Ep. 395: Should I Try a “Social Media Pause”? | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Back in early 2024, I stopped by the West Hollywood studios of The Minimalist to record an episode of their popular podcast.

Now, if that name sounds familiar to you but you can't quite place why, it's probably because you've seen one of their Emmy Award nominated Netflix documentaries.

All right.

So I'm doing the show.

I'm recording an episode of The Minimalist.

And the conversation takes a surprising turn when one of the hosts Joshua, floats the idea of The Minimalist taking a break from social media.

Well, of course, me being me, I jumped in and began pushing him to encourage him to follow up on that idea.

Jesse, let's play the clip to see what happened next.

Well, platforms.

I think there are a few problems here with social media as we talk about walking away.

And I think we'll give it a 30-day shot.

We can just, even with the minimalist, we can walk away for 30 days.

You should do this, by the way.

See what happens.

Do it for 30 days.

Talk to me about it.

Yeah, try this.

Let's do it.

Do it for 30 days.

Sean can go discover himself without having to post it.

He's gonna be like, here's this opera I wrote with all my brain cells.

And see what happens with your numbers.

See what you hear from your listeners and your readers.

I might want to do it.

What if we do it for the rest of the year?

Yeah.

And they did.

So, right there in the room, Joshua committed the minimalist to abstaining from social media for the rest of the year.

Now, keep in mind, this was March of 2024.

So it was actually most of a year they were going to abstain from social media.

Now, I have a name for this strategy.

I call it the social media pause.

And it's something that you can do with your own company or your own team, or even in your own personal life.

Here's the key thing about the social media pause strategy.

It is not about detoxing.

It is not about just rejecting the tech overlords.

It is instead intended as an experiment.

The goal is to learn about yourself.

What feels better?

What do you miss?

What did you discover about social media that was actually unnecessary?

What about?

Social media was actually playing a more important role in your work and life than you realized.

All right, so this brings us back to The Minimalist and their social media pause.

What did they learn from that nearly a year they spent experimenting with a more disconnected life?

Well, to help answer this question...

Today I'm gonna be joined on the show by one of the other minimalists who was in the room while we were recording that episode.

His name is TK Coleman and we're gonna discuss the practical consequences.

We'll be right back about the role social media is playing right now in your daily experience.

Then this episode is for you.

As always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.

And we'll get started right after the music.

The team was at least twice as big as it is now when I first joined.

And when we would get together at the studio and record our full podcast, One of the things that we would do.

Yes, we had a dedicated social media person, but then and that was the person who did all the posting and the copy and the scheduling

But then there was a separate person dedicated to sifting through the show to find great moments that can be reels and on Instagram and great moments that can be like highlights on YouTube.

And we had this process where, as a team, we would each pick something like our top three or four real candidates.

And we would all come in and we would kind of like argue over them or deliberate over them and do a process of elimination.

And we had it scheduled that there was a new reel every single day.

So I would say this was pretty active.

On our Instagram, you would have a highlight from...

That previous podcast, every single day, YouTube was pretty heavily populated.

And so social media was a pretty big deal.

There were multiple posts on multiple channels, for the most part, every day.

And then around the time that we talked to you, a number of things were changing.

This was the timeline.

This is when I came out for the Slow Productivity Tour, probably, like 2024.

That's right.

Yeah.

And so there are a number of things that are all happening that converged around your appearance on our show.

The first thing for me personally is I had kind of been doing some thinking about my relationship to social media.

Lent was coming up and I was trying to think of what could be something that could be a meaningful sacrifice that I can make that isn't just a ritual.

It isn't just me saying I'm going to give up something just to be part of the club.

But that can actually help me think more critically and clearly about my priorities.

And I'm thinking, you know, I'm going to do I'm going to give up social media for that.

I think that'll be a good experiment, because I wasn't convinced that I could do it and get away with it at that time.

And then we have a number of people on our team, particularly social media person and our main video person.

They're graduating on to different projects.

And so we're rethinking a lot of things.

Do we still want to do this?

How do we approach this more creatively?

Do we want to bring someone else in?

And you came to see us kind of at the perfect time, because if there's ever a moment where You're open to change,

It's when you've got a lot of transitionings happening around you.

And we all had that going on at individual levels, but also at a collective level.

Josh and I were having conversations about what we wanted things to look like going forward.

So you come in and for me you not only sort of solidified in my mind the choice I wanted to make, but then you also convinced me to just keep it going for the rest of the year.

Why stop at Lent?

That's kind of like an arbitrary stopping point.

Why not just push myself and do it for the rest of the year?

And you did the same for Josh, and I think that simplified a lot of things for him and gave him the opportunity to say not only do I get to do this experiment for the personal development benefits, but also It allows me to step back and gives me time to think about what, what our social media strategy should be, without having to be reactive about it.

And so that's when we took that that the rest of that year off.

And yeah, I'll pause there and I can talk a little bit about what it was like coming back.

Right.

OK, so now we're getting into the we're getting to the nitty gritty here.

So when you talk about taking the year off.

It's personal social media use for both you and Josh, but also the minimalist writ large, right?

So it really was like a pause of most social media activity, coming out of a period where, as we just described, it was like a really big piece of what was going on.

What were the pain points though, right?

This is what I'm trying to remember.

I remember talking to both of you at the time and that you were – eager to do this and i was giving a push, but what i don't remember exactly was what were the pain points that you were feeling individually and then maybe as a business that really had the whole team thinking about taking this pause.

Yeah,

So that's distinct from the pain points of saying we're going to take a break.

These are the pain points that made us a little more open.

Yeah.

And then we'll get into all of the pain of actually doing it, because I do not want to whitewash that.

Right, right.

So the pain point for the minimalist side is we had some hard decisions we needed to make about who's going to step into the role of the people that are leaving.

We've got a dedicated social media person that's graduating to a different project.

We've got a dedicated video person that's graduating to different projects.

And if we're going to maintain the status quo, then we're going to have to bring new people in.

Now, that's not the biggest pain point.

Lots of podcasts, lots of shows go through transitions like that where you're hiring new people, bringing on new talent.

But that was a pain point, because when you've got great chemistry with the people that you work with, you have a system that's pretty well oiled.

It makes you say, my gosh, are we going to be able to find the right person?

Should we take this as an opportunity to maybe do something a little bit different?

But that was one of the pain points, losing those people.

Another pain point is just the time.

We were starting to really enjoy things like the live shows.

I'm really enjoying the clutter counseling stuff.

And we've got a number of things going on that we want to do, like the course that we're working on or the book projects that we're having discussions about.

And social media has a way of keeping you pretty busy.

And it takes a lot of dedication to have reels and highlights and tweets going up every single day.

And so we started to wonder if that was holding us back.

If maybe, if we had more time and more attention and more energy on other things maybe, even if we took hits in that area, we could grow in new ways.

And so that was a big question for us and a big what if in our minds.

Trying to think.

I think those would be the main pain points, for what kind of made us a little bit more open to the idea.

I like those because I think what that establishes is the experimental nature of the pause, which is something I want to underscore right.

Is because it's a different framing, right?

I think when a lot of people think about social media or removing it from their business or from their life, it's often coming from a point of resistance or I'm fed up with this, or I'm pushing back on this, which is all good.

But there's this other element, right?

You were coming into it not, I hate this technology now, let's take a stand.

It was.

We haven't we don't really know Like the full role of this in our company, like how it has these costs.

It might have benefits.

We're not sure exactly what those benefits are.

There's certain costs to having it in terms of like staffing and time.

And it's crept up.

Its role has crept up in our business, in the same way that the role of social media often creeps up in people's lives.

I wrote about that in Digital Minimalism, where you're like oh, I want to see the relationship status of my old roommate.

This is great.

Fast forward six years.

You're on this thing, scrolling through like 19 hours a day.

Your eyes are bleeding like what did this happen?

And so there's really a, what I'm picking up is there was like an actual spirit of inquiry.

Hey, let's try to understand better.

