Ep. 351: Making the Internet Good Again

Tyler Cowen recently wrote an article arguing that spending lots of time online is in fact a good thing. In this episode, Cal looks deeper at Cowen’s argument and finds some surprising common ground. The internet can be a major source of good in your life, he argues, but only if you use it in the right way. He then answers listener questions and reviews the books he read in April. Find out more about Done Daily at DoneDaily.com! Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: Making the Internet Good Again [5:06] What are good activities for “deep breaks”? [28:38] How can I approach parenting without resenting the sacrifices to deep work? [31:36] How does the deep life compare to David Epstein’s book, “Range”? [38:06] What is the difference between a “winner-take-all” field of work and “auction” field of work? [41:12] Does “following your passion” have any connection to “lifestyle centric planning”? [47:39] CASE STUDY: Implementing the concept of “Eat The Frog” [52:48] CALL: Introducing seasonality and the meetings being the work [55:07] APRIL BOOKS: The 5 books Cal read in April, 2025 [1:06:08] I, Robot (Isaac Asimov)After Disney (Neil O’brien)The Baseball Book of Why (John McCollister)The Technology Republic (Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska)Everything is Tuberculosis (John Green) Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newportCal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?thefp.com/p/the-case-for-living-online Thanks to our Sponsors: shopify.com/deepauraframes.com [Use promo code “DEEPQUESTIONS”]indeed.com/deepharrys.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Cal Newport?

  I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, that was heartening to see a particular piece of reader feedback that you added to the script because it's been a thorn in my side for a long time and I'm glad that someone else noticed that.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was Michael from Massachusetts.

• 0:45Cal Newport?

  Okay, so I guess he was visiting Georgetown.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  He was visiting with his kids because they're thinking about going there and they're juniors.

• 0:52Cal Newport?

  So what Michael noticed, which is something I've long noticed but never brought up, is the Georgetown bookstore doesn't carry my books.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was very upset.

• 1:01Cal Newport?

  Not only do they not carry my books on the shelves, but they have right up front, and they have for a long time, a table that is labeled Faculty Authors and it's books by Georgetown faculty. And they're good books, but I will say, I, you know, my, any one of my books is probably outsold half that table. Like, they're pretty well-known books and they just do not put it on there. I assume that because my books aren't with an academic press, maybe they just don't consider them a faculty book because they're for a general audience, I guess. I don't know, but for whatever reason Georgetown just does not carry that bookstore, whoever

• 1:42Cal Newport?

  runs the bookstore, does not think about my books as being Georgetown faculty authored books, I suppose.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  I'll read a quick sentence. "As a frequent listener of the podcast, I was very excited to visit the bookstore and purchase a few of Cal's books. I thought this would be a great way to introduce Cal to my children. I wanted to get slow productivity and how to win a college for my daughter. We got to the bookstore, we couldn't find any of the books. We asked the lady behind the counter and she sent us to the second level. They were not there either."

• 2:07Cal Newport?

  I think it's, it's a tragedy. We're talking three to three and a half million copies of these books have been sold. None of them out of the Georgetown bookstore. I do a lot of events at Georgetown, too. You know, I give a lot of talks for the libraries, for different departments, for, you know, the, the parents' weekends, parents' weekends, so what have you. I think in the end, it's just maybe whoever runs the bookstore just hates me.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Well, you read a lot of books. Do you buy any books there? Maybe they're like, oh, you read so many books, but you don't buy any here.

• 2:36Cal Newport?

  Yeah, maybe. That's true. I don't. I don't. Yeah.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Then you gotta go in there and spend some money and then you can make some money.

• 2:43Cal Newport?

  I will say, I did see who I think is the owner of the Georgetown bookstore, the administrator walking by with a Free Jesse Skeleton shirt. So I think what's really going on here is that it is a pointed protest against what we're doing here on this show. But anyways, there we go. Well, Michael noted it. I hope he complained vociferously. I don't know why I really care about it. I like checking. I do check bookstores. I'm always curious like which carried and which don't. Like, I was happy to see when we were just up in Boston that my favorite bookstore in Cambridge, Harvard bookstore, has a Good Call Newport section. So I was like, that's cool, because I used to go to that store when I was first starting to write books. So I was happy to see that. The Harvard Co-op, which I didn't go in, but when my first books came out, when I was,

• 3:25Cal Newport?

  you know, 22 and a newly minted graduate at MIT, I remember the Harvard Co-op put How to Win at College on like one of their tables. Like, they liked that book. And I would just sort of lurk around and be like, was anyone going to? People would pick it up and look at it. And so like, I liked that bookstore or whatever. But there's other bookstores that just determinately do not carry. So it's always interesting.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Do you ever see it in airport bookstores?

• 3:50Cal Newport?

  Sometimes. Those are negotiated differently. It's like, what people don't know is if you see a book in an airport bookstore, like on it being displayed. Most of that's pay to play. It's like part of the marketing publicity budget for the book is like Hudson News, you pay to play. All right, we're going to pay you to put our book in there. That's, that's which is different than, you know, say like an independent bookstore. So it's a self fulfilling prophecy. You see just like major releases of things that might appeal to a large crowd because those are the books that are going to make enough money that they'll spend money to put in the airports. I'm so you, I'm sure my books have been in airports, but it's just often it's investment and like, okay, we're going to pay for like a few months or a few weeks of your book being, it's not the case for all the shelves in the airport, but certainly for like the

• 4:35Cal Newport?

  display cases.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 4:36Cal Newport?

  Yeah, that's all, that's all pay to play.

• 4:40Cal Newport?

  All right, well anyways, we enough of me complaining about not getting enough, enough of my books places. We got a good show. We're going to react to some pro internet stuff. An interesting article that I had a fun time getting into. We got some questions and then a first episode in May, so we'll do my April books in the final segment. All right, so let's get started with my deep dive. Last week, the economics professor and commentator Tyler Cowen published a contrarian article over at the Free Press. It was titled, Why I Often Choose My Phone Instead of Flesh and Blood. I'll put it on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening.

• 5:23Cal Newport?

  It had a contrarian subhead. I'll read it to you right now. Admonishments Against the Online World Miss Why It Is Profoundly Human. Without the internet, I would not know most of the people I learned from the most. So given my history of techno criticism with my particular focus on social media and smartphones, you might expect that I would have a lot of disagreement with Cowen, but I'm actually more on the same page as him than you might at first expect. I think it's worth understanding what we agree on as well as the places where we still disagree as it will, as you will see, help us uncover a powerful new way of thinking about the role of the internet and cultivating a deep life. All right, so I'm going to dive into the article here a little bit. Tyler opens with a strong claim.

• 6:08Cal Newport?

  I'll read it to you from the article. Just walk through an airport where most people have idle time and watch how many of them are on their phones. You must either think this is mostly justifiable or you have a very low opinion of current humanity. Right? So he's like, look, how bad can this be if it's the default thing most people do? Are most people just bad and living bad lives? Or maybe it's not so bad? Then he goes deeper, and here's where I think it gets important. He goes deeper to explain what he thinks people are doing on these phones that is justifiable, that is good, why he's not worried about how much time he spends online. So I'm going to read a couple of quotes here, and this gets to the core of Tyler's argument.

• 6:51Cal Newport?

  He says, "I view many of these online time investments as a determined attempt to be in touch with the people we want to be in touch with, to meet the people we truly want to meet, and to befriend, and sometimes to marry them." That last note is a pointer to the fact that Cowan met his wife on Match.com. All right, he goes on to say, "Why do I spend so much of my time with email, group chats, and also writing for larger audiences such as free press readers? I asked myself that earnestly, and I have arrived at a pretty good answer. I believe that by spending time online, I will meet and befriend a collection of individuals around the world who are pretty much exactly the people I want to be in touch with, and then I will be in touch with them regularly. I call them, quote, 'the perfect people for me,' end quote.

• 7:35Cal Newport?

