Dr Rupy: Modern work is defined by a relentless barrage of incoming messages and back-and-forth digital conversations. And what this creates is a state of constant, anxious chatter in which nobody can disconnect. In addition to this inability to unplug is a squeezing of our cognitive bandwidth to perform substantive work, the type of work that really matters. And we've become so used to an inbox-driven workday that it's, it's quite hard to imagine alternatives. And that's why I'm speaking with computer science professor Cal Newport today, who makes the case that our current approach to work is broken and why digital minimalism is so important. Cal is a New York Times best-selling author of several books, including most recently, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and my personal favourite, Deep Work. Many of his articles from his column in The New Yorker and his weekly newsletter have inspired me to create a better work environment for me, my staff, with the goal of promoting mental wellbeing and happiness, which is why it was such a pleasure to have him on the show today. His latest book, A World Without Email, provides a bold vision for liberating workers from the tyranny of the inbox and unleashing a new era of productivity. And our conversation today flings from A-list comedians, the dominant internet companies, Web3.0, and why internet creators like MrBeast are so interesting, as well as the utility of creator-founded communities. If you're interested in finding more meaning through a better and more creative work-life, I really think you're going to enjoy today's conversation. Remember, you can check out all Cal's work via the links on thedoctorskitchen.com and download The Doctor's Kitchen app whilst you're there for free, where you can also get a 14-day free trial. And also, whilst you're on my website, you can check out the newsletter, Eat, Listen, Read. Every week I send you a recipe to eat, something to listen to, and something to read. And actually, Cal's work has featured quite heavily in the past on my watch section because his TED Talk is absolutely fantastic. And in this week's episode, or this week's newsletter, I should say, I'm going to make sure that I attach some of my favourite talks from Cal that have been spread across the internet. And considering the guy doesn't use social media, his impact has been pretty profound. Anyway, I'm going to stop talking here, I'm going to let you listen to my conversation with the wonderful Cal Newport. Really excited to chat to you. I've read your books and I've been following you for a little while. I was wondering where to start this conversation, but then in my inbox yesterday was your newsletter that I get every week, and it was about Aziz Ansari. And I love that comedian stand, I mean, I love Aziz Ansari, first of all, but I love the latest Netflix special, which was only like half an hour long. And he talks about, just for the listener, he talks about joining the Flipmode Squad, which is in part a homage to Busta Rhymes and that sort of genre of music that he always goes on about. But then also to his sort of entry into digital minimalism. And I thought, I wonder if this is actually going mainstream now that you've got these A-listers, heavy-hitting A-listers who are all talking about removing their digital devices and taking conscious efforts to, you know, reduce the amount of dependence they have on things like phones. So I wanted to get your thoughts on that, and I thought, yeah, a great way to start our conversation today.
Cal Newport: Well, I think it might be going mainstream. To me, the most important turning point when it comes to our culture's relationship with this technology was actually around 2016, 2017, which is when the first widespread public issues with social media arose. So this is where in America, the political left was upset with Russian misinformation and Cambridge Analytica, and the political right was getting upset about what they thought was censorship of conservative voices. My argument is, forget the details. What's important is that everyone had at least something that made them upset about, in regards to social media. And what this did was change the category. So the tech had been categorised in people's minds as this exuberant, futuristic Steve Jobs dictatorship, tumbling, beautiful, shiny technology, right? So it had been categorised as this is great. And I know it was categorised there because when I would at an early point express social media scepticism, I would be met with fierce resistance. So I mean, the public reaction in, let's say, 2015 or early 2016 to saying something like, Twitter is not that useful, or maybe we all shouldn't be on Facebook, was fierce. It was a category error. People couldn't even understand it. But once you had any reason, any reason to say, I dislike social media for X, it changed its category. So it was no longer this untouchable piece of exuberantly embraced technology, and it became something that could have flaws. And once it was something that could have flaws, we began to notice a lot more. So to me, it was that transition where we left the exuberant piece of the hype cycle and went to the, okay, let's take a second look at this piece, is where people are beginning to form more nuanced and personalised relationships with this technology. So it's in that setting that when you see, for example, A-listers stepping away from social media, people can look at that and say, oh, there's something there. You know, maybe I want to do that too. So we're in a completely different relationship right now than we were five years ago, and I think it's a much better one.
Dr Rupy: How come you were so early to this? How come you saw the signals about how it was detracting to day-to-day and work and obviously how that's spilled into your writing as well? What were the early signals that you came across?
Cal Newport: Well, with my relationship to social media, this is happenstance. It's luck. It's a historical fluke. I mean, my memory was, social media began making its move in my world around 2004. I was a senior in college. Facebook arrived at my college. This is when it was still going college to college. You had to have a an email address from a specific institution to access it. At the time, I was roughly a contemporary of Mark Zuckerberg. So he's a couple years younger, but we were both at Northeast Ivy League college, computer science majors at the same time. I had had a small .com company that I had started in my teenage years that had not really worked out, and I had shut that down. But we were roughly peers, computer science nerds that had done some tech companies in schools that weren't that far from each other. So when I saw Facebook spread, I just had this reaction of, who is this guy? What's he up to? Why is this thing he invented so popular? It was a weird, a little bit tinged with jealousy, insider baseball type reaction. And then the other thing at the time was Facebook in 2004 was very list-centric. What are your favourite books? What are your favourite quotes? What are your favourite movies? These were the profiles were built around these lists, and I have a particular type of aphasia where I have a very hard time doing lists of favourites in any category. I mean, if someone asked me on a podcast, what's your favourite books, I'm in trouble. So I didn't want to do that either. So it was happenstance. I was like, all right, I don't think I'm going to sign up for this. That one random, serendipitous decision put me on the outside. So as these technologies began to get their claws deeper into our culture, I just happened to be on the outside. But being on the outside, not even for that long, began to notice some troubling signals. Like to me from the outside, there's a lot of arbitrariness and weirdness to the interfaces and interaction patterns of these technologies, and people are getting more and more enmeshed into that. And after a while, I said, it's way more interesting observing this than to be caught up in it. And so it was an accident, but I think that remove has been really useful in my work as someone who writes about technology and culture, because I think it's difficult. It's difficult to conceive about how arbitrary and unusual and dramatic some of these technologies are in our lives when you're in the middle of it. And as one of the last people never to have one of these accounts, I can have a little bit of objective remove still.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I mean, people must struggle to figure out how on earth you've been able to avoid this draw for this amount of time, considering, you know, at the start it was listicles and it was a bit of a college thing. I remember when I first got my Facebook account, it was a couple of years into med school. And I remember at the time being told about it from a friend of mine who was at Indianapolis, and he said, you know, this college kid, he started this thing and it's just going crazy over here in the States, and it's going to be soon available in the UK. You should sign up. And then it became just something that was necessary to connect with people. And, you know, social media has got a lot of positives as well as negatives. But I, I, I wonder like what the reaction was to people who came across your work in technology, in math, and in education as well, whilst avoiding all these different social media platforms. Like, how, how were those conversations going?
Cal Newport: There was a period when I had become more of a public figure and the wheel had not yet turned in terms of the public reception on social media. And I was viewed almost as a dangerous character. I remember this. I mean, to me, one of the clear examples of this would have been an op-ed I published in the New York Times in, this was probably early in 2016. So before, again, we had had this cultural shift before the election here in the US, these other things that really shifted the culture. And I published an op-ed in the New York Times that was arguing something like, for young people, social media is not as important to their careers as they think. Like, ultimately, the main thing that's going to matter in moving ahead in your career is like, what skills do you have? What can you do for us? You're spending too much time thinking about your profile. It was something like that. And it was a firestorm. It was a firestorm. The New York Times the next week commissioned an op-ed. They went out and commissioned an op-ed from someone at monster.com, the head of social media engagement at monster.com, that was a direct repudiation of what I had written. Not implicitly, but specifically. Dr. Cal Newport said last week in his op-ed, XYZ, this is wrong, he has this completely wrong. I was pilloried in a lot of different publications. I remember going on Canadian public radio, they did an ambush where, you know, you're five minutes into a live interview and then they're like, here is an artist that uses social media to reach an audience and a social media expert, and they threw in all these people to sort of ambush me. So people were upset. There's a professor here in DC that was almost manically trying to challenge me to a debate. It was a communications professor, and this idea that, hey, maybe social media is not that important was undermining his entire academic existence. He's like, manically, we have to debate. Come on, you have to get over here, we got to do this. So anyways, that's what it was like. And then all of a sudden it wasn't. So it's such an interesting transition. I mean, for a while it was like, you are crazy. Of course you have to be on here. And I'm standing on the outside, I said, I don't know, this looks weird to me, these 140 characters and these hashtags, and you're confined into these weird, constrained interfaces where you have to kind of do threads and and links and screenshots and move these pictures around and click on these little icons. Like this whole thing seems like a weird contrived Willy Wonka factory. Why is everyone spending so much time doing this? But for everyone else, it was, how can you not be here? You have to be here. And that universalism, that really after a while began to stick in my craw. This idea that we all had to be using this. I had no issue with the technology. I had issue with the call to universal usage. This idea that it was somehow weird to not use it. That became the thing that that militarised me in my writing for a while. And of course, now it's almost mundane, the type of things I used to talk about. People are like, of course. Yeah, I mean, yeah, Twitter's kind of terrible. I should quit. You know, it's the most mundane thing, but it really wasn't like that before.