What is really going on with this technology?

Now in your, in terms of your personal relationship though, because you were thinking about, even if the minimalist writ large did not take a pause you were already had taken a pause for Lent at the time.

What was your I would almost say like spiritual relationship associated at that time?

In other words, like its impact on you and your sense of, you know, values in life.

Well, like what was going on with your personal relationship?

How was it making you feel?

Yeah.

Well, first I just want to say like, with respect to the example you gave of you're looking at the relationship status from someone that you used to date.

And then, you know, six years later, you're spending 19 hours a day on this thing.

I think about this short story that I watched many years ago, and it was about this really old woman who knew that her day for death was coming.

But the angel of death had a constraint where he needed to get her to open the door to her home before he could enter and take her home.

And so she was aware of this constraint.

And so she made a promise to herself that she's never going to open that door for anyone, because of the sheer possibility that it might be the angel of death.

And so he tried to get her to open the door under many different guises.

He pretended to be a delivery guy with a very valuable package from a loved one or a long lost friend.

He pretended to be a lawyer who has information about a great inheritance she received that they've been looking for for years.

You know, he pretended to be a salesperson, a plumber coming to check on an appliance.

And every single time she says, no, I'm not going to open this door.

But then one day.

He walks up to the door and he begins to scream as if he's in pain.

She perks up her ears and moves towards the door.

And he says, I'm hurt.

I'm hurting so bad.

And he pretends to have fallen to hurt his leg.

And he says, if you can just help me, if you can just provide any help.

And you can see that it's really pulling on her heartstrings because she's so tenderhearted.

And she opens the door and she brings him in and she begins to help him.

And at one moment, as she's helping him, she looks him in the eyes and she knows.

And she just has a moment like, darn it, I bought your story.

I let you into my home.

And now it's time for me to call it quits because it's over.

Life as I knew it is over.

And I think the smartphone, I think social media is in many ways kind of like that angel of death.

It knows that it can get us, but it just needs the right story for you.

There's a story that everyone is capable of telling themselves that will make them say yeah yeah, I hear you, Cal.

I hear all this stuff.

And you're mostly right.

But for me, I need it for X, Y, Z. And that's when the angel of death says, you got it.

And we open the door and we let it in and it's all over at that point.

So that's kind of like how I see exactly what you're talking about, that pattern.

But where I was spiritually, in terms of my relationship to the phone is.

This goes back to something that I did several years ago, where I was dealing with the heartbreak of a failed startup, a number of projects that I was really excited about.

And so many of the things that I was doing at that stage in my life.

They felt really permission based.

It felt like I had to make these presentations for wealthy people that had the power to change my life and get them to write a check, get them to green light a project.

And if they said no, then I couldn't express my creativity.

So I'm always auditioning for the money or the green light so I could express my creativity.

And one day I'm thinking to myself I just want to do something that feels permissionless, even if it doesn't make me money, even if it doesn't succeed.

And I had the idea of starting a blog and doing what I called an experiment in personal development, where I showed up every single day for a year and wrote a blog post.

And I had in my mind I don't care if the, I don't care if it's short, if it's long, if it's not very good, if no one reads it.

I need to know what in the world would happen to me if I showed up every day for a year and did something that I thought was difficult and that I've never done before.

And And three years later, I was blogging every single day and I had a three-year streak.

And the person that I was after that was so substantively different in ways that I couldn't predict.

I've been preoccupied ever since with that notion of experiments and personal development, exploring the possibilities of who I might become by doing difficult things that I don't have to do for reasons that are not morally compulsive, but simply because they challenged me.

And I felt that way about social media.

I thought to myself, well, who might I become?

What possibilities might emerge in terms of my habits, in terms of where my thoughts go, if I take a break from this?

And so that was my mentality going into it.

Who might I become?

I appreciate that.

Think about how many people don't have an answer to that question right now.

So what did become?

So this is now the question.

The break happens.

Yeah.

The good, the bad, the unexpected.

What's the unvarnished view or description of what started to happen as you unfolded this experiment?

One of my first experiences was I would have these thoughts and my instinct was to pick them up and tweet them, or to create something on Instagram or record myself riffing on it.

And when I couldn't do that, I had to do something else with the thought.

And you know what I did with the thought?

I held on to it and I thought about it some more.

And because I didn't have that release of being able to immediately broadcast a line of thought that I thought was interesting, I engaged in more self-communion.

In order to get that fulfillment, I would take a walk and I'd tell myself the thought and I'd ask myself well, why is that interesting to me?

Why do I care about that?

Why is that even worth tweeting?

And then I just go deeper with that thought and I sit with it for a while.

And it would take me places that I begin to realize.

Hmm, social media is kind of preventing me from that because it gives me this easy out.

But when I have to hold on to it, I go a little deeper in my thinking.

And I think I'm liking this, not just the way it feels, but the promise of where that might lead and how good that might be for me.

That was a big thing.

The second thing is I begin to remember something that I had completely forgotten.

My first job after college was as a financial advisor at American Express.

And you had to have all of these financial licenses before you could begin practicing.

And the deal they had at that time was if they hire you, They will finance the entire process of you getting your licenses and so on.

But you had to come in and you had to study their materials and take their classes.

And then you would be immediately terminated because of that investment in you if you went and took a test and you failed.

So it was like high pressure, high stakes, but you had a ton of support.

And I remember we would go to the office, me and like five other like new advisors.

And from about eight in the morning until about six at night, we would do nothing other than sit in our cubicles and read books about all the different things.

And we would sometimes take breaks to go into a class where we could ask questions and we'd have things written on the whiteboard and all that kind of stuff.

And during that time, it was very difficult for me, probably for at least the first few weeks.

But there came this point where I really locked in and I discovered something that my college life never brought out of me.

And that was the ability to sit down and read for like six, seven hours straight and to just really be locked in and understand what I read.

It was very specific to that point in life, to that stage of life.

And when I'm off social media, I start to remember that.

And I started to realize that my attention span wasn't as good as it used to be.

My ability to follow a sustained passage of thought was really weak.

Like I was out of shape.

It's almost as if I, you know, these memories begin to well up of being a marathon runner and feeling how good it was to be out there on the track and just all of the joy of that, to feeling like, if I go up one flight of stairs just to get into my apartment, I'm huffing and puffing and feeling like I'm going to die.

And that recognition made me hunger for more of that.

And by the time I got to, hey, our year is up, I was pretty scared.

I was thinking, oh, I don't know if I want to go back.

I don't know if it's good for me to go back.

I'm thinking more.

I think my brain is starting to wake up.

I don't see myself as a deep cat, but there's some rubble that's starting to clear away and the depths are greater than I thought.

And I really do love to read and I kind of forgot that.

I get a lot of joy out of it.

There's no sense of I need to do this to be successful, but man, this is incredibly fun.

And I want more space for that.

And so I'm starting to experience that fear as time is coming to an end, because I don't know what I wanna do.

And I don't have a philosophy at that time for what role I want this to play in my life.

So you're feeling, as this experiment's going on, you're feeling, as you said, the rubble clearing these new depths, reacquainting with long thought.

I sometimes call it long thinking, being noticing the world, being there with their books.

On the business side, How much did this hurt just the day-to-day revenue of the company?

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All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show.

Yeah.

So it hurt in a few ways.

First, when we announced it, there were a lot of people and I was surprised.

There were a lot of people who felt very disappointed.

There were some who felt like it was a selfish move.

You know we're taking our spiritual journey or we're taking kind of like this emotional driven need to experiment.

And We thought you guys were one of the positive forces on social media.

There's so much junk out there.

And your show was part of a short list of shows that I watched to get my mind off of the news, to get my mind off of the controversial stuff.

And now you're taking that away.

Maybe you should think about something more than yourself.

Is this like when the you leave the bar and your friends at the bar are like you are a reasonable drinker?

If you go, it's just going to be us and the drunks at the end of the bar.

And I don't want to be hanging out with them.

It's like, come on, you got to stay.