  The internet, in other words, has invented a new means of human connection characterized by 'the perfect people for me.'" He later adds, "While I do not find my online life depresses me at all, if it did a bit, maybe that would be worth it anyway, given how rich and interesting these connections can be." All right, so when we see what Cowen's argument for the internet is based on, "I find a lot of common ground." What he is describing, when he's talking about the internet delivering the perfect people for me, is basically one of the original pitches that accompanied the very early introduction of the consumer internet, which is the ability to discover and connect to interesting people that you'd likely have a hard time ever encountering in person.

• 8:20Cal Newport?

  This was a great liberating force that the internet brought to the world. It was a big promise of the internet, and I think it was something that it was able to deliver on. This is what for, you know, so many centuries earlier would attract creative types or independent types to cities. They were crowded and they were messy and they smelled and they were expensive, but they had a better chance of finding people who shared their idiosyncratic sensibilities. And there was how many countless people, historically speaking, living not in the cities, but in more parochial settings, found themselves misunderstood or marginalized or even rejected with no one in their life that seemed to be on the same wavelength or shared the same interest. The internet made it possible for basically anyone in the world to connect to anyone

• 9:02Cal Newport?

  else, almost for free and basically without delay, friction, or restriction. That is miraculous. I think that is a massive promise that this technology delivered on. Cowan is pointing that out, and I agree with him. But this brings me to a nuance that I think Cowan's piece is missing. Here's the problem. Here's what I would add on to the end of this article that he wrote. The problem is, more and more of the way that we're using the internet at the moment is actually pushing us farther away from this original promise of connection. In particular, I think the massive attention platforms, those that attempt to bring together hundreds of millions or even billions of users onto the same platform and to the same

• 9:47Cal Newport?

  homogeneous information ecosystem, these platforms which are increasingly dominating the amount of what people are doing when they're on their phone, when they're on their computers, these platforms are taking people away from this original promise of digital connection that Cowan is pointing out as being valuable. And the reason is, is because these platforms are aimed at engagement instead of connection. Like, the right way to think about these, and I believe this was Nicholas Negroponte's term, is they turn the masses into digital sharecroppers. They want as many people as possible generating text so that algorithms can sort and experiment and test to find what is as engaging as possible in this moment.

• 10:28Cal Newport?

  What, for example, is X if not a giant cybernetic algorithm where the input is the 500 million tweets that are written a day, and this algorithm, which is the combination of actual digital algorithms and human behavior with retweeting and reposting? What is this not, just sorting through this to say, what is capturing the zeitgeist right now? With such a big mill of possible content, we can find things that are really going to grab individuals' attention and keep them looking at this app. With 500 million tweets a day... You are only seeing a staggeringly small and astonishingly small fraction of the content being generated and it's been optimized to try to capture your attention. Now, the first generation of these attention platforms like Facebook and the original

• 11:13Cal Newport?

  version of Instagram, they pretended to care about things like connection. They would actually have you say, "This is my friend," and click a button. Or say, "I want to follow this person," or "This is a favorite person of mine." They had social graphs, but they were largely exploiting these social graphs to try to gain more engagement. They were just using these to figure out, "Hey, you're gonna be more interested in stuff that people you know look at, or things your friends like you might like." And so, they made it seem like they cared about connection, but they quickly were just exploiting these digital social graphs just to try to make content more engaging. The new generation of attention platforms such as TikTok or the new Instagram got rid of even pretending like they care about who your friends are, who you're following.

• 11:56Cal Newport?

  And they say, "We'll just completely abstract from any marker of classical human sociality. We'll just show you stuff that algorithms selected." Right? It's just, this is what we were doing, this is what we were trying to do all along. Let's just purify it. Put it straight to my brain. I still, to this day, get a bit of a shiver of, ooh, dystopian shiver when I'm on a plane and you'll see two rows ahead, the sort of grown man or woman like on a phone doing TikTok when the plane lands. And it's just three-second swipe, three-second swipe, two-second swipe, just nonsense. Right? Nothing about this is connecting us to interesting people. Nothing about that is helping us find the perfect people for us.

• 12:38Cal Newport?

  I actually wrote about this difference in The New Yorker a couple of years ago. I talked about, it was in the context of this article was threads being introduced as a competitor to Twitter, which had just been taken over by Elon Musk at that time. And my argument was, "We don't need a new Twitter." Right? Like, the whole concept of a platform like Twitter doesn't really solve a useful problem and gets us farther away from the promise of connection that the internet's built on. Here's what I wrote. Forcing millions of people into the same shared conversation is unnatural, requiring aggressive curation that in turn leads to the type of supercharged engagement that seems to leave everyone upset and exhausted. Aggregation as a goal in this context survives instead for the simple reason that it's lucrative.

• 13:22Cal Newport?

  There's great value in connecting huge groups of people to the same platform where they can be monitored and sold targeted advertisements, even if the resulting experience is dehumanizing for those involved. So that comes to the slight issue I have with Cowan's formulation is that the people hunched over their phones at the airport are largely not connecting to the perfect people for them. They're zoning out the TikTok or getting a vicarious, rancorous thrill by watching an aggressive X feed float by. I think that is a vision that is better analogized to Las Vegas than it is to the original proponents of the internet's vision of a global community of connection.

• 14:03Cal Newport?

  Now, here's the thing, though, when you understand that distinction between what we're going to call the original vision of a non-algorithmic internet and these new algorithmic-driven attention platforms, it empowers you, right? Because it gets rid of this dichotomy of either I am completely offline, in which case you're missing out on all these potential values like Cowan talks about, or I'm the guy three rows ahead of me on the airplane scrolling through TikTok addictively like as soon as the plane lands. This gives us more nuance. It says, "I can use the internet, but not the whole internet. What I care about is the non-algorithmic internet." So think about how you would do this.

• 14:45Cal Newport?

  You would say, "Okay, here's my rule for myself. When I go online, I'm interested in sites, apps, and services that do not involve algorithms to help curate what I see." Now, this is going to take most social platforms off the table. It might constrain other platforms. Like, for example, you might say, "I really like Cal's podcast and I watch it, the YouTube version on YouTube." And that's fine, but I don't follow the auto recommendations on the YouTube app down some like rabbit hole of just what's going to capture my attention. Right. So in some cases, platforms can embody both algorithmic and non-algorithmic engagement. When I wrote my book, Digital Minimalism, one of the big examples of this was Facebook groups.

• 15:29Cal Newport?

  There's a lot of people who had real world groups they were a part of, like running clubs that used Facebook groups to organize. But when they recognized that's what I need Facebook for, they said, great, I'll use a plugin to block an algorithmically selected news feed that's just trying to capture my attention and just log in to go to the group to see when the next run is going to be. So there's, there's sometimes a platform can have within it both algorithmic and non-algorithmic parts. So what does this really leave on the table then, outside of those examples? Discussion groups? In that New Yorker piece I just quoted from, I spend time on a web forum I love called TalkNats.com, which is just fans of the Washington Nationals and every game, there's

• 16:13Cal Newport?

  just a discussion thread. It's about 40 or 50 people are on there. Most people know each other and just having a good time. They have the game on, they're chatting about the game, about where they are. It's fantastic internet community. Nothing's algorithmically selected. Nothing is rancorous. I just think that's fantastic. There's plenty of those type of discussions on the internet. Sometimes it's voice based like you would find on a Discord server. I think newsletters, fantastic example of non-algorithmic internet. I am getting ideas from someone I think are interesting. And often, like if it's a Substack based letter, there's comments and discussion under the article itself. Like Tyler's article was part of the Free Press. If you go to

• 16:54Cal Newport?

  the Free Press, it gets emailed to you. There's big discussion of that article of people who like subscribe to Free Press and like Tyler and want to argue it. Like that's going to be an interesting discussion. I think podcasts are a great example of non-algorithmic internet. Yeah, you find a podcast you're really interested in and you're able to engage deeply and sustained with like a particular conversation on a topic and you might not have like it might be too niche of a topic that there would ever be a national radio show or television show on and now you can find a community of people who care about it. And if that podcast has an accompanying newsletter or has a Patreon, you can have a place to go talk with other people who like that podcast. Micro social, uh, micro social media sites or hyper local media sites, I think are also great. It's, it's, it's like social media, but it's a small group of people

