you could really master the material pretty quickly. And then what am I supposed to do? I didn't do all nighters. You want to make any sense like active recall is how you prepare and it's going to take four hours and it's going to be tough.

So do it in the morning when you have energy and then you're done.

I love it. I learned essentially all of neuro anatomy looking down the my scope at tissue samples.

And then I would try and take photographs with my eyes. I do not have a photographic memory, but then I would get home in the evening, look through the neuro anatomy textbook, lie down and try and fly through the different circuits in my mind.

And then if I arrived at a structure in the brain that I couldn't identify, I would then go check my notes and go back. So basically I learned neuro anatomy, which I, you know, I'm poor. I'd agree many things in life, but neuro anatomy, I'm solid at.

And then some, if I may say so. And it's because there's a mental map. You can move through it, you know, fly through it dynamically.

And that it's the same process. Not all things lend themselves to that approach. I'm guessing maybe we could think of a few that don't.

I guess if people were learning music. That might be tricky. Maybe they need the sheet music in front of them. I don't know. I'm not a musician.

Yeah. I mean, I studied a professional guitar player at one point. You were a professional guitar player. No, I studied one.

Oh, so for a book, everything's from some book. I written a lot of books. So I wrote a book 10 years ago, where I was trying to figure out as part of it, how do people get better at things.

And so I spent time with professional guitar player to say, I just wanted to see how he practiced. Like what does this actually look like?

What I learned from them is like, what they do is, yeah, they have the music in front of them. But for them, it's all speed. So they take a piece. He was working on Lex for he was a new acoustic style player. And they had these kind of blue grassy type of licks.

And he probably had a memorize. And he knew how fast he could comfortably play it for them. It's all about adding 20% to what they're comfortably doing. And then that push past for their comfortable.

And the thing I remember writing about him was he was concentrating so hard to try to hit this lick 20% faster than he was used to it as a he'd forget the breathe.

So he'd be like going, going, going, and then just gasp, you know, like his body would, you know, force him for some the breathe. So yeah, there it seemed to be all about deliberate practice. So like, how do you, they don't waste any time professional musicians waste no time doing things they're comfortable doing.

Every time they spend practicing, and this is also incredibly difficult, but every time they spend practicing is almost entirely in a state of, I'm not comfortable with this. But if I focus as hard as I can, maybe I'm going to pull this off.

Like I'll pull off the sonata at this new speed I'm trying to do maybe I'll pull it off. It's like the maximal growth stimulating state. And so I wrote in the in this chapter.

Why was he so much better at guitar than I was at the same age because I played a lot of guitar when I was younger and was in rock bands right and this kid was young right but really, really good.

And I said, okay, now I realize it I can recognize me when I look back at my time playing guitar at his age, I played stuff I knew how to play.

Like that's what was fun. Like yeah, I want to like jam along with the songs I knew or you know, rip some pentatonic scales, you know, to like a Jimmy Hendrix album.

It was fun and he spent almost no time the pros, but no time having fun. Practicing was your brain had to be, you know, uncomfortable.

So I learned a lot from that, you know, this actually led to a bit of a battle because of my readers, there was this, this battle that emerged where people were trying to combine Anders Erickson and deliberate practice with me, Haley chick sent me high and flow.

And really they were trying to make flow apply everywhere like it's all about flow, deliberate practices flow, everything is flow, the whole thing is to get into a state of flow.

And I remember Anders talking about this at some point and say like no, no, no, like this state of practice that makes you better.

It's the opposite of flow, right and flow you lose track of time. When you're practicing like that professional guitar player, you know every second that passes by because it's like incredibly difficult like what you're doing your mind is rebelling, it's not natural, you know, it's not fun.

It's not the skier going down the hill and it's all instinct, it's you it's all you thinking about exactly what you're trying to do. And so, you know, I began to push this point out here is like it's not all about flow like actually getting better at things is really painful sometimes deliberate practice is not the same as flow.

And there's a lot of fights about this for a while. I think there was a lot of flow advocates that just wanted life to be flow all the time.

But I think Anders was right because I watched these professionals practice like that's what it is. It's not fun. Well, everything we know about neuroplasticity, which of course is the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience says that there needs to be some

neurochemical or electrical condition that changes in the nervous system in order to queue up plasticity. And to my knowledge, one of the most robust of those is the release of the so called catacolomines dopamine epinephrine nor epinephrine dopamine because it's involved in so many things can be a little bit of a distractor.

So let's just say epinephrine nor epinephrine adrenaline or adrenaline create in the body and mine to some extent a state of alertness and often a state of agitation.

But if you think about it in the absence of some neuromodulators like those that change the conditions for wiring of neurons, you know, everyone loves fire together wire together.

Beautiful statement by Carla Shatz, not Donald, have Dr. Carla Shatz said that not Donald have. But why would neurons need to change their patterns of connectivity if you can complete the operation the nervous system needs to.

It doesn't feel discomfort. It creates discomfort, but the nervous system needs a queue to that. Okay, this is different. I'm failing. And it's the failures that actually trigger the plasticity is the discomfort that queues that conditions are different.

Now, otherwise there's simply no reason to devote energetic resources to rewiring neurons. And I feel like we don't learn this one where kids we.

And I think as kids, we can learn so much without that feeling of agitation. We get into these modes of looking for flow.

And I have respect for the research on flow and the people who are balled in by like to talk about flow a little bit. The only thing I really know about flow for sure is that backwards it spells wolf.

So one of flow it's such an attractive idea right is like Star Wars. It's like you have the force and you're doing things without thinking and awesome.

But I can't flow myself through a paper and extract the critical data. I can't create a podcast in flow. But when it's done, it feels great.

Especially if you nailed the key metrics. So what do you think about flow? I'm not trying to beat up on it. I just want to understand how you place it in the framework of learning and deep work if it belongs there at all.

It doesn't have a big place in it in the deep work framework. And this was what the controversy was for a while. And I knew my Haley a little bit like we corresponded some I knew Anders a little bit like we corresponded some so I sort of felt like I was.

And both of them actually tragically have died in the last three or four years, I think. Yeah, I think both recently.

Flow doesn't play a big role in the deep work framework. So when I was trying to justify deep work. So why focusing without distraction was important.

I was drawing a lot more for Anders work, right, because why is focusing without distraction important. Well, you have to quiet the neural circuitries you can isolate the circuit that's actually relevant to the thing that you're doing right.

You're not going to get better at something if you have noisy circuitry. This is and that requires a really intense concentration. So it was one of the big advantages of deep work.

If you're used to that cognitive state, you're going to learn things faster. And I think it was all on the earth to understand why. So if you're not distracted, I'm really focusing hard on what I'm doing trying to learn this new thing.

You're giving the right mental conditions, but it's not a flow state. I always used to say, okay, when you're when your deep work is not flow.

Because of this, like a lot of deep work is you're trying to do something that is beyond your comfort zone. And that's going to be difficult. That's a state of deliberate practice.

And there's a famous paper about this where Anders actually explicitly says deliberate practice and flow are very different.

And I wrote an essay years ago called the father of deliberate practice, disowns flow. And again, people are really flow partisans out there. It's interesting. I think people just like the idea, because it feels good.

But I mean, flow is the feeling of performance is the way I think about it. It's really hard to train for certain sports. But then when you're actually performing, you're in the game, you can fall in the flow. Right.

Because then everything is on. It's really hard to train guitar. But like when you're performing in front of a big crowd, you probably maybe fall in the flow. Maybe you don't, but you could, right.

But it's a performance state, not the practicing getting better state. So, you know, to me, flow has like very little role in how I think about what I do as a cognitive professional. It's just not something that comes up that often.

I agree that we learn through focused work and that flow does manifest itself during performance. And sometimes so much so that people exhibit virtuosity is the surprising themselves even at what's in there.

I always think of it's what is unskilled skilled mastery virtuosity virtuosity seems to incorporate some random elements of maybe even the performer has not done that before and they surprise themselves or something like that. Who knows? These are words for for something that isn't easily quantified in the first place.

But in terms of deep work and getting a little bit back to kind of practical steps towards deep work. I also have to ask you because I didn't earlier when you are on your laptop in your library with your fireplace and these books. It's a beautiful image actually that you drawn for us in our minds is the Wi-Fi connection to your computer activated or you offline.

It's connected because it doesn't really matter to me, you know, because what is it what's drawing my attention. I mean the most important decision I think I made technically speaking to be a cognitive worker is I didn't lack a social media.

I think we underestimate the degree to which our problem with digital distraction is not the internet is not our phones it is specific products and services that are engineered at great expense the pull you back to them when you take that away the Internet is not that interesting.

I don't have a cycle of sites to go to you know I can check my email but I don't really know where else to go I'm going to go to the New York Times I guess but then you've seen the articles right they change it once a day there's just not much I've set things up so there's not much that's that interesting to me.

We've all heard of FOMO fear of missing out I feel like there's the other thing which is fear of missing something bad right so like an anxiety a more primitive anxiety within us that if we are not engaged on social media or looking at our phone often or texting often that it's not that we'll miss the party will miss the emergency.

You don't seem to suffer from those kind of everyday is yeah I mean it doesn't happen that much I have a phone you know a standard no I have my phone I guess I'm working away from it yeah I guess it's true if there's an emergency.

But this was the case for a very long time right we didn't have smartphones till really relatively recently this is you know 15 years ago so we were just used to this until yesterday essentially that there's just periods of time where you're out of touch like you're at a restaurant with someone.

You're out of touch until you get back to your office like we're okay you know we weren't plagued by emergencies that that led to disastrous results because we couldn't hear about it right then go to the movies like you're out of touch right and be a couple hours so you're in touch again and so I you know it's not something that's affected me as much so maybe I'm working without my phone nearby.

A lot of people have this response they begin sort of catastrophizing like what if this happens or this or that and I'm thinking you know I survived before that my parent survived without that my my grandparents survived without that I don't worry about it as much you know and some of this maybe is just this isn't upset people as much as it used to the fact I don't use a lot of these apps are my phone.

But it really does upset people right there's well what about this what about that what about this and I don't know how much of this is just maybe I'm oblivious and how much of this is people back sliding explanation for why they do need their phone why they do need to look at all the time but I I get a lot of it you know maybe they're upset and you don't know because you're not looking at your phone that's right.

I hate I'll tell you what that's a blessing not knowing how upset people are at you yeah it's a blessing is a semi public figure I'll tell you that.

Yeah I can comment on that but I won't I am on social media and I do enjoy it as I've got started posting on Instagram and then expanded to other platforms including the podcast but there's a threshold beyond which it becomes counterproductive for sure I think there's information there like questions that people ask are often informative it's sort of like a nigma class and asking are there any questions sometimes the comments that people bring back are truly informative towards.

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I'm doing it pretty well now I'm done you know why just didn't even take that long so I mean I think people underestimate what's going on here I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge our sponsor element elements is an

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huberman yeah would like to drill into the concept of context and task switching a bit more I do think that the brain has

something akin to a transmission system where you know for people that drive and have driven you know the the amount of energy that

needs to be used in order to accelerate a vehicle to get up to a you know higher gear it's very different than the equal amount of

increase in speed at a given gear right so it's sort of that this is you hear this if you're not familiar with transmission so that it sounds like

mmm it sounds as if there's it's more facile at higher speeds well how could it be that you're burning less fuel at higher speed it's not

exactly that way but but I think the brain has these sort of transmission systems and what you're describing with

um people switching back and forth and checking email and phone etc and back to the work um that should be at hand

is sort of akin to going up and down the the gear system constantly yeah trying to arrive at a given destination and sure you might

arrive but you're going to burn far more fuel it's the least efficient way to go about it you want to get into that deep

groove and I think when we hear about flow I feel like at least for me that's the sort of notion of flow that I'm

looking for dropping into that deep groove even if there's some friction within that groove of the the challenge of

the work that I'm doing it's about not thinking about anything else it's really about focus yep right and the word flow is just a

wonderfully attractive word um that I think gives us the the false impression that we can just drop into things like a

square wave function sit down pen and paper yeah go and there's no possible way that neural circuits can work that way

no we let's let's invent a term and I'm you're telling the term extends I'm a bit on the fly but uh

neurosimantic coherence this is going to be my alternative term for flow when you're working on something

hard uh it's not that you're in an actual flow state where you lose track what you're doing you're

concentrating really hard but I'm why I'm saying neurosimantic coherence is you get to this place where

the sort of relevant semantic neural networks are all um those that are activated are all relevant to what

you're doing and you've uh over time inhibited most of the unrelated networks that were fired up before

and so you get in this sense of it's hard maybe I'm not losing track of time but like I'm all focused on

this you know I'm grappling with the the bear here the the math equation the the book chapter whatever

it is um and so it's something different than flow but it's also different than linda stone had

the term partial continuous attention which is what you're that cognitive disaster of I'm constantly

networks switching back and forth so we'll call it neurosimantic coherence I get to coin that

term um because it's uh you have this coherence of the semantic neural networks on what you're doing

and that's the feeling of I'm getting after this hard problem and it might be really hard to do I

mean I know the feeling of trying to solve a math proof for me for example could be so difficult

because I mean what does it actually feel like in your head when you're solving a math proof it's

a lot of you hold this here and then you try to get to the next step by doing this and it doesn't

work but you have to keep holding this here it takes a lot of concentration okay let me try this

that didn't work either but this look promising okay so now I need to go back and in my mind's