Dr Rupy: I want to double click on that for a second actually, because in the face of so much backlash against, you know, esteemed, you know, with esteemed professors, people in the media, there must have been personal attacks as well. How, how did you thrive through that period? I mean, you clearly had a strong conviction. You said it was weird to you, but at the same time, when everyone around you is saying the exact opposite thing, it's very hard to maintain that sort of line. So I wonder how you were coping.
Cal Newport: Well, and I don't mean this to seem like it's being flipped because it's actually true. I wasn't on social media. So the backlash of not being on social media is a lot muted because you're not on social media. It's another thing that we underestimate the degree to which this weird contrived, non-normal in the history of humankind type of communication that happens on social media really grabs at people and is very emotionally demanding and anxiety producing. I wasn't on social media. I was writing my newsletter, I was writing books. I was just doing my thing. It's an example of actually having less interactivity was probably better for intellectual development. And then the other piece was, I was just convinced this universality cannot be right. I just felt really as if that was, that was a belief that was not flawed. This notion that we all needed to be using these arbitrary platforms, I really, really believed that that was a problem. And you have to, you have to remember, I come from an earlier era, right? I, I come from the early public facing, the consumer internet early days, the 90s, before the worldwide web, the early 90s, when you would telnet in and use gopher. I remember the first Mosaic browser coming out of the supercomputer centre at University of Illinois. I was early to all these technologies, a huge internet booster. And for a lot of the early internet boosters like me, what happened in the 2000s with the social media companies was very alarming. It was very distressing because they were taking the democratic open web, this internet, this vast tangle, right, of possible connections and expressions and homegrown weirdness and interestingness, and they were building their own private versions of the internet. And they were taking all of this interesting, expressive, democratic energy that the internet made possible and saying, you have to come into our walled gardens. And you have to do this on our networks with our panopticon-like surveillance of every single thing you do. And then we're going to take control. It's no longer now you're posting interesting things and people discover you. You have to push everything into our centralised algorithms, and we will figure out what other people need to see. And we will chop it up and dissect it and put it into this algorithmically generated stream that you are just going to dip into, sort of slack-jawed, and just let the distraction wave over you. If you're an early internet guy, that's terrifying. That's dystopian. That's that's defying the entire open culture excitement that arose over this technology. So I had that deep in my bones. I was never, it never sat right with me. And there's other commentators like Jaron Lanier is big on this, I think Douglas Rushkoff is big on this. So there's other commentators who were big in that era and even earlier, who have always had that same scepticism of putting the internet behind the walled gardens of three companies cannot be what's right for the internet. And so I had a bit of righteousness too. This is, this is subverting the potential of the technology. It just not sit well with me.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I totally understand it now you're putting it in those terms. And actually, I read an article recently called The Internet is Having a Kodak Moment. The writer evades me at the moment, but it's a really lovely article that I'll link to in the show notes where it basically describes the arc of the internet and how the internet was formed through the analogy and the lens of how we've evolved as humans from hunter-gatherers to feudal systems and where the web is going at the moment. And I've got to admit, I'm still not 100% on Web3.0 and meta and all these other terms. I sort of have a very shallow understanding of what they are. But from your perspective, what do you think about the idea of a truly decentralised web that we appear to be moving towards, at least if you look at the number of engineers getting involved in this area?
Cal Newport: Well, I am bullish on where the web is heading, but not because of the Web3.0 narratives. Now, caveat before I say what I'm about to say, I often miss technological trends. This is, I'm known for this. So I am late. I'm late. I'm tinged with nostalgia and backwards looking. That being said, there's a line of critique of Web3.0 which says, essentially, you have a small number of venture firms, A16Z chief among them, who are looking for new vast territories to get 100x, 1000x returns on their capital, right? There's no more seed capital investments into Facebooks left to do right now, right? That the landscape of attention, the attention economy is captured by these giant social media giants. That's done. And so they're looking for new places to get huge return on their capital. So they're cheerleading crypto. And, you know, crypto when it first came out, the cheerleading was financial. All right, we're going to have decentralised currency. It's going to allow us to get around currency controls. It's going to allow us to get around countries, central banks doing things, manipulations of the currencies. That largely didn't happen. Venezuela did not switch over to Bitcoin. All these other things that were predicted. So then it shifted like, okay, it's not going to be about currency. Crypto is going to be about decentralisation. So if we have public ledgers, you can have, for example, social media platforms that's just out there. It's out there on these decentralised public ledgers. There's no one to censor it. You can just build your own, whatever, devices, your own clients to surf it. There's a line of critique that says a lot of this is, you know, A16Z and others trying to pump this up because they have money in it. Now, that's a little bit of cynicism behind that critique. But where I tend to fall on that is, yes, I think there, there is perhaps something to decentralisation. I did a thing on my podcast about this not long ago, however, that I don't think you need the full-born guarantees of these purely decentralised crypto blockchains to get useful decentralisation. There's also a lot of movement happening now that's not as reported on as much, but even Tim Berners-Lee, the originator of the World Wide Web, has been working on one of these initiatives to to gain more decentralised social media style platforms that don't require the full machinery of crypto, but the idea is having some sort of shared store of posts or information or missives or whatever you're putting out there, that then different clients can pull from to create social media experiences. So there's this idea that there's a shared social graph, and there's shared databases in which what people are posting just lives. And then you can build your own client. Like, what do you want to show? How do you want to moderate it? What type of connections do you want to show on it? And you could therefore have a lot of diversity of social media experiences without having to worry with the network effect notion of every single social media platform has to build up their own social graph, their own databases. So I think there's something to that. The thing I'm most excited about, though, in the future of the web, and I'm working on a big New Yorker piece on this, so maybe I shouldn't give away too much. But what I'm excited about is more and more activity is now leaving the walled gardens. People are more and more looking to find other ways to connect directly with people over the internet to do commerce and information sharing that does not exist in the streams of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. And I think one of the things this is opening up is the ability to make a living in a creative living, doing creative work. This has been opened up in a way that I think social media tamped down for a while. We see more and more examples of people, you can use Substack or Supercast or these these direct-to-consumer ways of selling my writing, my artwork, my audio, movies. I think there's a real renaissance happening of people trying to build up niche audiences online. Podcasting, I think is a huge part of this boom as well. All of that is destabilising where we were six years ago, which was almost all information, attention, and money on the web is all going through three or four centralised social media hubs. So that's what I'm really, that's what I'm really excited about.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. And would you argue that you would even need blockchain technology for that to happen? Because like you said, if you're not going through those three main companies and you've got different podcasting platforms like Supercast is a really good example, which allows creators to monetise their their podcast or Substack or other premium newsletters. Like, what I'm trying to get my head around, and sorry if we're varying off conversation here because I didn't think we were going to get into into this level, but what I'm trying to get my head around is where the need for Web3.0 is when we've already got those platforms that are in existence already for creators who want to monetise.
Cal Newport: No, I think you're absolutely right. I think this is the issue with Web3.0. There's really high standards. Web3.0 promoters have these really high standards that the information has to be completely decentralised. There can be no control from any organisation or nation state on it. It's these incredibly high standards that have a sort of crypto-libertarian political underpinning. Most people don't need that. I mean, look, you can basically, you can build a niche platform. You can have a podcast that's hosted on just an individual hosting company that you have subscribers for that you then sell a course that you create using some sort of white-labelled off-the-shelf course, online course software, and you communicate with them with a a Mailchimp email newsletter account. You've created a thriving community of a couple thousand true fans that you're making a living off of that cobbles together a few different types of technologies. That is incredibly powerful, and I think that's where the excitement is. The fact that, yes, technically, I guess Mailchimp is a company that could, you know, come in and subvert your email newsletter list or shut you down. Yes, that's true. But for most people, they don't care. And so I agree. I think the, when I talked about this on my, on my podcast, the pushback I got was these big scenarios in which governments are coming in and trying to take control of what you're doing or shut down your service. And it's these purified scenarios of escape from control that are not relevant to 99% of what people are doing interestingly on the internet. So I mean, it's good this technology exists, but I'm with you. We do not need to rebuild the internet around a blockchain. We just need to break down the walls that had been confining the internet into three companies' servers. So much good happens when you get diverse again, different services, different connections, all sorts of niche communities. That's my vision for the future of social internet, by the way, is niche. We do not need three billion people using the same service. I might want 300 people who are into the same very narrow thing I am. And now I can find them wherever they are around the world and we have a really rich community. That's the vision I think is most exciting for social internet, and we don't need some sort of centralised blockchain funded by one venture capital firm that can get a huge return on it in order to make that happen.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And actually, that was one of the main, one of the motivations for me building my own app because I was sort of sick of having to share all the recipes across those different platforms, the major ones, where your attention is subverted by a dance or like a comedian or like, you know, every time I have to use Instagram, I get sucked into it. And so I know that users who want to perhaps see a healthy recipe or get some hacks or some advice or whatever, they're going to have the same attention grabbing issues as well. So one of the reasons why we built an app to provide healthy recipes that you can personalise, etc, etc, build collections of, and not have the attention issues, was one of the reasons why we built the app in the first place.