That's right.

So there was definitely some of that.

But then there's this other part where you're not posting on social media anymore.

And the algorithm says well, you're not being very useful to me, So I'm not going to remind people that you exist, because we're not in the old world of social media anymore, where you decide who you're going to follow and you see the people that you follow.

And I know you talk about this a lot, but the algorithm says, all right, I'm going to show your followers, the people that are posting.

And since most people are consuming social media based on what's showing up for them, we stop getting served up.

Our social media traffic sort of dwindles down.

And that means a lot of the onboarding into the larger ecosystem begins to dwindle.

Fewer people showing up on YouTube, fewer people signing on for Patreon.

And we're taking a hit.

You know, you feel nervous and you wonder, is this something that you can get away with?

Especially when you're in a space where so much of what you do seems to depend on views.

So that was a problem.

That was a challenge.

And it definitely stirred a lot of conversations around, all right, we're keeping this commitment.

But what does it look like when the commitment is over?

So you're seeing dollars go down.

Ultimately, you're seeing concrete.

Yeah, and then what are?

Just we understand better how these businesses work.

So what are the the various funnels in which people, when you say coming into your ecosystem, just so we understand the business, like what?

Becoming a subscriber to like the podcast, becoming a subscriber to the newsletter, like what's ultimately what's the destination, and then what were the funnels in which people get to those destinations and then which of those funnels now are effectively turned off?

Yeah, so the primary way we make money is through Patreon subscribers.

I would say it's a pretty small percentage of Patreon subscribers who finance everything.

We don't really make any money off YouTube, off social media, off ads or any of those things.

Now there is a change that we can come back to later, where YouTube turned on the ads for our videos.

They persisted in turning them on.

We can't get them to turn it off, and so now we have ads on our videos as a qualifier.

But that's something that we can't control.

But everything leads to in terms of like financing things.

It comes through the patreon subscribers, and so the social media channels, the youtube channels, the spotify, all of that stuff.

It's designed to create interest, so people like what they hear and they say hey, we want more.

And we try to deliver a high quality product for all the free viewers.

But we do record, you know, two and a half hours of a maximal episode.

And we invite people, after anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes of an episode, to to come check out the second half.

And that's the primary way.

And so when all of that other stuff dwindles down, then that's essentially the commercial, if you will.

Josh might hate that language, but that's kind of the commercial for the Patreon.

That's how they find out.

No one's Googling Patreon channels that I can support.

That's how they find out.

So like I might see a couple of Instagram videos and like, oh, I like this.

I might move from there over to the podcast, either audio or video, like, oh, this is great.

And then when I'm there, then I'm like, oh, I want the maximal episode.

And now I joined Patreon.

So you were lopping off the front of that pathway.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

It's almost like you've got a...

A clothing store that's located right on the corner of a major intersection.

And you get a lot of people who come in who didn't even know about your store or care about your store, because they're on vacation.

They're out with family.

They're waiting on their table for the restaurant next door.

And just a lot of people come in.

And then you say, I'm going to shut this store down.

And everything is off.

Everything is online.

That's how you get our clothes.

That's a that's a major change in your business.

So was there adjustments made?

I mean, was it?

This is unsustainable, but we can.

We can make adjustments that will make it sustainable, or was it sustainable?

But you're now just it's a different level of growth.

You're like, you know what?

That's not what it was before.

But hey, this is still a business.

We're all still doing OK.

Like, how are you thinking about the future of the business now, or was it clearly this is unsustainable.

We're going to have to turn this back on.

What were the thoughts that were emerging about the long-term viability of the business during this period?

Yeah, so this is interesting because this is where Josh and I, I think, are processing things a little bit differently.

I think Josh would say anything is sustainable if you're willing to make the trade-offs involved, right?

And so you can make money And continue building an empire, which we know he'd never call it that, even if you're not on social media.

I think for him, social media is a positive space where you can do a lot of good things.

There was nothing about his time away that made him feel like afraid of social media or afraid of his relationship to it.

He learned a lot of things that...

Helps him return to it in a more healthful manner.

And so for him, it's, hey, look, if you don't want to do social media, there are things that you could do to make money.

But I like social media.

I think it's valuable.

I think it's a good space.

And so let's return to it.

But let's not return to it out of fear like, oh, no, the business is breaking down.

Let's do all the things that we used to do.

But let's return to it mindfully.

We're not going to post highlights every day just for the sake of doing it.

We're not going to do whatever the algorithm tells us to do.

We're not going to speak in the language that the algorithm commands us to speak in.

If we want to say words that the algorithm threatens us for saying, We're going to ignore that and we're going to still do our thing, but in a modified way.

And so if you look at social media minimalist social media today versus minimalist social media before that year it's a more laid back vibe with less frequent posts, but things that are still kind of like consistent with the mission.

That's what I think Josh would say.

I think that's a fairly decent representation of his position.

Maybe there's some nuance he would have to fill in.

And that describes basically what the company as a whole is doing now, right?

So the people who are working on – That's right.

And then what was – because I want to hear – yours is interesting to me.

But just to close the loop on the effect of that.

So then, what's this more laid-back – approach to social media, where you're basically, as you're saying, you eliminated the stuff that, like you really didn't like, the like the, the drive of every day?

We have to produce something and that feeling of clutter is it.

Did you find a that you know what?

This new style is just as effective, so we just had some wrong assumptions.

Or did you find like, maybe it is less effective than the maximal style we're doing before, but it's a good trade-off.

It's yielding enough growth that like, things are sustainable again?

I think a lot of those things as a team, we're still learning about.

But I think the suspicion is less actually can be more.

That you don't have to be posting multiple times every day in order to get those benefits that you want.

And there's an increasing respect for just how flighty the algorithm could be.

And just how careful you should be, if you're on those spaces, of building your entire vocation or game plan around what the algorithm rewards.

Because that might change next week.

Next week, the algorithm might be like hey, a cup of coffee needs to be visible on the screen in order for it to show up in the feed.

As a matter of fact, I've got a funny story about that, a funny discovery we made.

So there was this period where our Instagram views seemed to drop down like out of nowhere.

And there was no major change in our posting schedule or the types of stuff we were putting out.

And one of our guys looked into it and he was just sort of like Sherlock Holmes-ing this thing, right.

Just really digging in.

And he finds out that the problem is These mics that we're using are covering our mouths.

And so when we're speaking, it's kind of like this.

And because our lips are not visible, and it's one of the ways that Instagram detects that this is a video versus a picture.

It was sort of showing up as a picture which is being more suppressed, because the thing to be promoted is the video.

This was his hypothesis, which we kind of laughed at and thought was totally strange.

The experiment was, let's move the mics and show our lips.

And so everything went back up after that.

And so something like that is so...

It makes sense as to why it's the case, but there's something about it that just feels so arbitrary and so silly to build your life around right.

And that might not even be a thing in three months or in three years.

The game might entirely change.

And so a lot of the formulas we come up with.

Well, you have to post at this time or this many times.

A lot of that is stuff we make up or stuff that we correctly guess, but it's only true for a time.

But it turns out that things are improving and doing better without as much work as what used to be the case.

So that closes that loop on that.

Now you want to get to my struggle.

And just so we're oriented on a timeline perspective, when was it, when are we talking about now?

When did the formal, the broad experiment end?

Professor, you know that? of 2025 beginning of 2025 okay and i was there in the spring of 2024 so this was like almost a year okay all right so that's the decision for the minimalist writ large is like we're going to be more a little bit more laid back about the social media and just be more flexible and it'll do what it does and okay now let's get into the mind of tk it's 2025 we get towards the beginning of 2025 how are you feeling I'm feeling very conflicted because I'm enjoying my time off social media, but I'm also convinced that I need to be on it.

The sense of needing to be on it is very strong.

The sense of you would never make it without this tool is very strong.

And there's a rebellious part of me that hates what I believe to be true.