• 17:39Cal Newport?

  doing a specific thing. Sometimes really large apps that have hyper locality can be okay. I know people who like spend time on Strava with other friends running in the same city. WhatsApp groups with people spread out you've met that share an interest could be really great. Blogs and old fashioned standalone websites, I think are great. Old fashioned, just sending emails between interesting people that you've met. Even AI, I think having explorations with an AI chatbot on a topic you find is interesting and you wanted to explain it to you and you're like, hey, I really want to understand how to do like this math technique or can you explain to me how a computer chip works? Like, I think that's fine as well. That's not, that's non-algorithmic in the sense that it's not someone trying to curate stuff the, the maximum engage you. You're

• 18:23Cal Newport?

  sort of like exploring like a topic, right? I think that's interesting as well. And open source collaborations would fall into non-algorithmic internet as well. The non-algorithmic internet, I think, remains a fantastic place and could be a boon to your daily life. It's non-addictive. It tends not to get in the way of other things that matter. It's a net plus, not a net negative. So it's all about, in my mind, differentiating between the algorithmic and non-algorithmic internet. I, I think these dichotomies matter. It's just like in the world of work where, you know, 10 years ago, I made this distinction between deep and shallow work and it really changed a lot for a lot of people.

• 18:58Cal Newport?

  There's a difference between thinking about work and not working and deep work versus shallow work. It really changed the way people thought they should understand it. We should have a similar discernment, I believe, when we're talking about the internet as well. The one final warning I'll add, though, to thinking about non-algorithmic internet is you can meet and connect with people that you otherwise would not find in your everyday life, and this is powerful. I have come to believe, however, that this should not be your only social connection, right? Like, I'm gonna use myself as an example here. The non-algorithmic internet has allowed me to meet or stay in touch with people I meet who are precisely matched to my idiosyncratic, like, abilities and interests, right? Like,

• 19:41Cal Newport?

  this morning before we recorded this podcast, I was emailing with Oliver Berkman. How many other writers are there out there who, like, do considered semi-philosophical writing about things like time management and the good life, right? There's like four of us. The internet means I can be talking to one of them on a regular basis. Yesterday, I had a conversation with, like, Brad Stolberg and Steve Magdis, writers who are also writing in the pragmatic nonfiction space, we're the same age, like, it's, we get along really well, and they don't live, you know, Brad's in North Carolina, Steve's in Texas. Non-algorithmic internet means we can chat. We were on a Zoom call and could just sort of chat, and this is all fantastic stuff. But my wife and I have also really prioritized, especially

• 20:23Cal Newport?

  the last five or six years or so, as our kids got a little older, community here, where we live, people that we see on a very regular basis, really put a lot of energy into it, and it's been a fantastic, I think, counterbalance. It's good to have the friction of interactions with people that you share, they're shared community values, but they're not people who are, like, hyper-matched to exactly like you and your personality and what you're interested in. It's more the sort of heterogeneity in your social connections is important. There's also, as I write about digital minimalism, there is something about just being there with real people in the real world on a regular basis that your mind recognizes as social, and it does not think about the text messages and the emails and the social posts and the Zoom calls the same way.

• 21:08Cal Newport?

  It likes those, but that's all you're doing. It is still a bit of a fragile anxiety that's going to surround your sense of sociality. It wants to see, your brain wants to see the same people on a regular basis, flesh and blood. You sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on their behalf, they do the same on yours. That can't be beat when it comes to your brain saying, yeah, we're part of a tribe in this matter. So you, I think your life is better with the non-algorithmic internet than without it. But I wouldn't build an entire social life just around that. I think the balance of the two is probably the, the way this works out best. So there we go. Non-algorithmic internet, Jesse. It's what I grew up with. I miss it. Actually, that's the only internet I use because I don't use the algorithmic sites.

• 21:51Cal Newport?

  So it's like my experience of the, I use a lot of internet, but it's all almost entirely non-algorithmic.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. What do you think Tyler uses is probably the same, right?

• 21:59Cal Newport?

  That's the thing. Yeah. You look at his article, everything he's talking about is non-algorithmic internet stuff, right? I mean, it's, it's, I email people, I listen, like he, he pushes back at some point against Ross Duhut and John Height. He's like, look, Ross had, had this big New Yorker piece or New York Times piece last week about the existential threat of digital life. And John has the anxious generation and he kind of pokes fun at them like, look, they have, I'm excited to listen to John's podcast and read, you know, Russ's Substack or whatever. Like saying like, hey, you guys are saying the internet's bad, but you're on the internet. But those types of things, like a podcast or a Substack, I think is really positive. That's non-algorithmic internet. So I think Tyler does a lot of like connecting with people, emailing people, having conversations with people.

• 22:44Cal Newport?

  He wrote a book about a few years ago, maybe it was a decade ago now, about how he's like an info vor, he called it. Like he loves just like sucking in huge amounts of information from all sorts of sources. It just, he gets really excited by that, meeting interesting people, sending messages around. Like he's very much information extroverted. Like he loves lots of information, meeting lots of people, talking to lots of people. What he's not doing is spending three hours on TikTok.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:10Cal Newport?

  Zoning out, right? I, he's not on probably just like an hour on Instagram, just seeing what like other authors, like highly produced videos. So I actually think he probably uses a way more internet than I do, but I think it's still largely non-algorithmic.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:25Cal Newport?

  Yeah, he's a nice guy. He met with me when I first moved out here for Georgetown and gave me some good advice about how to write books for a general audience while also being a professor. Really smart guy and his advice was good.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  You gotta get on his podcast.

• 23:39Cal Newport?

  Oh, yeah. His podcast is a bit intimidating. He's a really smart guy.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  He grilled, um, I, yeah.

• 23:45Cal Newport?

  He reads, he's like Ezra, Ezra does this too, Ezra Klein, though Ezra doesn't grill you. But what they both share is they read the book.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  He was on Ezra was on him recently. It was good.

• 23:54Cal Newport?

  Yeah, because he reads the book and then he really thinks about it. And then he's like, this is what I disagree with. And there are like serious disagreements. But there was a while where his set for his podcast had a pile of like, part of the set was like a pile of books on a table between two chairs. And Deep Work was in that pile of books. So I feel like

• 24:13Cal Newport?

  he'd probably have me on, but he'd probably grill me about a bunch of stuff.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:16Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Uh, all right. So we've got some good questions coming up, but first to hear briefly from a sponsor.

• 24:26Speaker 02

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• 24:54Cal Newport?

  Let's talk facial hair, Jesse. Uh, when it comes to a good shave, who do you need to look towards? You look towards Harry's. Harry's has what you need to keep your face looking the way you want it to look without the pain of having to go to the drugstore to try to buy new razors or shaving cream. I mean, to try to do that here in Tacoma Park, there's like a, it's like playing the game, you know, Legends of Zelda. They try to find the right person to unlock the gate that brings you into the secret hallway in which you have to get past the serpent. And then the, the metal bars in front of the, then finally at the end of your quest, like a princess comes out and hands you your shaving cream.

• 25:37Cal Newport?