Cal Newport: I love that. And part of what's making this possible too is a cultural shift. There's a cultural shift where 10 years ago, it was just assumed people will not spend money for bits. So if you're, if it's recipes, it's an app, it's audio, it's video, people will not pay money for that on the internet. It has to be free. It has to be free. That means we have to monetise attention. We have the only way to make that profitable is at scale. So everything has to happen through these free social media platforms. That's no longer the case. People are much more comfortable now with this idea of, I like what you're doing. I'll pay a little bit of money to get access to it. And it's because, in my, my opinion, at least, my guess is streaming platforms and paywall. So now we have a bunch of different a la carte subscriptions we're used to paying for. I got Hulu, I have Disney Plus, I have Netflix. Also with the rise of paywall, we're used to paying for text online. Oh, the New Yorker.com, New York Times.com. So now people are used to this a la carte monthly payment for content or information that is digital but is useful to their lives. And once we broke that seal, I think that opens up everything you're talking about. Now it's no longer, well, look, I have to just, my only hope is to be on Facebook or YouTube because no one will pay money for it. That's no longer the case. Our culture has shifted. If people like what you're doing, they're willing to be a true fan. They're willing to spend some money. And that opens up, I mean, it opens up a lot of interesting economic possibilities because it used to be all of the dollars going to three major hubs where it would then get ossified into basically San Francisco real estate prices. So all of this money being sucked out and then captured in the stock price of three companies. And that's not, there's no velocity of currency there. That's not great for the economy, right? But what we have now is you can have the money bouncing back and forth. You know, you have a thousand people paying you for this app and you subscribe to four other things. Now you have what Douglas Rushkoff calls high velocity of currency. When you have a high velocity of money moving back and forth between different people, then you get an energetic and rich economy. So there's a lot of really exciting things the internet is about to unlock, and it all required us to break down these stupid walls that we were, most people were trapped behind, the wall of Twitter, the wall of Instagram, the wall of Facebook.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, and I think the average consumer is coming around to this idea about their attention being currency as well and that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Um, things that, like you said at the start, have become pretty mundane to talk about these days. But um, I wanted to get to this concept of deep work actually, because I guess in order to build an audience where you do have thousands of true fans, you really have to put in the work to provide something valuable. Um, and you talk in your one of my favourite books of yours, Deep Work, about the concept of deep work versus shallow work. And I wonder if we could just go through what we mean by those definitions and then dive into how we actually achieve those as well, because I think it spills out into areas beyond the creative economy and academia and actually into areas like my life, working in medicine and in various different specialities.
Cal Newport: Well, so deep work is when you are focused without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. So it has your full attention. You're not context shifting, so no quick glances to email, no quick glances to your phone. You give something your full attention and you're really concentrating on it hard. Shallow work is everything else. So we just define it to be the antonym. Everything that's not deep work is shallow work. My big argument is that when it comes to autonomous skilled labour, so anytime you're given autonomy to do something, you're applying skill to produce something of value, to create new value out of less valuable ingredients, and you have some autonomy in doing it, almost always deep work is what moves the needle. That is the state in which you can create new things that are valuable. So if you're a writer, that's what's required to do really good writing. If you're a computer programmer, it's what's required to write good code. If you're a master woodworker, it's what's required to actually get the joints to fit in just right and to have the piece come together just right. And so my argument is, you really need to be prioritising and protecting that. Like this is the core activity in all of these different fields that more and more people are now making a living off of. This is the core activity. So you better be prioritising and protecting that core activity. Now, you still need shallow work. I mean, you have to pay the invoices, you have to put up the advertising, like there's stuff you have to do. But it's in some sense a necessary evil. If you're doing skilled autonomous labour, it's going to be the deep work that actually moves the needle. And I was distressed. I wrote that book because I was distressed to see that we weren't making that distinction. And more and more work was falling farther and farther into just more and more shallow work. We were getting away from the actual underlying activities that make the difference that move the needle. So I figured if we gave it a name, we might be more successful in trying to actually protect and prioritise it.
Dr Rupy: Yeah. And on that note, protecting and prioritising deep work, what are the things that you think are the major distractors right now? I mean, we've just been talking about social media and the constant dopamine hits that you get from flashing messages and all the rest of it and the draw of not missing out. But what are the other things within the context of different professions?
Cal Newport: Well, the biggest thing that is, I would say, sabotaging deep work in the professional sphere is professional communication. So we have two different related but largely non-overlapping magisteria of distraction. We have the stuff on your phone that is just meant to grab your attention. So this is social media, this is online news. That's relevant to work because, hey, if you're looking at your phone while you're working, that's going to be a problem. But it's not directly needed by your work, right? But once you're actually at your work, once you're at your office, you're at your home office, let's say you've put your phone away, you don't do social media during work like a lot of people, it's professional communication. It's a separate magisteria of issue that really is the problem. And you know, I wrote a whole book about this that came out last year called A World Without Email, where I tried to diagnose what was happening with professional communication. And the issue is, the way we use tools like Slack, like email, the way we use these tools requires us to have to check channels and check inboxes constantly. And those checks of channels and inboxes constantly makes deep work impossible because if you are context shifting, if you have to check an inbox every six minutes or keep your Slack window open, you're not in a state of deep work. You're in a state of pseudo-deep work. You don't get anywhere near the maximal potential of your brain if you keep switching context to look at an email inbox, to look at a Slack message that comes in. So that is really, I think, the biggest issue in the professional workplace is what's happening on Slack, what's happening on email. And it is a hard issue to solve because as I argue in that book, we have built many workplaces, we have built our entire mode of collaboration around the need to keep checking those. That you can't just solve the problem by having a personal rule. I batch my email. That does not work in a context of a workplace in which everything is being worked out with back and forth asynchronous ad hoc conversation. You can't wait till 2 o'clock to check that email. There's ongoing conversations happening. People are waiting on you. There's 10 messages that have to bounce back and forth in this thread to figure out our strategy for the client that's coming tomorrow morning. We have to figure that out before tomorrow morning. It's going to take 10 messages, so you can't wait to answer the next one, message number two, until two. We have to go back and forth all day. So we have built up modes of office collaboration that depend on constantly moving messages around, and it is a cognitive disaster. It is probably the worst thing we could do if we're in a context where using our brain to create value is how we actually make money as an organisation. So I think we're in a really bad way right now in that world of computer screen work.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I want to double down on the the context shifting and the impact on cognitive ability actually, because in your book Deep Work, you talk about the myelination of nerves and actually how it's the repetitive firing of those synapses or the neurons along with the synapses where which causes the myelination and how that's how you create deep learning as well. That's how you create new skills. And so in the context of context switching, and we're applying this instead of in the workplace, but to to children, I know you've got three kids yourself. How, how do you see that playing out? Because I worry that given the ubiquity of digital devices, yes, they might not be looking at email, they're probably looking at messages from all the different systems that we have at the moment. How, how is this going to play out in terms of kids' ability to learn? And I wonder if you've done any things yourself to prevent any of those issues.