It's almost like someone telling you Hey Cal, in order to be a somebody in this world, in order to be relevant, in order for anybody to watch your podcast, you have to wear Nike clothes and the logo has to be visible.

I suppose you could live with that.

But there might be a part of you that's self-respecting enough to say I don't like that.

I don't mind Nike.

I don't really hate them, but I don't like believing that I have to do that in order to succeed.

Something feels wrong about that.

And so that's where I am emotionally at that time.

And I guess I come on to social media in a very casual sense.

I download the apps again and I log back on.

But every time I try to post, it feels like I'm forcing it.

It feels like I'm posting something for no other reason than that I can and that I probably should, because I probably should keep things going.

And you have a channel that's got, you know, your personal channel over 30,000 followers.

And that's not a whole lot comparatively speaking, but it's probably irresponsible to not take advantage of that in some kind of way.

So I probably should be posting.

And there was never any post where I'm thinking, this is something that I gotta put out.

This is something that I gotta share.

Every time I shared something, I just felt a little bit cheap.

I just felt a little bit cheap.

And I'm thinking, I don't know, I don't like this.

I'm not doing this very well.

I'm back on here, but I have no consistency with my posts.

My posts have no theme at all.

I probably should be more consistent.

But I don't want to do that.

And I start to even think, and I'm not done with this thought process.

I start to think, maybe I should be an electrician like my brother.

Really?

His career doesn't require him to be online.

He does very well.

No one knows who he is outside of physical space.

And I could focus in on that.

I could learn on that.

I think I have a pretty solid ability to you know, enjoy things and manufacture meaning and passion out of mastery like you talk about so good.

They can't ignore you.

Maybe I should do that.

And I go, where's that thought coming from?

And it was an expression of my desire to be free of feeling like I have to be on here.

And so I started to think like that.

And when I say that thought process is still ongoing, what I mean is I haven't closed the door on the possibility of choosing something other than this media space anymore as the primary means by which I provide for my family.

That's still an open topic for me.

And that could take many different forms.

And I'm still sort of wrestling with that.

I think I love media space so much that in some shape, form or fashion, I'll always show up and do stuff.

But that could just be TK showing up and doing stuff in a way that's entirely separated from money and that's just TK doing a hobby.

Now it also could show up as TK next week launching his new podcast, having sponsorships and doing his thing.

I'm not dogmatic in either direction, but my wheels have been turning that way and that just gives you a sense of how deeply uncomfortable

I felt with this stuff and how much I'm wrestling.

Did you realize you were feeling that way before you actually took that time to pause?

To what degree did the pause help clarify for you the fact that there is this conflict going on internally?

Well, remember how I talked about the thoughts that I wasn't tweeting out and how I was spending more time thinking about those thoughts.

Yeah.

I also had experiences where the impulse to take pictures of things went away when I couldn't share them on social media.

And that sort of got redirected to talking with my wife more about the day or about interesting observations.

And I noticed, in a way that wasn't quite like intentional, that I started to do more things, like more volunteering at my church and my wife and I trying out new things more like, you know, going to go into the botanical garden more.

And it was almost as if there was kind of like this, this natural desire for novelty, this natural desire to connect with humans, to see things, to even show off what I saw.

And it wasn't being fulfilled by social media.

And so I'm starting to experience this in space.

Those are things that I experienced before all this smartphone stuff.

But I was starting to wake up to them again and experience it at a later stage in life.

And so that kind of led to me being nervous about getting on.

What is that going to take away from me?

But once I get on the things that I was doing just felt so empty and vacuous and kind of vain compared to what I was doing before.

You know, I have these, I mentioned Steve Patterson.

I have an hour long conversation with him every month.

And it's just us arguing about philosophy.

And we basically just take a topic.

The assignment that we most recently talked about was Barclay's Dialogues.

And we both just committed to reading those.

And then we just got on the phone for an hour.

No cameras.

We argued about it.

We didn't record the conversation.

Those are the kinds of things that started to happen more.

And I feel like those things give me more meaning than the stuff that I was doing on social media.

And that's not a moral position.

That's not a judgment about other people that are on there and the content they're creating.

But that was sort of the dominant feeling.

Does that make sense?

So it's, I mean, it's kind of ironic.

The part that makes sense is you were exposed to things more of things that were important to you when you were taking the break.

And then that helped you understand their importance.

And then when you returned, you saw the vacuousness.

But there's this ironic piece as well to this, which I think is Social media has this self-defense mechanism where it puts enough rubble around your brain that you don't actually have the practice or cognitive space to actually work through the thoughts about hey, how is this thing affecting me or what are my possibilities?

It distracts you too much from being able to think about the cost of the distraction, because that's a complicated thing, uncomfortable thought that requires you're on a long walk and you're coming back to it again and you're seeing a feeling, and you're noticing a feeling and you're sticking with the feeling and then you're evolving the feeling and then it comes back and you're updating the frameworks of structure within your own psyche and so it's like the maybe the the strongest defense that social media has to its own propagation is make it difficult for people to actually think clearly about.

Hey, what's going on here?

But you would say, so people have, what's interesting about this is Josh had a different response.

So like the value here is clarity, right?

Like this, it's not really like, this is not a PSA for this is bad, this is good.

And you don't, you won't realize this is bad until you do X, Y, or Z, right?

It's a PSA for clarity, right?

You know, you get clarity about your life, what matters, what doesn't, how things fit in, visions for how your life might go forward.

And you can't develop those visions without clarity.

And that's what came out of, not that you're still struggling with it, but you're struggling with the right things now.

Like you didn't even know to struggle about that before the podcast.

That's right.

You know, when you talk about the struggle and the self-defense mechanism of social media, I think of two categories of that.

The first is the social category.

Whenever you talk out loud about these things, no matter how many qualifications you make, no matter how many prefacing remarks you make, you can spend 10 minutes issuing out disclaimers about how nonjudgmental you are about all this and how all the people you love are on social media and you realize they're getting a lot of good out of it.

And you're going to have to suffer through with great patience, a number of people responding to that by being like well, maybe it's just the way you're using it, man.

Like social media is still good.

It's positive.

Hey, I wouldn't even know you.

We wouldn't even have this conversation if it wasn't for social media.

I love your conversation with Cal Newport, but you know what?

If it wasn't for social media, you wouldn't have it.

And there's something about that that's not just possibly irritating.

It kind of tempts you to think, you know, I am kind of being over-serious about this.

And yeah, they're right.

What the heck am I doing by even rethinking any of this?

So that's a powerful social component.

The second component is this sense of it being pragmatically necessary in a way that just – you just can't possibly shake it.

So the example that I use is imagine that, that that you're a gambling addict and you're an alcoholic and you want to live a normal life like anybody else.

And you're the only grocery store where you can buy your food is, is in the casino.

Your barber is in the casino and all of your friends are in the casino.

Now, you know your own weaknesses.

And when you walk to the front doors of that casino, you can feel it.

You can feel yourself, like you know, on the cusp of something that's going to move you in a direction you don't want to go in.

But at the same time, all your friends are there and you don't want to be antisocial.

You definitely don't want to be irrelevant.

And you want to get your hair cut, right?

And you need the groceries.

Just go in there, stay focused, don't drink, don't gamble, do your thing.

And somehow every time you do this, It's five hours later.

You've knocked back several drinks.

You spent several hours at the roulette table.

You're a lot poorer because you've spent so much money and in the heat of the moment, you just kind of like, even though you intended, even though you told yourself you know what I'm just going to sit down for and play 50 on roulette.

And the only reason I'm sitting down is because my buddy's here at the table and he called me over and and he says, just hang out with me for a few minutes.

And I'm, and I'm here, like it's, I'll put a limit on it.

And then, like five hundred dollars later, I'm just, I'm miserable and I leave the, I leave the casino and I didn't get my hair cut because I used my time on the roulette table.

I got some groceries, but not as much as I needed, and all of the people who gave me those great arguments about how it's necessary and gave me all of those awesome pointers about how to manage it effectively, I

I think they're right, but there's something about it that's inconsistent with my lived experience.