I update this setup and now let me try this so it's a lot of holding things in your working memory

and keeping them loaded while you try an extension and then evaluating how that worked without and so

it it requires um you just internal concentration which isn't pleasant but in neurosimatic coherence

it's all this happening in your world you know is that in that proof so maybe that's what we should be

pitching what people should be looking for is yeah forget flow but also remember like this default

where you're like the rescue time data set participants checking email once every five minutes

that's cognitive nonsense that's crazy that's like you're trying to you know play football and you're

covering over one of your eyes and wearing like a 50 pound rucksack on you're just like

handicapping your abilities here for no reason right so what's in between is this idea and that

requires focus you know requires deep work you know we're playing football and then every three

downs or so running into the stands and having a conversation trying to work out something challenging

with your spouse or whatever and then going back and trying to totally give her a play set right

every risk of throwing in too many analogies and stories I'll just briefly say I went and saw

that the play in New York with my sister this year I think it was Harry Potter and the cursed

child or something like that I didn't really enjoy the play that much but the set stuff was amazing

and they have this magic library I think is very very relevant here where essentially the book that

you open has a certain topic I don't know me it spells or something is Harry Potter again fun show

but great set stuff didn't really resonate with me too much in any event and then the books around

it change their topic that but are related to that central book and then if you look at one particular

thing like maybe it's potions or something I'm making this up and then all of a sudden that the

the books the books around it change they become either more specific there might be a distant but

related idea that could lend itself to creativity so sort of that's the way the brain works in cognition

is that we get into a frame of of a certain discussion or a certain theme and the books on the

shelf change according to their relatedness based on memory of past what's going on now in plans

for the future I think anytime we look at we change context and we look at you know a raccoon video

on Instagram or our calendar and oh there's that thing the books become very scatters so when

we return to it there's a lot more friction a lot more work or neural neural energy required to get

back into that this narrow states of cognition just that exactly explains sort of my experience in

the way I think about it yeah yeah because you're it takes time to load up the sort of relevant

the secondary interciary semantic ideas and now they're there so like you can pull from them and

then as you shift you have to sort of shift this whole thing around that takes a lot of concentration

I mean I wrote this this article once that got me a little bit of trouble might not not trouble

but mild trouble but it was it was called for the Chronicle Higher Education and the title they gave

it was is email making professor stupid which wasn't my title you basically called every every

one of your colleagues stupid I got all checking the dean at the time did call me in for lunch but

actually he was here's the thing he was like hey this is real I agree with this but what I was

arguing actually in that article essentially was what do we do at a university is a person what

we're supposed to be doing is trying to teach what the life of the mind is and how that works

and we've kind of forgotten that so we like why we should maybe think about like at universities we

need to be explicitly not just teaching how to think but also modeling the life of the mind at

the at the highest level and so this idea that we just allow the the professor's area to to be

drowned in emails and and tasks and be it distracted you know it's the main war that every research

professor has is how do I how do I fight the admin overload until I become famous enough to get

an assistant right like this is the big problem and I was making this proposal of university should

be the citadel's a concentration it's if you want to get the the best academics in the world

to university just tell them here's at the top of our contract you will not be assigned an email

address like you're going to get Nobel laureates coming from you know all over the country to come to

this place and so I was making this argument we should think a lot more about thinking we should

talk more about it we should model it exactly the type of things you're talking about but we don't

it's much more contents focus but really this should be something more that we we get into specifically

like this is how you actually use the mind to produce innovative interesting high value new cognitive

artifacts this is a very hard thing we're asking you to do but you can apprentice here because this

is what we do and we've mastered we're going to teach you how to do it but we never have that sort

of meta conversation sort of meta cognition conversation I've always thought that'd be important I

think you'd have much better outcomes if that's part of what you learned at the university

was how to take the thing in your head and really put it to work you know really extract out of

it as capabilities or even high school or even elementary school level I agree yeah you have kids

yeah and do they have smartphones no yeah how do they feel about that well I mean they're not

they're not old enough yet that it's a it's a real problem but they're they're not going to be

happy with me probably soon hate me now love me later as my mother used to say basically because I

you know I'm I'm convinced having spent some time thinking about this writing about this doing

some journalism on this talking to a lot of the experts that like I think we're going to end up

where all the the arrows from the the relevant social psych research which I've been following

this research since you know 2017 this 2017 is roughly when you see the first warning signs going

up that we need to worry about the potential mental health impacts of these tools especially

social meeting smartphones on young people and I you can track this right now I have a talk I

actually gave them my kids school do I have to be about this where I tracked how this research evolved

and you know like any literature is it's contentious at first and then you see you begin to see

a conciliance between different lines of evidence and I think we're everything now in the last

couple of years is starting to come together this idea if we don't really know if this is bad or

not I think that's just an old take the research has moved past that and I think where we're we're

landing on is unrestricted internet use pre puberty is risky and like the new standard is going to

be post puberty is probably the right time to be given a device that gives you unrestricted access

we're talking like 16 is probably the appropriate age so this does not make me popular at the middle

school where my son my old son's about to go I think in two or three years that's just going to

be common sense this is the direction I see the research literature and the advocacy going and I

think there's a solid ground for this because you're a computer scientist I can ask this question

what about video games I'm not a big consumer of video games it's been years since I've played one

in fact but video games are so very different than smartphones and other technologies because they

seem to put at least the kids I've observed playing them and adults into a very narrow

trench of attention yeah I mean there are definitely issues with it I mean look I'm not a

social psychologist I just sort of play one in my articles but but I've looked into this literature

a lot there's a bit of a gendered breakdown that has a lot of overlaps where when they're looking

at potential harms of these technologies young adolescents right pre adolescent young adolescents

you tend to see social media there be more signal for cognitive distress for young women and

girls and the video games to actually be the bigger culprit for young men and boys right there is

a bit of a difference here because with the social media impact the the content of what's

happening matters in this picture right so so what I'm seeing the engagement I'm having how this

impacts my social life this is part of the mental distress with video games it seems to be more

an impact of just disharmonious passion and obsession just the time it takes right because the

games can be incredibly addictive so the problem that young men are having are just they're playing

it all the time that I'm staying up late because I have an iPad in my room and I'm 14 and I'm going

to play Fortnite until three in the morning because my brain cannot handle like what you're what

you're giving me here right so it's less of a a content concern than it is just a time concern right

that seems more solvable to me you know like my solution with my own kids I don't mind

be a game I'm a computer scientist but I said nothing that's online right nothing that was free

because if it was free that means their business model involves getting you to play it all the time

so you can upcharge or whatever they have an Nintendo switches like I like Nintendo okay Nintendo

switch here's a $60 L the game that someone spent five years making or whatever you can only play

those games so long at a time before you know you're tired you come back to it they don't have an

addictive response to it if they get an iPad with a game on it they'll just like play that

till their eyes bleed because those are meant to be is it to be addictive so I'm wary about video

games but there it's all just a usage game so you stick away from the more addictive games it's

a much easier problem to solve I think than the social media the social media issue earlier you

talked about books I still read hardcover and paperback books what are your thoughts on audio books

and learning by way of audio book versus paper in front of you flipping a physical device or

kindles I don't know if there's any real research on this I've seen a little bit but I'm curious what

you've encountered and what your thoughts are as well you could speculate yeah I mean I'll tell

you personally I can only do fiction in audiobooks right because when I'm in a nonfiction experience

I'm just very used to constantly looking for connections and ideas you know and so I have to be

able to slow down and then speed up and then go back to something I just read so I really have a

distressing experience trying to listen to nonfiction audiobooks fiction's fine that's great

we'll put a thriller on it you know audible great you know listen through it and I think some of

this might be particular to my my engagement with books which is I'm you know I'm a writer and a

thinker so I'm constantly looking for ideas and so I might have a different engagement with a

nonfiction book and someone you know just listening to one of my books but I can only do fiction on audio

that makes sense thinking about what works for me what doesn't I agree I love stories and

a fiction by by audiobook you ideally consumed on a long drive or a hike but nonfiction requires

that I take notes and see things in their kind of respective spatial layout and yeah in your

most recent book you describe this concept of pseudo productivity is pseudo productivity a general

term to refer to some of the things we've already talked about this task switching context switching

or pseudo productivity something that includes other categories of limiting ourselves as well

I mean I think it's more specific than that right so it to me sort of productivity was the answer

that we came up with a knowledge work to a real dilemma which is that's a sector you know using

your brain primarily to create value that's a sector that emerged as a major part of the economy

in roughly the mid 20th century when that emerged all the definitions of productivity that we had

were inspired from agriculture and industry right so so in agriculture we can have ratios

bushels of corn per whatever acres of land under cultivation and industrial

manufacturing we have ratios model teas per input labor hour so you could just measure these

things we also had clearly defined systems of production so you could then say if I change this

about the system of production what happens to this number and you could do gradient descent right

okay I do this that number goes down let's not do that but I make this change it goes up that's

a better way of building it like this was the dominant way of thinking about productivity since

basically Adam Smith the knowledge workerizes that doesn't work right because I'm working on whatever

five different things it's different than what you were working on how I'm managing my work is

entirely off you skated right in knowledge work organizational ideas is entirely left up to the

individual how you manage your work and your workload and collaboration that's like up to you

that's all off you skated there's no number to measure there's no system to improve so I think it

was a real quandary my argument is what essentially the management class came up with the

shooter productivity which is okay and the absence of being able to be quantitative about this

we will use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort so that's it like we see you doing things

that's better than not the more we see you doing the better I call that shooter productivity and I

think that's implicitly how we've been organizing the management of knowledge work labor since the 1950s

and we say visibility at people doing things this is the conflating of busyness with actual

productivity yes and so the problem came when we had this a general way of measuring approximating

productive effort which wasn't very good but whatever right I mean I want to see you're at the

office and you're doing things the problem was the front office IT revolution right because I'm

I'm essentially a technocratic I see everything through the lens of technology am I writing

we got computers we got networks we got email shooter productivity can't be sustainable in that

context because now with something like email then later tools like slack I can demonstrate effort

at a very fine grain right because I can send an email respond to this jump onto a slack conversation

I can now do that at a very fine grain level and essentially everywhere and anywhere

all throughout my day I can be demonstrating labor at home I can be demonstrating labor because we

have mobile computing we get the smartphone revolution so there's there's now an ability to

constantly be demonstrating effort at all points of our day and that's where I think the wheels came

off the bus right and and led to this this this point that got worse and worse starting the early

2000s and hit ahead in the pandemic of knowledge worker burnout knowledge worker exhaustion and nihilism

of like what's going on with my job like all I do is zoom all day what's happening I think that

shooter productivity plus front office IT revolution they did not play nice together and you can see

this by the way if you look even at productivity books you see this huge shift that happens early 90s

versus early 2000s it's like a completely shift in tone right early 90s it's Stephen Covey is

very optimistic it's like how are we going to self-actualize and like carefully choose the most

meaningful activities to fulfill all of our dreams for all of our roles early 2000s now we have email

you have David Allen there's like oh my god we're so overwhelmed with task all we can hope for is

like these little moments of zin in the day if we can just automate how we're just churning through

these widgets at least we can find some cognitive piece what happened in those 10 years was the front

office IT revolution and now we just felt like we had to constantly be demonstrating that visible

effort so you know I think that's where we got to the problem shooter productivity plus technology

recently my podcast team was in Australia and my producer and close friend here Rob Moore instructed

all of us to get rid of social media on our phones except one guy who would post our weekly episodes

announcements and it was pretty brutal at first and then coming back to social media as it

actually turned out to be more challenging you really experienced the friction coming back

the other way and then one experiences the lack of friction and that's where it gets scary it's

so interesting the way that the brain can adapt the friction leaving something behind the friction

coming back to it and I think for people listening to this I raised this because I think of course

many people listening are you know have work that they really need to focus on they may be having

issues with productivity and burnout etc I think a lot of people use the phone and social media because

it fills their life you know it provides some enrichment and they aren't necessarily committed

to specific projects but I guess through the lens of the let's just call it the Cal New Portee

and Lens one might argue that those people almost certainly have untapped creativity untapped

resources within them that they don't yet know about because they're essentially using that energy

elsewhere yeah I mean I think for a lot of people it's papering over the void right you have

this void in your life because there's a unmet potential unmet interest living in misalignment with

the things you care about right I mean a lot of people this is the classic sort of catastrophe of

life right social media and there's before this it was other things right there's other intoxicants

or other sorts of distractions it's a way for some people of essentially putting a screen over

that like gaping void and it like just makes it bearable enough that you can kind of go on with

life and so it is true if you just rip it out you see the void and that's really difficult right

I mean because I did this experiment for one of my books I ran an experiment with 1600 people

and they all turned off all their social media for 30 days 30 days right these are young people

old people a whole mix a whole mix right not just university students I recruited them from my

my newsletter readership so they weren't university students and it wasn't formal research it was

you know I put out the call right so this is not randomly sampled right but I put out the call

and I said here I'm gonna walk you walk you through this and then I got a lot of information back

so people reported back how it went and this was like the number one thing I heard was it's really

hard at first right and so who were the people that succeeded for 30 days versus those who

did it the ones who didn't succeeded tended to just try to white knuckle it just be like I don't

like how much I'm using social media I'm just gonna stop because it's bad and I don't want to do

a bad thing I'm just gonna like you know hold on to tables white knuckles they want it make it 30 days

the people who did succeed followed my advice to incredibly aggressively pursue alternatives in those