  Subscription shaving stuff means you don't have to worry about that. If you're going to do the subscription sets, you gotta use Harry's. They got good blades, German engineered blades. I like the handle. The handle is nice. It's weighted and the one I got has this very sort of like sharp rubber eyes, like orange stuff on it. Like it feels good in the hand. The blades are fantastic. Gives you a really close shave. They have customizable delivery options for scheduled refills as low as $2, which is half of what you'll pay for other big brands. You get a five blade razor, the handle I really love, foaming shave gel and a travel cover for just three bucks. If you go to harrys.com/deep. I mean, it's a no brainer. You shave every day

• 26:20Cal Newport?

  if you're a guy, I'm assuming, unless you have an awesome beard. But even then, you gotta trim it. Harry's has the great blades. It has the great handles. It has the great shaving foam. It's the right price and it comes automatically at the schedule that you want. Really is a no brainer. They got some other stuff going on you should know about. Rich lathering, skin softening, body wash and scents like redwood, wildlands and stone. I like the sound slash smell of that. They have deodorant now. High quality amazing smell deodorant for just $5. They have hair and grooming products. If you're like me, you're like, I don't want to deal with going to stores for this stuff. You really can take care of everything you need for, from your shaving to

• 27:00Cal Newport?

  showers to your hair, just showing up on, for a good price, like in a box automatically on a schedule that works for you. Harry's is what you need. So you can define your look with the best shaving products at the best price from Harry's. Normally their trial set is $13, but right now you can get it for just $3 at harrys.com/deep. That's our exclusive link, harrys.com/deep for a $3 trial set. I also want to talk about the Aura Frame. A U R A. It's Mother's Day is coming up. This is a fantastic Mother's Day gift. It's one of these digital picture frames. And what you can do is easily upload pictures straight from your phone where you took them

• 27:42Cal Newport?

  and they will show up and rotate nicely through the Aura Frame so that, for example, your mom Keep up with what's going on in your life. I've mentioned on the show before, I've bought an Aura Frame for both my mom and my mother-in-law. So we have an Aura Frame at both places. We try to be good about uploading our photos to both of these at the same time. And they love it. And the frame is cool. It'll, it'll like move the photos around. And if they're cropped vertically, it'll put two next to each other. And as I've mentioned, I get text messages from my mom, which is like, what's this photo? This is great. And I'm like, I can't see your picture frame. You live 100 miles away. But they love their frames. Your family will as well. Fantastic technology, simple to use. I've bought into and I love

• 28:24Cal Newport?

  them. They were named best digital photo frame by Wirecutter. They've been featured in over 495 gift guides. If you want to do one of these digital picture frames, the Aura Frames is the one you need to do. Now Aura has a great deal for Mother's Day. For a limited time, listeners can save on the perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com to get $35 off plus free shipping on their best-selling Carver Matte Frame. That's A-U-R-A-frames.com. And use the promo code DEEPQUESTIONS, one word, DEEPQUESTIONS. And you can support the show by also mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  First question's from Antonio. Can you suggest activities for deep breaks? As a recovering binge worker, I struggle to maintain a sustainable work pace. I think that planning for some deep breaks along the workday may help me out.

• 29:21Cal Newport?

  Well, I'm going to suggest two things. All right. You say you're a recovering binge worker. A, I would say just work less. And then B, you can have some deep breaks interspersed between the work. But deep breaks are not what you use to make your work pace more sustainable. Working less is what you do to make your work pace more sustainable. So let me just pull those two apart real quick. Deep breaks, what that means is if you're working on something that requires deep work, right? So you're in a singular cognitive context, doing something cognitively demanding, and you need to like, take a break, you need to give your brain a breather. Deep breaks, they don't do something in that like, five or 10 minute break, that is going to load up a conflicting cognitive context, because

• 30:05Cal Newport?

  it's going to take you a while to get back into your focus. So a deep break is a way to take a breather. Without jumbling up what's going on in your brain. So for example, if you're trying to write something very complicated, like I'm going to go up, I'm going to walk across the street to get a coffee. Maybe I'm going to listen to a podcast that is completely divorced from the work I'm doing, like a baseball podcast. And then I'm going to come back and put down my coffee, get back to the work. Like, that's fine. If instead you say, let me go on my email for 10 minutes. Now you're going to be looking at lots of semi-related work tasks with overlapping cognitive contexts. And it's going to really get you like emotionally aroused and jumble up the cognitive contexts that are activated in your brain. And then when you turn your attention back to writing, it's so much harder.

• 30:49Cal Newport?

  So deep breaks is like, how do you take a breather without jumbling up your brain? That's not going to make your work pace more sustainable. I mean, yeah, it's nice to take breaks here and there. But what makes your work pace more sustainable is working on fewer things at the same time. What burns people out is too large of a concurrent workload. Why? Everything you agree to work on is going to bring with it its own administrative overhead, emails, meetings, conversations that you have to do to collaborate and keep up with the work. The more things you're working on, the more of this administrative overhead that's in your day. After a while, a large fraction of your day is just servicing administrative overhead, which tends to arrive haphazardly and often require sort of like ad hoc decisions or quick responses. And now you're just jumping around between things.

• 31:33Cal Newport?

  That burns you out. Work on fewer things. Have a clear shutdown. Make some days easier than others. Like, I'm just going to really stop at two on Friday. That's how you get sustainability out of work. And it really is a separate thing than just making sure that your short breaks don't jumble your brain. Like, deep break advice is really basically like, don't check your email when you take a break from something hard. Like, that's just going to scramble your brain. So there's really two different things going on here. Do both, but working less at the same time, I think, is what you really need for a sustainable work pace.

• 32:05Cal Newport?

  All right, who do we got next?

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Next up is Yajna. I'm struggling with the idea of becoming a parent largely because I fear losing the time and space required for deep work. This difference in priorities is causing tension between me and my partner who doesn't share the same creative drive or need for deep focus. Could you share your thoughts on how to approach parenting without resenting the sacrifices to my deep work?

• 32:27Cal Newport?

  I mean, I think for most people in this situation, this question doesn't make a lot of sense. For some people it does, but let me make this distinction because it's, it's often something that surprises me. So here's the common situation that I'm thinking about. Like you, you have a job, you have a nine to five job, right? You're, you work at, you know, like university or something like that. You know, you have a job, maybe like it's hybrid, like on, on one day a week, you could like do it from home or something, but like you have a traditional job.

• 33:00Cal Newport?

  And then you have a kid. Okay. And then maybe you take time off from your job because you have like maternity leave or paternity leave. And then at some point like you're going back to your job. You know, your life is a lot busier now in the sense that when you're not at your job, your time really is not your own. When you're, when you're presumably when you're at your job, you haven't left the kid home alone with the dog or presumably, you know, you don't have the baby torn on, you know, at your office and hoping no one notices. So there's childcare during that period, but when you're not at your job or before, you could be like, I'm going to go for a run and then I'm going to read a book and then I'm going to like maybe meditate. No, no, no. What you're going to be doing is like survival mode and then including at night, the baby is up and it's constantly like passing it back and forth.

• 33:45Cal Newport?

  And you really do lose that time. But when you're at your job, you're at your job. If you're in the standard situation, having a standard job, deep work is all about just what you do during those hours where you're at your job. I'm here anyways. I want to make a higher fraction of this time be deep versus shallow, which means I'm going to put aside chunks of time while I'm at the office to do undistracted work as opposed to trying to interleave my other work with my deep work. So it's just about here are the things I'm doing at my work. How do I want to arrange them today? I'm going to try to batch together concentration and then batch together non-concentrated things. In that sense, this is unrelated to what's going to happen when you get home.

• 34:23Cal Newport?

  In other senses, it can be really related. So let's, let's go through those cases as well. Okay. How can it be related? Well, some people don't have normal job, office jobs. Right. And some people are like, look, I kind of freelancing or cobbling things together. I work from home. I don't have a childcare solution. I'm going to just be watching the kid and trying to do as much of this freelance work as I can. That is a situation in which in, at first will be very hard to do deep work because you will be very distracted. It'll be very hard if you're doing childcare and work. That is just a hard situation. And it will be hard to do deep work. That is a situation which is hard to do deep work. The other ways, and this is kind of more subtle.

• 35:03Cal Newport?