And at some point I got to start being true to that, even if it makes me uncomfortable.

Well, I'll say this about my appreciation for your work.

I think the things you're talking about and I've been listening to you your entire career, but a heck of a lot more lately as you talk about AI, you talk about the smartphone, you talk about habit formation.

I think we're at a time where the world is just getting so noisy, but in a way that's good.

Entertainment is more addicting than it's ever been.

Even the cheapest forms of entertainment are so well produced that it's difficult to not watch them.

Even the commercials that we used to skip past are starting to get so good that they make us want to watch them.

It's so easy to just get into that hypnagogic state and then wake up later and say where did my time go?

Where did myself go?

I think about the lyrics to this Kurt Elling song called Finding Neverland, where he says my friends, every day we go to our everyday work.

We return to our everyday homes.

We sit in the everyday chair and drink from the everyday cup, but we never allow ourselves to go into the extraordinary places in our hearts and our minds.

I ask you, my friend, how do you think a book is written?

How do you think a song is born?

How do you think a picture is painted?

How do you think a race is won?

How do you think a world gets started?

If a little daydreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

When I think about that lyric, I think about how the greatest adventure is to journey deep into the.

But for the sake of cultivating this ability to look out upon the world from the vantage point of being in those deep spaces in yourself.

It's as radical of a change in perspective as it is to look at the world from the mountaintop, to go to the Grand Canyon and then look at things, or to experience a neighborhood by riding on a bicycle rather than by walking or by driving in a car.

How you experience things is so different based on your vantage point.

And when your vantage point is being connected to your deep self...

It's the most amazing vantage point to have in life.

And what you're really showing people is not just tips on how to handle technology, not just perspectives on the smartphone or social media, but really how to find those spaces within themselves where, when they look out on the world again, when they have conversations, when they read a book or do things, they're looking at it from the most exciting vantage point possible.

And that's what's become most exciting to me.

And in this stage of life where I've got the gray on my beard, I'm more excited about life than I ever have been, because

I just can't wait to know who I get to become by minimizing my time on these apps, my time on these devices, my face being in this screen.

And I'll be showing up in some manner, but my priority will be engaging life from the deep self.

And you've really done a lot to help me and others minimize the sense of loss that comes with that.

Well TK, I can't think of a better, more elegant, inspiring way to bring this conversation to a close.

I think that captures beautifully what's at stake here.

Going deep into yourself is a journey that we've forgotten about, but it is the best journey.

But you have set yourself up now that if you release a long series of TikTok dance videos, we're just going to be disappointed now

See, that's the problem.

You've put yourself into a box...

Or those videos where you snap and like different items of clothing change on you or whatever.

When we start seeing hours of TK close switching TikTok videos, we're going to know.

We're going to be disappointed.

That's it, man.

You've boxed yourself in.

Believe me, if you ever see that, I'll be disappointed too.

Yeah.

If you see that, call the authorities.

Sean has a gun right off screen.

We need more subscribers, TK.

More TikToks.

All right, TK.

Always a pleasure.

Thank you for coming on the show.

We had a great conversation.

Likewise, man.

It's an honor.

Always.

All right.

So there we go, Jesse.

That was my conversation with TK Coleman.

I'll tell you probably the most poignant part of our discussion.

For me It was when TK started to get sort of self-reflective about the role social media was playing in his life and him being uncomfortable about it being back in his life.

The most poignant point for me is when he said, and I'm kind of paraphrasing, sometimes I feel like I should just become an electrician like my brother.

And he went on to elaborate if you're an electrician, There's no audience that has to like follow what you're doing.

There's no one to get mad at you or to applaud you for your take on things.

There's no one that's waiting for your next missive.

You just go into the world and do a skilled thing that people appreciate.

So you could really tell he was struggling.

Two of my best buddies are electricians.

It's actually a pretty tough job.

It's a really good job.

But it's also tough because they have to deal with like a lot of like the whys.

They're very difficult.

Are they residential electricians?

Yeah.

So I have a buddy who's a builder, like a commercial real estate family.

And he said the best job is commercial electrician.

So you're not dealing with like the homeowners who are terrible, let's be honest.

And it's like really complicated big jobs.

They're way more interesting because I think the residential jobs are –

Pretty straightforward.

Who writes about this?

Matt Crawford writes about this.

The shop class is Soulcraft.

He was an electrician apprentice.

And he talks about in that book is a very poignant scene about the art and simple satisfactions of bending wire conduit.

So if you're doing commercial electricity you might have, you know, 30 major wires coming into a giant junction box and they all have to have metal pipe that they come in.

And how do you bend them all so all of those pipes can come out and fit together?

And he was like that was so much more satisfying than all of my work as a think tank knowledge worker.

But anyways, I think that it was a good discussion.

And I loved how TK got personal.

I loved how his takeaways were different than Joshua's.

And that gets to the core of the social media pause, which is learning.

And I really want to emphasize that because I think again, I mentioned this in the intro to the show, but there's often an emphasis in a social media discourse about detoxing.

I just want to sort of clear out these toxins from my system before I return to the activity, which I don't think is particularly useful.

Or a sort of more reactionary, I don't like Elon Musk, it's a political statement, which is fine.

I think anything that gets you off social media is probably good.

But what most people really need, they have a complicated relationship with social media.

It's a love-hate, practical-impractical relationship.

They need self-knowledge about what was I missing?

What is this doing to my life?

What was actually useful?

If that's what's useful and this other stuff was garbage, can I reintroduce just this into my life and not these other things?

Or you get that feeling like TK had.

He described the feeling of rubble in his brain.

He didn't realize what's happening until he took a social media pause.

He was like, oh, I wasn't thinking clearly.

And I didn't realize I wasn't thinking clearly until I stopped.

So I love this idea as an experiment.

All right.

I'm going to give you advice about this.

I got four points for successfully deploying a social media pause in your own work or life.

All right, point number one. define the pause with specificity, okay?

So you need to be clear about what you're going to stop doing during the pause and what you're going to continue doing, and the things that you're going to continue to do, what rules you're going to put around it.

A lot of people have some sort of background activity.

It might be related to their job or connected to something else they do, like a running club that they're a part of, or they need some social media engagement.

So just be clear about it.

I'm doing A and B with these rules and nothing else, right?

So be very clear about the parameters of your pause.

If it's just, I wanna try to use this stuff less, but I still have to use some, it'll fall apart.

Piece of advice number two, Define its duration.

Specifically, how long are you going to go during the pause?

I think 30 days is a good amount for most people.

That was the minimalist original idea.

It's also the amount I suggest in my 2019 book, Digital Minimalism.

And so there's a lot of success.

30 days is enough time to gain some real insight, but it's not overly onerous.

Advice number three, you need to experiment and reflect during the pause.

So you need to try out other things, to try to rediscover other modes of living and activities that are important to you, that have been diluted through the use of social media, and do self-reflection.

What's going on?

What am I feeling?

Why am I feeling it?

I mean, we saw TK doing this type of self-reflection in real time in our conversation.

He was trying to grapple with why do I feel this antipathy towards this technology?

What is it doing to my life?

What am I going to lose?

He was being really clear about it.

There's huge cost for someone in his job to not be aggressively engaging in these tools.

And you've got to do this self-reflection during the pause.

And then finally, when it's over, you have to debrief and decide.

What did I learn?

What concrete changes in my life going forward does that impact? point towards.

If you miss that last stage, you're going to miss all the value of actually doing the social media pause.

So there you go, Jesse, the social media pause.

My social media pause experiment is just coming up on its 20th year.

So it's a pretty long pause.

It's been a long one, but we'll see what happens.

I'm going to end it one day.

I've decided I need to spend... I missed a lot.

I need to be on TikTok a lot more.

A lot of TikTok.

A lot of...

A lot of inappropriate TikToks are coming your way once I'm done with my social media pause.

So be ready for that.

All right, we're going to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

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I also want to talk about our friends at Wayfair.