30 days so it's like go learn new hobbies join things right away get like really structured about

your day get into exercise again learn how to knit again a lot of people said oh I learned about

I forgot how fun libraries were like you can go into this building and like all the books are free

and there's there you could just grab whatever and it's okay if you don't like the book because

you didn't have to pay for it I'm going out with friends again I'm okay every week I'm gonna have

you know we're gonna have drinks with this person and every Thursday morning I'm gonna go running

with this person the people who aggressively tried to put in place a more positive alternative

through self-reflection experimentation they lasted to 30 days and beyond right and so then I

came to realize like oh I see what's happening here is you have these unmet needs these tools can

give you sort of a simulacrum of meeting them I need I'm a social bean I need to be connected to

people well I'm texting and like doing comments on social media it sort of touches that a little

bit just enough that you don't feel hopelessly lonely but it's not really fulfilling that I have a

need to like see my intentions made manifest concretely in the world humans want to do this well I'm

you know posting these things and people are responding it's sort of this simulacrum of real creation

so it's like kind of satisfying that just enough that it's not just intolerable right and so what

happens and if you remove that you have to actually fill those things the right way so now I'm not

socializing on social media but I'm going out of my way to sacrifice time and attention on

behalf of other people I'm feeling a social void in the right way now I don't really feel like I need

to go back I'm actually build making my intentions manifest I'm learning skills and building things

now this sort of pseudo construction and collective attention economy of social media post this and

you'll like it I'm like this I don't need that anymore to fill that void so it's like you have to

fill the void first so so you know five years ago I wrote a book that was about reforming this

part of your life and a lot of the book was had nothing to do with technology but about how to

actually just rebuild parts of your life and on my podcast honestly like one of the big topics

we talk about which is crazy that I'm a technologist and I write about trying to find focus in

a distracted world is this thing we call the deep life which is just straight up building a meaningful

life 101 and it's like crazy that my podcast is talking about it but on the other hand it's not

because my it's the podcast people go to when they're fed up with the digital world and it turns out

if you don't get the analog world working right for you you need something to avoid starting to

avoid and send the digital world will do that well enough it's like just good enough to keep life

tolerable there's a lot of discussion nowadays about ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

sometimes minus the H minus the hyperactivity a lot of kids have true clinically diagnosed ADHD so

we want to be um sensitive to that's a real issue for a lot of people a lot of adults have true ADHD

but nowadays people talk about ADHD the same way terms like depression trauma gas lighting and um

et cetera are discussing in nonclinical territory yeah we do you know technically as well right

right and um and I'm not disparaging that it's just that we we have sort of a dilution of

deeper understanding of what these things really are and aren't um what are your thoughts I realize

you're not a psychiatrist but what are your thoughts on the idea that um many people that think they

perhaps have true attention issues have either um built those attention issues through neuroplasticity

into their system meaning their system probably work nervous system probably worked pretty well

to focus but they engaged in enough task switching that the circuits of the brain involved in cognition

became optimized for um this very distributed cognition um as opposed to um neuro focused attention

and what are your thoughts about um just the amount of stimulant use on college campuses and in

in adult populations to to try and overcome this I feel like there's a lot of attempts to use

pharmacology to match the level of distraction to try and make that distraction not seem like

distraction um but what you know this is uh this is an area I hear a lot about given the nature of

the things I cover on the podcast I think a lot of these issues are phone induced right um and I

think the problem is yeah not solvable as much you don't need pills you need a different phone

relationship my optimistic hypothesis is again this uh nonclinical uh difficulty with maintaining

attention like in your work or if you're a college student or whatever um it's not necessarily

representing sort of knock on wood like a wholesale neural rewiring like the I basically rewired my

circuits on my brain to be a sort of distributed switching processor I think most of this is persisting

in that much more malleable area that gets affected by moderate behavioral addictions right so the

the we have parts of the brain that are part of these like feedback reward loops that's meant to be

malleable right I mean this is supposed to be so we can have really rapid learning about what's

happening in our environment and how we're supposed to respond to it and then this is what gets

hijacked when you you build up these behavioral addictions and so it's it's very quick to change

um but that malleability means you can change it back right so so I I think this this drive

do I have to keep checking my email or my phone is again you build up a moderate behavioral addiction

because of like standard reward cues and and that's a part of the brain that you can't it's difficult

but it's not your whole brain is now a social media brain and that's just the brain you have because

you're exposed to this it's a matter of you know getting this stimuli out of your life doing the same

type of training you would do uh extboard them exposure like it used to the idea of feeling that

drive and not actually doing it you can work with blocking apps like there's stuff you can do this

is sort of like standard it's painful it takes two months and then like you're doing better on it

so I do think we have a a large stratum of subclinical attention issues that are not representing

wholesale neural rewiring but are like absolutely sort of expected outcomes of working with

malleable reward cue circuits in the brain we can fix those just like we can if you know you're

you're gambling too much or compulsively eating the junk food or something we don't say your whole

brain got we rired for junk food it's like no you have this this particular cue cycle that we

have to work on so maybe I'm being optimistic there and you know the brain better but like

it would be extraordinary if in like a 10 year period right your entire brain somehow got

rewired in a way that it couldn't sustain focus anymore I totally agree with that statement

unless you're a young person and you grew up in a distracted world and your brain optimized

as the young brain does for the conditions it's in and then I think you have a real issue

yeah which is not to say it can't be rescued through the use of discipline tools protocols

pharmacology nutrition great sleep and if necessary prescription drugs right because there is a

case for prescription drugs in certain instances for ADHD and as I understand it you know any time

people say wait aren't those drugs just math isn't it just speed yep they are in vitamins in most

cases and the idea is to increase the deployment of certain certain neuromodulators once I mentioned

before as it means to induce neuroplasticity so that the focus state becomes more of a default state

so I think that young people are in trouble I think that we I do worry about young people I think

we've it's it's akin to putting them in a kind of a well we know this in the visual system if

you take an animal or human and you put them into an altered visual environment the visual

system changes in your perception of the visual world is becomes inaccurate and the way I think of

this cognitively with respect to attention the analogy would be I think we've been for the last

10 years or so 10 15 years we've been raising kids in a sort of house of fun house mirror things

which is anything but fun where you look at yourself and your legs are shorter than in your

torso is long and so everywhere you turn you're getting a distorted perception and trying to navigate

the world through that distorted perception is very very difficult you can do it but it's a lot

of extra work that's what I feel we've done to young people I'm very concerned about that as well

yeah yeah and and I think I don't know what you're taking on this but like do you think

at the undergraduate level that we have just been not explicitly but just sort of implicitly

professors in general we have been just sort of slowly adapting the difficulty of what we're

teaching etc because we maybe there's a reduced cognitive focus capacity which is like the

the key skill for this sort of very artificial thing of learning you know complicated college

level work I think this would be an interesting experiment to find out is have we been implicitly

having to sort of simplify things to keep roughly speaking grade distributions were normatively

we feel comfortable I mean do we see this signal yet that's my interest do we see this signal yet

if we look back a generation 20 years ago versus now I don't know for courses of the sort that I

teach or taught until very recently I still teach but I was directing the neuroanatomy course and

there's a laboratory module so the students dissect brains they're holding actual human brains

that's a real physical contact that cannot be recapitulated digitally you just can't do it you can

try use VR but it ain't the same I mean how would you like it if your neurosurgeon learned

on a virtual brain and then it does surgery on a brain no not no such thing should happen I think that

my experience with this is perhaps most relevant with respect to social media where I teach neuroscience

and I use a variety of duration of clips you know the 90 second real the you know seven minute

thing the two and a half hour podcast that you know we have podcast solo podcast of four and a

half hours I don't know how many people listen start to finish but I think having a variety of

different durations really helps and I'm told by my team I have a tiktok account although I've

never logged on there you know I think tiktok represents the extreme of kind of bubble gum level

information slash entertainment and they really nailed some some circuit that can handle

information of about 30 to 60 seconds in a format that tickles the brain just right to keep swiping

liking commenting and sharing yeah and I don't think that's anything like a real understanding

or education yeah I mean it's is nothing like a real understanding or education yeah I mean tiktok

in particular like I think something people what people get wrong about tiktok is they think

that there was a real algorithmic innovation which is actually not the case like as far as I

understand the machine learning algorithm underneath tiktok is probably like a relatively standard sort

of multi-arm band-ent you know intermittent feedback reinforcement algorithm all they do is they

clear out all the other noise so you know if you're Facebook or something like this you're trying

to use algorithms to curate things but you have all these other legacy structures you also have to

try to satisfy there's friends and you know you want to show stuff that your friends like more than

other people and there's groups you're joining tiktok just got rid of all the noise and so we're

just going to all we're doing is optimizing watch time to we think we don't know but we think watch

time is the main thing that they're they're optimizing so we want to optimize it watch time and everything

all these videos all just exist as multi-dimensional points in this sort of semantic cloud and all we're

doing is just showing you things and then you swipe another thing swipe another thing so when you

get rid of all the noise from machine learning algorithm it doesn't also have to satisfy that I

follow this person on Instagram or this is my friend all I have to do is optimize this one number

how long did they walk before they swipe it just turns out like oh it's really easy like you do

that for a couple hours you're going to hone in on these sub regions in this massive multi-dimensional

space of stuff that just tickles this particular person's brain you know and it's very cybernetic

because now I'm the user of tiktok I'm the content creator I'm getting immediate feedback what's

working what's not I really quickly find these particularly rich regions in this sort of cybernetic

space and so it's like tiktok just purified something that was simple basic machine learning but

just like purify what we're doing here and that turned out to be enough to create what's like

probably the most addictive force we've seen in the digital world in a long time so tiktok

is optimized for dwell time yeah that's the thought right because it's not public so like we don't

exactly know how the algorithm works but people have been studying it like a Skinnerbox you know

100 phones and we we're looking at all these accounts look into variables it seems like that's

largely what it's optimizing for is how long did you watch before you swiped right and that's it so

that there I mean it's not this was both what was smart about tiktok and also why I've been arguing

it's it's destabilized a whole traditional social media narrative is because the traditional

massive social media players of the last decade had this first mover advantage on these giant

actual social networks right so like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram had these massive networks

of people's preferences of I'm following this person and this person I'm following and they

could leverage these actual social graphs as a huge source of producing interesting content right

and this was a huge first mover advantage because you can't it's hard to get 100 million people to

use something now right tiktok got rid of all that we don't want a social graph us a user don't

have to declare anything you don't have to follow people or say who your friends are we'll just

start showing you things and that was more compelling than what you could generate with a social

graph but now there's no first mover advantage so as the big social media players follow the tiktok

model which is much more algorithmic let's just try to curate based on algorithms not who you follow

or who your friends are they're now much more vulnerable because tiktok could come along and do

this without having to spend five years getting people to clear their friends and now if someone

else could come along and do this so I think the major players are giving away their competitive advantage

which is this the social graph IP that no one will ever replicate again they're giving away that

advantage and now it's a free-for-all-plane field of all sources of attention engagement so I don't

know I think tiktok accidentally destabilized the social media decade that had been defining until

I think just recently what I find so interesting about social media platforms like tiktok is that

sure it makes sense that kids and teens would use it they were raised with it snapchat etc but when

I see my peers who you know we call ourselves adults people in their mid to late 40s 50s essentially

playing kids games or engaging through these platforms that are and they're not childlike

necessarily but they they just prove that the or rather that their adherence slash addiction to

them just proves that this is tapping into some core neural circuit that exists in everyone

so while it might be shaping the young grain a lot this is adults basically eating junk food all day

yeah which raises a question you know I think while there are many different ways to eat and

that's not a topic we want to get into now Lord knows that's a great way to create a lot of social media

content debating which diet omnivore, carnivore, vegan etc the notion of intermittent fasting

limiting ones portion of the day where they eat to whatever six hours four hours 12 hours

um is an interesting one that maybe has some applicability here um what are your thoughts about

simply not turning on the phone maybe even not turning Wi-Fi on if people are are not as disciplined

as you are with the laptop or tablet um for the first two hours of the day or four hours of the day

or for a portion of the day sort of like you're taking a social media fast that isn't 30 days it's

you know which I think for a lot of people is going to evoke um high cortisol release uh just the

idea of it yeah uh now this is an idea I've written about before you know in deep work I had this

chapter called embrace boredom that was the entire idea right so the idea was um boredom by itself

is not I think laudable right there's a reason why it feels distressing when things feel distressing

that's usually an evolutionary signal that there's something going on here but what I was arguing in

that chapter was exactly what you're talking about you should have some moments every day where

you're free from distraction even though you could be accessing distraction and you want to

and like a little bit each day 20 minutes each day and then maybe a longer session once a week

like a couple hours um my argument for that was it's about breaking a pevelovian connection in

this sense right so if it's every time I feel bored I'm lack of novel stimuli I get this release of

the phone your mind is really going to make that association of like this is what we always do if

sometimes you don't it's a different cognitive landscape right your mind is uh sometimes we get

the distraction sometimes we don't that's a much better place to be because now when it comes time

to actually focus on something you know your mind's like I've been here before like we don't always

get the distraction so you know it isn't going back you know early 20th century psychology there's

probably a more neuroscientific way to think about this but it's like breaking pevelovian loops

if like sometimes we at the end of the day I'm exhausted it's an Instagram time and it like

scratches an itch but other times I'm bored I'm in line with the pharmacy and I don't look at the

phone my brain learns like yeah we don't always do it and and so the idea is that you know if you

make boredom more tolerable then you're much more likely to succeed with doing things that are

boring but hard and I think deep work for example is boring it just in the clinical sense of there's

lack of novel stimuli you're just doing the same thing for a long time so I've always advocated

for that is like you shouldn't be unsuperon comfortable with boredom like don't go seeking it