  Right. So I used to say like, look, this is a clean distinction. When you're at your office, you're at your office. I'm not saying work more hours or anything, just deep work is what you do when you're there. There is overlap between these two things. A, you're going to be tireder, right? That can make it harder to do deep work. So yeah, my kid is in childcare. It's with the nanny. I'm at the office, but you are up five times feeding the baby. It's going to be harder to do deep work than without it. That is a way that kids can interfere with deep work at work. The other way, and honestly, I think this gets worse as the kid gets older, is there's a psychological footprint of thinking about your kids. They, what's going on? I'm worried about this or that, that you find I have a harder time concentrating,

• 35:47Cal Newport?

  even though there's not a, there's not a physical distraction. I'm at my office. My kid is not here. My kid has no access to me, but I'm thinking about her, thinking about him. And it's harder than it used to be to get into deep work. Fair or not fair, this tends to affect moms more than dads, right? So I'll get this complaint from moms like, yeah, sure, we both go to work and we're both working the same number of hours and we're splitting the, the work when we get home in like a consistent way, but I am worrying about the kid a lot more because of whatever evolution or genetics than my husband is. And this is frustrating to me because I'm just having a hard time working as deeply as I used to. And I think that's a reality I didn't used to notice, but then we had someone on at some point, Jesse, we had a psychologist on who sort of explained this. There's somebody who studies psychology at work.

• 36:31Cal Newport?

  All right. So we put these together. What do we get? We get, okay, during this period, you gotta be really on the ball. If you're working at an office, be on the ball when you're working because you don't have access to time outside of that. Right? So you want to be organized and separate time blocking and deep work for non-deep work is important because you just don't have, you're not going to have the ability that you might've had before the kid to be like, oh, that's like, when I get home from work, knock out the memos. You have to be more on the ball. Two, you probably do have to moderate your deep work expectations, whether it's because you're freelancing at home, tiredness, or psychological footprint of kids. It is going to like reduce your facility with deep work, but then it gets better. Right? And then the

• 37:13Cal Newport?

  kids get older and it's the division between the two. It's less of a crisis mode. Your mind gets more used to kids and your routine. And it's like, this is fine when I'm working, I'm working, when I'm not working, I'm not working. They're not staying up all night. You gain back other parts of your life again. And then it gets better. And so like, it's okay to think about like, a young kid period is a foot off to accelerate a little bit on deep work period. Knowing that like, I can put it back on again in a little bit. I mean, there'll be other issues, but that crisis mode kind of goes away. So I, I now recognize where I used to say, like, I don't understand the relevance of this. Like, are you bringing your kid to the office? Like, this is just about what you do at the office. I now see this stuff bleeds over. So get realistic

• 37:55Cal Newport?

  about it, but know that like, from a work perspective, it does, in some sense, it does get easier, better to get back to deep work. Or you'll end up like simplifying, like, actually, I don't want to work this much. I'm going to sort of change my, you know, which I think is also a very natural evolution that kids can sometimes push. This used to be this big thing, right? I see like, people would always write in, like, well, who's watching the kids when you're doing deep work? It's like, I'm at the office. Like, I don't understand. The nanny. I mean, I'm at work. What do you mean? I'm not, I'm not, it's not like nine o'clock at night, and I'm at a chalkboard while like, my wife's feeding the kids. Like, what are you talking about? But then we sort of learn, like, okay, no, no, there's like this psychological, these like deeper things that are going there. All right. Who we got next?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Next up is Benji. In David Epstein's book, Range, he describes the advantages of doing a wide variety of activities. I understand the deep life as being more focused on deliberate practice and applied to narrower topics. Do you feel that your two philosophies are as different as I am representing them? Or are they closer than they seem?

• 38:55Cal Newport?

  Well, I'm going to change the terminology there. That's not my definition of the deep life. So you say, I understand the deep life is being focused on deliberate practice applied to narrow topics. Now, the deep life is about cultivating a life where you spend more time doing the small number of things that really matter to you and less time doing the things that don't. I think what you're referring to is maybe more of the philosophies you would see in like my book, Slow Productivity, or my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I do talk about professionally, the value of having a small number of things you do really well, this being more sustainable, but also something that gives you more career capital and therefore more control over your working life. So being good at a small number of things that are valuable, I argue, is often the best career strategy.

• 39:38Cal Newport?

  We had Dave on the show when his book came out. I don't know what episode this was, Jesse, but it was a couple of years ago. He came and did it in studio and we talked about this. We kind of got into, you know, my professional strategies of focusing on a small number of things and his strategy of being more open to things. And we actually reached an area of common ground. And I don't remember exactly how it resolved, but I believe the sort of common ground we landed on is that he was, he was sort of arguing professionally speaking, because his advice is also your non-professional life. It's just more interesting to have varied interests. But professionally speaking, he was talking about within a general direction, by sampling,

• 40:21Cal Newport?

  like you're kind of doing different things within that general direction, they can come together in really interesting ways. Not do completely unrelated things are going to somehow necessarily help your career. So he was talking about experimenting more within your general field, things that come together in more interesting ways. Or he was also talking about like maybe a single major life change, like his was, he was in grad school. Studying science and then he went into journalism and then the science helped them be a science journalist and like that, you know, that was really helpful, but I think we found some common ground where he agreed on deliberate practice and getting good at things is important, right? He talked about, I remember he talked about taking a novel writing course just to

• 41:06Cal Newport?

  get his nonfiction writing a little bit better because it was pushing muscles he didn't have before. And then he was also saying having other experimenting within your field could lead to interesting new connections that, you know, give you an interesting niches to uncover. So go back and find that episode. It was a really interesting discussion. Range is a great book. I mean, I know Dave well. He's a DC guy. Great writer. It's a great book. So, but we did find common ground. So definitely go back and find that interview. We should have him back. Yeah. He's a really interesting guy. I talked to him a lot. I should tell him, come back to the studio. All right. Who else have we got?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Next up is Alex. I was interested in pursuing a career in academia. Based on your book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, is this considered a winner take all field or an auction field of work?

• 41:52Cal Newport?

  That's an important question, Alex. For those who don't remember So Good They Can't Ignore You, the winner take all field is where there's pretty clear, a pretty clear competitive structure by which you're being evaluated and only those who get near the top of this structure get to succeed, right? The obvious example being like sports. It's pretty obvious what it means to be good at baseball. You're evaluated in a clear way and it's a very small number of people. I think the major leagues, I saw this number the other day. It's like 600 or 350 total people. Very few people are going to like win and when they win, they do really well and you're gonna make a lot of money and be very successful, but there's no shortcut or secret way to get into professional baseball. Auction markets, by contrast, this is more like

• 42:34Cal Newport?

  we were talking about with Dave Epstein. It's where you find a unique combination of skills in some field that no one else has. And then you're able to gain career capital and autonomy based largely on the fact that like I can do this, this, and this, and no one else can. I didn't have to beat out a thousand people and definitively be the best among those thousand people to get the success. There's just no one else doing this. This was sort of like Dave with his science master's degree and then he went to Sports Illustrated and he was like, look, I'm really the only sports writer here who also understands how to read academic science papers. And then that became, you know, his beat, this sort of like science of sports

• 43:14Cal Newport?

  Academia, if we're talking, and we got to define our terms here, but if we're talking like R1 academia, so like a classic tenure track job at a well-known institute, Carnegie One Institute, that's basically a winner-take-all field. It is a trap to think, I can kind of find a way into a position by, look, I'm combining this interest with that interest and this type of skill here, no one else is doing this, and that's going to kind of get me a side door into the job at Georgetown, or the job at Dartmouth, or the job at Harvard. That basically doesn't work. It's a pretty clear competitive structure that is almost entirely assessed on, how many papers have you published in places where it's super, super hard to publish papers? Just straight-up intellect testing, right? That's what matters. You have to do that. It's

• 43:59Cal Newport?

  really hard to do that. Most people aren't going to succeed to do that. Everyone's trying to publish in the top venues, only the best stuff gets in. You have to do that a bunch of times. It's the academic equivalent of, look, I've been hitting 300 in, you know, D1 college baseball for the last three years, right? There's no shortcut to that. The numbers don't lie. So with academia, that's why I always say, if you want to do like the classic, you know, R1 tenure-track position at like a tier-one school, you have to like honestly assess, do I have, do I have a chance of like winning in this winner-take-all competition in my school? Can I be like one of the top producers, you know, in my field? That's what it's going to take. That's why you want to go to the best possible graduate school

• 44:42Cal Newport?

  and work with the best possible people and, and publish, publish, publish. It was a lot of flashbacks about this, Jesse, because we were up in Boston a couple of weekends ago. I took my kids to MIT. Like, so walking around the MIT campus, it was a lot of flashbacks of my time at MIT. That was the whole attitude there was like, you need to publish in the best places, and you need to do it like yesterday. Like, that's what we do here. You're going to get an academic job, that's what matters. None of this like going to work for industry stuff, that's embarrassing. You want an academic job, and that means you have to publish. And I came out of there with a lot of papers. I don't remember. I had to look up my, it wasn't my-

• 45:21Cal Newport?