Cal Newport: Well, it's important to emphasise that changing the target of your attention from one destination to another, so I'm looking at this, now I'm looking at that. So you're changing your attention from one thing to another is a messy, slow, and expensive neural operation. Like a lot actually happens in your brain when you switch from the cognitive context of doing a math problem in school to, let's say, the social context of an ongoing text thread conversation that you're dipping into. Now we tell ourselves, oh, I'm just glancing at that real quick to answer and then I'm going back to what I'm working on. I'm not multitasking. I'm not keeping that conversation open at the same time I'm working on the math problem, so it should be fine. But what you're missing is that when you glance over at that text thread, you initiate an expensive cognitive context shift. There's whole semantic networks in your brain that begin to be inhibited. There's other ones that begin to be amplified. It's a messy process that can take a long time to actually complete. So you begin this messy process, but before it can complete, you turn your attention back to the original thing. You turn your attention back to the math problem. So now it tries to hit the brakes on this shift that was just beginning and try to switch back to the cognitive context of the math problem. Oh, wait, we have to start inhibiting these social semantic networks and we need to begin amplifying these connections over to the processing centres of the brain. So now you're trying to switch back again. All of this is a train wreck in your head. And you're not able to think clear, you get fatigue, you're done, you know, after an hour, you're like, I'm just done with working. Everything takes longer. This is an effect that can take 10, 15 minutes to clear out. I mean, you look at a text thread or an email inbox for one minute, you may have generated 15 minutes of really dragging cognitively before you can really get back up to speed on what you were working on before. So these context shifts are cognitive poison. They're productivity poison. It's like one of the worst things you can do if you're trying to concentrate. But we take it real casually. So in the school environment, you're absolutely right. If kids are in a situation where they're bouncing back and forth between a phone and open windows in their schoolwork, it really is almost cognitively equivalent to being, you know, recommending, here's what I want you to do. I want you to have a a nice big glass of wine that you're drinking while you work on your homework because you're having a similar cognitive effect in terms of how clearly they're going to be able to think and how long things are going to be able to take. It's just a lot less fun to do it with communication distraction. But same thing in the office. If you have an office setup where I have to check an inbox once every six minutes, which is about average for American knowledge workers, it's productivity poison. You're constantly in a state of this log-jammed, back and forth, convoluted, confused, conflicting context shifts. You can't think clearly. It's why people check out by 2 p.m. and they're like, you know what, I'm just going to for the rest of the day just answer emails and kind of jump around on Zoom. They've fried their brain, and it's an unforced error. So I think it's a big issue. You can't learn in that state of confused context shifts. You can't produce high quality work in that state, and anything you do produce is going to be a lot slower. So those are three really big effects. But we're in this state of convoluted, conflicting attention almost all the time.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I want to double down on the the context shifting and the impact on cognitive ability actually, because in your book Deep Work, you talk about the myelination of nerves and actually how it's the repetitive firing of those synapses or the neurons along with the synapses where which causes the myelination and how that's how you create deep learning as well. That's how you create new skills. And so in the context of context switching, and we're applying this instead of in the workplace, but to to children, I know you've got three kids yourself. How, how do you see that playing out? Because I worry that given the ubiquity of digital devices, yes, they might not be looking at email, they're probably looking at messages from all the different systems that we have at the moment. How, how is this going to play out in terms of kids' ability to learn? And I wonder if you've done any things yourself to prevent any of those issues.
Cal Newport: Well, the the underlying maxim for getting good cognitive performance out of your brain is one thing at a time until a natural stopping point before switching completely to the next. This is what you want to do. One thing at a time. I'm doing this, now I'm doing this, now I'm doing that. The thing you want to avoid is these partial or brief interruptive context switches. So I'm working on this, I have to temporarily turn my attention to this and then come back to finish this. That's where you really are going to get the the worst impact. And so if you're let's say we're in a medical situation, and I did some consulting with a radiology department here in DC. We really got into this. And one of the things we discovered when I was working with the head of radiology there is that the issue that was happening was that the nurses were finding sort of favourite radiologists and just grabbing them, you know, hey, take a look at this film, can you just get this? And then the other, the consulting doctors, and I might have the terminology wrong about how the department's unfold, but the people who needed the radiologists were just grabbing them ad hoc, the ones they liked, as opposed to it being dispatched in some sense of I'm done looking at this film, what's next? That more dispatched type, okay, I'm done with this, what's next? Now I'm done with this, what's next? And the what's next are being captured and stored. I think ERs do this okay with the patient board method. Stuff is getting up there. Okay, I'm done with this, what's next? I'm done with this, what's next? That's the right rhythm. So the issue is not switching from one thing to another. In certain jobs, you're doing that all the time. I mean, I use the example of IT, IT professionals in my latest book. So I'm helping 50 different people with their computer problems in my company today. That's constant context switching. But what makes IT work from a cognitive standpoint is they have a ticketing system where it's they work on one thing till it's done, they update the ticket, then they turn to the system and say, okay, what should I do next? And they're able to see this clear presentation of different relevant issues. They can grab one, work on it till done, move on till what's next. That's ultimately what you want. Switching from one thing to another when you reach a natural stopping point, completely changing your attention over to the next thing. The poison here to avoid is while I'm working on this thing, I'm going to be interrupted seven times. So it's why, for example, from doctors, especially ER docs, I hear a lot of complaint about when the Epic EMR system introduced these instant messaging features. And now it's a doctor, now it's these incredibly interruptive messages that can come in at any point. That's, to me, it's the equivalent of saying, look, we're going to have worse medical equipment. It really, I think it has a similar effect of, we thought it would be convenient to use, whatever, cheaper scalpels or the needles for our IVs aren't that great and some of these bags fall apart. I mean, you're having, it's going to have severe detriment to sustainability of the work and eventually quality of care. So that's the issue, interruptive, brief context switches is the thing we want to sidestep.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, that's a really good point. Actually, some of the tactics that wards have used for nursing staff are actually giving them specialised aprons that warn people when they're doing drug rounds. So what we found looking at some research is nurses who were doing drug rounds would be prone to drug errors if they were interrupted by just the normal day-to-day. So what one of the solutions was was to have them wear something that identified that they were doing drug rounds and they should only be disturbed if it was a true emergency. And I think that massively reduced the likelihood of a drug error. And there are a few other sort of ideas around that of of not interrupting people when they're doing something that's cognitively tasking to avoid errors. But yeah, that that's definitely a really good point and applicable to the radiology department as well. With regard to, so the other side of my life is the app building, and we've actually got a forecast system where you can actually see what is to do, what the features are that are being made right now, where that is in terms of the progress, who's responsible for it. It's this lovely sort of graph where you can actually see how things are progressing along this this board. What were the the solutions that you come up with with regard to those email inbound and how actually you deal with that in an office-based environment? Because I certainly have that problem just using Gmail and all the other email servers that I have in terms of the amount of conversation that's coming in. And you've got some wonderful ideas in your latest book about how to structure it such that your productivity goes up as well as your cognitive ability is maintained.
Cal Newport: Well, to me, the key to getting rid of this approach to collaboration that requires all of the checks, inboxes and Slack, and this approach to work I call the hyperactive hive mind, where it's just all back and forth ad hoc, unstructured messaging moving forward most coordination and collaboration. The way to get away from that is to actually put in place alternative methods to get that collaboration coordination done that does not require you to just monitor an inbox and respond to unscheduled messages. You have to actually put in place the alternative. And I think this is what a lot of people get wrong. They want to solve the problem of too much time in their inbox and too much time on Slack at the level of just people's personal interaction with those tools. They say, you need better habits around how often you check email. You need better norms for your team about when to expect a response time. Like this is the type of thing you hear. But to me, that's like being in a boat that's filling with water and obsessing over the technique of how you bail water out of it, where the real solution is you need to go find a hole in the boat and plug it. And that's what I think is happening here. You can't solve this problem by saying, I will try to ignore messages until later in the day, or I'll just tell people, don't expect to hear a response. That does not work if the primary mode by which collaboration happens is just back and forth messages. Because again, like the example I gave earlier in the interview, if there's something we have to figure out and we're just doing it by shooting emails back and forth and it's going to take 10 back and forth emails to reach a decision, if I wait until two to check my inbox, we're not going to finish that conversation today. It's going to take 10 days or something to get that done, and that's that can't happen. It needs to get done a lot quicker. So the key is to move away from using unscheduled messages in the first place as your primary mode of collaboration. You have to start putting in place alternative systems of collaboration and communication that do not require you to keep monitoring inboxes and channels waiting for things to come in. And that's why I think it's interesting you pointed towards your software developers working on the app and how nicely structured that all is, because software developers are way ahead of the game on this. They long ago moved away from workflows where they just bother each other all day. Hey, how's it going? Are you working on that feature? Where are we? Should we jump on Zoom? They have a much more structured system of collaboration. Let's have a public board. Here are the features that need to be added. Here is their status. Here is who is working on what right now. Here is when and how we decide how to update this board. It's a status meeting. It takes 15 minutes. It's at this time every single day. Here's what happens during this meeting. You say, this is what I was working on, here's its status, here's what I'm working on next, here's what I need from everyone, here's what I need it by. Everyone signs off on it. We'll talk again tomorrow. The board is up to date, you work. So software developers are way ahead of the game on this. They don't just rock and roll on Slack and say, we'll figure out how to get this app built. They have systems. And I think a lot of other types of knowledge work can probably borrow ideas from that approach. More structure, more clarity. You need an alternative. How does this work get done in a way that does not require me to just wait for a message from you and shoot one back to you, then you shoot one back to me, and we'll just go back and forth ad hoc until until we reach some decision. We have to get away from that hyperactive hive mind and it requires an alternative.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, as you're, as you're saying that, I'm definitely guilty of having shot loads of emails to my development team who all work remotely at the moment because I think that's probably why I was invited to even join the public board in the first place because I was sending a lot of customer support emails and whenever there was an issue, that would generate an email and then that would generate a suite of emails because obviously you have to find a resolution for that, whereas actually if you put it on the board and then that's there for public and you assign a team member, there's no need for the email communication. It's just a much better structured flow and then my inbox actually reduced and I'm sure there's did as well. So as you were saying that, it just put a smile on my face because it's definitely something that I was doing. You've got some other ideas about solutions and better systems of working collaboratively as well as public boards. What are some of the other ones that you've mentioned in your book?