I'm not a big believer of and boredom is where all creative insight comes from I think it's a strong

evolutionary cue like leave this state but you do have to have some tolerance for it I wonder if

we need a different word than boredom um are you familiar with this notion of gap effects in learning

these gap effects are similar to the effects of um neural processing during sleep um focused

attention with some agitation triggers neuroplasticity and learning but it's during sleep in particular

deep sleep rapid eye movement sleep states of deep brass maybe in some forms of meditation that the

actual rewiring takes place and then there's this literature about gap effects which have been

demonstrated for music from math for many things in which if people say are practicing new scales on

the piano for instance but to be any scale and then they um intermittently are are queued by a

buzzer to just stop and do nothing the the hippocampus which is involved in learning memory

replays the action sometimes in reverse just as it occurs during sleep um at a rate of maybe 20 or

30 times faster at the neural level we're not talking about boredom what we're talking about

it's pauses during which perhaps um we are obtaining accelerated neuroplasticity the gap effects

certainly accelerate learning I've talked about these in other podcasts but I wonder whether

not this thing you're calling boredom so being in line um to get some groceries yeah and not

taking one's phone out while the checker is just getting the groceries through and just not really

doing much of anything it's entirely possible that the thing that we were working on earlier that

day or the previous day is being processed in the hippocampus at an unconscious level at a much

more rapid rate where we to look at our phone we would inhibit those gap effects which are

truly beneficial yeah well I mean professors feel this all the time right at least a lot of ones

I've talked to with peer reviews so I don't know if you've had this experience but you're like

reviewing a paper I often have this experience where when I'm first engaging with the paper I feel

incredibly frustrated okay I don't quite understand what they're doing here like this mathematics

isn't quite making sense to me and it'll often be the fact I come back later like well let me just

like write up what I have so far and your understanding is like much much better right so there's

this this sense of maybe something's been processing I took that so seriously when I was a especially

a post-doc like when I was at the height of just all I do in my life is produce value with my brain

every day I would do what I call thorough walks because I discovered thorough well a grad student

I read it down by the Charles like the full sort of you know just minus the beret like pretentious

grad student thing but I was really in the the the Walden real influential book for me so every day

when I would walk back I was living on Beacon Hill walking from MIT so people who know Boston it's

going across the Longfellow Bridge I would say nothing but nature observation like that's what

I'm doing I'm just oh the ice is thinner on the Charles today like look at this tree or the leaves

coming back partially I think what was going on is like this was right after I'd been whiteboard

in it right I think it was letting stuff process right so I had this explicitly in my routine a lot

of time where I was okay I can't think about work at all I can't do anything else but you know I'm

thinking about the tree I'm thinking about the water like really sort of minimal cognitive lifts

and I wonder if that's what was going on there like to me that I mean that was a very productive

period of my life yeah I feel like in the in the last five ten years thanks largely in part to

Matt Walker's book why we sleep and the advocacy around sleep from others we've come to understand

that sleep is essential for mental health physical health and learning cognitive performance physical

performance so much so that now people devoted men's rounds of attention and resources to try

to get the best possible night sleep whereas it was the all sleep when I'm dead mentality prior to

that and I would love to see a world where people embrace not the notion of boredom per se but the

notion of gaps lack of external stimuli coming into our our eyes and our cognitive system as a

means to get smarter to get more creative to get better we just need a language for this yeah and

I think it's the you know so often it languages as a separator when it comes to health and

performance tools and something I really strive for is to try and create language that's not

linked to anyone person that it illustrates what something is for so maybe no small task

album maybe we'll just have you rename boredom as a neural rewiring box or something like that

I'll go with the term yeah my whole writing career by the way is based on taking things people

already intuitively know in their gut and giving it a two word name just having the language around

that really matters like it does deep work oh okay that's like this activity I kind of knew that

was important I didn't have a name or digital minimalism like oh yeah that I kind of know what

that means like it's a different different philosophy towards it but there's all so I do have a name

related to the gaps we're talking about but but for one of the other negative effects right so we

have the positive effects you talked about which is consolidation of learning and acceleration

of learning we had the one negative effect which was the Pavlovian connection to distraction the

other one I've written about before is solitude deprivation right so so I'm using a different

definition of solitude than the colloquial one most people think of it as a physical thing I'm

I'm just isolated but there's a there's a cognitive psychological definition of solitude which

means absence of stimuli created by other human minds right so I'm not taking in information that's

coming directly from another human mind having no period with this solitude so having no period in

your day where you're free from stimuli created from other minds is solitude deprivation and it's

a real issue and partially it's a real issue because when we're processing input from another human

brain it's all hands on deck right and we're very social beings a huge portion of our brain is

dedicated to this right so it's a very cognitively expensive activity when I'm trying to understand

another human's what they're saying I'm simulating their mental state I'm trying to understand like

where do they fall in this sort of social hierarchy and one of my arguments was when you spend your

entire day in that state it's exhausting and anxiety producing and like until we had smartphones and

ubiquitous wireless internet the idea that you could banish all solitude from your day is laughable

it's just impossible right so of course we had a lot of portions of our day where our brain was not

like ramped up in gear for the sort of social processing mode but smartphones makes it possible that

you can be in that mode all day long and so like one of the things I hypothesize is some of the

anxiety rises that goes with the age of smartphones is brain exhaustion right so that's another

negative effect of the constant we have two negative effects now for the constant stimuli and one

positive effect for the absence of the constant stimuli so I think we're making a case here for

not always being on your device yeah I agree what one of my favorite literature is from neurosciences

I think most people have heard of the so-called critical period stages of development when the

brain is essentially hyperplastic to any input for better or worse this is a stage of life

called childhood and then of course people throughout the number 25 after age 25 plasticity is

possible requires more effort tension etc and then sleep so forth but we know based on really

beautiful studies that if you deprive someone of sensory input for even a few hours and we're

not talking about sitting in a completely black and room with no input but you essentially limit

the amount of sensory input in the period that follows you get an opportunity for a hyperplastic

response to any stimuli and this just makes sense if you understand basics about signal the noise

in the visual system and the brain it just means when there's a lot of background chatter of

stuff it's harder to see the stuff that matters and the stuff that the brain's required to

very computer science-y neuroengineering type perspective but yes I would love for you to come

up with a two-word description of this it's not boredom induced plasticity it's this quiet

induced hyperplasticity or something I don't know maybe we can riff on this together sometimes

not trying to move into your space but I have a very practical question and I'd love to get a

little more insight into the structure of your days but are you a list maker? Do you wake up in

the morning and make lists and cross things off and then decide what are the key items on that list?

No I'm a time blocker. Time blocker. Yeah so I'm not a big believer in to-do list I like to grapple

with the actual available time like okay I have a meeting here I have to like pick my kids up from

school here here's the actual hours of the day that are free and where they fall all right what do I

want to do with that time? Well okay now that I see that there's a lot of gaps in the middle of the

day here they're short maybe there I'm gonna do a lot of small non-conjury demanding thing oh this

first 90 minutes in the morning it's like the main time I have uninterrupted okay so this I'm gonna

work on writing so I've been a big believer this since I was an undergrad like you give your time

a job as opposed to having a list which is somewhat orthogonal to what's actually happening your day

and then just as you go through your day seeing what do I want to try to do next which I think

is a lot less efficient I'm gonna try your method I try and structure my days as much as I can but

it just never quite works do you work late into the night or you know no I'm a 530 man okay yeah

so 530 PM that's it yeah more or less that's my cut off now the one exception is if I'm writing

on deadline I'll sometimes like if I need to get more writing done I can do an evening writing session

which which I got used to through long experience I've used to write my blog post at night after like

my kids went to bed now they're older and they don't go to bed as early so it's like the one thing

I have left that I'll do after 530 is like every once in a while I'll do like a 90 minute evening

writing block but I call this by the way this whole philosophy I call fixed schedule productivity

I've been doing it since I was a grad student fixed the work hour schedule that's my commitment I work

in these hours and then work downstream from that for everything else so like this controls like even

what you decide to bring into your life because you know I can't go past a schedule and it drives

you to be more innovative and how you deal with your time and schedule you have to be efficient

because you only have these these hours here that's been you know a signal for my my life since I

was in my early 20s fixed a schedule and don't work outside of that schedule now it's your move

to figure out anything you want to do you have to make that work when we come professor figure out

how to make that work you want to write books while you're being a professor figure out how to make

that work you don't have the option of just throwing hours at it and you innovate a lot I think when

you have the constraints where do sleep and exercise fit into your schedule what's your typical

to bed time wake up time what's your typical exercise routine and the reason I ask about this

is because I think nowadays we hopefully people understand that exercising cognitive function

are inextricably linked yeah and we're all going to live longer lives and be sharper mentally

by doing exercise yeah so I mean my main like actual working with weights I do this pre-dinner

right and this was the innovation in the last couple of years it's it's a fantastic

psychologically for me this is a transition from work to like family time after work is so

so I'll do like 45-50 minutes garage gym you know the way built during covid after I'm done working

before dinner and once you get used to that like it also forces you like I gotta finish work because I

got to get this in before dinner but then I'll do also quite a bit of walking if it's not a teaching

day so I'm not on campus I do a lot of thinking on foot you know walking my kids to the bus stop

which isn't particularly close and back so I'll do a lot of walking but that's when I by serious

exercise now is always always pre-dinner then I want to be up you know in our room by 10

and then at that point I don't track so I have insomnia issues which which actually has been like

key driver of a lot of the things I think about especially with slow productivity is I'm very wary

because I can without any control on my own just find myself unable to sleep sometimes fall asleep

or stay asleep fall asleep yeah I mean I used to get it really bad not so bad now but you know

it comes and goes that really affected the way I thought about productivity because it seemed

like to me the the definition of just I get after it with a bunch of stuff wasn't really on the table

because if my notion of productivity depended on me like every day being able to just like

hammer on a bunch of stuff I'm very busy I've lots of commitments what would happen if I couldn't

sleep I want to be able to do that so it I drifted naturally towards a definition of productivity

which was it doesn't really matter if you work tomorrow but it is important that like this month

you work like writing a book it doesn't matter if you work on your book chapter tomorrow in particular

but like this month you have to spend a lot of time working on it so it was like an insomnia

compatible definition of productivity was sort of morphed into this idea of slow productivity taking

your time with it so it's interesting so like sleep issues really shaped away I thought about work

and put me on these much longer time scales of productivity try not to be dependent on any particular

day being critical to what you do I don't want the high stress situation I don't want to like I'm

just going to ten hours a day for the next ten days we're going to make this deal happen like I

can't operate in that space because I worry about it anytime my brain could betray me and I

could like lose sleep for a couple days I think it's really important that you're sharing this because

while people's challenges differ I think oftentimes people hear the content of my podcast or

other podcasts and think oh gosh I have to have everything dialed in just right when in fact most

all of the tools and protocols that have been discussed on the Hubertman lab podcast are in response

to particular challenge that I've had or that others close to me have had and I love this

well I'm sorry that you suffer from insomnia we have a series on sleep with Matt Walker in which

he lays out some some great tools that we haven't yet discussed on the podcast I'll just send you

up text to you I'll call you with a short list of those and hopefully they'll help but

as we do cover insomnia and some depth but I think it's important that people realize that they

can be very productive with the hours that they have and the moments or hours of high focus clarity

that they have even if they're not sleeping great even if they're raising small children

because that's the real world and certainly that's the real world of deadlines and academia but

family and colds and flus and travel and jet lag and arguments and all the happy stuff too

vacations so sounds like you're very good at adapting your day to what's going on around it

but that you have certain sort of committed time in my correct in assuming that you have

at least one period of say 60 to 90 minutes of real what you would call deep work let's say at

least five days a week I know that might be an underestimate but it seems like that's what

that's what I'm extracting from this that's the goal right so so to me depending on the season

is how extreme that can get so the busiest season would be like a teaching semester right but even

then I'm going to make sure that five days a week I'm starting with deep work and the non-teaching

days a more than the teaching days compare that to the summer for example where like all I do for

the most part is deep work no meetings on Mondays and Fridays all admin stuff is

midday to early afternoon Tuesday Wednesday Thursday everything else is deep work you know just locked

in yeah hours at a time but I want if I'm not getting five days five days of starting the day with

deep work I'm I'm unhappy right because I mean I keep coming back to this is okay because I'm not

going to be able to I mean fortunately the insomnia does involve it has a bother me in years but the

threat of it like completely shaped away I think about things and because I know I'm never going to be

uh have a sort of like an Elon Musk style energy of like I can just take on seven companies and make

it happen right I just don't have that ability um I've always focused on the long game and to me the

long game plays out with get your deep work time in you know just keep working on the stuff you do

best and get better at it you know tomorrow doesn't matter but if you if you're doing this most days

for the next four months like that's going to matter you know and so I often think about productivity

my own life at the scale of decades like what do I want to do in my 20s you know okay what do I

want to do in my 30s you know what do I want to do in my 40s you know um and that helps like in my