Something I'm going to discuss at the end of today's episode is our ongoing efforts to renovate part of the Deep Work HQ.

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All right, Jesse.

Let's get back to the show.

All right.

You've heard from me.

Now we want to hear from you.

So let's open up our inbox.

A quick reminder if you have a question for me, or you want to share a case study, or you want to try to trick me into doing a rant, we have a new email address for you.

You can send that in straight to podcast at calnewport.com.

We'll try to get the most interesting stuff on the air.

All right, let's get into it.

We have some messages from the inbox to cover.

Jesse, what message do we have here first?

First message is from an Oxford professor named Nuno.

Oh, I like this one.

We're getting a high class of correspondence here, Jesse.

I'm impressed.

We got Oxford professors.

All right, I'm going to read this message here from Nuno.

I'm a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford.

I'm a big fan of your work, and I am always on the lookout for deep work stories in history.

Here's one below, which I published in my newsletter.

All right.

So Nuno sent me a newsletter saying He had written about a historical figure who basically discovered deep work and why this was important during that period.

So what I'm going to do here is I've captured a few excerpts from this newsletter.

I'm going to read to you now.

There's a lot of elision in here, so just keep in mind I'm cutting things out.

But let me read you these excerpts from this newsletter because I think it's really interesting.

All right, it starts as follows.

Those who are into productivity know the New York Times bestselling Deep Work.

Bestseller, Deep Work.

A little aside, Jesse, Deep Work was never a New York Times bestseller.

I've had many New York Times bestsellers, but Deep Work was not.

It's never been on the list.

Two million copies in, never been on the list.

All right.

Anyways, what I'm trying to say here is Nuno, I'm fact-checking you and I'm going to drum you out of academia.

You can't make those type of mistakes.

Not on my watch.

All right, let's get back into it.

In this book, Cal Newport argues that having uninterrupted blocks of time for work leads to a more productive life.

All right.

Later on, Nuno elaborates books were a leading distraction in the early modern period, and how envious we should be of those times.

From the 1500s onward, with the development of the printing press and the humanist revival of ancient philosophies, knowledge became available at a much greater pace than ever before.

As this great harvard historian explains, scholars felt there were too much to know in order to capture and control the avalanche of information that came their way, a question that we still have today.

Readers develop new note-taking techniques.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, they copied excerpts of what they read into notebooks, which they were later recopied into a master notebook called a book of commonplaces.

Yet, even then, there are problems.

Nicholas Steno, the main character of my new book, The Traveling Anatomist, faced all these challenges during his university studies in the late 1650s.

His way of tackling them shaped his work productivity in significant ways, making him one of the most significant scientists of his time.

As an advanced university student, he learned to focus on specific themes.

Rather than letting his mind read multiple things quickly...

A, quote, harmful hastening should be avoided, end quote, as he put it.

His solution was to, quote, stick to one topic, end quote.

In practice, this meant blocking specific moments of time to go through the hardest tasks.

As he wrote in his personal notebook, before noon, nothing must be done except medical things.

I'll stop there, Jesse, because I think this is fascinating.

We see Early on or in the 1600s.

We see the sort of emergence of psychologically oriented productivity.

This is the type of productivity I talk about, where you acknowledge the reality of your brain and how it functions when thinking about the best way to approach your work.

And they realized because knowledge work was becoming a thing that didn't exist before.

You had to have knowledge to even process and produce new knowledge for there to be knowledge work.

And the printing press actually made knowledge work something to still a small number of people, but you had a whole class of scholars now.

So it became a job.

I think this is important because if you go back to the actually ancient period let's, there were like six dudes doing this right.

It was, you know, Socrates and a couple others.

It was Pythagoras or whatever, because it was just really hard to get even the information you needed the process and think about right.

But by the early modern period, as talked about in this essay, you had books.

So now more people, more people could be a sort of professional scholar class.

And what did they invent right away?

Time blocking, deep work, focus.

All right, you gotta be careful at what you wanna work on.

You wanna keep your mind on one thing at a time and you wanna block the time because it requires time that you otherwise aren't gonna spend concentrating unless you put it aside ahead of time.

So a lot of the ideas I talked about seem like they emerged at the very beginning of knowledge work.

What don't you see in this study? how do I optimize the number of tasks I get through?

How do I build, you know, a complex system to automatically prioritize what I'm working on?

Let me build like really elaborate productivity philosophies.

No, it was the main thing, is the main thing, which is focusing hard on a in a narrow area for time that I blocked off in advance.

Those key ideas were there from the very beginning.

So there we go.

Interesting letter, you know, All right.

What's the second message we have, Jesse?

Next message is from a programmer named William on a tool suggestion.

All right.

Let's see here.

Let's get technical.

William says, I'm going to keep it brief.

Try Obsidian.

You'll love the flexibility of the system and the utility.

A simple Obsidian system has felt like a digital revelation to keep an eye on task and not let it become overwhelming.

Make of it what you will.

Backlinks is by far the best feature for me capturing hardware engineering notes, meeting and daily notes.

It's hard at first and becomes easier every day.

I strongly encourage you to go through it and understand it before you think of it like a normal task manager.

It's the ultimate system of systems designer.

All right.

Have you heard of Obsidian, Jesse?

Yeah, from you.

Yeah, it kind of is around.

I mean programmer and programmer-adjacent people like this, so I kind of know it from computer science circles, but it's kind of spreading.

It's a little bit technical.

Here's the main idea.

Okay, so let me give you the quick primer on why people like Obsidian.

It is a system for organizing information that is based on plain text files.

So there's not some proprietary database existing in the cloud somewhere where all of your data is stored and then some sort of application on your phone is talking to that database to retrieve information, which it then shows, and it's all locked in there.

Instead, all of the information in your Obsidian system is just plain text files on your computer.

And what you do is there's a special collection of formatting tags, and I don't know what you would call it formatting elements, plain text formatting elements that you can add to these plain text files and So like.

If you want something to be a header, you might put two asterisks on either side of the phrase, right.

And that indicates this text is supposed to be like a header.

Or if it's part of a to-do list, maybe you have two square brackets and a square next to something.

And that indicates it's all plain text.

Like this is a to-do list element, right?

So it's all plain text.

This is called markdown, where you have this particular plain text elements you add to try to put formatting cues.

And then anyone can write an obsidian text viewer app that can load up these files from your system and then display them properly.

So where it sees you have the asterisks that mean there should be a header, it'll display that text as a header.

Or where it sees the square brackets next to an item that you're trying to say.

This is a task.

It'll make it like a to-do list when it displays it.

So you can have a whole competitive ecosystem of different people writing readers to display what's in these text files and for you to write and have them store in these text files.

There's like no one program you need.

It's like an agreement of here's how we're going to format information and text files.

And anyone can write a reader for displaying those text files and an editor for editing them.

Right.

So that so it's all sort of simple and it's all local.

Now, what makes this really exciting for people is it's easy to process text files.

So like, let's say you wanna add a special feature, right?

Like you're, like you know, what I want is because this is like, very relevant to my work is that certain types of phrases that I think are inspiring.

I want, when I see those them to be next to, like you know, a picture of Cal Network flexing, or something like that.

Well, you could invent, you're like, here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to have a special little formatting code, like two tildes next to each other.

And to me, that means put a picture of Cal Network.

And now I can just write.

You know an Obsidian viewer tool that like when it reads these text files and sees that it shows a picture of Cal Network.

So you can, these are called plugins.

You can add all sorts of extra different formatting things, different ways of displaying the information that's all stored underneath it, and just plain text files.

No fancy databases, no fancy format.

So that's what Obsidian is.

There's a lot of plugins that have extended common Obsidian readers so that you can do a lot of task management stuff.

So like you can show task list, you can tag things and just show things that have a certain tag.

You can move things in the calendar view or into a Kanban type of word view.

And so you can build up, in a sort of Lego brick style complicated, bespoke design productivity task management systems on top of the core of just obsidians and plugins for obsidians.