  Not my application for my professorship, but I my research statement when I went up for 10 year, which I did pretty soon, early, I went up early for 10 year and I was giving it, someone asked for it yesterday, another professor going for 10 years. So I was like looking at my old, the research statement when I went up for 10 year in 2015. And what does it say? It was like, okay, I have published, it was 64 peer reviewed papers.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Damn.

• 45:48Cal Newport?

  Yeah, 42 conference, 10 journal and then workshop and shorts. It was like a lot of already 2,500 citations, 22h index at the point. It's numerical. Like you had to just do the work. There's no secret way into those types of, I mean, you can get kind of fake positions at those good schools and people might not be able to tell the difference, but there is no shortcut. So like, if you think you can win, it's a really cool job. But don't, don't delude yourself. If you're really not on the track to win in that game, then it is winner take all field.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  When you finished your program, how many other students finished with you?

• 46:26Cal Newport?

  I don't know. That's a good question. I mean, MIT is a huge, relatively.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  But in your little group, like five?

• 46:31Cal Newport?

  Oh, let me think. In my group, I was, I was the only one to graduated that year, my research group.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 46:38Cal Newport?

  Usually like there's someone, it's a big enough group that you'll have someone like per, once per year.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Are any of those other people who are below or above you professors right now?

• 46:48Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them are killing it. There's one guy who started towards the end of my time. He's MIT professor now. Yeah, he was really good. Another person, she came up in conversation the other day, she had Tel Aviv University, 10 years doing, doing really well. The, here's the, the most funny coincidence is there was someone I went to undergrad with, he was a year ahead of me. I think a year ahead of me, Jeremy. We were both undergrads together at Dartmouth. We both ended up at MIT, working in the broader theory group. And then we graduated the same year.

• 47:29Cal Newport?

  And we both got hired at Georgetown the same year. So we have been, and then we got tenure the same year, and we got full professor the same year.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  So you see them all the time?

• 47:38Cal Newport?

  Every day. Yeah. So we have been, and we have, our CS trajectories began in undergrad, and we have never been separated since. Yeah.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  That's pretty wild.

• 47:48Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it's just kind of like a coincidence. Yeah. My closest collaborator who graduated a couple of years before me, he's a National University of Singapore, he's crushing it over there. That group was very successful in placing people in academia.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 48:03Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Interesting. Going back there. I like my time at MIT. All right. Who we got?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Next up is AK. What's the difference between following your passion, what you are critical of, and lifestyle centric planning, which you advocate for? The latter seems to be based on what you feel passionate about.

• 48:21Cal Newport?

  So the problem with following your passion is it's an idea that's very based on jobs. It's very job specific. So this phrase, follow your passion, is specifically referring to how you select a job and what you should expect in return for that selection. It says, if you match your job to a pre-existing passion, your life will be good and you'll be happy. My argument is that often doesn't work, and a lot of people don't have a clear passion they can match the jobs in the, in the first place. What does bring people day-to-day happiness is actually the reality of their day-to-day lifestyle. Who are they around? What type of place do they live? Like, what's the rhythm of their day? What's going on? Is it, is it

• 49:05Cal Newport?

  like a day where they're living somewhere scenic and they're done with work by three and they're mountain biking in these mountains and then they come back and there's like friends in the backyard and it's cafe lights and they're like trying out like a microbrew that someone brewed and just socializing? Or is it like they're in, you know, it's, it's, they're, they're in a city and it's like all energy and they're kind of like plugged into like an art scene and, and, you know, you, you feel like, what do I want my day-to-day? What, what are the, that's what makes your, your affect is affected by the reality.

• 49:37Cal Newport?

  The reality of your day to day, like what type of things happen in your day to day? So my argument has been for a very long time, work backwards from that. Like, what do I want my days to be like? Then I'll figure out like, how do I get that? And your job will be one of the big levers you use, among other things. But now your job is way more instrumental. In the follow your passion paradigm, your job is the source of your contentment. In the lifestyle centric career paradigm, your job is one of the tools you use to get to a lifestyle that you think is going to cause you contentment. It's way higher probability to work backwards from the lifestyle that seems good than to work forwards from the job. I mean, I think most people can identify like, yeah, a lifestyle like this would make me happy. And it's different from people to people.

• 50:20Cal Newport?

  That's not super hard to identify. What is hard is assuming that just like your choice of the job is going to give you everything you want and care about in your lifestyle. And in fact, one of the main reasons why following your passion fails is that connecting a job to something you're passionate about often disrespects or steps on all of the other stuff that's important to you in your lifestyle. Like in pursuit of like, I'm passionate about this, you end up like living in a type of place you don't want to live in, working in a rhythm you don't like to work in, doing the types of things day to day that like make you unhappy with like four or five things that are really meaningful to you that are far removed from your life because your job doesn't know what the ideal lifestyle is. So I first introduced lifestyle center career plan. I looked this up the other day.

• 51:02Cal Newport?

  It was way early, way before I even published So Good They Can't Ignore You. It was a blog post on my blog. And I believe it was titled like, The Career Advice No One Ever Tells You. And I wrote it at my sister's graduation. I remember we had like rented a house. She went to the Naval Academy, so we were in Annapolis. So I was thinking about graduation and commencement stuff. And I remember just having this clear, so I would have been at this point, early in my grad student career. And I remember thinking, man, what really matters is like the day to day of your life. I wish I had just thought, you know, this is the right way to do it. Like work backwards from the ideal lifestyle and then think, what are my options for getting there? So anyways, I'm a big advocate for it.

• 51:47Cal Newport?

  The other thing that's opened up by lifestyle center career planning is options. Right. So we're pretty good. It'd be like this lifestyle would make me happy. There's often a huge number of different combination of stuff you could do to get close to that lifestyle. The more options you have, the more likely you are to succeed. Whereas with following your passion, there might be just like one job that you think is your passion. It might be really hard to get. Like it's a, it's a way more narrow path. You might be out of luck. But if you're working backwards from a lifestyle, there's like so many different ways, you know, you can get there. And so you're much more likely to succeed with it. So anyways, I've been, I'm really developing this concept now because part two of my new book on the deep life is going to be about it. So I will have more rich thoughts about it, I guess, coming up.

• 52:31Cal Newport?

  I'm just finishing, you know, I'm up to my ears right now. In the final chapter of part one of that book, which is prepare to change your life. And then part two is doing lifestyle planning to actually transform it. So I'll be thinking about this a lot more. So Jesse, we'll have to revisit. We'll revisit lifestyle centric planning as I add more sophistication, but that's the basic idea.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  And then we can wear the hats.

• 52:55Cal Newport?

  Oh, we have, yeah, VBL CCP hats. Yeah.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  I actually wearing mine today.

• 52:59Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Have you been, has anyone identified it yet?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  No.

• 53:05Cal Newport?

  Did people cross the other side of the sidewalk when you walked by with it?

• 53:08Speaker 01

  No, it's a cool looking hat.

• 53:10Cal Newport?

  I like it. Yeah. Like the gray. I mean, didn't we like send it back? Like, Hey, can you?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:14Cal Newport?

  Yeah. He, he updated it for us. Yeah. I should wear mine more. All right. We got a case study. This is where people write in to talk about parts of our advice that we give here on the show, actually working in their own life positively. If you have a case study, you can send it to [email protected]. Okay. So today's case study is from Abigail. I said that right? And it says, I wanted to share my experience after implementing the takeaway from a recent episode.