30s I've a lot of young kids like it's yeah I mean the amount of time I could spend total working is

like much less right but I could still think about what do I want to do in my 30s how do I make that

happen let me make sure I'm pushing like on those things then everything else I can adapt to I can give

here and there you know it allows you to be very adaptable when you're thinking about what do I want

to do you know for the next 10 years it also means you're not on a random Tuesday

chiding yourself because like why didn't I get three more hours of work in that becomes sort of

a nonsensical question and what you care about is like what happens in the next decade which is

that's a long game it's not about you know hustling today it's about I came back to deep work

day after day after day when other people got distracted by TikTok you know like I got to yeah

whatever it's that coming back to what matters again and again years ago I was in a scientific

competition slash battle and one of my tools it wasn't really the kindest tool was I would just

suggest to the competitor um great television series so the wire yeah that's how it's great

and we want a few they want a few but um you know there's something very addictive about those

yeah Netflix shows I you know I mean they're unbelievably addictive just even seeing

that the the the slider next episode slider come up you can skip the intro it's just like they've

just dialed it in yeah so I suggest those to competitors all the time no longer but

then who knows what role they played but I just noticed in myself how distracting they could be

they could take me to when I start watching Ozark yeah I found myself waking up in the middle

of the night perhaps to use the restroom or something and then starting another episode of Ozark

is wild yeah and um I wonder whether or not a way to reverse engineer one's way to productivity

reverse hack our way to productivity would be to think about all the ways that you would

benevolently deploy distraction for a competitor and then ask yourself what which of those

you're still engaging in and think of yourself as sort of in a competition with the highly distracted

version of oneself yeah um because I think that one task um I think for us today is to try and

think about for the person listening to this who's non-academic um we're hearing about all this

distraction that enjoys some social media you know how how can they bring about the best version

of themselves in terms of productivity but also presence for family um presence with self um etc

and um and if one isn't in a competitive environment then maybe it's about setting up different

um mental maps of the self and then trying to pit them against one another and be the best version

yeah literally I think that's interesting right like think about what would be yeah what what I

like is idea of thinking about my competitor you know what what what would really give me a leg

off yeah am I doing this I mean but I would also add in here this is like a slower productivity type

idea um you figure out the thing you really care about you figure out what you would need to do to

really show up for that thing and then if you're doing that like give yourself a break on everything

else too you know what I mean it's like I'm this way with right if I'm getting in my writing time

I have to write I'm very uncomfortable and I'm not writing I just write all the time articles books

you know I'm always writing if I'm getting in my writing time then it's like okay the rest of the day

maybe like this week was a kind of a loss like the kids were homesick or there's a crisis at the

university or whatever and like I'm just trying to keep that under control and like have good

productivity habits and like don't context switch too much and don't be too distracted but still

have your fixed-hiddle productivity like in at 5.30 every day and time block and try to be reasonable

with that time limit the damage but if I'm doing the thing that ultimately really matters I'm

going to be pretty happy with it so it's like moving to the definition of am I happy with what I'm

producing away from a quantity metric and to this more am I aggregating the quality reps you know

and it like I think in weightlifting this would make a lot more sense right it's like yeah there's

a certain number of like a certain amount of time under load each muscle group needs to be on

and like if I'm doing that I'm happy if I'm you know weightlifting right there's no notion of like

why can't I why didn't I exercise five hours more this or that and so I sometimes try to think

about my core intellectual work that way like if I'm getting in the core deep reps and the thing

I care most about which for me is almost always writing then like the rest I just want to it's

like damage control like I want to like do the other stuff well and like not get too stressed out

about it and you know there's the productivity habits then that are about doing the stuff that

matters and protecting it and then there's the habits that are all just about let's not let the

other stuff get out of control you know I find it a little bit easier you go easier on myself when

I think about it that way do you listen to music while you work no well the data certainly

support not listening to music or if you do listen to music listening to music without lyrics yeah

you have to train even to get used to it right I mean even to get used to music without lyrics you

got to get used to it I guess your brain's building the filters some people I have met have trained

themselves to work with lyrical music which I think it took them a long time but I I met a self

published novelist who does like a million words a year which is crazy and he blast because he has

four kids he blasts Metallica in NASCAR earphones and I think how do you possibly write like this I think

you just trained his mind has just like a pure auditory filter that it's that it's he adapted I guess

or maybe his books are that good I don't know but I like silence or like background noise to

but even background noise is hard I have a hard time writing at cafes for example like I really do

like lack of stimuli do you use visual blinders you know like some people actually do this they'll

you know it's like a hoodie and they'll be like really trying to tunnel their vision which makes

perfect sense from the perspective of neuroscience I mean your visual world strongly constraints

to the the narrowness or the or the broadness of your cognitive maps yeah I mean I just have my

spaces engineered right so like where I write in my my library at home all the interesting windows

are like behind me and over here I'm staring across to windows it just looks right next to the

neighbors and like just typically blinds down but as you say this it just makes me want to you know

shout that you know so many people who think they have attention deficit issues have probably

just put themselves in compromised environments which include smartphone apps and things that so

I mean like like there's absolutely no way that they ought to be able to focus in fact perhaps the

fact that can focus at all is is miraculous given the constraints like trying to run with shackles on

yeah I mean look we're used to this with physical stuff right well if we if we analogize to

physical fitness we're so used to all these details right like it matters like what you're eating

like how you're sleeping the details of how you train and when you train and how much like we're

very used to this idea that that really matters we have no intuitions for cognitive development or

application we like treat our brain I guess because we associate it so much with a sense of self

it's just this sort of an effable connection to us as a person we don't think of it as much of an organ

as like a muscle or something like this but we don't have a sophisticated vocabulary at all for

thinking about how do you do stuff with your brain which is the if you're in knowledge work that's

the whole game like the whole game is this brain takes an information adds value to it it alchemizes

value out of out of mind stuff and people who who alchemize value out of you know muscles I'm a

relief pitcher in baseball that I know like my whole job is like to take a certain muscles on my

kinetic chain and use them to move a ball very fast if I if I really am very careful about this

I can have a multi-million dollar deal those of us who do this with our brain don't have any of

these intuitions it's just like you know you have to work hard you know and we're on our phone all day

I mean this has to be the physical equivalent if you had like an endurance athlete who's smoking

all the time like this is crazy like this is directly contra-intercating or indicating what you

need to do what matters like what what the actual activity is that matters for your value production

but with cognitive stuff we have no intuition like this yeah when I was a junior professor this was

down in San Diego not Stanford my girlfriend at the time she said to me she said you're like a

professional athlete that was before I got 10 year and she was like in you're trying to go from

like minor leagues to major to go from you know you're like second string to to starter yeah

so you have to treat what you're doing like a professional athlete with their their their game

like prioritize sleep prioritize food prioritize time prioritize you know it's and we as you

point out we don't do that with the mind we we tend for cognitive stuff we tend to assume that we

just flip a switch and like focus time and I think that's in part because there are certain things

such as social media such as a great movie such as certain social interactions that can

immediately and completely harness our attention yeah unlike a marathon or where sure I could

probably finish the 26 miles or wherever it is 26.23 I forget what is if I had to do it right now

to save my life but it's not like I can just hit a switch and and and I think that's the that's the

kind of um caveat here is that the kid that loves video games can definitely focus yeah give him

her a video game they love and boom they're focused so it seems as if there's a problem when they can't

but they know they can right is it's stuff obvious when one states it but I think um

it's worth pointing out that this stuff needs attention it needs it needs work yeah which means

and it starts with vocabulary it starts with intentions starts with examples you know I mean

there should be a book like how to think that we just give to everyone get learned and learn

yeah like how to use your brain like the user manual you know like that would be a very useful

user manual and I think in like elite cognitive professions this gets handed down as lore and people

figure it out right I mean like this was like my experience trained at MIT in the theory group is

that you know everything was focused on getting the most out of your mind and so it's being passed

down from you know person to person it was also in the culture it was in the way that people

acted but most places that do cognitive work don't have these don't have these cultures yeah but

here's the advantage though here like here's the silver lining right if you're one of the few

cares about it's a huge advantage right now like it's a it's a big part of like my success I don't

think I have the highest horsepower brain but like it I care a lot about trying to you know

get the most out of it like to push it to like the edges of like the reps like and I can actually

RPMs like can actually get out of it you know so it's an advantage as you know someone is listening

to this you start caring about your brain how it works how you want to take care of it what you

want to get out of it you start caring about this you're going to get advantage as compared to the

person right next to you like suddenly in your office or you know in your grad program it's going

to be like well it's going on here yeah super power and sometimes there's a bit of a social

cost upfront yeah when I made the shift from being a let's just call it a not serious student to

a serious student in college and I was coming from behind I had to put so many more hours in and so

partying was this something happened fairly seldom I still did it but and it was isolating yeah

I actually lived alone in a studio apartment I mean as it's isolating there you're you're going

to miss out on certain things there's there's some deprivation there but you eventually end up

in a position to do far more with your life yeah of course what you said a moment ago also reminds

me David Goggins the David Goggins no no introduction needed has been quoted as saying you know it's

easy nowadays to be exceptional because so many people are just distracted and wasting their time

so that you put in 20% more effort to being more focused or toward toward your fitness program and

you're gonna you're gonna surpass many many people yeah so it's not that hard to accelerate is just

it it takes some practices that are socially challenging to implement it's it's funny I had that

same experience as an undergrad that you had yeah because I cared I was impatient to be done

with college and like to do things with my brain I want to be a writer I want to be an academic but

you know that takes a lot of work and I really cared a lot about it so I was I was a fraternity brother

for one day and I went to the first meeting they're doing you know he just held a pledging or

whatever and I remember I just not for me and I walk away it's like I'm not going because this

is going to be distracting like the the hangovers and this and that and and you know I want to focus

on writing I want to learn how do this it is pretty isolating yeah I um and I know some people that

were in the Greek system that also benefited tremendously from that I wasn't one of them um but

I definitely resonate with it yeah yeah so not everyone yeah I mean they don't all have to be

as it's not all I were right um but but caring about your brain it gives you a lot of options

and if you're playing catch up it there's almost always a social cost associated with it but

you eventually are joined by many other people you find the other nerds it's a lot of

nerds the other nerds misfits and people who um who are you know seeking something they come around

you fight you you find them uh I'm interested in this concept of burnout um we hear about burnout

um we associate with it too much adrenaline lack of sleep tired and wired um feeling disengage

the the poet David white has a beautiful poem I forget the title about burnout where he says that

that I think the cure to burnout is wholeheartedness um and I I always like that's a bit more abstract

than the kinds of things we're talking about today um but I like that because there's something

about wholeheartedness um really leaning into something with with the true desire to be there

and to explore it no matter how hard that is um the opposite extreme of burnout yeah well I

mean I think burnout in if we're thinking knowledge work like people with office jobs my diagnosis

there it's not exactly quantity of work that that does play a role it's the kind of work because I

think what's happening what what's been deranging actually for people in these jobs is uh workloads

are getting larger right in part because communication is low friction and we always want to be

demonstrating activity because of pseudo productivity and people are always asking to do things we say yes

everything we say yes to brings with it administrative overhead right which is talking about the

thing but not actually doing it so it's like emails about the commitment it's a meetings about the

commitment um because our workloads are larger what happens then is more and more of our time has

to service this administrative overhead because everything we say yes to brings with it its own overhead

it adds up and aggregates right so now more and more of our day is spent talking about work

and not actually doing the work and then make it even worse it's not like this overhead is all

batch together it's sort of spread out throughout your day so it's also putting you in that state of

constant distraction which makes it hard to do work what I think is burning people out is they're

now in this state where they're saying I'm spending most of my day talking about work sending emails

attending meetings very little time is left to actually make progress on the work and then the

the workload gets larger and larger this by itself is deranging right this it feels like you're in

some sort of um nihilistic experiment like what what is this why why I have six hours and meetings