Cal Newport: I mean, once you know that the whole game here is to find ways to collaborate without unscheduled messages, lots of ideas come up. So for example, office hours is something I talk about. Here is regular times on regular days, well publicised within our organisation that I'm available. My office door is open, my Zoom meeting room is active. If you have questions, small discussions, you want to check on something with me, just come to my next office hours. I'll be here and we can have a conversation and figure it out, right? That is an example of a method that if you look at it from the standpoint of what's going to make my life easiest in the moment, it seems like a loss. Like, oh, that's a pain. I have to wait till tomorrow to ask you a question. I could just shoot it off on an email and it'd be off my mind. But if you think about it through the context of what's going to reduce unscheduled back and forth messages, it's fantastic. Because now, yeah, I have to wait till tomorrow, but we can just go back and forth for five minutes. No unscheduled messages generated and we have figured out the problem. And that's actually a big win. So when you know what the right metric is, that matters too. Another thing you see a lot, I call it automation, but I don't really mean automation in the sense of it's actually automatically happening. What I mean is you have a set procedure that everyone agrees on for how a certain type of repetitive work is accomplished. So let's say there's some sort of white paper report that you generate for your clients once a week. You could get this down to an automated system where it could go something like this. You know, I write a draft of the report on Mondays. It's in the Google Doc in the folder we've set up for this, this shared folder by end of business on Monday. Everyone can start looking through it on Tuesday morning. My office hours from 1:00 to 3:00 on Tuesday is where you should come if you have any real serious questions or points to give to me about what really needs to be, what's missing or what should we change. I will take that. Whatever I have in that Google Doc at the close of business on Tuesday is what is finalised. So the designer can then take it anytime after close of business Tuesday, they can take it, they can produce the fancy PDF in the right format. That goes into this folder. I just leave a Dropbox comment once I've looked at it to say it's okay. I'll do that at some point on Wednesday, and once our distribution team sees that that comment is there, they can push it out through the proper platforms, right? That's an example of an automated process. And again, it's not automatic like a machine is doing it, but now this white paper involving lots of different people and lots of different moving parts gets produced every week without a single unscheduled message that someone has to wait for and respond to. And so you can apply that type of thinking to any number of things you do on a regular basis within your organisation. And again, it's all about having the right metric. And the metric here is not what's going to be easiest, it's not what's going to require the least amount of time. No, the right metric is what is going to generate the least number of context shifts to get this done. And the best concrete proxy I can find for context shifts is unscheduled messages that require a response. So if method A requires half as many unscheduled messages to be seen and responded to than method B, method A is what I'm going for, even if it's a pain, even if I have to start earlier, even if it seems like it's annoying that there's these rules and I have to keep track of things, who cares? How many messages am I going to have to respond to? That really is what we should be focusing on.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, that's definitely a metric I'm going to start using myself actually. And the context switching is really interesting because, I mean, prior to this episode, if I look back through my day today, I've context switched a bunch of times when it comes to having a conversation about my app this morning. I was chatting to a recipe developer. We had a couple of corporate event meetings. Prior to this, I was obviously going through some of your summaries. And yeah, so I've done that throughout the whole day. And I guess leaning on some of the concepts in your previous, I mean, what were you doing before this? It's probably a different time, so it might not be relevant, but what, what does your day look like in terms of what themes of things you work on throughout the day? Does it change that often or do you have set chunks of time where you're just doing one thing?
Cal Newport: Well, when it's, when it's summertime like it is for me right now, so my academic semester is over, I have a lot more control over my schedule. So we get a sense of what the, what I think the optimal cognitive schedule is for someone who does work like me. So for me, I always start with deep work in the morning. That's what you do first thing in the morning. So you can do that work with no context shifts at your complete freshness of mind. Then there's the afternoon period is this is when there will be, you know, interviews, calls, back and forth, email, just stuff that is going to require you move from one thing to another thing to another thing. Now you try to, I try to reduce the cognitive load of that admin work by again, through automation or things like office hours, to provide another quick example. When I'm on book tour, for example, my publicist and I have a system for interviews in which she sets up Google Docs that I check in once a day. So we're not doing emails back and forth. So I do what I can, but it's deep work, then meetings, calls, and shallow work. So deep work first, shallow work first. So I'm doing this, it's about lunchtime right now when we're talking. The entire day up until I got here, I was working on writing. I was actually reading a, skimming through a biography of Jane Austen because there was, I was trying to get context for understanding her writing habits. What allowed her in that social context to actually produce these works? And I needed that for a book chapter I'm working on. So I spent two and a half hours out on my porch, at a coffee shop, back at my office, like moving all around, just in the world of this one context. And now with this interview, this now shifts me over to a more shallow work type mode. After this interview, I have a call with one of my grad students, there's some emails for me to do. I'm in a different type of mindset. So deep work first, then switch over to the mentally draining shift from context to context and then come in for a landing, hopefully not too late.
Dr Rupy: What did you learn about Jane Austen's writing habits that you're going to, you're going to put into practice?
Cal Newport: Well, it's not that I'm going to put in practice, but there's the point I was trying to extract from Jane Austen's life is, okay, so she's one of several examples I have of someone who produced work of a much higher quality or import than would be expected for that context. So in her context in 18th century England at the social class they were, you would not expect a woman to be producing, this would be very, very rare to be producing innovative and insightful literature. It was not the way the social roles worked right then. And I have a couple other examples of different people at different periods of time. The sort of punchline is like, what, what allowed these various examples I have, I was also looking at Andrew Wiles solving Fermat's Last Theorem in the 90s when basically academic mathematicians had given up on it. I have a few different examples like this. What made the unusual accomplishment possible is that they all had unusual circumstances that significantly reduced what was on their plate. So Jane Austen, for example, it's a complex story that basically got her to a situation in which, unlike almost anyone else at her social class at that time and her gender, could actually spend a lot of time writing. Almost all of the domestic chores that would fall upon someone in this sort of pseudo-gentry economic class that she was in were taken on by her sister Cassandra and her aged mother because they had moved to this, this small house that used to be the bailiff's house that was owned by her brother Edward in the town of Chawton. And they removed themselves from a lot of the normal social life of visitations and and they had been encouraging of her writing for very specific reasons having to do with her late father and his giant library and it's all a complicated story, but it led to unusual circumstances where suddenly she had the ability to spend a lot of time writing. She had almost no domestic responsibilities beyond she would make the breakfast in the morning. That was it. And so in those circumstances, one of the only people in her circumstances to have fewer things on her plate, she could bring all she'd observed in her life in the pseudo-gentry in Hampshire to produce this incredibly insightful new type of literature. Andrew Wiles did something similar at Princeton when he saw Fermat's Last Enigma. That theorem had not been solved because it was going to take years and years and years of work and most people don't have seven years they can devote to it. But he found a way to basically take most responsibilities off of his plate and basically just focus on that. He had a whole book he was about to publish. He chopped it up and dribbled out the results over several different years so that to the outside world and his department, they'd be like, oh, Andrew's still working. But it was all stuff he had already done because all he was doing was working on this one thing. He stopped going to conferences, he stopped attending colloquiums. But in both those cases, the ingredient for doing something unusually impressive for your situation was doing unusually less things. And that was the point I was trying to pull from is that doing less than what is normal in terms of what's on your plate, reducing what's on your plate to fewer things is often a catalyst for producing better overall outcomes. But anyways, that just requires a lot of reading and thinking. And I was not going to be able to get through that book and come up with those insights if I was trying to do that in between meetings today, if I was trying to do that while also on email or while also supervising social media. Sometimes you just have to have your brain marinate in a context so that these connections can slowly start to form, structure can slowly crystallise about what you're trying to think about. So it's a sort of case study of deep work in action.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. And you talk about this concept of our daily willpower being finite and how, you know, you should be doing that sort of creative deep work first thing in the morning. It's one of the reasons why I've taken to waking up super early because it's before my dog gets up, it's before my partner, my partner's also an early riser as well. She's up at like 6, 6:30 most days. So I have to sort of wake up a little bit earlier to make sure we don't cross paths and that I don't have those distractions. And you're right, you don't get the interruptions through constant email communication that I don't check actually before 8:00 a.m. Um, why is our willpower finite? And why, why is it such that, you know, you have to do the deep work first thing in the morning? Is this something, is this a trait that we all have?