You can write your own plugins, because it's just text file uh processing, and if you vibe code it, it's like you can do whatever you want.

So anyways, programmers like this because it's highly customizable and they love the, the conceptual simplicity of.

You could write the most complicated viewers in the world, but the underlying data is just text in text files.

All right.

So now the question is, Other than the customizability, are there advantages to building task management systems on top of Obsidian?

I don't personally do that.

So what I've done here is I've loaded up a Reddit thread.

This is from a few years ago, but the technology is, you know, it's been around for a while.

And it says, please share how you use Obsidian for task management.

I thought we'd quickly read a few of these responses to get a sense of what do these Obsidian-based task management systems actually look like in practice.

All right, so here's one response.

Honestly, after trying all the various plugins and getting as creative as possible, I decided not to use Obsidian for task management.

It was never designed for this and even though so much work has gone into various plugins and their abilities, it all just feels really clunky and not as flexible as what I need for task project management.

All right, let's see if we can find another response here.

Someone says, I use OBSI, which is an Obsidian Task Manager on mobile.

Another one says, I'm using Proletarian Wizard for a couple days.

I like it so far.

Simple and exactly what I need.

If I go back up here, someone else says it's important to have an effective way to organize all your tasks in one place, especially with a heavy workload from uni.

Have you tried using Obsidian's plugins?

If not, might be a good start.

There's a plugin called Tasks in Obsidian. you could check out.

It allows you to create, manage and filter tasks across all of your notes, which sounds exactly like the functionality you need.

You can even add due dates to your task and filter them based on priority or deadline.

There's also another plugin called Calendar.

This might come in handy if you like to see your task and events visually laid out in calendar format.

It integrates seamlessly with tasks and so on.

All right, so I think we get a feel here, right?

It's like you find these plugins.

You build sort of customized setups.

That might be hard for the novice user, but if you're used to sort of messing around with text file-based systems and scripting, It does give you a big sense of control.

This is not new.

In the computer programmer world, this idea of like organizing your life in text files goes all the way back.

We see like the early 2000s when the term lifehacker was coined.

I mean, that's kind of a blast from the past, Jesse.

People don't use that anymore.

But lifehacking actually came from a talk where a programmer talked about how people were programmers were organizing their lives with text files, with codes and little scripts.

And they're doing this in Vim or in Emacs or something like that.

So this sort of obsidian task manager is in the long line of that.

Now, in a day of like terminal agents, like Claude Code, where everything is about files and file systems,

A lot of programmers are now really thinking about their life as files and file systems and building cloud code agents to help them organize it.

So here's where I land on this.

I think this is kind of programmer stuff.

It's sort of like model trains a little bit for programmers.

It's fun to fit these things together and feel like you have some customization.

A little bit of coding might be involved, but easy coding.

I don't know that the average person needs this for tracking tasks.

I mean keep in mind last week when we had Sarah Hart Unger on the podcast.

She doesn't even list tasks in any system.

She just writes them onto her calendar.

She has a list somewhere of big picture stuff she's working on.

And then just each week She's writes tasks on her calendar on particular days or time that she needs to get done.

I keep track of tasks, you know, largely in Things 3 and some Trello.

I look for just low friction in the interface.

I just need a place to store them where I can get to them quickly from multiple devices when I'm planning.

So this is probably overkill for most people, but it's interesting to hear about.

Obsidian.

I mean, it's just one of these things that conceptually is so clean and cool but it doesn't necessarily mean in practice you're getting something out of it that functionally is way different than you would get from other simpler systems.

We're kind of in, I like this type of stuff, Jesse, but it's probably not for everyone.

All right.

Do we have one more episode or one more message rather?

We do.

We have a note from Russell about our film student episode.

Yes.

Film students who cannot make it through.

Movies.

We'll talk about the end of the show, Jesse.

I've watched three movies since the last episode.

I like this new addition to the show.

Like what I'm watching?

Yeah.

Yeah, three movies last week and two books.

Got a lot to talk about.

All right.

Let's see what Russell said.

Russell said.

In my newsletter I wrote about my experiences doing an exercise I first encountered in Oliver Berkman's 4000 Weeks staring at a painting for three hours.

It's one of the best actions I've taken ever.

I'm forwarding you a copy of the essay because it seemed relevant to your recent episode on film students who can no longer sit through films.

Russell's newsletter is called Solvitor Ambulando, S-O-L-V-I-T-U-R, A-M-B-U-L-A-N-D-O.

And the essay I'm reading from here is called Solve It, Oh no, Salvatore Ambulando translates to solve it by walking.

And the title of this essay is called Staring at a Painting for Three Hours.

All right, I'm going to read a few excerpts.

This is from his essay describing notes from his journal from doing this exercise of staring at a painting for three hours.

So he starts by saying he bought a painting the year before by a French-Canadian artist named Jean-Claude And he had it hung up in his house, in his office in downtown Louisville.

And he said this is the painting he was going to do the three-hour exercise.

All right.

Here's some notes from his first hour of staring at that painting.

I brought my chair around the face to painting.

I kept my pen and journal nearby as I wanted to record my impressions for use in my essay.

My phone stayed on my desk.

I started a three-hour timer.

Besides glancing over to the phone for a time check four times, I did nothing with my phone during those three hours.

I didn't touch it.

In that first hour, I scrutinized the painting, asking myself, what is going on in it?

What have I missed before?

What patterns exist?

My pen hummed with new observations coming at me thick and fast.

It'd be funny just if it turned out it was a modernist painting and it was just a black canvas.

Still black.

All right.

Notes from his second hour, second straight hour staring at the painting.

I kept asking my what question and it birthed a growing set of why or what really questions.

Again, let me share a sample to my notes.

Much more pink in this painting than I initially saw.

All right, here's notes from his third straight hour of staring at the painting.

Okay.

In the third hour, again, my questioning made a subtle shift.

The why questions from the second hour evolved into who questions.

Who was in the painting?

Was I in it?

And if so, where?

Who else was in it?

What exactly might those three fishermen be?

And how did I experience the painting?

This is where he discovered he was actually looking through a window.

And why are those people moving?

And why are they coming towards me?

All right, here's a couple of reflections that he had from this exercise.

It might be obvious at this point, but just in case, let me write it down.

I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise and it significantly enhanced my attachment to, and appreciation of, a piece of art I already admired and savored.

In a profound sense, I cannot convey the feelings and wonder of this exercise.

Like reading the Bhagavad Gita or the Bible, or even noble literature like Jane Eyre.

You have to do it yourself.

Were we humans meant to scroll, taking snippets of a rapidly passing global experience, or to stare with fixed attention, appreciating our corner of the world and our place in it?

I can't answer for all humans, of course, but last week I found the answer for myself.

All right, that's a cool essay.

Staring at a painting for three hours.

I'm a big believer.

This is like this developing idea I have.

I've been working on a few pieces about this, more on that later.

Kind of confidential for now, but more on that later.

This idea that... cognitive fitness is something we really need to care about in the 21st century.

It'll be what physical fitness became in the 20th century that we need to defend thinking as a tier one skill, not just economically but at the core of the human experience.

And we're going to get more used to in the 21st century talking about exercises like this, just like we got used to in the 1970s and 80s talking about doing cardiovascular exercise, an idea that never would have occurred to us before the late 1960s.

This would be, I think, the physical exercise equivalent of running a half marathon.

Took a lot of training.

It was hard.

It was significant.

You felt good about it, and it made your body a lot more healthy.

Same thing with this.

It's non-trivial.

It's hard, but it could be a real life-changing experience that makes your mind a lot more healthy.

So I like these ideas of treating the mind and focus and concentration and thinking as tier one things at the core of both our economy and our human experience, and practicing them and prioritizing them.

All right, so Russell, I appreciate you sending in that case study.

All right, before we wrap up this episode, let's quickly check in with what's been going on here in the Deep Work HQ.

All right, Jesse, we got a lot to cover here quickly.

People like to know what's going on, so we'll give them a quick summary.

Changes to the show.

I sent out a request for feedback about the idea of taking my AI content and separating that out into like a separate episode or a separate podcast and not in this main Monday episode.

And the feedback was pretty clear.

People like, yeah, I think that should be separate.

And so I kind of split the difference, my sort of AI reality check content.

I'm bringing it out of these Monday episodes, but I'm keeping it in this feed for now.

And for now we're releasing these on Thursdays not every Thursday, but Thursday will be the day going forward where we have a short episode called AI Reality Check Live, where I put on my computer science, journalist and humanist hats.

I put them all on together, and it looks really cool.

And I look at big, worrisome or attention-catching news from AI from the week before and try to give you a measured response.

So it's out of the Monday episodes but still in the podcast feed.

The first one aired last Thursday.

We're doing one this Thursday as well.

So check that out.

For now, I think in the newsletter I'll probably keep it as a separate section of our main newsletter to avoid – newsletter bloat, but we'll see.

Maybe at some point I'll separate that out again.

Always happy to hear comments or feedbacks on this.

You can go to podcast at calnewportcom.

All right, what did I read since we last recorded?

I read Tim Wu's book The Age of Extraction, which is a real.

I really like Tim Wu's writing.

He's a law professor at Columbia but writes a lot about technology and technology in the economy and technology in law.

And it really talks about the economic model that was ushered in by the large platform monopolies like meta, like what's going on with Twitter, like what's going on with TikTok, how it's economically unproductive and fundamentally extractive of value of the economy in a way that should be corrected and in a regulatory sense.

And I think it's a great argument that this is not normal.

And it's an argument we need to practice as we look ahead to AI, so we don't make the same mistakes that we made back with the extractive platforms.

I really like that book and I really respect Tim Wu.

Also finished up.

Ian Leslie has a book out called John and Paul about John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

So it's about their history as songwriters.

It's broken up into – it's a long book.

It's like 400 pages.

It's broken up by actual songs.

So each chapter focuses on one song that they wrote, and as it tells the story of that song, you learn more about their relationship and the history of the Beatles.

There you go.

I didn't know that much about the Beatles.

I learned a lot.

The thing I did reading that book, which I'm sure every single person who read this book did iPhone, Apple Music, right there constantly playing the songs.

Like you get to a chapter, you're like, oh, I got to hear the song first.

There's a lot like hear the song, read about the song, hear the song, read about the song.

Yeah.

Which is pretty cool.

I've seen three movies since the last time we talked as well.

I watched Train Dreams.

Netflix movie is nominated for best picture.

Beautifully shot.

So its director did it almost entirely with natural light.

So it's sort of similar to the Alejandro movie.

In your A2 movie, The Revenant, which I really like, where they just use natural light and you can, kind of you could tell.

I always think that's a real flex.

It had a little bit of that annoying sort of new Netflix thing we talked about a couple of weeks ago, where they have to add every once in a while heavy handed narration to explain to the viewer who's not fully paying attention what's going on and what it means and how that person felt.

You're not going to see that in like a Terrence Malick movie or something like this, which was of a similar style.

So I thought that was interesting.

I watched The Hurt Locker.

Kathleen Bigelow.

Haven't seen that in a long time.

So you saw it twice?

I saw it when it came out.

Yeah.

But that was, you know, 2009.

Yeah.

So I was just watching it on wherever it's on.

Real shaky cam, naturalistic, high stress, vignette based.

It's a good movie.

She got best director for that.

And then, in honor of a group of friends, we do movie watching.

In honor of Robert Redford's passing, we watched Three Days of the Condor, which I like.

It was one of the first movies to have, which we're now so used to so we don't recognize this was new looking at it now, but it was very new then.

In a paranoid thriller, which was kind of new, this was two years after Watergate, you have this, Parallax, Humanitarian Candidate, All the President's Men.

You have scenes where Robert Redford is doing inscrutable things with technology and wires.

And you don't really know what he's doing, but it just feels like high tech and super competent.

So he's like down with phone in the phone interchanges at like a hotel and taking out wires and plugging them into like the maintenance headset and touching things together.

You don't really know what he's doing.

Other than like, yeah, that's pretty high tech.

That's standard now, but that was kind of new back then.

They had a computer.

Oh, okay.

They had a computer in there in the opening scene.

It was like kind of supposed to be like scanning books and taking in.

It was like one of the first movies to do this like techno thriller stuff in a movie.

I mean, I guess Adronima Strain had that, the Robert Wise version of the Michael Crichton book, which would have been earlier.

So this was around, but it was still kind of new.

Westworld was around this time.

They had one kind of hilarious technology thing where they were tracing the phone call and they're in the headquarters.

And so they had a machine and just had like these big, like light up options like phone trace and option trace done.

And on the screen to try to show like where the phone was trying to show like okay, here's where the call is coming from.

It was like a, almost like a microfiche viewer of maps.

You saw physical maps behind this screen shifting around rapidly.

It was actually moving physical maps to show you where the call was coming from.

As opposed to just whatever technology knew where the call was coming from and was translating it into physical commands to move a map around to show you physically where it is.

Why not just display the location?

So I thought it was funny.

Good movie.

Probably the most 1975 thing of that is that he kidnaps...

Daryl Hannah by gunpoint because he's like you know we got to.

I don't want to give away the plot, but he's trying to escape from nefarious dark government forces that are trying to kill him.

Kidnaps her gunpoint, brings her back to her apartment, you know, keeps her at gunpoint, ties her up and gags her because he has to go, you know, investigate something and doesn't want her to tell her.

Comes back from that love scene.

She's like, well... you know, you got to break an egg to make an omelet.

And this guy is pretty attractive.

He's got a good haircut.

She's like, yeah, he's a good looking guy.

Sorry, 1970s.

Kidnapped her, tied her gunpoint, like all the worst things.

Like, he's a good looking guy.

Anyways, that was in tribute of like the late Robert Redford.

All right.

Finally, upcoming projects.

Jesse, I'm finally going through.

We're renovating.

We're renovating the Maker Lab slash producer's office here in the Deep Work HQ.

You can attest.

I have tape on the wall that's now marking up all different things we're going to hang up.

There is tape on the walls.

It's an impossibly complicated project.

There's so many things involved like this the things to hang and who's gonna hang them, but the things to buy to put in the things you're gonna hang and the lights you need to display on the things you're gonna hang, but also the task light for here, and you need a rug that's gonna fit here, but you gotta replace the chairs.

And it had been like really overwhelming, but I spend more time working here now.

And I really want this space to be like bespoke and like a place like I love being in, that is very conducive to being creative.

And I have microelectronics maker stuff next to like books where I write and have all of that mindset like in the same room.

And so...

I'm doing it.

It's a good thing we were next to a hardware store.

It does help.

It does.

We're next to a hardware store and above a bar.

So like we're set up so I can get all the stuff I need.

And then after I destroy things and fail to properly build it, I can get a drink.

So I think we're doing well.

All right.

Well, that's all the time we have for today.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be back next week with another episode of the main podcast.

And on Thursday. check out an AI Reality Check short episode.

And until then, as always, stay deep.

[The Social Media Pause: A Strategy for Clarity and Self-Discovery]-[Ep. 395: Should I Try a “Social Media Pause”?]

📋 Summary

The Social Media Pause: An Experimental Approach to Digital Life

The Catalyst: A Collective Decision

The "Angel of Death" and the Illusion of Necessity

The Unvarnished Consequences

A New Philosophy of Digital Engagement

Four Steps to a Successful Social Media Pause

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Social Media Pause: A Strategy for Clarity and Self-Discovery]-[Ep. 395: Should I Try a “Social Media Pause”?]

📋 Summary

The Social Media Pause: An Experimental Approach to Digital Life

The Catalyst: A Collective Decision

The "Angel of Death" and the Illusion of Necessity

The Unvarnished Consequences

A New Philosophy of Digital Engagement

Four Steps to a Successful Social Media Pause

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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