I'm not actually just can't be the right way to work um and then what happens of course is you

have to recover time in the morning in the afternoon maybe after your kids go to bed they try to

actually make progress so now you also have just a straight work quantity issue so you're working

more hours there's an energy drain but I think that psychological piece of this can't possibly make

sense that like I'm checking email once every two minutes and spend six hours in zoom like doing

very little actual high value work like this can't be the right way to work that's what I think

the burnout epidemic right now is coming from is is that psychological component of we all know this

is stupid but no one is saying the emperor has no clothes on we all know that the amount of email

and meetings I'm doing is such a waste of my salary like this is a highly trained brain like I could be

writing these reports or this code or creating these business strategies um but we're all just

accepting this I think the absurdity of the current situation is creating as much of the burnout as

it is just we also have to add these extra hours just like a straight aggregation of work quantity

it's almost analogous to taking professional athletes or would be professional athletes and

having them do a bunch of other physical labor so that they're showing up not fresh for the game

and little micro injuries and distracted and um and no one's admitting that this doesn't make

sense and everyone's just getting injured and no one's talking about it so it's the absurdity of

it would drive people crazy and it is driving people crazy it's so difficult though because

certain things like smartphones are very useful on the hospital ward I mean doctors can communicate

nurses communicate so much faster now um parents and kids can communicate who's gonna pick up the kids

and nope got stuck in traffic you go this way alternate route on google maps and on and on so

it's all woven in with stuff that's that's also highly adaptive it makes it tough yeah you know

it's almost like the work of being a selective filter yeah is half the work of trying to

deload the cognitive systems that would allow you to do deep work yeah well in the workplaces

even harder than that right because because part of the issue is email and slack let's just say

digital communication um I spent a lot of time studying that closely right from like a technocratic

standpoint the introduction of digital communication to the workplace and the problem there is the

reason why we're checking this all the time it's not some like individual habit de-optimization

it's not oh I should just check this less often what happened is when we introduced low friction

digital communication to the office this it emerging consensus came about that said great let's

just use ad hoc messaging as our major way of collaborating like we can just figure things out on

the fly I can just be like and you what's going on with the whatever and you can answer me and I can

send it back um this was very convenient the activation cost was low and so this is how we began

actually collaborating on work now what happens is as workloads get higher we now have many things at

the same time they're all generating these asynchronous back and forth conversations most of these

have some sort of time sensitivity right so if I email you and say like what's going on with like the

guest coming later today we have to kind of resolve this before later today um so now it's not just

that these messages are going back and forth with all these different threads but I have to keep

checking my inbox to make sure the gap's not too big this is not a failure of habits it's not a

moral failure it's uh necessitated by the fact that all these back and forth conversations have to

keep moving forward so it is difficult then if you're in this system to step out by yourself

because this is the way we're collaborating is these asynchronous back and forth messages and I

can't disengage myself from that without slowing things down like a from a like a mathematical

game theory point of view it's a suboptible Nash equilibrium it's not the right place not the

right way to to run this to the utility value this configuration is low but no one individual can

deploy a different strategy that's going to be higher value we're stuck in it right and so now it

becomes really hard for an individual just to say I want to check my email less often it's built in

systemically into this hyperactive hive mind workflow and the only way to break free from the

suboptimal configuration is to basically have the organization itself do like a really high cost

change to the rules of the game these are how we're collaborating now we're not using email freely

anymore we're going to use this system instead here you it's a very expensive top down procedure

to free ourselves from the suboptimality it's like in the world of work that's partially why this is

such an intractable problem and I tried to write a book about this recently and it was really hard

to gain traction because it's not easy to solve this like no individual can move out of this and

you have to put in a lot of energy as an organization to try to change this so it's in some sense

email is a more insidious problem than social media on the phone because at least over here

this is my engagement with this and I might have these moderate behavioral addictions but I could

make differences here in my company oh this is much worse this is like a systemic problem it's an

emergent deterministic work impact on an economic social cultural system that was completely

dynamical and went in a way we didn't really expect so it's a it's a really tough situation

sometimes especially in the world of work how do we get out of this constant distraction it's why

you know I wrote deep work and I was like well why don't people just do this that's why they don't

just do this because it's not so easy to reclaim this time well it's like when I was a graduate

student in postdoc I was focused on eating pretty well meaning just clean-ish food and

people talked less about that at that time yeah I was also really committed to exercise and

so 16 people were less committed to that in the academic sector at that time now I think it's

commonplace for people like I'm going to my yoga class I'm doing my zone two cardio I go to the

gym you know men and women do this yeah I remember I'm like this like sneak off to the gym like oh yeah

yeah and you know you felt like a bit of an oddball if you were the one bringing your lunch to the

the you know the pizza luncheon not there's any wrong pizza love pizza but I was trying to eat

well I have for a long time I feel better when I do and I'm grateful that I did but you get some

weird looks like out you have a eating disorder or something like that that's what people would say

then yep now people will probably look you know that looks better than the pizza people start

to understand so I think there needs to be a cultural shift yep and I think there has been a

cultural shift around food and exercise certainly food meditation sleep yep I think people are far

more accepting and actually encouraging of their workers and co-workers I'm taking really good

care in order to function better for longer yeah I think this is going to be the next revolution

and it's going to be a revolution it's going to unlock we're talking on the scale of like a

trillion dollar GVP when we go through knowledge work and have this revolution I call it like the

cognitive revolution let's take really seriously how the brains of our workers work like these are

our number one assets like not to be too mechanistic about it but what is our main capital asset if

we're a knowledge work organization we have some buildings but really these brains that we have

like employment contracts with these brains create value let's take seriously how the brains

actually operate and as soon as we do we'll say oh my god these brains are checking email once every

two minutes what a disaster it's like if we had a car factory and we spent 20 million dollars on

one of these German robots that can you know put cars on the doors or whatever and we just weren't

taking care of it and it was like rusty and it was dropping the doors and the production pipeline

was going down we said this is crazy we got to take care of this equipment right when we have the

cognitive revolution the sort of cognitive capital revolution and knowledge work I think it's

going to unlock a trillion dollar GVP I think that's how unproductive we've been if we just think in

the pure raw terms of brains producing stuff that's worth money like if we're just like super

deterministic and kind of inhumane about it so much is being lost because we're in the suboptimal

Nash equilibrium everyone just email everyone all the time everyone's just on slack all the time

that when we finally have the revolution to get over that it's going to be a massive economic

kit and you know AI might play a role in this right because maybe AI wants to get planning

capabilities is going to be able to take the burden of some of this back and forth planning

I think it's easier to get there with cultural shifts I don't think we have to wait to build

an email capable chat GPT to do this like you could solve this tomorrow this is cultural as

much as this tool based but I think it's going to be a huge revolution when we get there a

akin to like the assembly line in manufacturing which was like a 10X improvement in productivity

metrics when we figured out the continuous motion assembly line with interchangeable parts

was a massive it created this productivity engine I'm using the economics and so productivity

now you know dollars per worker the economic miracle that came from this process-based industrial

innovations in the late 19th early 20th century the money generated by that the wealth generated

by that was the foundation of the modern west like the whole world as we know it was built there's

these huge latent potentials and right now I don't think we're there with the brain and I think

it's going to be a huge revolution it's just it's just difficult right it's not an easy revolution

to start but I think it's going to change whole industries in ways that we're not it's going to

be hard to even imagine yeah and I think as long as there are individuals who either by virtue of

lack of family or other constraints or by virtue of just having more energy and requiring less

sleep because these individuals do exist out there yeah there will always be these individuals

that can kind of apply themselves more than others in the sense that they can get in earlier and

stay in later yeah and and that trying to be them is not a good idea that we all need to optimize

for our you know best balance of productivity deep work and work life balance for lack of a

better term when I was a graduate student I was really committed to my my craft and I remember

that hearing about a student he's now a professor a very accomplished and a chronologist I'll just

give him a name because he did this that he doesn't know me but I heard about this guy that had been

in the department Randy Nelson and everyone's like he used to work a hundred hours a week yeah so

I was like all right great I'm going to start logging my work hours silently I'm going to do 102

hours and I ended up with a flu and autoimmune condition yeah I literally had an autoimmune condition

you've never had one since then I stopped working that much yeah started working quote unquote

smarter in the lines of many of the things you're saying here although I didn't implement or

know about all these tools that time and of course the autoimmune thing went away it was a fairly

minor thing yeah never had it again but you can destroy yourself simply by working more yeah

um even if it's deep work so that the solution is not necessarily more it's um just like with

exercise I guess that stand is obvious but I thought I'd share that anecdote because uh

Randy Nelson taught me what I'm capable of and what I'm not capable of yeah well the other

thing that happens by the way too it's not just who's capable of working more get these advantages

there's these other unpredictable inequities um I talked at a law firm once years ago about deep work

and I was invited by a group was actually a group of women lawyers who had a reading group

and they said part of what was happening at this law firm is that people who were uh disagreeable

like just sort of gruff and jerks would get asked to do less of what they would call non-promotable

activities or can you organize this or whatever which meant they had more time to do deep work uh

which meant they would do better and they would rise faster and then what was happening then was

you had accidentally built a system that said let's make sure we have a fast track for like our

most disagreeable employees to the partnership level where actually you need to be pretty

agreeable because your client acquisition is really on the partners and so they accidentally had

you know pushed towards this uh this inequity and these type inequities happen all the time when

we leave it like haphazard and okay so who's doing less work like like well I just sort of like

I'm gruff and people don't like me or I have something going on at my house it means I don't have

the same time to do this um and you end up pushing people up these paths that might not be who you

really want to select because you're selecting for uh things that are sort of unrelated to their

actual underlying talent or like how much they can actually produce and so I'm with you on that

yeah it's a complex problem but attractable one nonetheless I'm interested in your thoughts on

remote work versus in-person work and the hybrid model yeah um I've heard about a hybrid model

recently if anyone's a big um record company uh here in Los Angeles so that um they require one

in-person day per week unless on sick leave um they require one at home day per week and then the other

days it's at your discretion yeah it's kind of an interesting model for you in a five day week model

yeah I mean I my my proposals have thought about this a lot is okay if you're gonna do hybrid work

and I proposed this in a lantic art of cruelty recently which created some positives some negative

waves as like here's the way you should do it uh synchronize the schedule here's at home days here's

an office days but for everybody for everybody okay or have a few of these schedules but like

groups of people who work together have the same schedule but then make the rule at home days no

meetings no email like that's the way to really get the full benefit out of hybrid work when we're

in the office we have meetings and we can talk about work and we're at home we're just doing work

and we can do it without distraction and we can just stay deep and really turn through things I

think it would really make a big difference on the overload issue I think would be much more

sustainable remote work so I did a lot of coverage or remote work as this was first emerging the

early pandemic there I became convinced I was doing this twice a month column for the New Yorker

back then that was just looking at the pandemic transforming work and I came away with the idea that

remote work can be fantastic but it's difficult and it can't just be do the job you were doing in

person but just do it at home and we have zoom and we'll figure it out like if you're going to be

fully remote we have to rethink what work means for that and there's a lot of differences it needs

to have it needs to be way more structured it probably needs to be you're working on less things

it's very clear what you're working on the collaboration is much more defined and much less frequent

you probably need to be freed from the sort of hyperactive hive my dance of we're just emailing

each other all day and in zoom meetings all day you have to sort of reconstitute what a remote

work job is I think before it works and we know this in part because software developers pre-pandemic

were one of the only knowledge sectors to have a really successful track record with remote work

that is the only sector within knowledge work where we had large companies fully remote they did

that because their jobs they they had really structured them around these these agile workload

management systems where okay here's when we talk about work here's how long it takes here's

how we assign you new work you work on one thing at a time you sprint till it's done they had all

this structure around work which didn't really matter if you're in the office or not so the less

structured work is the more free for all the more you need we have to be in the office so like I'm a

huge fan of full-time remote work but I think those jobs have to look very different than like a

standard 2019 job yeah I've always done a hybrid of remote work I stick Wednesday mornings at

home from the lab yeah but nowadays it's wild because it's especially during the pandemic but

still now I mean you can do the whole day in pajamas and get it worked on and I love this idea of no

no email and limiting text and social media while at home doing work to really extract the

most out of it yeah are there any data maybe from the pandemic era or prior or beyond about zoom and

things like it in terms of how they enhance or diminish or perhaps have no effect on productivity

like zoom specifically and yeah meetings we haven't we just found ourselves in zoom all the time

for a while that was the bigger problem I mean so there is data that says for example a hybrid meeting

some people are online some people aren't these are less effective meetings they don't they don't

work as well but the bigger problem is zoom I think was the quantity and part of it was just the

the technology involved right so if we're in the office together and I have a relatively quick

thing to talk to you about I can just grab you and we can talk about this and then the footprint is

going to be five minutes but it's not just that it's five minutes it's five well allocated minutes

because I'm probably going to use the social cues of your doors open or you're going to get coffee

anyways right and the zoom error instead we would say what we should set up a meeting right because

as you know we have to talk about this but if you think about a standard online calendar it's

difficult to have a meeting this less than 30 minutes long I mean you just you have to drag it you

know I mean 30 minutes is like the default smallest length meeting so we're taking a lot of informal

back and forth and inflating the time I think that was part of it so we just had too much zoom going

on right if it was just I do one meeting a week now it's on zoom it used to be in person we're all

on zoom we saw being person it's that's not that big of a deal it's maybe like a slightly less

effective meeting but it's fine it's good enough but if it's I have four x more meetings than I used

to because of the the inherent inefficiencies of having to go to prescheduled virtual for basically

all collaboration that could be a huge problem the data I saw from Microsoft the last data I saw

was a 252 percent increase in these meetings from 2020 to now and it's not a number it's not like

it peaked and then it started coming back down again once we went to hybrid we just it's just high

and it's still creeping up right that's a lot of time that just vanished and we sort of pretend like

it didn't but that's a lot of time that is not actively working on things and just talking

about work or talking about other stuff while we get around to talking about work I think it's a real

issue is there a top three list of things that if you had a magic wand you would see everyone do

each day you know if you yeah if you had three he wishes um yes you mean what they be if the

knowledge worker if he's of the enhancing work creativity focused work I mean I think you and I both

um clearly agree that there's not just great value in terms of productivity yeah but a great

degree of life enrichment yeah like a deep level of enrichment in terms of happiness feelings