Cal Newport: You know, it's an interesting, there's an interesting literature on there, right? So there was a, the scientist who really worked on this famously was Roy Baumeister, who wrote a book about this, Willpower, with the New York Times science reporter, John Tierney. And this is what I talked about a little bit in Deep Work. And they had done these famous experiments where they could actually, they would fatigue the willpower muscle and giving someone glucose, they would get more willpower back. And there was this willpower is a finite resource. That research actually fell into the replication crisis. So subsequent psychologists have had a hard time directly, directly replicating the results of Baumeister, which was this sort of clear, you reduced willpower as the day went on. That was hard to exactly replicate. But what I think is going on, here's my hypothesis, it's not willpower in the sense of here is a substance that diminishes. I think it is cognitive exhaustion. This is what I think is the real culprit. And the most exhausting thing you can do with your brain, really in most people's day-to-day life, is these colliding context shifts. This is why I think you get good work done first thing in the morning. You haven't yet started doing back and forth context shifts. It's why I think people really burn out by the early afternoon. It's they've checked email 75 times at this point. And it's a huge draw. It's a huge drain. Those context shifts back and forth and back and forth and you're aborting this one, going to this one, and aborting this one. Your brain is never settling on one thing. A brain that has evolved to say, we've been doing this for the last three hours, and now we're going to go pay attention to this, can't handle the constant back and forth. So I really think it's the cognitive fatigue, accumulated cognitive fatigue that is a real problem. And if you're not switching back and forth all the time, and in particular, if you're not doing these quick interruptive context shifts, you can do a lot more high quality cognitive effort throughout a day. You're spending three hours on this, then an hour to this, then you rest, then you do two hours on this, and then finally one hour of communication. You can have much more done than when you muddle all this stuff together. It's the back and forth, I think, that drains us.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. I want to get back to some of the solutions that you've underpinned in your latest book actually for how we prevent context shifting and actually improving work capacity as well as our cognitive ability as well. But in the scenario of, I'm sure there are different examples here, but I'll use my own, when you're working in A&E and you're seeing multiple patients at the same time, someone comes in, you're thinking that person might have had a stroke, 75-year-old, we'll put him into the CT scanner, we'll do these bloods. Someone, you'll be pulled by one of the other juniors like, I want to see this person. Can you see if this toe x-ray is actually broken or not, or, you know, whether they should have even done the x-ray themselves? And then you move into another office and then you've got someone else and you're seeing whether they've got a flare up of their IBD or whether this is, you know, an bowel ischemia or something. You get my drift. We're constantly changing from different directions or pulled, being pulled in different directions all day long. Are there some ideas that you might have to apply to those sort of areas where it's an inevitability that you're going to have to context switch to just do your normal day-to-day?
Cal Newport: I'm a big believer in clear shutdown routines. So there's a distinctive barrier, psychologically speaking, between work time and non-work time. And that barrier is defined by a shutdown routine. And one of the core things on a shutdown routine is to service any what David Allen would call open loops. To make sure that there's nothing that you are storing just in your head that you have to just remember. That's going to be a real drag and source of stress. So that everything is out of your head, it's in a system that you trust. You know your plan for the next day, you know your plan for the next week. You can trust yourself. We have this figured out. There's nothing I need to be working on tonight. Everything is written down. I'm not going to forget it. I have a plan for my week. I know what's happening tomorrow. Okay, we're good, brain. We don't need to be doing anything tonight. So now let's shut down. And you should have a phrase you say or a checkbox you check or something that is distinctive that you do to indicate the end of the shutdown. And so, for example, I used to use the phrase, schedule shutdown complete. I used to talk about this on my newsletter readers because it was purposefully weird and dorkish. But you'll remember it. Like I never would, you're not going to say that casually. Now, you know, I sell this, I have this time block planner that has a shutdown complete checkbox. So I can save people, save people the embarrassment of it. But here's why this works. You can use this as the foundation of a cognitive behavioural therapy that's very effective. So if you're used to being very anxious and stressed about work, you switch over to this shutdown routine method where you, all the open loops are closed, everything's written down, you look at your plan for the week, you really are good. And you say the phrase or you check the checkbox. Later in the night, your mind will still want to raise work issues. Like, oh, we got to, we got to think through this email that we got to send or what did my boss really mean by this or what's really happening. And instead of having to engage with the rumination, you say, I feel this rising, I feel this rumination trying to get power. Instead of engaging with it, you say, you know what, I said that crazy phrase or I checked off that box. Look, here it is, I checked it. I would never have done that unless I had finished a shutdown routine, which made me confident that we're fine and there's nothing we have to figure out tonight. So I don't need to get into this rumination because I checked that box or I said that phrase. And at first, when people are doing this, you're having this CBT style interaction again and again and again, but it fills in the groove. And then that tendency, you know, one week later, three weeks later, that tendency to just fall into work rumination anxiety significantly diminishes. So it actually, it's a really powerful psychological tool to have a routine you trust that has a clear hook that indicates its activation.
Dr Rupy: I'm definitely going to use a verbal cue now because I've got a to-do list. It's just my Apple notes and it's purposely simple because I don't want to, I don't want to have to use a notion or whatever. And it's got my full to-do list of everything that's on it, including all the things that I want to build over the next couple of weeks and all the rest of it. But then right at the top, there's a section of things to do today, and there's never more than four or five things on it. And I tick those things off, and then my routine, my shutdown routine is to fill the boxes that I need to do tomorrow. And once those are all there and they're populated without any ticks, I can, okay, that's it. I'm done. Shut the computer and then I get on with my day. But I 100% have ruminations in the middle of the night. So I definitely need to attach a verbal cue to it. That's such a good tip. I'm definitely going to embrace that.
Cal Newport: Yeah, it works. It works.
Dr Rupy: I was going to ask you about boredom and embracing boredom. So I'm the kind of person that, apart from, well, in the morning when I'm doing work and I have meditation routine, stretching, etc, etc, wherever I'm travelling, I'm consuming information generally. So I'm either listening to a podcast or an audio book, I'm engaging in emails, I'm, you know, there's, there's never a dull opportunity where I can't do something that I deem to myself productive. But after reading your book, I was really galvanised by the idea of embracing boredom as a form of work almost. It's a, it's a pure necessity, you know, particularly for creative work. I'm interested in how you embrace boredom.
Cal Newport: Well, the rule I often apply when I'm thinking about how to put that idea into action is there should be at least one short occasion every single day in which you're bored, so meaning that you're craving novel stimuli but you don't give yourself novel stimuli. By short, I'm talking 5 to 20 minutes, and at least one long period of boredom once a week. So now we might be talking an hour plus. So it's like a simple rule. Every day there has to be at least something I do, like go run an errand to the pharmacy or my commute or something you do where you say nothing in my ear, nothing in my hand. So you want one of those every day, and then a longer, like a long walk or a hike or something more reflective once a week. So I use those simple rules. And again, for two benefits I'm looking for there, and between two different books, I talk about two different benefits for boredom. One is breaking the Pavlovian connection to distraction. That's what I talk about in Deep Work. So it's this idea that if your mind gets used to distraction every single time you feel bored, it learns to never tolerate boredom. And the issue with that is that deep work, important cognitive work is often technically speaking boring because there's not a lot of novel stimuli. So if your brain has learned, I always get the phone when I'm a little bit bored, what happens when you're trying to make this article work and you're having a hard time with it? Your brain will say, this is boring, where's the novel stimuli? Phone. And you can't resist it because you've taught it. So if on a regular basis you are bored and don't get the stimuli, then your brain learns like that is one of the options that could happen. So it's not about being bored all the time, it's just making that an option. And then the other one, and this comes from the book Digital Minimalism, is time alone with your own thoughts is where you actually structure and make sense of your experiences and therefore are able to evolve your identity. So humans need solitude. And by solitude really does mean time alone with your own thoughts. That's how you evolve as a person. It's how you integrate the things that have happened to you into your structure for understanding your life and your identity. It's how you make big leaps in self-understanding. It's incredibly important. So you don't want to deprive yourself of solitude. You need that to be a highly function, functional human being. So semi-regular boredom gives you both those things. You break the Pavlovian connection and you get that dose of vitamin solitude that we need every day.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, vitamin solitude. I'm definitely going to use that vitamin. In terms of other elements of productivity, because, you know, you've written about it, you've thought about it for many years now. What are the other things that you do outside of processes or automations or structured routines that you do to improve productivity? I mean, like, do you, do you subscribe to a particular way of eating or do you think about supplements or do what kind of other sort of extracurricular activities do you utilise to improve deep work?