• 53:45Cal Newport?

  In particular, the idea of eat the frog. I've heard it before, but something really hit me when I was listening to you guys talk about it. I figured out that the frog for me has nothing to do with work, but rather with making sure that I cook dinner for my kids. Since listening to the episode, I prioritize that difficult task in a set time after my husband takes the kids to school between nine and 10 a.m. It has been a made a world of difference for being able to focus on my actual job. I own a martial arts school currently in a self maintaining phase, so mostly just communication with current and prospective students. It has also helped my emotional well being by reducing stress levels as I solo parent most evenings while my husband is teaching. I guess what surprised me is figuring out what the difficult task was and accepting that.

• 54:29Cal Newport?

  I am also a writer and I may have been tempted to pick that as the focus, but it's not the thing that's causing the most friction in my life right now. So I just wanted to thank you and maybe share with your listeners how a takeaway can be a little bit surprising, but still very helpful. Eat that frog. That's a Brian Tracy idea. Do the hard thing first and the rest of the day will be easier. I think that phrase is if the first thing you do in the day is like eat a frog, then everything else will seem easier by comparison. So it's a great example of it. I'm jealous, by the way, that your kids go to school between nine and 10 a.m. We're out the door at 7:30 a.m. That would be nice. Our elementary schools around here, the public elementary schools start at like nine.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 55:09Cal Newport?

  Yeah. But our kids are in independent schools, so we don't get that advantage. High schools are like early, so it's middle school is earlier than elementary school because they use the same buses. High school is earlier than middle school. High school is like a seven o'clock bus pickup.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 55:21Cal Newport?

  Yikes. But that's great. I like this idea. Figure out like, what is the thing that's really causing friction and figure out a way to deal with it? And it could be eating the frog, like I just do that first thing. It could be automating it, or it could be taken out of your life. But I like that, like actually facing what's causing me stress. All right, do we have a call this week?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  We do.

• 55:39Cal Newport?

  All right, let's hear this.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Hello folks, my name is Owen. I'm calling from Edmonton in Alberta. I got two questions for you. One, what recommendations would you have to introduce a sense of seasonality? So are there specific rituals that you would recommend or ways of marking the change in seasons? And the second question is what to do when it seems like the meetings are the work. So I'm not referring to what to do in terms of organizing, you know, office hours and so on, but I work in a management position and a lot of the time just having meetings and getting people on board and explaining to people what's going on and driving. All

• 56:26Speaker 03

  of that is not just the culture, but it is actually the practice of the work. And are there ways of adapting to that? Or is it just a case of accepting that as reality? Okay, thanks so much. Take care. Bye.

• 56:41Cal Newport?

  Good question. There's a lot of ways to think about introducing seasonality into your work. A couple of things that are obvious. At the beginning of each season, do a plan, do a seasonal plan. You know, we talk about in multi-scale planning, the highest level is like a quarterly or semester plan. You can call that a seasonal plan. Take a day to do this. Like, I'm gonna kind of plan, maybe I'm not gonna go into the office, take a personal day or a vacation day. It's only four, it's not gonna add up to that much. Go to a cafe, think things through, work out your weekly templates or autopilot schedules, get new priorities, kind of clear your head. Like, that's helpful to mark the passing of seasons. Then I would say have busier seasons and less busier seasons. Maybe the summer is gonna be your less busy season. You don't need to make a big deal about this.

• 57:24Cal Newport?

  Just like have less projects that are due, schedule less meetings, you know, just have a period that you consider less intense and then other periods where you make it more intense. That's gonna make a difference as well. When it comes to your question about meetings, I think the important thing in a meeting-heavy job

• 57:42Cal Newport?

  Is to not think of like your whole schedule's fair game for meetings. You need to have more control about when these meetings happen. If it's a meeting heavy job, I would really lean into the use of some sort of automated scheduling tool and it could be using shared calendars. It could be using a specific scheduling tool like a Calendly, like a Schedule Once. And you're going to have to have significant parts of your days open for meetings, but it gives you control over when those parts of your day are, right? So you might have like 11 to four. So the morning you can kind of get stuff done and you have four to five to like shut

• 58:23Cal Newport?

  down and you give people like the chance to schedule meetings in there. Another thing, so now it's easy, right? You want to take the friction out, like we got to talk about this. Here's the link. We got to talk about this. Here's the link and people just sign up when they can. You just see when your afternoon meetings are. I think that works. I think that works really well. Another trick with this is like, if you have a couple of different meeting durations, make the actual duration that people are booking for 10 to 15 minutes longer than that. So if you're using one of these scheduling tools, you could have like a short conversation. You describe it however you want. It could be like short conversation, 15 minutes, longer conversation, 45 minutes.

• 59:05Cal Newport?

  But the actual scheduling schedules a half hour for the short conversation and an hour for the long one. So that you are going to have extra time right after a meeting to fully process your notes from that meeting. What do I need to do with this? What task need to go on my task list? What follow up can I do right away? You really do not want to stack back to back meetings because the unfinished tasks of the first meeting stay in your mind while you're in the second and this stuff can kind of aggregate. You just tell people like, yeah, this is a 15 minute meeting. It's going to book for a half hour on my calendar because I protect the second half. For processing the meeting, but this meeting is for 15 minutes, right? And that's how long we're going to talk. But this is a 45 minute meeting. I know it's on our calendar for an hour, but I'm going to call it at 45 minutes.

• 59:49Cal Newport?

  And that's going to help us because I need to process these notes. That makes a big difference as well. The other thing I would add is you need probably, especially if you're in the managerial position, you need to make sure that these meetings are on the ball. Right? So there needs to be some sense of whenever someone schedules a meeting, you know, it's this is what we need before this meeting starts. Like you need to send me X, Y, and Z. I need like, here's the decision you need to, that needs to be made. And here's all the relevant points for it. Right? That, that culture of like, you have to do work before the meeting. So the meeting can be focused on the decision that has to be made. That culture is really important for preventing meetings from rambling. And it allows much shorter meetings to actually work. Some companies have this culture. Amazon famously has this culture.

• 1:00:34Cal Newport?

  You have to do a lot of work before you can call people together into a meeting. And they have read, you have to write up this whole memo. Like here's why we're meeting. Here is all the relevant information. Here is why I can't make a decision, what I need from you. And you get grilled basically for like 15 minutes from the people who have read this. And then a decision is made and that meeting is over. So you really have to avoid people using meetings as a stand in for actual like time blocking or productivity. You really have to be careful of people who are like, this is on my plate. I'm worried about not making progress on it. So I'll just put a meeting with you on the calendar. Because when we get there, that'll like, remind me to work on this and we'll figure something out. Like, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not a source of your productivity for you.

• 1:01:17Cal Newport?

  If you need to meet with me, there needs to be a reason you have to do work. Right? And, and so if these are people that you manage who are scheduling these meetings, you can actually say like, yes, okay. You can schedule a meeting with me, but before you do, like before I say, yeah, schedule a meeting with me, send me the following. And you tell them like a background on like, what decision needs to be made? What the relevant information is and why they, what like help they need in making that decision? And you could say, email that to me. Even better, you can have like a folder where they can set up a Google Doc. Like, okay, I'm going to put all that information in. And you can say, let me know once you've filled that in. And then we can schedule a time to talk about it. Half your meetings are going to go away, by the way, because people like, I don't actually

• 1:02:02Cal Newport?

  want to do work. I was just trying to not have to remember this and get it on your calendar so I don't have to forget about it. And then the work that does happen is going to be way more efficient. So, three things I said here. Have scheduling set up for your meetings so you can control when you don't meet, so they can't conquer your whole schedule. Two, schedule meetings longer than the meeting's going to last. You always have at least 15 minutes to process a meeting and fully shut down that context when you're done. And three, always have some sort of pre-task that has to be done before you'll give someone the ability to schedule with you. At least for people who are below you, where you can actually get away with that. Those three things make a meeting-heavy job better. And then four, I mean, you mentioned this in your call, but use the office hours, right? For quick

• 1:02:45Cal Newport?

  questions or quick discussions, every day, one hour. Just show up during that time and ask me. I'm telling you, it's going to be a third of your meetings or more can get deferred to the office hours. Hey, that's a quick question. Just show up at my next office hours you can to three o'clock every day. Just call me or stop by my office. That's going to be a third of your meetings that never have to take up a dedicated spot in your calendar. This is a quick thing. Just show up at my next office hours. We'll get into it. We'll figure it out real quick. You do those things, I think you contain meetings. The final thing is if you have too many things going on, you're going to have too many meetings, but we'll leave that aside for now. All right. So there we go. That's my meeting advice. All right. We've got a good final segment coming up. Books I read in April, but first, hear from another sponsor.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

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• 1:03:58Cal Newport?

  Hiring is important. I was just having this conversation with a group of

• 1:04:04Cal Newport?

  I guess online content people that I know who now their team is, well, they have like four people on their team now. And they were saying like, yeah, here's the hard part about like doing anything is like finding the right people. Hiring is so critical. If you want to do any sort of businesses beyond just a single person. And when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidate. So you can reach the people you want faster. This makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs post directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. So if you've been

• 1:04:49Cal Newport?

  procrastinating on hiring because you're not sure where to find someone, Indeed has what you need, especially if you use their sponsored jobs featured. Plus with Indeed sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts. You pay only for results. How fast is Indeed? In the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility. If you go to indeed.com/deep, just go to indeed.com/deep right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast, indeed.com/deep.

• 1:05:34Cal Newport?

  Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need. I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Again, people I know, I know a lot of people in the world that do things online, sell things online from the physical to the digital. And there's a consensus that Shopify is how you sell. All right. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. happens with Shopify. From household names like Mattel and Jimm Shark to brands that are just getting started. With Shopify, you can tackle all the important tasks in one place from inventory to payments, to analytics and more.

• 1:06:19Cal Newport?

  It makes the marketing mind feel easy with built-in tools for running social media and email campaigns. So you can find new customers and keep them. And if you're looking for your business to grow internationally, Shopify has global selling tools to help you in over 150 countries. In person, try to open up an old fashioned store. Shopify is award-winning point of sale, connects your online and offline sales all in one place. It has 99.99% uptime and the best converting checkout on the planet. So you'll never miss a sale again when you use Shopify. So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/deep. Go to Shopify.com/deep.

• 1:07:02Cal Newport?

  That's Shopify.com/deep. All right, let's do our final segment. The first episode in May, so I'll talk about the books I read in April. I read, as I often try to do, five books in April, which I'll briefly summarize for you now. The first was I, Robot. My Isaac Asimov. I came across, actually, my wife came across it, a cool vintage version, like a 1950s version with a great sort of sci-fi modernist cover. The book itself came out in the 40s, but so this is like a pretty early edition, not a first edition. I hadn't read in a long time. A really interesting book. It's actually a collection of short stories that they combined to a single book

• 1:07:46Cal Newport?

  by adding these sort of italicized narration at the beginning of every story to try to like draw some connections between them. But you can tell they're separate stories. It's interesting because Asimov is dealing with ideas that seem relevant in our current age of AI at a time when computers didn't even exist. So it's like a largely electronic analog world. These robots have artificial intelligence through something he calls a positron network. He just kind of invented a technology that is like, it just works. And they, they, they had intelligence. And he's mainly dealing with like the moral quandaries of having intelligent robots. They're, they're all constrained by the three laws robotics. They can't hurt people. In his book, there's a worldwide government and the unions have said, no robots on earth. They're not taking jobs. They only exist on like outer space mining, you know, rigs or whatever.

• 1:08:31Cal Newport?

  And the stories are like about these like border cases, moral quandaries about weird stuff that'll happen. Including there's a cool story on a space station early on where like one of the robots becomes a god to the other robots. Like one of those, those types of things. It was, it was good. Asimov is an interesting character. I like the fact that he was a professor and then his, his sci-fi writing became so successful that he became a full-time writer. I kind of collect those stories. Then I read, because I don't know, I read a lot about Disney for some reason. But I read a book, a new one called After Disney by Neil O'Brien. It was a book about the period right after Walt died. And about that, like 10 to 20 year period.

• 1:09:14Cal Newport?

  And it's, it's really like a Tik Tok business book and I, not like Tik Tok T I K, but T I C K. Like this happened, that happened, this happened. It just kind of captures this period where Walt's son-in-law takes over and what was going on in the company. I just have always been interested in Disney as a business. We're going, by the way, God help us. I have a talk in Anaheim and we're bringing out the kids.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Are you going on the one on the west coast?

• 1:09:37Cal Newport?

  We're going to Disneyland. Yeah, God help us. Actually, I'm looking forward to it because I've read all these books about Disney, including books about Disneyland itself. So I want to.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  You've been before, right?

• 1:09:47Cal Newport?

  I've never been.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Really?

• 1:09:48Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And my parents.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  I've been to Disney World.

• 1:09:51Cal Newport?

  I've been to neither. My parents weren't on board with that, but I'm excited for Pirates. I love old animatronics, Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, like that type of stuff. I'm excited about. Or staying in the Grand Californian.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Sweet.

• 1:10:03Cal Newport?

  Doing it up. That should be fun. Then I read the baseball book of why by John McCollister, because it's baseball season started. I had to try to read some baseball stuff when it started. I'm reading another baseball book now, but you know, just to kind of get in the mood. That was a quick read. Then I read the technological republic by Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zeminski. So Karp is the founder of Palantir, I believe, right? Which is like a Silicon Valley style tech company that works on military technology. It's an interesting book. I like these types of books where they have like a new way of looking at things. There is a lot of homogeneity, I think, in like tech journalism and tech criticism. It's like, this is how we think about this. And then everyone gets on board with that.

• 1:10:47Cal Newport?

  This book is coming in and saying like, hey, we should be using technology, like not just, like their argument, Karp's argument, which I've heard him make before, is it's like, wimpy or a lack of courage or interestingness that like all of these tech companies, like what's the safest thing we can do is make like advertising based apps, like social media apps and video sharing apps. He's like, we should be building cool stuff with technology. And in particular, like we should be making our country better. Like technology shouldn't just be like, what's the safest thing we can do that, you know, is going to maybe make the most money. We should be like building better weapon systems. So the US can like be awesome, right? We should be building flying cars and like doing cool stuff

• 1:11:29Cal Newport?

  that makes the country better, like have ambitions for our technologies beyond just these like anodyne distraction apps. So, you know, I like that argument. And clearly he's biased in the sense that he wants the answer to be like Palantir's the right thing to do. You know, his argument is like we, military technology is important. Like it's better that the US needs to be better than other countries out the military. It's for our benefit and the benefit of the world. But I like that more general argument of like, we should be more inspired with technology, like do cooler, bigger things with it, not just trying to make apps that like in theory could be like a billion dollar unicorn, but doesn't really help the world at all. So it was interesting.

• 1:12:10Cal Newport?

  He's a good writer. Finally, I read Everything is Tuberculosis. This is John Green, the novelist, wrote this nonfiction book about tuberculosis and its history and his own experience, meeting someone at a tubercular ward in Africa. It's getting really good reviews. It was a good book. Yeah, John Green's a good writer. I picked this up randomly at the Harvard bookstore and it was good. It's interesting. It's partially the history of tuberculosis, partially like why, why we should be treating it more, like the history of policy and tuberculosis, plus personal narrative. And it's an interesting book. I like those types of swings. So I enjoyed it. I recommend it. There we go, Jesse. Those were my books.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Like it.

• 1:12:50Cal Newport?

  For April. I'm off to a slow start in May, but I think I'll catch up.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:12:56Cal Newport?

  That's all we got. We'll be back next week with another episode. Until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:13:03Cal Newport?

  Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions Podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.