of well-being kind of time for connectivity with others yeah lessons about deep work that can be

exported to time with others where we we are really present etc just so much to be gained from

these from engaging in deep work yeah and things like it that you've written about in your various

books um and talk about on your podcast are you know if is there a top three yeah yeah yeah so if I

do three I would say okay um first of all with your workload simulate something like a pull system

instead of a push system and what I mean by that is when you keep track of what you're working on

have a the top part of that list which is um actively working on these things and keep that top

part of your list like two or three things everything else is in the bottom part of the list it's

to work on next and it's in an ordered queue and so when you finish something that you're working on

you pull something new to take it slot from the list below right so what I'm trying to do with that

advice is reduce all this administrative overhead because now even if like you can't get away you

have to say yes to these things because it's the way like your your organization works the stuff

that's in the waiting to work on queue you say I don't have meetings about that I don't do emails

about that I wait till I'm actively working on it and I only actively work on three things at a time

now I'm going to finish those things really quickly because I don't have 15 items worth the

meetings I'm going to every day so things are going to pull up there pretty quickly and so the rate

at which I'm accomplishing things will probably be higher than it was before but I only work on three

things actively you could even make this visible it's in a shared document if you want to when

someone asked you to do something new tell them to put it on the end of your queue you're like oh okay

so like Andrew is not working on this right now he's working on these three things and there's

seven things here and I'm adding something number eight so I know not to expect something for a while

in fact I can keep checking this list until I see Andrew's working on it so I can see it's making

progress and then once I know he's working on it I can start email him about it we can do just a

normal type of overhead you would have with with projects right that alone is going to have a huge

difference like now the amount of distraction your day is going to plummet because that's generated

from overhead of things you've agreed to do and that's going to that's going to plummet that out

all right so that'd be number one could I just thank you could I just ask a few questions about that

just to clarify so for I use myself as an example selfishly but then of course I don't know

what everyone else out there is pursuing but so substitute the specifics I'm about to insert here

for whatever it is that you care about in your life so researching podcasts yeah solo podcasts

in particular for me is my major task in life these days yeah with respect to work so that would

be top of the list yeah and then there could be two other items on this you know top of Q would

daily activities like like exercise social time with loved ones etc would that be included there

or we're talking specifically about work yeah let's just keep just work okay so it'll be you know

podcast prep but you might have the podcast prep right you might have the particular topic though

right right yeah so part right I'm working on an episode right now about about skin health yeah

um so you could you could have two different episodes topics your copying does could both be up

there yep so skin health allergies episode these are two that I'm spending a lot of time on

um months yeah in fact yeah right and then you heard might be something that it involves the

uh the media company something on the business side but like okay we're trying to figure out um

a plan for whatever right content for for a new context brand association yeah exactly okay got it

great so that those three would be top of the list and every day until those are done

they could sit top of the list and then there are a number of items underneath those that fall under

whatever yeah and critically when these other items come up right like oh this is like a topic

for example I want to do a show on you have a place to put it um it's not being forgotten or here's

a there's a business idea really we need to figure out like whatever we want to add do something

with our camera configure okay put on the list it's not being forgotten like it's on there and you

can see where it is not only is it on there but like this could be shared among your team so as

people had extra information or things to add to one of these projects they can add it to it on

the list right so the information is aggregating so if you use a tool like Trello for this Trello

spelled T-R-E-L-L-O okay is an app it's a web-based service that the metaphor is just index cards in

piles right but they're virtual okay but you can flip over the index card digitally attach files

right notes and so I use Trello for my own organization what I'm working on so now you have a place

where you can gather like oh we just I just heard about something that's relevant to this thing I

need to work on you have a place to put it like it goes on to the Trello card or you could do this

with shared documents doesn't matter you're just like literally typing things into a Google Doc you

or a whiteboard or a whiteboard yeah yeah you could be we're keeping track of these things right

I'm gonna do this by the way yeah well I mean I'm a big believer in this and then everyone can

see what you're working on and then the key thing is if it's not in your active list you don't have

meetings about it and you don't have emails about it right like if people have ideas or things they

just add it to the card so when that gets up to the active list we can work on all the information

there we haven't forgotten anything and what two word language you used to describe this first

point this method I love this I called it a pull-based pull-based right what gets me pulled up you

pull in to the so you're fixing it in advance here's how much concentration I have to give on work

and you pull stuff into that the alternative is push-based which is how most organizations run which

is when I want you to do something I just push it on to you and now you have to deal with it got it

once her email described as a public post to do list yeah that made me scared of email in a way

that nothing else had yeah it's new ports pull-based system I called it that by the way

this is what in a lot of the advice in the first one of the chapters of the new book is basically

how do you get away with implementing this and when you have a boss and there's like all sorts

of different so you're your own boss you can just say this is what we're doing here's the board

but there's a lot of like subtle ways you can do this yeah right so that's number one that's

number one the um cal new quarts pull-based system I'm gonna do this and I'm actually gonna report

back on this at some point you won't see the post on social media because you're not there but

others well all right so that's one all right number two would be multi-scale planning okay so now

this is planning uh you're planning on three different scales daily weekly I think seasonally or

quarterly however you want to think about it right so you have a a plan for like the semester the

season or the quarter like this is what I'm working on these are the big objectives I want to hit

here's to remind us to myself about like what matters like remember like I'm overhauling my

my workout routine we're trying to like do this with the podcast you look at that scale planning

every week when you build your weekly plan and the weekly plan it gets freeform text you don't

need anything you know any special tools your weekly plan you're looking at the actual calendar

all right uh what from my bigger scale plan my seasonal quarterly plan what am I trying to make

sure I can make progress on this week and you confront the reality of your week you see where

it's the empty space where there's the busy space you also change what's on your plate right here

you know if I cancel this thing that frees up that whole morning which means like I could really

make progress on this which I really want to make progress on so great I'm going to cancel that

thing on Friday so you're looking at the whole week is one unit then every day you look at your

weekly plan like okay so so I'm going to use this when I make my plan for the day and when you do

your daily plan you do time blocking now I'm every I'm giving a job every minute on my workday

not my day after work but every minute my workday I'm time blocking so I call it time blocking is

you're literally drawing blocks around the free time okay this I'm working on this this I'm working

on this so you're making a plan for your day that is informed by the weekly plan so in multi-scale

planning you have like the the big picture things you care about trickle their way all the way down

to okay I'm what am I going to do during this hour during the day but you don't have to grapple

every this what most people do every time I'm figuring out what to do next I'm not grappling with

all these scales at the same time what are my objectives what's my big plan what's going on this

week you're you're dealing with each of these scales when the time is right and so when it finally

gets down to it's now three o'clock you're just doing what that block is and you figured out that

block earlier today when you looked at your weekly plan that weekly plan reflected what was in your

semester plan which you figured out you spent a whole afternoon working on at the beginning of

the semester so multi-scale planning it keeps you focused on what matters it prevents you from

wandering through your day and how you disperse your energy and it gives you control over your time

on different scales from like canceling major ongoing obligations that just being more efficient

about what you do during a given day so I swear by multi-scale planning to try to keep this whole

lumbering ship that is sort of like Kell Newport aiming in the towards the right shores you know

like keep correcting and keeping it aimed back I love this this is more or less what I do with my

physical workouts every week I know I mean to get three resistance training sessions two or three

cardiovascular training sessions I know I'm gonna train my legs once it's either gonna be on

depending on travel Sunday money or Tuesday I'll train torso muscles in the middle of the week I'll

train sort of limb accessory muscles on a Saturday yeah long run on Sunday or hike on Sunday or

some other day there'll be some sort of hit workout in the middle of the week and ideally there's

a jog in there too and you can adjust it a little bit based on the reality of the week yeah I might

double up yeah for two days then take a day off I have my ideal schedule but sometimes it gets

compromised and and then I do that for 16 week cycles where I vary the kind of intensity load etc

and I've done this for years and it's just kind of works for me yeah now with cognitive work I don't

tend to do this it tends to be more deadline based yeah but I think that the the pull-based system

is really gonna help yeah if I dovetail it with this multi-scale planning I love this and you can

see the deadlines now you see him coming right so that's part of what's nice about multi-scale planning

is you know the deadlines coming up and so when you're doing your semester planning you start

thinking like okay for the big deadlines like when I get the December I need to be really starting

getting after this thing is going to be due yeah I've got a book to yeah so then you know and so

this really helps in book writing because now when I'm planning it's like you know a year in advance

I know this month I need to get like roughly the rough draft of chapter two done you know and then

that trickles down to my week where I'm gonna make sure I have enough time cleared to like be on

track for finishing it and then that trickles into my day now I know to like block those mornings

to work on it so it all it all works together an added bonus of the daily scale is I would say

communications should get its own block email social media whatever that's like you communicating

with the outside world goes into your time block plan so if your block doesn't include that you

don't do it so it's like this block is writing it's not email it's not social media so the rule

is really simple I'm not gonna use email or social media but I still need to do email at some point

so I have to put a block in for it and when I'm in my email blocks I'm doing the email if I need to go

on social media to see what's going on with like the latest episode or something I got to give that

time and then you can monofocus because then it's a psychological hack but basically when you

particularly when you schedule communication and distraction now the only thing you have to

muster willpower to do is obey the single rule of I'm following my blocks if you don't do that

if you're like I just sometimes do email and social media sometimes I don't now what you have to do

is just constantly be having this debate is now the right time to do this and I'm gonna do it at

some point today why not now well what about now what about now like you're just constantly asking

yourself right that's impossible right that's gonna drain you but if all you have to do instead

is say my commitment today is to follow my blocks and I get I really feel good when I do it and like

I check off a box if I do give yourself some feedback here it's a much easier cognitive battle

the win then just trying to be reasonable about well let me wait a little longer to check my email

like you're gonna lose that battle you know eight times out of 10 which is like enough to really

overcome it so that's like a hidden bonus of time blocking is now you can really get your arms

around separating different cognitively distinct activities this is where the analogy of time

restricted eating comes to mind yeah again not that that's the best way to lose weight or maintain

weight or it's it's rolling longevity is still debated etc but I think for many people not all but

for many people the decision that they do not eat during certain time blocks and they do eat

another time blocks it's just far more tractable in the real world for them then trying to limit

portion size decide whether or not they're gonna eat or they're gonna pass the cookie and have a

little bit nope they're they're interfesting window it's just it simplifies the issue yep

and as a consequence I think it improves behavior overall although the clinical trials point to

some mixed results with that last statement again I don't want the nutrition east does after me

though the point is the time blocking and the the thick black line didness of the yes no the binary

yes no as um eat don't eat or a single commissary email communicate don't communicate in a given

a time block I think that's that really um is what it's about it it honors the the power of those

sorts of neural computations and there's another hidden bonus of time blocking too is visually

distinct blocks so what I do for example is I put a double thick line around deep work blocks

focusing on some not just deep work but deep work on things I really care about

just this gives you a visual record how much deep work am I doing right like it's this diagnosis

I use a paper based time block planner so you flip through those pages and you're just looking for

dark blocks right so you see if I see I don't have a lot of dark blocks I see this is my whole job

like my whole life I've been trained in a lab to think really hard about things and write things

why do I not have very many dark blocks you get this feedback mechanism so there's all these

bonuses when you start doing this type of doing this type of planning before you tell us about

number three I often have fantasized about a web based program that seems to run countercurrent

of much of what you're talking about but goes back to this the whiteboard MIT observer stuff that

you talked about the beginning which is often long for okay I need to write today I need to write a

book or I'm going to do some podcast prep I'm going to pop up a few windows of other people that

are also doing deep work and we're not going to communicate in fact if we do or if music comes

through on the microphone or somebody coughs that's going to be considered a distraction but it does

anyone want to join me for some deep work yes where we don't communicate and I often thought I

would just pay someone to be there yeah to just sit there and but I haven't done that there are

multiple companies to do this okay yeah it's interesting you're you're you're online with

or in person was just other people doing deep work so a deep work club basically the

challenge is synchronizing schedules because I might want to do this with somebody on the East Coast

and they might not be doing deep work at the same time and a recording isn't the same because then

you know they're not really watching yeah but but there's something really to this right yeah

especially for at home workers or people like me that work often in isolation

do this right dissertation boot camps I don't know if if you had this experience but Georgetown

does a lot of colleges do this okay everyone work on their dissertation we're all going to get

together and we're going to work on it together because they would often have me come speak at these

things earlier in my career it would just be a bunch of grad students they were just coming to the

same space and they would work for like okay 90 minutes and then they would have like a speaker

come in or launch and nine so the the group cohesion of everyone working deeply at the same time

writers retreats are the same way we all go to this same house in the middle of nowhere

so that we're all just going to encourage each other the right because that's all what anyone's

doing here yeah so social pressure I'm with you I was thinking if I ever needed to you know

put a big extension on my house that's that's what I should do just like okay pay me money

then I will sit there on zoom and do deep work with you this is my secret plan I pay money I'd pay

money to do deep work in parallel with you by with a virtual window there there's Kalan

his office doing that I think there's something nice about having some knowledge of who people are

yeah you know like hey login in today yeah yeah all right let's get down to it set the timer and go

and then you know osta I'm out you know working at the library academic libraries why did people do that

right this everyone there is working right yeah no I'm big believer in that there's really