Cal Newport: Well, when it comes to, let's say the physical, because you're giving some of those examples, I am a believer in, you know, exercise, eating, that the brain is a muscle. It's a part of the body. So like what you're doing with your body matters. So I do, I do care a lot about that. What type of exercise am I getting? How much movement am I getting? What am I eating? I think all of that, all of that can be pretty critical as well. Clear shutdowns are key for me as well. I need to rest the brain. I see it like an athlete sees their muscles. You can't just train endlessly. You can't just practice endlessly. You're going to get hurt. Metaphorically speaking, the same can happen for your brain. So you have to go back and forth. Um, with that in mind, I embrace seasonality. I believe in seasonality on all scales. So seasonality meaning that you have shifts where some periods are more intense and others are less. So there's different seasons. And I embrace that on all scales. On the scale of the day, you might be working hard in the morning, but you're pull back in the evening after your shutdown to help unwind and to help have that come out. On the scale of weeks, you know, you take Saturdays completely off. You're trying to balance the hard days with the not hard days. On the scale of a year, actual seasons can be harder than others. What the fall looks like maybe is different than what the winter works like. And some you're pulsing harder some seasons and then you pull back on others. So you have this seasonality of intensity and non-intensity balancing each other out. I think psychologically that's really important. You're going to end up in the long run producing a lot more and you're going to be a lot happier than trying to redline it all the time. Every day, every hour of the day, every day of the week, every month of the year, we're always going full out. I believe the seasonality is really important as well. So there's a lot of little hacks like that. And I shouldn't even call them hacks. I mean, this seems like wisdom that humans have known for a long time. There's nothing, nothing that we're inventing today. But all that stuff plays into playing the long game. The long game of I want to produce good stuff in a sustainable and meaningful way over a long period of time.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. Do you track your sleep or do you track your activity and that kind of stuff?
Cal Newport: I track activity. Yeah, for sure. I don't, I don't track sleep because I, you know, I have some insomnia issues. And as you know, with people who have insomnia issues, there's nothing worse than to tell them, hey, let's put on one of these straps that's going to tell you exactly how much you sleep. Because let me tell you what will keep an insomniac up is knowing that each minute that you're up is being tracked into into an app. But I do track, I track steps. To me, this is a very simple thing. The 10,000 step rule is a simple one because what it's going to impose, what the side effect of that, for example, is you're going to be outside a lot more. You're going to be moving a lot more. Your day is going to be a lot more varied. It's going to get you out from in front of the screen. So it's a simple rule. I like simple rules that then have these more complicated second order effects. Another rule I use in my productivity thinking is what I call fixed schedule productivity. You fix in advance the time you're going to work. And then you work backwards from those rules and say, look, it has to fit into there. And that one decision induces all sorts of innovation and second order effects. It changes how much you have on your plate. It changes how you schedule things. It changes how you approach your day. It's one simple primary rule that has a lot of secondary benefits. So I do like those type of, those type of strategies. Something simple, so it's easy to understand. It's binary. Did I do this or not? But in order to accomplish that, all sorts of complicated activities happen as a result.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I'm a big fan of scheduling. I mean, like, to the point where, and it sounds kind of unromantic, but I think it's actually to ensure that there is a romantic element to my life. But me and my partner schedule our date nights. And you know, it's in my diary and I can see it and like, I can look forward to it. You know, it's something that can be a nice punctuation to the end of the weekend and all that kind of stuff. So actually scheduling that time where you know you're not going to be in front of your computer, you're going to put your phone down and all the rest of it, I think is super important. And I think it's necessary in our ever busier lives.
Cal Newport: Well, I'm a big believer in that. I talk about this a lot, but I think it's absolutely true. The most relaxed you're ever going to see someone is someone who has their act together from a scheduling perspective and can fully let go. Like the best vacations are the vacations where you've organised and got, you know what's going on, the loose ends have been captured, they've been covered, people know you're gone, and your mind can actually relax. The same thing is true with creative work. I think there's this myth out there that somehow having less structure is going to make you less creative. It doesn't. It makes you much less creative because you're existing in this persistent state where you're half mixing in work and non-work and you're always worried about what you're missing and whether you should be doing more and it's haphazard and it's exhausting and it's anxiety producing, and that's not how people get creative work done. It's the people who knows what's on their plate, you found the time for it, when you're done, you're done. And now you have the whole afternoon clear and protected to be creative and you can actually trust that time. This is really clear. I'm not forgetting anything. I'm on top of everything. That is the mode in which you're really going to get real things done. So I'm a big believer in that. You know, adding structure is what gives you relaxation. Adding structure is what gives you true creativity. Adding structure is what gives you freedom. There is a pyrrhic flexibility or autonomy in just trying to wing it. Maybe it feels like I am more free, but it's not. You're constantly slave to the forgotten item of the moment or the anxieties of uncertain status of all the things on your plate.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah, definitely. In terms of creativity, obviously, author, writer with pieces in the New York and, obviously, a podcaster now. Do you have any other creative pursuits that you're thinking about? I mean, this is a concept of like, uh, reinventing oneself every like five or 10 years or so. Do you subscribe to that? Are you thinking about any other creative pursuits that you want to, you want to enjoy?
Cal Newport: Well, this is what's happening right now with me with podcasting. I, so I, when I often evolve, I mean, in my writing career, I write, and there's usually some sort of direct audience engagement piece to that. I've always had that. So I was very early to blogging and newsletters, and I had an audience through there. And I've moved now where I also, I podcast, but I'm also very focused on video. I just have this intuition that democratised video, like the ability of the internet to present video produced by anyone to anyone else who wants to consume it is going to be a massive shift because, look, podcasting's been a big deal. It's about to take over radio, but radio is teeny compared to TV and movie, right? I mean, visual is very powerful. So to me, this is a big pursuit. And the way I manage it, though, is fixed schedule productivity. So I said, here's what I'm going to do. And I started this early in the pandemic when I had time. And then I was like, okay, how am I going to make this sustainable? It's one half day a week. One half day a week is dedicated to anything podcasting and video podcasting related. And that's the time I have. And then I say, how can I do the most with that time? And so what happens is my my producer and I will spend a lot of time trying to figure something out. Once we figure it out, we'll automate that, make that routine, that frees up new time. Now we can spend more of that half day trying to do something new. And so over time, we're able to evolve and experiment and really have fun with this new medium, but keep the whole thing constrained. It's one half day once a week. So this week it's tomorrow. It's Wednesday afternoon, starting at 12:30. And that's been a lot of fun. So I think there's something there. And I don't know what it is, but I think the direct engagement with an audience, I think video in particular, there's a lot of innovation happening in the world of a la carte bespoke media. And I want to at least be in the conversation. So right now, this is where where I'm spending a lot of my, a lot of the the free time, the small amount of free time I have set aside for innovation, this is where I'm putting it right now.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, yeah. I couldn't agree more actually. I mean, I've had my fair share of experiences in traditional TV and TV shows and all that kind of stuff. And I think one of the things that you have to sacrifice is ownership and true creative control about what you want to produce. You're always going to be nudged in a certain way that might not be, might not necessarily be completely out of alignment with what you believe in, but you certainly don't have 100% control. And I think the medium of podcasting and adding video to that and long form conversation in general is going to be the antidote for these sort of character limited social media platforms with the lack of nuance.
Cal Newport: Yeah, and not to go down a rabbit hole, it's just a topic I really like. I mean, it seems like what you see in these media evolutions is if you can open up the content production to very large audiences, you get this rapid Darwinian sifting of all sorts of different types of talents and formats. And if you have enough people going into one end of the funnel, a lot of innovation comes out of the other side. The key to being able to open up media production, various formats to this type of Darwinian sifting, this innovation is caused is that you have to close the quality gap. So that's what happened with podcasting. The gap between what I'm listening to on the radio, just from a pure audio quality perspective, and what I hear in podcast, that got small enough that now a podcast is in the same general orbit of professionalness as radio. And so now everyone can produce a podcast. We get all this really interesting innovation happening. We're almost there with video. Like we're very rapidly, we're very rapidly closing the gap between, let's say, cable quality video production and what someone can do on the scale of thousands of dollars, but not tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. That's what I think is about to unleash the innovation in video. It's such a powerful format, but up until now, it's like, look, the when you get to cable or above, they have the $50,000 camera. And it just doesn't look the same. Everyone else has a webcam and it just doesn't look the same. Those gaps are collapsing, you know? Like this is not a, this is a $600 camera I'm looking into right now. It's not super expensive. The gap is getting smaller. If you spend $2,000 on a camera with the right lighting, now you're going, you can produce something that's not that much different than what you're going to see on a cable reality TV show. So I think there's really interesting, once you can open a medium that's very compelling to a huge new audience of creators, the wrong thing people say is, oh, all these creators, here's what always happens, and not and then I'll come back to it. But what always happens when when new technologies, creative technologies open up is there's always these disappointment pieces that says, oh, most of the stuff people produced was bad, as if like that is an indictment of, oh, this is this revolution is not a big one. But that's what's supposed to happen. You open up a new format, a new way to a huge pool of creators, you open up all of this experiment and sifting that's going to identify huge new talents who would never have otherwise been identified and really cool new formats that otherwise never would have survived. For that to happen, 99% of the stuff is going to obviously be failed experiments and bad. But who cares? The point is is that the 2% is still an order of magnitude larger than the number of people who had access to radio or TV before. And so you always, this happened with blogging. They're like, well, most people's blogs were stupid. So what a failure. And it's like, well, wait a second, what were you expecting? That you open this technology to everyone and that everyone was going to make a living off of their blog? No, what you got out of it was a push forward in journalism. The 2% in this experimentation that were doing new things led to really cool new innovations. Same thing with podcasting. Yeah, sure, most podcasts are bad, but we're having huge innovation in the format and we're sifting through talents that we never would have known, you know, we're getting them out of the gravel and able to polish them up. Like, my God, this guy is fascinating. And we never would have found him or found her if not for this experimentation. Same thing with video. So yes, most stuff that's going to be produced when you have new technological innovations that open up new formats to a lot of people, most stuff will be bad. But that is the survival of the fittest. That's the churn you need to find new good. And so I'm excited about the new good that all these mediums are going to produce.
Dr Rupy: Oh, absolutely. Like, I'm not expecting you to know this particular YouTuber, but he is the biggest YouTuber in the world. His name is MrBeast. And he does these viral videos where he's done like crazy feats and all this kind of stuff. Really, really popular, obviously, like over 100 million subscribers on YouTube. And the amount of revenue that he can generate, he pumps all back into his videos. And that gives him a studio level budget to do bigger and bigger stunts, including, and this is where I thought the tipping point was, there was a really popular show, Squid Games on Netflix. I'm sure you've heard of it. That got like 100 million views, I think, within the first eight weeks of it showing on Netflix. The spoof that MrBeast did on YouTube got over 200 million views in the first month. And so that was the tip I was like, ah, TV is dying very slowly. And actually, it's surrendering to the creators who are taking over this platform, creating beautifully shot videos with high-level equipment that has drastically reduced in price, giving everyone the opportunity to create truly their own shows that are of immense quality. And I think what we're going to witness in video in particular, which is why I'm so interested you said that, is going to be a shift towards these platforms where creators have true creative control.
Cal Newport: Yeah, I think I, and I know Mr. Beast, I know that case study, and I think it's fascinating. I was just spending time with a an internet news, I guess you call it a show. I was profiling them for the New Yorker, an article I'm working on now. And they have six people that work part-time on the show. The these hosts were on cable news before, and they had a a staff of 30. It took a staff, a full-time staff of 30 to produce the show traditionally. They're now doing it on the internet with six part-time people. They produce it in 4K. They have a, it's beautiful quality. You can put it on a smart, large smart screen TV. They have a $60,000 4K tricasting system. The whole thing has an annual budget of about a million dollars a year, which is very, very small. And they easily, they easily make that with subscriptions, etc. to it. And I think you can look at, they had to actually replace the backdrop because their set was so good, their cameras were so good that you could see that the fake backdrop, it looked too fake. Like little details, they had fake bricks, they had to get better bricks. But if you're in cable news, the idea of a million dollar a year budget, that's crazy. The budget for a cable news show is going to be $60 million a year. It is crazy. And they're doing it out of a studio that they lease in downtown DC with six part-time employees. They each make salaries that are better than what they made on cable news. The show has more reach than their other show. And yeah, anyways, I think really cool stuff is, really cool stuff is happening. The Mr. Beast is crazy, man. I mean, he's just scaling. He's like, wait a second, if you do this at this level, you get this many viewers. So then if you take all that money and put it back in the show, you can do this at this level, but then you get this many more viewers. And he just started turning that exponential crank until he's like, well, if I make, if I make $10 million on revenue on this video, why don't I just invest $10 million in the next video? And it's, I mean, he's insane, but I love it.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, he's definitely got, I mean, he, by his own admission, is just obsessed and will just talk about YouTube all day long. I heard him on, it wasn't Joe Rogan's podcast, it was another podcast from a couple of years ago, and he's very open with his secrets and he's very open about the strategy that he's taken to for his show, just constantly reinvesting every cent of the show into bigger and better videos. And I think that's the way to crack it. It's, it's figure out what your format is, figure out what the community wants, serve them as big as possible, as good as possible, and then just invest in higher, higher quality videos, get more people in, get more, and and this is why I think YouTube is going to be a huge, huge, um, light bulb for a lot of people. And it's funny that we're talking about YouTube in 2022 when it's been around for so long. Uh, and I, I yeah, I just think people are just only getting started with it. So I'll be interested to see how you, how you get on with video as well.
Cal Newport: Yeah, it's it's fun. It's a fun experiment. I predict the big video streamers are going to make themselves more of competitors to YouTube as well. So I think we're going to see more like on a Netflix, on a Hulu, in peacock, like on these big streamers, we're going to be begin to see a tranche of these sort of professionally produced high audience engagement but niche type personalities and shows because the production costs are still really low. And so I think we're going to see more of that where on a Netflix, it's not all going to be shows with these very high budgets. You're going to have, I mean, we see it now. I mean, one of the big innovations the big podcasters have figured out. There's all these innovations that are just being passed around person to person. But like the big podcasters with especially with video presence and the big network deals, most of them have figured out that light industrial warehouse space is like the right way to actually set up on the budget a really flexible and effective studio. So if you look at Rogan, Adam Carolla, Rich Roll, all of these podcasters, what do they do is they're renting warehouses in light industrial spaces, very large rooms, very cost-effective. And then you can just build pretty cheaply in the middle of these warehouses bespoke studios with lighting grids and sound dampening. And like this type of innovation is happening, and it's just being passed around person to person, but it's like an incredibly cost-effective way to have a studio. Mr. Beast does this. I mean, Mr. Beast doesn't just have a small warehouse in a light industrial factory. He has a massive warehouse. But that's what he did. He rented, he might have owned it, owned it at this point, but he has like two or three massive warehouses from an industrial, an industrial centre out there in California, I guess that's where he is. And they've just, they flexibly have built lighting grids and sound stages throughout these warehouses. So people are building TV and movie studios. You can do this as a podcaster now from scratch on like a reasonable sized budget. I mean, I love all this innovation. I love when there's churn like this.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's super disruptive and people are just really making use of their communities and platforms to, to, I mean, he does a lot of good as well. I've heard about his philanthropic work and it's pretty incredible, the food banks that he's set up. And I think he's based in where he grew up in North Carolina. So the huge warehouse is actually in North Carolina and they've already outgrown the space because they've just got so many videos going on simultaneously, different producers, and it's, yeah, it's quite amazing to watch.
Cal Newport: Yeah, I mean, when I'm, when I'm at my allergist, so like once a month I go to an allergist to get a shot, and they have a TV in the waiting room, and they usually have on Discovery Channel or Animal Planet. And I'm looking, like this is going to be the Nero burning of Rome moment for TV. Like where we are right now or where we were a couple years ago, you look at these shows they're producing, it's these kind of crap reality shows that just are not at all compelling. It's usually when I'm there, it's a show about people who install professional fish tanks. And it's, man, it's just boring. And there's a lot of these confessionals of like, well, you know, so and so and they're doing this sort of forced jocularity and we're trying to be kind of funny about it. And I remember this is what made Discovery Channel so lucrative in the day is all about what is your cost per production per hour? And they got it down to like $400,000 per hour. And they're like, this is so cheap and and this is why we're so lucrative. But the stuff is terrible. But terrible stuff will get watched. There's other shows, there's a show where it's it's like a park police in Texas. Like so a whole episode will be we're on a lake and these people are drinking while boating. We're going to give them a ticket. It's boring. And they're spending, yes, $40,000 per hour producing this stuff. And I'm thinking there is so much stuff right now being produced that's of the same level of production quality that's fascinating and so much better because it's gone through this whole Darwinian sifting and it's sifted out like Mr. Beast would never get hired by a, you know, network to build a show, but it's he found the formula that's fascinating. And like, so all we need now is it's just almost like interface. You know, there's, there's young people who are very comfortable with the recommendation algorithm just floating along in YouTube. But I'm like, how do you get this onto that screen at the allergist office? Because you could fill every minute of the day on this screen with stuff that's being produced right now on YouTube that would be 10x more interesting than watching people install fish tanks or whatever it is. And so that's the peak. I mean, like, we're past right now. I think, I think independent creators can do better than what a lot of right now cable reality is doing. They can match the quality and and surpass the interestingness. So we're at this tipping point now. We'll see what happens.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, absolutely. Cal, I didn't think our conversation was going to dive into the success of social media creators, but I'm glad it did because it was an awesome chat. And uh, I, we're going to wrap up the conversation here, but I, I love your work. I'm so glad we actually got to connect because I know you make a point of being less contactable. So I'm glad we got to connect and hopefully we'll be able to do this again soon.
Cal Newport: Yeah, no, it's my pleasure. I love having these type of conversations. And I will say just to round the corner on that paradox, I'm obviously very suspicious of the large social media monopolies that are trying to capture your attention and get you to keep looking at these screens all day, but I'm very interested in the ability of the internet to support creation and expression. And so this is why I'm very excited with people producing original video and podcasts and and niche social networks and apps where it's small communities coming together. I think that is all great. And all of that is different than I'm on hour four of TikTok scrolling. So, so hey, all the stuff we're excited about in this conversation, I think is all a good sign that the internet immune system is healing itself. It's evolving. Much more interesting stuff is coming.
Dr Rupy: Yeah, I love that analogy. I'm going to have to use that one. Thank you, Cal. I really appreciate it, buddy.