something sticky to that okay number three all right have a shutdown ritual which clearly

demarcates the end of work in the start of the night after work and the shutdown ritual so it has to

you have to close open loops right so you got to make sure this is like a review type period let

me look back at my inbox and look at my plan let me look at my you know my time block and my calendar

um really make sure I there's nothing urgent that needs to be dealt with that I did it and there's

nothing that's just in my head that I don't want to forget it's not written down somewhere like

take care of all of that right so you review all these things you get what am I gonna do tomorrow

you don't have to build your whole plan for tomorrow you have a sense for it um and then you need some

sort of demonstrative thing you do to indicate that you finished a routine right so my my long time

newsletter readers know I used to actually have a phrase I would say schedule shutdown complete

like a crazy phrase right it's not how normal people talk right um now I have a planner that has

like a check box that says shutdown complete next to it the reason why that it's a demonstrative anchor

is that you use this then for cognitive behavioral therapy because at first people have a hard time

shutting down work I mean I invented this because I had a very hard time shutting down working on

my dissertation I just what this proof doesn't work and blah blah so what you do is when you're

you get a rumination post shutdown hey what about what's going on with our work we doing the right

thing do we forget this or that instead of engaging in the rumination well let's like no I think we're

okay let me think about my schedule tomorrow what's my plan you instead can just say um I said that

crazy phrase right check that box I wouldn't have said that phrase unless I had gone through everything

and made sure that I had a good plan and nothing's been missed and it was okay to shut down work

because of that I'm not going to engage with you rumination I said the weird thing let's get back

to what we're doing this is like cognitive behavioral therapy that after a month or so you were really

able to actually effortlessly disengage from work and do everything you know all the other stuff that

matters right without having the constant rumination about work which gives your mind an actual

break to you know do other things so I mean this is more mental health and productivity but for me

it was critical I mean I can really remember when I came up with this you know exactly where I was

in my graduate career and there's just too much too many ideas and concerns that were just

roiling and like once I did this you know it took a few weeks and then I could actually like shut down

and go on and do other things yeah the paired associative nature of the brain can make it really

problematic if you're thinking about work at the dinner table you start to associate the dinner

table with work I mean it when a mat walker came here to do this six part series that's soon to be

released and we were discussing insomnia he said you know one of the major issues with insomnia

is people who have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep will often stay in bed when they can't

sleep and then the bed becomes associated with challenges with sleep yeah that you know hence the

recommendation that virtually every sleep coach and sleep scientist recommends that people actually

if they can't sleep for 20 minutes or so of effort then you get up and leave the bed and go someplace

else until until you feel sleepy enough to go back and try or fall asleep on the couch elsewhere yeah

I put that in as a as a note to you but this seems incredibly important also for enrichment of

relationships with spouses and children and people in your life I mean the problem is the first

thing that we ask people when they walk in the door typically it was how does work today yeah

how does work what do you do today yeah tell me about your school day tell me about your work maybe

we need to come up with better questions yeah like here's something interesting we could do or

here's like something I read about unrelated to work yeah no I think I think it makes a huge

difference and again there's all these meta benefits for these things so so one of the meta

benefits for all of these is also these are all very structured you'll begin to build a reputation

as someone who is very careful about how they manage themselves in their time like if you're doing

multi-scale planning certainly if you're doing you know pull-based workload management people are

going to start thinking this is someone who thinks a lot about like how they manage their work day

and how things happen this gives you massively way right yeah because we think what like our

colleagues want from us is accessibility but really why they want accessibility is because they have

no clarity about you know are we going to do this thing are we going to remember to do this thing

am I going to have to keep bothering you you know what if I don't really think you have your

act together I just wish you would just do this right away or respond to me right away because I'm

going to have to worry about this until I hear back from you that you did it like accessibility is

born from lack of trust or lack of clarity right so if you have the reputation of someone who really

has to act together you can for example lean into a shutdown I don't do email at all and people

they don't think that you're being lazy or that you're not keeping up with the work they're like no

like Andrew has his act together with this stuff I trust them when you show them something like

this workload management system like this is where the queue is like I can't get to this yet

like okay that's reasonable like you have your act together so there's this meta benefit

of starting to get a little bit more structured about your your time and cognitive work is that people

will give you more flexibility to work with the better you get at actually working with you know

the resources you have as your reputation grows your autonomy grows yeah and of course as your

reputation grows more gets thrown at you and it probably takes a bit more discipline to enforce

these things but I always remind myself and other people that you know that the reason people

want to access you is because of presumably the consequences of the deep work you did yeah not

um but people love meetings gosh to the um I won't do brainstorm meetings anymore unless it's

with my close team yeah it's like you can pitch me a contract yeah and we can reverse engineer

the idea you know um but it just doesn't work to to meet with people and kind of brainstorm stuff

it but I don't know what this is like I think maybe people are taking their own lack of structure

and um projecting it on to other people as a way to fill the time yeah it's pseudo productivity as

well like this is what I have like visible activity and so let's quit meetings let's talk let's

hop on calls like that all feels useful when ultimately it's not like I'm with you on it like

remember the reason why everyone wants to talk to me is because not I'm so great at brainstorming

meetings you know if you're like this is great like Andrew's great at brainstorming meetings so that's

why we want to bother no it's because you're really good at the podcast and you're doing like

the deep thing and then that brings in you know the better you get at what you do best the more the

world conspires to take away your time to actually work on it uh like professors know this well like

pre-tenure they most big universities are pretty good at preaching the professors all that's

going to matter is going to be your research but they throw a ton of other stuff at you at that time

it depends on the school like I was like Georgetown's very good about this they're like we don't

uh from our perspective it's a waste of resources to hire you and and have you not get tenure so like

we want to try to protect you from they keep service requirements low for example and like just

focus on you know just focus on your research because that's what's going to matter and at least

professors know this right like uh there's a clear process like the tenure process most people

don't understand tenure they think it's like getting promoted at a job and there's like all these

different ways you can sort of impress your boss it's none of that right I mean it's these

confidential letters from leading scholars in your field that are doing nothing but brutally

assessing your research how good is Cal who are two people who are better than him on the market

right now who are like two people he's slightly better than would you tenure him at your university

what university could he get tenureed at I mean it's all that matters is yeah research quality

um so you have to somehow rediscover what that is if you're not a professor like ultimately like

this is the thing I do best for my company so let me do that let me do that really well there's

also an aspect by the way of uh if you do a deep thing really well that does not attract as much

work as if what you do is you're just really good at like responding to people's things to put

now fires it's like you don't want to get too much trapped in that game unless that's the game you

want to play you know if you get trapped in the game of how I distinguish myself as I reply right

away doesn't matter when it is I make your life easier you're playing the game and making other

people's lives easier and that's what they're going to ask you to do but if instead you play the game

of I'm competent with this like I'll respond to the emails and not be uh I won't be pathological

about it but the real thing you care about is like this code on producing these reports on producing

are just really second to none then you're not going to get a much of the small stuff they're like okay

we'll do that then you know like that's what we want that's what we want you to work on so like

what is your equivalent of research is probably a really key question for a lot of people

how do you treat um social engagements through work like you know like the company barbecue

I don't know anyone does company barbecue is anymore but um you know like happy hour or I don't

know anyone does that either um and social engagements with family like you know because obviously

those things are important too yeah um are those on your schedule well you know I treat uh

work schedule different from non work schedule right so my work schedule is this time block plan

part of a multi-scale plan um really dialed in like when I'm working I'm working right um but

then when I'm not working I'm way more lax you know so I don't do time block planning of my weekends

or my evenings uh the work shutdown being clear gives you more flexibility there so it's like okay

what do we want to do like let's go like see these people see these things with the family um I like

to be flexible and not overly planned outside of the workday but then during the work day itself

you know it's much more machine like so you're you're fairly um not lax but you're a bit more

relaxed around social engagements and engaging with the kids but yeah at work or when you're working

at home or in the office you're you're obese yeah I'm like a black box in the workday like when

I'm working like I disappear nice yeah and then what I'm done like I'm around but like my family

and friends and they've learned like if you text me during the workday I'm I'm not part of that

game of like I'll just respond back to it people know like it may have been four hours since I

saw my phone it's like likes freedman yeah and people often ask to get in touch with lax and I've

you know made that connect for a few people but I always point out you know

let's go go long periods of time where we don't connect and then we're close close friends we

spent a lot of time in person on the phone text but I understand that if I text lax I might not

hear from them for four or five days and it's all good yeah yeah you know it's just yeah in fact

that that tells me he's good it's like that that scene at the end of goodwill hunting where he's

like I just want to show up at your house you're not there and you get there and he smiles as

friends gawney knows he went the direction of of his of his heart so you're saying if you start

to get a lot of like memes texted to you from lax that's not gonna happen you're gonna be like

what's going on less that's never gonna happen what struggle let's struggle are you having

in your life right now yeah I'm a big believer in the phone I'm old school pick up the phone

make a call we'll get on a call sometimes FaceTime we do text one or two things back for us often

really quick yeah really quick and I have other friends in the podcast space for which it's the same

as just phone is a great tool yep and you know drop in and then get back to it yeah not a lot of

cheater chatter on I like that I always like text is like a great logistical tool you know like

wait what what restaurant are you at oh you know okay I'll meet you there or it can't are you

free to talk like I love text as a logistical tool but you're right as a conversational tool yes

not from either and do you take vacations where you are on pure vacation so just with family or

or maybe even solo or with your spouse whereas like no digital anything uh yeah digital's not a

prompt for me on vacation but my wife won't let me not bring something to work on a vacation

because because I become a monster got it your brain needs that it needs it yeah when we have

little kids I tried this right it's like okay like this is it I'm not gonna think about anything

like this is and I would just become like an anxiety case so what I've learned is bring one thing

it's like very deep and non-urgent like a book concept I'm trying to make work or an academic paper

that was like trying to crack or like something new and I need like that 90 minutes a day to like

walk on the beach and think and I have to have a notebook I have it with me in here I have to have

a notebook with me so that like I can capture notes and get them out of my head on vacation and that

now we have a happy medium like I work a little bit every day no email I don't get that email not

no deep work thinking uh I'm much happier it's like an itch that you have to scratch yeah if I'm

not writing or thinking it's it's I get cognitively antsy I get anxious you know like I'm on I've been

now I'm talking to you now but I've been you know traveling doing some podcasts and stuff like

this and I'm way out of my cognitive comfort zone here because I'm not vlogging like early in this

trip I was a New Yorker in Atlantic deadline like writing all the time you know in California time

up at 5 a.m. like you know and I'm done with that now and I'm really cognitively antsy like I

just feel out of sorts right now you know like I'm not working I'm not thinking love it

Cal for me this has been such an honor I mean I should have said this at the beginning of the

episode but I've been such a fan for such a long time um long before we met or communicated at all

uh I started reading your books and um I would say you and Tim Ferriss of the people who

are really in my academic career had such a profound influence on how I approach work and

and it required that I do things um kind of against the grain people around me and very quickly I saw

um that I was making progress much faster than I would have otherwise yeah and I never looked

as a competitive endeavor with others but and um you just continue to churn out

valuable information actionable tools you know book and after book after book and um and obviously

they require some structure and some some restriction but also some moving toward um action items

and I love these these top three that you provided us on the pull forward the um multi-scale planning

and the and the shutdown ritual and all all the others on the you put forth and I guess that the

um major takeaway for me today is is that yes you've developed all these tools but you also use them

and um it's not lost on me that you also have a flourishing career as a computer scientist

so you're not just somebody who talks about and here I'm not dissing anyone else in the in the

information sphere like just talks about habits or just talks about protocols you do these things

and you implement them in the context of your work life your creative life your family life

in your relationship to self and you exercise and um and I think that that all combines to to

be an amazing example of what's possible if we introduce um a bit of understanding about how we

function as a as a being um and that we implement some of these tools in in the user manual that

that you've come up with and so I just want to say on behalf of myself and everyone who's listening

and watching you know thank you so much this is incredibly valuable information regardless of what

one is doing in life and um I'm certainly going to implement this um three step uh system and

I do have the book I was like to read books after guests are on I'm going to read the book um and

I'm going to do some posts about uh what I uh experience as a consequence so thank you so much

I would pay a substantial amount of money to do deep work sessions with you in the on the screen

there but I won't put that on you I'm just gonna I'm gonna just bite down and uh and do this stuff

so thank you so much for being a pioneer in the space and for such a clear communicator we all

owe you a debt of gratitude oh thanks Andrew well and for the rest of us professors who are also

podcasting we owe you a debt of gratitude because you're showing us what's actually uh what's actually

possible so this has been great meeting you as well has been fantastic all right well thank you we won't

um we won't see each other on social media but we'll we'll share a meal at some point before long

thank you for joining me for today's discussion with dr. cal newport to find links to cal's website

books and to his excellent podcast please see the links in the show note caption if you're learning

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[Optimizing Focus and Productivity: Insights from Dr. Cal Newport]-[Dr. Cal Newport: How to Enhance Focus and Improve Productivity]

📋 Summary

The Core Philosophy: Deep Work and Slow Productivity

1. The Mechanics of Focus: Beyond Flow

2. The Dangers of Constant Context Switching

3. Practical Protocols for Cognitive Performance

4. The Digital Environment and Childhood Development

5. Cultivating a "Deep Life"

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript