Ep. 338: Why You’re Always Distracted

Find out more about Done Daily at DoneDaily.com! One of the most common complaints from listeners to the podcast is the feeling that they’re too distracted; both at work and at home. In today’s episode, Cal reviews five major explanations for this current state of affairs, and then uses this new understanding to identify concrete actions to make things better. He then answers reader questions and reviews the five books he read in January. 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: Why You’re Always Distracted [3:50] - How should I use social media for my documentary film project? [29:40] - How can I master a new job skill in a busy schedule? [37:11] - Any advice for developing and nurturing my “second mountain” values? [42:10] - How can overcome project paralysis? [48:41] - Is my knowledge work role doomed to fail? [52:10] - CALL: Supporting a spouse during stressful career planning [58:01] CASE STUDY: The benefits of a commute [1:05:35] JANUARY BOOKS: The 5 Books Cal Read in January, 2025 [1:14:13] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? Thanks to our Sponsors: thrivemarket.com/deep shopify.com/deep landroverusa.com vanta.com/deepquestions 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.

• 0:24Cal Newport?

  So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I'm a little bit relaxed today because yesterday, the day before we recorded this, I've published the fourth of the four weekly columns I had promised The New Yorker. Oh, yeah. So four in four weeks. Four in four weeks. The month of January was Cal month. What I was really doing actually was taking over Kyle Shaka's column for a month. He's on leave or some such, and so they're sort of handing out his column to various people. So I took it for the month of January. Man, that's a hard job. So he writes one every week? I guess so. And you usually are on once a month?

• 1:05Cal Newport?

  Or whatever. Whatever. I work on a word count. So it just sort of depends what I'm doing. Shorter ones will be more frequent, but if I do some longer ones, less frequent. I did a twice a month column in, God, early pandemic. And I don't remember if that was 2020 or 2021. But for about six months or a year, I did a twice a month column. That was like, okay, especially during the pandemic, because there's nothing else to do. We couldn't go anywhere. I would just come here and work on these articles and it was like something to do. Like you couldn't go to campus. You weren't going to social events. And I remember that being like, okay, that was some breathing room. Once a week is fast.

• 1:41Cal Newport?

  It was fun, though. You should check out the final column. The final column is about Michael Crichton. Like, the challenge was to work Michael Crichton as a motivating force in one of these columns. And I wrote about actually lessons, lessons from Crichton that's relevant to dealing with technology today. So I think it's kind of a cool idea. I did not, however, get eruption worked into it. Oh, you wanted to. I wanted to. We cut the stuff about like my personal relationship to Crichton. Did you have an interruption reference in that? I had a reference in some, one of the drafts. What did it say? I mean, I was talking about, somewhere I made a reference to the sort of preposterously large number of novels that were discovered after he died and published. And it was something like, Some of them from some of them which were like actually pretty good like 2011's

• 2:26Cal Newport?

  micros and the others, I think I call it like bafflingly bad. 2024 is eruption.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  At least you tried.

• 2:33Cal Newport?

  I tried.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  A cut.

• 2:35Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I tried. James Patterson might have sent out a hit team if I had said that. So anyways, read the articles. I think there's some cool stuff in there. Probably the one of the four that seemed to, I don't know which one has gotten the most attention. I like the last one I did about social media bans. So I actually got into the legal, we talked about a little bit on the show, but that one, I think it got some legs. Get into the actual legal standards for when you do or do not ban things that could be harming kids and how would we apply those to social media. Also seemed to get a bunch of pickup, I think on the me using Tik Tok article with the melt, my face melted into a phone.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:09Cal Newport?

  Yeah. That, that kind of made it around. I just ran into one of my neighbors in the hallway here at the HQ and she had seen that one.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:16Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So that one must be getting around. We'll see if the correct one's present. But that was fun, but my hat's off to Kyle for doing this every week. That is a skill and I am impressed. All right. We got a good show. Got a deep dive in here about a topic that I care about a lot. We got some good questions and case studies coming up. And for our final segment, this is our first episode of February. So we will do the books I read. We will review the books I read last month. All right. Let's get rolling, Jesse.

• 3:50Cal Newport?

  So one of the most common complaints I hear from my listeners and readers is that they feel like they're too distracted. This is a problem they have at work. It is also a problem that many of you have in your life outside of work as well. When we study mismatches between the modern digital environment and our current lives, which is more or less the theme of this show, this distraction issue really is one of the big issues that we're dealing with. And we've talked about all sorts of different isolated aspects of distraction, where it comes from, the value of attention, reclaiming attention. We've talked about all sorts of isolated aspects about that on this show, but today I wanted to pull a bunch of those ideas together. I have five big ideas.

• 4:34Cal Newport?

  About why you're probably too distracted. Some of them about your life outside of work, some of them about your life in work. And then for each of those ideas, we have some concrete responses to it. If you recognize that source of distraction, if you recognize its dynamics, what can you do in response? All right, so that's our plan. Let's start with idea one. You use your phone as a stress reliever. All right, so here's something I learned recently when I was going through first the acute recovery from my surgery for my core issue. And now as I'm going through the rehab for my back, because my back got messed up because my core was injured. You know how those fun things unfold.

• 5:14Cal Newport?

  One of the things I learned is that, oh, your phone can be a very powerful distract or stress reliever, right? Because the type of content you get delivered through your phone, if you're a social media user, it'll be through social media. If it's me, it's going to be like news or baseball rumors. It distracts you, it pushes emotional buttons. It's a bit of a sort of like a numbing palliative effect. In fact, when I was on the gurney waiting for my turn for surgery, which I was nervous about for obvious reasons, I had my phone still, right? They don't take that till the end. I was looking up on my phone on Wikipedia. I was reading the technical details of the MIDI format. I don't know if you know about this, Jesse, but the MIDI format

• 5:59Cal Newport?

  that you use for digital music transmission. That was very soothing to me. I was actually reading about the actual packet headers and payloads that have evolved for doing digital, capturing digital music. So I get this, right? I get that power. So what I learned from this is that for a lot of people, this just becomes a default response for any stress or any boredom, because it sort of works. It will put your mind somewhere else. It'll probably press an emotional cue. And it gets you just that, that relief in the moment. And again, it's not a bad thing in isolation, but when it becomes your default response to any sort of stress and boredom, when that becomes ingrained into your habit loops, when that reward system is pumping out the dopamine every time it sees that phone nearby and

• 6:40Cal Newport?

  you're a little bit uncomfortable, your life necessarily becomes very distracted. You can't watch that television show you're looking forward to watching with your full attention, the phone pulls you in, you can't enjoy dinner with your family because the phone is pulling you in, you can't finish that really hard, say, or memo or piece of source code you're trying to write at your job because that phone continues to pull you in. So we have a potentially positive use in isolation that when it becomes default, makes your life by default distracted. All right, so what is our concrete response to that particular dynamic? You have to introduce systematically higher quality stress relievers into your life. Build new habits about when I feel that stress. I know it's built up, I'm stressed about what's going on at life or work, I just want

• 7:25Cal Newport?

  to pull out that phone, that you have these other higher quality, more self-contained stress relievers. It could be exercise, could be getting outside and doing a particular type of walk, it could be making a certain type of tea, reading is a good one here, a particular type of books, in particular locations that you like to read, hobby or hobby-related projects, you're retraining your mind, in particular, your reward system to give you dopamine around those high-quality alternatives. It will also bust to stress, it will do so in a more durable way, and because it's an activity that has its own intrinsic value, you are actually going to feel better about it, and it doesn't lead to a behavior loop that's going to affect other parts of your life. Another thing you can do here is just train your mind to be more comfortable with boredom or a mild amount of stress. You're just bored sometimes, and you can kind of just like take a deep breath and slow

• 8:10Cal Newport?

  down and be present. That requires training, but it makes your mind more comfortable, and so your reward system becomes less desperate to have some sort of dissipation of those bad feelings. You're going to resist better this idea that I have this ready-made distraction, ready to go. All right, idea number two, why you might be too distracted. In the context of work, you are playing obligation hot potato.

• 8:37Cal Newport?

  This is an effect I've talked about before on the show, but I think it's critical for understanding a lot of the distraction in the modern knowledge workplace. When you see a message arrive in your inbox, or maybe in a chat window, but you see an incoming message that is sitting there, this can be a source of interpersonal stress because we say, "This is now an obligation on my plate. Someone is waiting for me." Kind of makes us a little uncomfortable. Our instinct, this is the bad habit we've learned, is to want to get those things out of these inboxes or channels as quickly as possible because that will, in the moment, relieve you of the cognitive burden of knowing that this thing is your responsibility. So what we do is we play obligation hot potato, which is what is the quickest way that technically

• 9:20Cal Newport?

  speaking, this message or chat is out of my hands and on someone else's plate? And so you send it back with like a question you made up. You know it's going to come back, right? You're not getting to the heart of the issue, but temporarily that's out of you, out of your inbox, right? Someone's like, "I think we should meet about this." You're like, "I don't want to deal with thinking through when I want to meet or whatever. I don't want to deal with my schedule. So how about like, yeah, sure, we should. When's good for you?" Technically, that's out of your inbox for now. It's coming back, but in the moment, it's out of here. Or you put thoughts, question mark, shoot it back. Or you send like a couple of random thoughts. You know it's insufficient for what they're asking for, but in the moment, it's not there in your inbox waiting for you to see it.

• 10:02Cal Newport?

  So it's just that drive obligation hot potato is I want to get stuff out of my channels as quickly as possible. The problem with obligation hot potato is that these things come right back. Then you punt them back. When you're doing the bare minimum to get you out of your inbox, the total number of times that messages will arrive and command your attention related to this particular issue goes up.

• 10:26Cal Newport?

  You're punting it, they punt it back. You punt it, they punt it back. You're throwing the hot potato over there. It burns their hands. They throw it over there. It comes back to you. The total amount of time now that you are having to react to something incoming goes up. The velocity of these things goes up because the granularity gets smaller and therefore the responses have to be quicker. And so overall, your level of distraction as captured by the amount of cognitive context shifting you have to do from your work back to your communication channels, that skyrockets all because in the moment, when you are in an inbox, you just want to get things out of there as quickly as possible. So once you recognize the obligation hot potato dynamic, it gives you... A concrete idea for solving this. How do we stop playing obligation hot potato? Well, we're going to have to spend more time with our messages. So that we're not doing the quickest thing.

• 11:11Cal Newport?

  We're doing the thing that's going to be most effective. Now, I have a very specific definition of most effective here. What makes a reply effective? It minimizes the number of follow-up messages you will have to receive and respond to. That's what matters. That's how you have to retrain your brain. I don't care if it takes me 10 minutes versus 30 seconds to answer this message right now. If the 10-minute response will minimize the number of future messages generated by a factor of three or four, it's worth it. If this 10-minute response means like we're basically done, that is worth it versus the one-minute response that's going to generate a 10 message back and forth. So you want to start prioritizing the reduction of unscheduled messages that you will have to receive and respond to.

• 11:56Cal Newport?

  That is the thing you're trying to reduce, not the time in the moment. This means you're going to have to spend more time on your inbox. Or in the time you do spend your inbox, you're not going to get through as many messages. And maybe you will need even longer sessions or more sessions or stuff that's just going to take longer for you to get to it. Like, there is something that has to give when you're no longer playing obligation hot potato, but it's better to have drawn out more frequent, more drawn out inbox sessions

• 12:21Cal Newport?

  than to have all this back and forth communication all day long. A thing that can help here, this is like a bonus tip, a thing that can help here is if, when you go into your inbox, you take a particular category of messages, messages that are all of the same type. So either they're all dealing with like the same project or event, or they're all of the same type in the sense of like, these are all paperwork or logistical questions, etc. Take a bunch of questions of the same type, put them in their own folder or label, then just load up those messages and deal with those one after another. It will be easier if the things you are dealing with consecutively, if they're all in the same cognitive context, it will be much less mentally exhausting to sort of go through those messages. Then you get another batch. It's a mistake people make when you're batching email.

• 13:05Cal Newport?

  It's not just, I'm going to batch the time in which I answer email. It's much better if you batch the content as well. It has much less of a cognitive drag. So that will help. But if you don't play obligation hot potato, your sessions are longer, but the times you're checking your inbox get much smaller. And that's, that's going to make your life feel a lot less distracted. All right, idea three. You're doing too many things at the same time. There's a core idea from my, my new, I guess I should call it newish book, Jesse, because we're coming up on the one year anniversary. My newish book, Slow Productivity, The Last Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. A key idea from that book is overhead tax. Every professional obligation you agree to brings with it logistical overhead.

• 13:49Cal Newport?

  It's emails, it's meetings, it's back and forths that you have to have, just to sort of organize and keep that, that obligation rolling. The more things you're working on at the same time, the more overhead tax you're paying at the same time. But that overhead tax, as it increases, what doesn't increase? The amount of time you have in the day. So now the ratio of your time spent servicing work versus actually doing work becomes unreasonable. And this is a, another big source of feeling distracted all the time is because if you have 10 ongoing obligations, that is a lot of overhead tax. And that overhead tax is pulling at your attention because you're all generating emails and meetings you have to jump in and out of, and you feel really distracted. The concrete solution here is what I suggest in the book.

• 14:34Cal Newport?

  Do fewer things at once. This doesn't mean you're doing fewer things, you're accomplishing fewer things over a long time scale. You probably get more done per month or per year if you do a few things at a time before you move on to the next. But in the moment, work on fewer things at once, they can get more of your attention, less of your day is spent on overhead tax. Those tasks will get completed faster than you bring in the new ones. You'll be getting things done in a, in a setting that feels a lot less distracted and a lot less frustrating. Right, idea number four.

• 15:05Cal Newport?

  You're disorganized. If you have not organized well, the obligations in your life, your life is going to feel distracted. Because what's going to happen is you're always discovering at the last minute, oh my God, this thing is due, I gotta get this done, I need to find these people, I'm making these calls, I'm waiting to hear back, where does this form go? There's going to be a sort of freneticism that is induced when your life is disorganized. Work gets consolidated around when it's due. Often you have deadline conflicts where multiple things are due around the same time and you're all doing them at the last minute. And now your day is incredibly back and forth and you're staying up late to try to make these things happen. There's always a sense of I need to be checking in on lots of channels because God knows what I'm missing.

• 15:50Cal Newport?

  Right? If you're not organized, reacting to things becomes your main mode of force for your actual efforts. You have to constantly be checking things because like, who knows what I'm missing. On the other hand, if you're organized, you know what you have to do and you make smart decisions about when you're going to do it, all of that calms down because you make better allocation of your available time. You can spread work out more evenly. So no one day is going to feel so overloaded. You can be more confident about being done with your workday or during your workday, being confident when I'm working on this, I don't need to be checking all the time for these other things because I know what I'm doing and I know my plan to do it. The more organized you are, the less distracted you're going to feel. So the concrete suggestions here is you got to get your act together

• 16:30Cal Newport?

  from an organizational perspective. At a minimum, you need some sort of task collection system. I suggest using status boards where you have a Trello style board for each of the roles you have in your professional life. And then you divide it up into columns. You have like back burner, things you're working on this week, things you're waiting to hear back from people on, etc. And then individual obligations are stored in these columns as cards on which you can then paste or attach or write all of the relevant information. You need one of these type of status boards and you need to practice a full capture methodology straight out of David Allen's book, Getting Things Done, which means nothing is kept just in your head. At the end of every day as part of your shutdown, you have to make sure that anything is just in your head, gets on to one of those boards or gets onto

• 17:14Cal Newport?

  your calendar if it's time specific, but it's not just in your head. You full capture, then you got to review that thing. At the very least, you need to be doing a weekly plan where you grapple with your calendar for the week. You see what's coming up. You understand what's coming up, what deadlines are coming up. You move things around on your calendar. Maybe I need to cancel this or move this over here to make time. And you begin adding appointments with yourself on your calendar to make sure that for the time sensitive things coming up, that you have enough time put aside to get it done. You're protecting that time. Oh my God, this thing is due on Thursday. Let me block off Monday afternoon just to make sure that time doesn't get taken because that's when I'm going to write this memo. When you do these weekly plans, it's when you really check in on those and update those status boards at the very minimum. You could be looking

• 17:59Cal Newport?

  at these more frequently, but at the very minimum. So capture and planning. Capture and planning is the what you need to not feel like you're constantly distracted. Now, if you get more advanced, we talked about on the show, a full multi-scale planning methodology, combined with these task boards, put all this together will be the best. But the very minimum, you need to be looking at your calendar once a week and having some place where all the things you need to do that aren't on your calendar can live.

• 18:25Cal Newport?

  All right, final idea for why you're so distracted. You lack sufficient foundational pursuits. So a foundational pursuit is something that requires an investment of focused time over a long period of time, and it's something you care about.

• 18:40Cal Newport?

  You can have these in your work life, you can have these in your life outside of work. They're foundational because you can sort of build your life on top of them. And there will be a certain stately pace to your life and a certain resistance to a sort of just random frenetic distractedness. When you don't have these, your mind doesn't know what to do.

• 19:02Cal Newport?

  So at work, it's like, let's just react to things. We need something to do, like we need to, otherwise we have no value to this office. Right? If we're not doing things, so let me jump on calls and answer emails and be in the mix. And you lean towards distraction. And at home, you're like, I don't know what to do with myself. Let me, let me, I'm on my phone, like I video games, like I need something to do to fill my time. So that it feels more significant. So you need to have these foundational pursuits. So you do not fall into that sort of default distraction. So at work, that means you've got to have some sort of project in which you are regularly dedicating long, deep work sessions towards. Unbroken concentration towards something important. It's building a new skill, it's a new initiative, a new project. That's the foundation on which you can build everything else in your work life.

• 19:45Cal Newport?

  It's what's going to make you be more resistant to the distraction and busyness. It's going to give you the courage to push back or corral that and not feel like you have no self-worth as a, as an employee. At home, this is going to be significant hobbies, sort of reading challenge you're taking on, self-education goals, health projects, community involvement, something from that type of list. It's like a really big part of your life. In fact, I recommend people, especially the hustle types.

• 20:12Cal Newport?

  Work less than make sure you have a foundational activity outside of your work. The counterbalance to work, it's that valuable. Even if it means that's a couple more hours, I could be crushing it. And I'm not because I'm trying to run this community thing, or I have a really important, like athletic, physical pursuit. That's an important part of my life and I want to train for it and do it. That is worth it. If you don't have that, the time that remains in your life is going to be scattered and reactive. All right, so those were my four ideas for why you might be too distracted. I'll list all five ideas. I was distracted there. Five ideas. Idea one, it's because you're using your phone as a stress reliever. Idea two, it's because you're playing too much obligation, hot potato.

• 20:56Cal Newport?

  Idea three is because you're doing too much at the same time. Idea four, it's because you're disorganized. Idea five is because you lack foundational pursuits in both work and your life. So there we go. I think distraction of the type we're talking about was less of a problem before the advent of our modern digital environment, which to me, that all the pieces to come together for our modern digital environment to make it what it is, it's digital technology plus digital networks. So we have internet technology and we have the sort of accessibility through devices like phones and tablets, et cetera.

• 21:31Cal Newport?

  This idea that I'm distracted too much was less of a problem 50 years ago or 100 years ago. It doesn't mean though, that we can look at those times nostalgically, right? They had their own problems. If you go back 100 years, if we go back to 1926, like what is the real issue going to be? It's going to be people who are in these newly industrialized workforces where their job is grueling and is breaking down their body. And there's a sense of nihilism and they're self medicating through like excessive alcohol consumption. To the point where we get, you know, the women's Christian temperance league pushing through the prohibition amendment to the constitution. Like that's not better. It's just different. Or we had, you know, similar in like the seventies, we were all just like watching television all the time. So it was like terrible quality entertainment with drinking our Schlitz beer.

• 22:15Cal Newport?

  Like, you know, it's not like things were a panacea before. And if anything, I actually see these mismatches with the modern digital environment. And in particular, this one of distraction, I'll take it. Here's why it's much more easily solvable. Like those type of solutions I gave are not that hard and they make your life better. So I don't, I'll just end on this idea because I'm a techno critic. I don't like this idea that, you know, everything is always bad. Everything is just making things worse, or there was like a better time that we're getting away from. We are always going to have problems because of mismatches between our culture and our paleolithic brain and neolithic way we run our lives, right? We're always going to have problems.

• 22:59Cal Newport?

  The question is, are those problems getting easier or harder to solve? And maybe there's some hope that these modern digital environment problems are going to be easier to solve. Right? It's going to be the jobs, these jobs aren't particularly bad. For example, the people who are distracted with email at work, they're going to an air conditioned box for like eight hours a day, doing non-physical labor with a huge amount of autonomy. If you were in 1926, you would take that bet all day long, right? Like I will do that. So like we're in a pretty good setup. We're just along the borders. Well, we get the emails, catch this up, we're too distracted, there's some nihilism. Those are some more solvable problems. So I just want to add that coda. This is a relatively new problem and it's a problem I'll take because it is, it is more solvable.

• 23:43Cal Newport?

  And where we end up and we solve it is so much better than where we were before. I can still see an arc of progress that we're progressing on. All right, Jesse, so there we go. Why you're too distracted.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  So when you were in the surgery, getting, reading your phone. Even though you were on social media, is that still technically a distraction? Or can you kind of treat it like a book?

• 24:02Cal Newport?

  You know, I don't know, because it was random. I was just looking for something literally distracting.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:09Cal Newport?

  Right? I wouldn't have had the energy to like really focus on something hard. I will see in the book segment we do at the end of today's episode, in the aftermath of that, when I was sort of laid up, I read a lot of math books, which we'll talk about at the end. But like, I couldn't do that then, because I was like really nervous. But yeah, surgery is a weird thing. So I was just like, I don't know. It's like a random thing. That's why it's a distraction. My distractions are more nerdy, looking up technical protocols or whatever. But I felt like it was, but there's, it served a purpose.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:38Cal Newport?

  I didn't need to be thinking about, you know, what was about to happen.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  But if you technically had, you know, the Washington Post app on your phone.

• 24:46Cal Newport?

  I would have been distracting myself with it. Yeah. I want to be like, I'm really interested in what's happening in, you know, Congress. I would have been like, I don't want to think about, hey, my stomach cut open.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Makes, makes sense.

• 24:58Cal Newport?

  Yeah. All right, well, we got.

• 25:02Cal Newport?

  I want to talk first about our friends at Defender, particularly Defender 90, the Defender 110, and the Defender 130, which seats up to eight line of vehicles. These were on my mind the other day because friend of the show Brad Stolberg was down in Miami. And he texted me a picture of a Defender. It was a tricked out Defender. I think it was a 130. And it looked cool. And he was saying, hey, when, when are we going to drive around in one of these things and podcast? And I think that's actually not a bad idea.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  It's not a bad idea.

• 25:35Cal Newport?

  Me and Stolberg just driving around in our Defender. Anyways, it was a really cool looking car. This one was tricked out. I think they had kitted it out with, I don't know the terminology, but like the off-road type stuff, like the tire jack and the kind of the cool stuff. These are cool looking cars. You can see them, if you go to landroverusa.com, you can see the three Defenders. And you can decide for yourselves if Brad and I should tour the country in one of these. I think we showed this one, he sent me a picture of, they had tinted the windows. So it was extra Miami cool.

• 26:08Cal Newport?

  I love it. We'll just have arm up, just podcasting like it's an episode of comedian in cars. But that would be cool. So anyways, I appreciated that he was on the lookout for defenders because I don't know, it's a great looking car. It's got that great tech. But I just love the way it just has cool lines. And then like the cool, it's a comfortable ride. It has a great technology and you can drive it off road and it has the camera that will show you like what's under your car. You can avoid obstacles and it looks nice in Miami. But I just love that idea. Me and Brad, just cruising, cruising in our Defender. So anyways, you can design your Defender at LandRoverUSA.com. Go there, check it out. Let me know if you think I should be cruising in one of those. You think

• 26:50Cal Newport?

  maybe it'll be cooler than my Kia Carnival minivan, which is black, though. We have a black one. I think the Defender looks cooler. I also want to talk about a new sponsor, a high tech sponsor for my IT, computer sciencey folks out there. We all speak the same language. It's our friends at Vanta. Here's the thing, trust isn't just earned, it's demanded. Whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit, or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex. That's where Vanta comes in. Businesses use Vanta to establish trust by automating compliance needs across over 35 frameworks like SOC

• 27:32Cal Newport?

  2 and ISO 27001. Centralized security workflows, they also help you complete questionnaires up to five times faster and proactively manage vendor risk. Man, when I first got started out in computer programming, things were so simple. You would just build a program and have an EXE file. But man, today's complicated world, all of this stuff matters. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta can help you start or scale your security program by connecting you with auditors and experts to conduct your audit and set up your security program quickly. Plus with automation and AI throughout the platform, Vanta gives you time back so you can focus on building your company. Join over 9,000 global companies like Atlassian,

• 28:13Cal Newport?

  Cora, and Factory who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. All right, I got a deal. Actually, I got two deals. Deal number one, if Jesse can explain to me what the ISO 27001 standard is, I will give a visitor, give a listener $10,000.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  I can't.

• 28:34Cal Newport?

  Oh, sorry, listener, that would have been yours. I love these ads that like for people like me who are like know startups and computer science, like know all these buzzwords and confuse normal people. I do have a better deal, though. My listeners will get $1,000 off Fanta if you go to vanta.com/deepquestions. Right, so if you know what I'm talking about here, you know the things I'm referencing, then that means you should know about Vanta. Best in class, you're gonna $1,000 off if you go to vanta.com/deepquestions. That's V A N T A dot com slash deepquestions to get $1,000 off. That might be our best promo. Is that the biggest promo amount we've ever given for something?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 29:13Cal Newport?

  All right. Until next week's, if you go to landroverusa.com/deep, you get the first, first offender for free. First offender for free. But you gotta use the promo code. That'd be funny if there's just a promo code when you're, when you're signing your paperwork to buy a new car, they just put down a sheet with a box in the middle and you write like deep 20. All right, enough of that, let's move on to our questions.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  All right, first questions from Arnod. I'm developing a documentary film project focused on environmental issues. I don't like social media, but started setting up Instagram and LinkedIn. I'd much prefer to have a solid newsletter. What should I do?

• 29:55Cal Newport?

  All right, let me tell you the way, I've been refining my thinking. Let me tell you the way I've been refining my thinking when it comes to the use of these, let's call them, I don't know, digital attention, digital content tools. Digital content tools is a good term. There's some points about this that have been confusing to me, and I think I have a new framework for thinking about this that helps with those confusions. So you can let me know if you buy this. When it comes to digital content tools, like namely, social media newsletters, maybe we could throw podcasts in there, but let's just talk about social media newsletters primarily. There are two different roles these can play in helping you with like the success of a project or professional endeavor. And I think we get confused when we mix these roles together.

• 30:38Cal Newport?

  So let me, let me pull these roles apart and we'll see if this clarifies things. All right, role number one.

• 30:45Cal Newport?

  Social media and newsletters can be something that you can deploy after something you're doing becomes successful to help you magnify or make more pervasive that success. Right? So if you're doing something like you're an author who hits a wave and is getting a lot of attention, you have a startup that is buzzy, it's doing something that people think is really interesting, your movie or your album is like starting to gather attention or has got some good reviews and now suddenly everyone's paying attention. Social media and newsletters in this circumstance can be very helpful for spreading or amplifying that success and/or solidifying that audience. So for example, you might start putting up lots of social clips that are shareable about your documentary or relevant to your book.

• 31:30Cal Newport?

  And if people are really into it, they're going to share it and that expands the reach because you have people organically, authentically sharing stuff that's about what you're doing. If you're an author whose book is doing really well, well, now you can solidify access to that audience by trying to capture them on an email newsletter, or now you have a way to actually talk to your audience directly. So that's a primary role these play, but that role requires first that you're doing something that's successful. And then it's about how do you professionally maximize the opportunities that that creates? So in that situation, if you're working on your documentary or film project and it starts to take off, you want to make sure you have pros in place to sort of take advantage of these possibilities to help spread the word, to harness the energy and harness the audience.

• 32:15Cal Newport?

  The second role technically that social media newsletters can play is as something that builds an audience and then deploys that that audience towards the primary project you're working on and makes that project more successful than it otherwise would be. So it's like what makes your project successful? This is where I think a lot of people think about using social media and newsletters. It's almost never successful. Role two is almost never successful.

• 32:44Cal Newport?

  So we mix these two things up. So it's not like social media newsletters aren't important. And we see really successful projects that really lean into this. But there's often a chicken and egg inversion happening there. They're professionally taking advantage of the audience they've built through other means. As opposed to they did something first to build an audience and then they use that to make their primary project succeed. And where you do see that happening, typically the primary project came later. This is someone who had success in one of these realms. Typically, they had success in social media and then they said, oh, why don't I do a project to take advantage of that? And there, there's a big survivorship bias issue because like most people don't have success on these platforms. And those who do are more likely to say, maybe I'll do a book.

• 33:26Cal Newport?

  Like so Heel Bloom has a book out right now that's doing very well. He has a huge presence online. So the book is doing very well, but the huge presence online came first. The reason why that direction is it's hard to deploy on demand. It's hard to say, I have this primary project. Let's go build a big newsletter or social to help it. Is that it's really hard when you're not starting with an already successful brand name or project to build a big social presence or newsletter. If you look at like Substack, what's successful on Substack? I mean, it's almost always people who already have earned audience trust painstakingly. It's journalists, it's authors with successful books, right?

• 34:07Cal Newport?

  Like I have a big newsletter. We got 125,000 people on something like that. That's because I've been writing books for whatever it is now, 20 years and have built trust with a lot of audience and then captured it, right? Nate Silver makes a lot of money off of his Substack. But he had a massively successful journalistic career, especially at the New York Times after his blog got taken up. People know him and follow him. So they followed him to Substack. It's very hard to do this from scratch. That's because these markets are attention markets and attention markets, especially when these attention markets are pretty efficient and pretty competitive. Why should someone pay attention to you? That is a hard question to answer.

• 34:48Cal Newport?

  And so what happens then is people say, well, I, I did the stuff you would do for role one. On role one, if you have a successful book. And you want to use media newsletters. You're like, I'm going to systematically make clips about my book and I'm going to very carefully have my web presences like ask for newsletter subscribers. And because people are really into me and what I'm doing, that will help spread and will gather a lot of people. So I'll do that, but for my unknown project and nothing happens. Because like the clips you're making about your project, no one cares about if they don't already know about your project. And your newsletter that you have all these signup widgets for, no one wants to sign up for if they don't know who you are and they don't care about it. So I think separating role one and role two explains a lot of the confusions

• 35:28Cal Newport?

  people have. They're doing the stuff you observe for role one as working and they're trying to use that to succeed in role two. But in role two, almost no one succeeds. And if you want to succeed there, you got to make a huge swing. Like if you want to try to build a social presence from scratch, you really have to think about it like you're a showrunner for a cable network. Like I gotta try to make a show that's going to break through and get a big audience. It can't just be random. It can't just be let's just film some stuff and put it on AMC and hope people watch. You have to like really think through like there's a niche in the market. I gotta really invest in this. I think this is different than what anyone else is doing. It's very catchy. It plays on the medium well. You really would have to be thinking about this like a major endeavor. Newsletters are even harder. People don't sign up for newsletters if they don't have

• 36:12Cal Newport?

  a reason to do so. So don't mess up, don't mix up role one strategies for this technology to try to achieve a role two goal. And so I think making these separations, hopefully that helps clarify how people think about this.

• 36:27Cal Newport?

  I don't know. I think it helps me because I don't know. Just tell me if you think that's more clarifying, but that's basically the way, that's how I finally realized what people were doing. And so like, well, I'm doing the same things Ryan Holiday is doing. I'm looking at like the clips he's put on his Instagram and I'm doing that myself. And why don't I have the followers? And it's like, well, he already has the audience. And so he's just feeding them things they can spread. So if you do that same thing, when you don't yet have the audience, nothing will happen. So there's got to be some core, get the audience or win the audience at some point. And if you don't have something, to win an audience from scratch on social media is really hard.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:03Cal Newport?

  It's like having your show be top five in the ratings. It's just really hard to do. All right. What do we got next?

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Next question is from Tom. I'm a software engineer wanting to take on more technically advanced work projects involving L L Ms in 3D computer graphics. My last formal math class was in high school, so I lack the foundational skills. To be good, to be so good, I can't be ignored. I think I need to add one to two hours of daily study. How can I do this on top of a full plate of work, hobbies, exercise and young kids?

• 37:35Cal Newport?

  Well, you know, I'm going to start my answer by saying, make sure first you're facing the productivity dragon.

• 37:42Cal Newport?

  How much time do these various things you care about take? And if that time adds up to more time than you have reasonably available, you can't do all those things.

• 37:51Cal Newport?

  If the universe, and in particular, the physics of time, do not care about your list of what you want to do.

• 38:00Cal Newport?

  So the universe is not going to accommodate by bending the rules of time. The fact that in addition to all these things, you want to do something else as well. So facing the productivity dragon can be freeing sometimes, right? Because it might lead you to say, I like my full life outside of work and I have young kids and I'm into this exercise and I don't really have time to pick up a major new skill. That time doesn't exist and okay, great. Then I don't feel guilty about not doing that. And that might be the answer here, that you face the productivity dragon and say, we can't do all of these things. So maybe I'll put my attention

• 38:35Cal Newport?

  towards getting better at the things I'm already doing at work during work itself. Through my selection of projects, for example, taking on projects that stretch my skills and I can actually act on those stretches during work. I'm learning new things to try to use. I'm learning this skill for exactly the feature I'm trying to add, the sprint I'm doing right now, like you're integrating the learning into your work, you're, you're moving your project skills towards areas that you think are going to give you more career capital that's useful, that you know, let me just be better about what I'm doing during the work day. Like that might be the answer. Or the answer might be, no, no, no, I'm doing lifestyle centric planning and if I could do L L M work, it's going to open up a lot of things. Maybe there's like a lot of jobs I could do remote at 1.5x the salary, which really would open up this whole vision I have

• 39:18Cal Newport?

  for what I want to do with life. Or maybe if I could do L L M work, it could be six months on, six months off, like maybe to unlock something really cool. So like I gotta figure this out. All right. Well, in that case, again, you have to face reality and look for some more extreme options. So for example, maybe what you need to do is take vacation time and be like, I'm gonna take 10 days and just hammer on this, like with a course on this technology, six hours a day, crash course this, maybe spend two days with someone who knows all about this, pay someone to like to come to me on the weekend and be like, teach me how to build this LLM using, you know, whatever particular I'm using TensorFlow or something like this. I want you to really walk me through it and explain that to me, explain that to me,

• 40:01Cal Newport?

  explain that to me. I'm gonna just crash course it. It might mean you're saying, okay, here's what I want to do. I normally work from like nine to five, but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start work at eight, so I can get an hour in every morning on an online course and then stretch that out over six months to pick up the skills. And maybe what this could require is like, I'm gonna have to ask like a big sacrifice for my wife and say, look, I'm not gonna be able to do this, my school drop offs for four months. But here's why. If I could pick up this skill, I think it's gonna get us closer to X, Y, and Z, or I'll, we'll swap back and I'll take them all, you know, after this is over. But you might have to change something, try to do something more extreme. Or you find a way to get formal permission. Okay, I'm doing the math. It doesn't add up. My evenings doesn't have this time. Let me get formal position from my boss. Like, can I spend

• 40:46Cal Newport?

  one to two every day working on an online course on LLM? It's because I think we should, I should have that skill because we might want to, you know, I need to be conversant in that if we want to add those features. And they're like, okay, yeah, if you can work around that and not fall behind on your whatever. So you might have, you could do something, you have to engineer something more extreme. That's not just, I'll just add this to what I do after work. But face the dragon. Don't try to change the laws of physics and time and either settle on, well, let me build my capital of what I'm doing, or find something you can change that's gonna make that more possible. The only other word of advice is gonna be if you're gonna learn something new, make sure every minute you're spending is actually challenging you and helping you learn something new.

• 41:29Cal Newport?

  Like, I want to actually build a LLM using open source model and these libraries. I have that goal and everything I'm doing is like towards that goal. So I'm not just getting lost reading and watching YouTube videos and like generally exploring and having ideas and people are drawing cute diagrams of transformers. You don't really know what's going on. Like no, if you need to learn linear algebra to understand what they're talking about when they're they're doing, uh, what's the dot product? I don't remember how to do vectors embeddings or whatever. Go learn that with like a course. You're learning it and then be like, I want to then use that to build something here and show that I've built it. So be very concrete. You don't want to waste the time because you don't have that much time to actually spare. All right. Who've we got next?

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Next question is from Ryan. I'm in the Bay area. I'm a Bay area tech guy in my 50s who has spent the last 25 years pursuing one lifestyle style plan focused on the hustle of building high growth products while raising high growth kids. I'd like to spend the next 25 years pursuing a very different lifestyle plan anchored in the emerging set of second mountain core values. I even took a year off as a sabbatical to figure this out, but found myself coming right back to my first mountain at the end.

• 42:39Cal Newport?

  Do you think when he says high growth kids, he's trying to have his kids be tall?

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Become basketball players?

• 42:43Cal Newport?

  That's what I'm thinking. Yeah. There's lots of milk. Get you, get you tall. I was just watching, I rewatched because I have to watch things while I do my PT. Uh, it was rewatching Last Dance, the ESPN documentary about the 98 Bulls. Yeah. But

• 43:00Speaker 01

  It saved a lot of people during COVID.

• 43:02Cal Newport?

  Yeah, that was early in COVID. Yeah. So I'm rewatching that whole thing. But anyways, my point is if you're tall, you can do well. Yeah, you can do well. Some of those guys, it's crazy. Like Scottie Pippen is playing, oh God, was this at the high school level? Maybe, maybe at the college level. He was like 6'2".

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, he grew a ton.

• 43:21Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And they're like, you're like a fine basketball player, but like if you're 6'2", like unless you're Allen Iverson, right? Like it's fine. And then he came back and he was like 6'6" and then he kept growing, but he, that was like over a summer. And it's like, oh, if you're like a fine basketball player in 6'2", a fine basketball player in 6'6" is like a whole different situation. You're like, oh, now this is useful. Yeah. Same with, uh, Jordan. He grew.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:43Cal Newport?

  He was short and he didn't make it the team as a freshman in high school. And then he grew. He also got better, but like he grew, like makes a big difference. Um, Ryan, I don't think that's what you're doing though with high growth kids. Um, but it's interesting to think about. So this is a common, it's a common. Issue, right? So if you don't know the first mountain, second mountain, that comes from David Brooks' book, The Second Mountain, where he says there's the first part of your adult life is focused on what he calls first mountain goals, which are professional aspirations, it's success, it's distinction standing out. And he says, there's going to be a point, at some point, you're going to move beyond that first mountain. And Brooks also talks about you fall into a valley between the first and second mountain, where you're going to have some despair. And then you realize, oh, what really matters are the second mountain

• 44:28Cal Newport?

  values, which, as he talks about, are the types of things people will talk about in your eulogy. In your eulogy, no one's going to say, hey, you know, Ryan delivered quarter over quarter growth, you know, for fiscal year 2020, fiscal year, you know, 2030, or whatever. Like, that's not going to be what they talk about in your eulogy. It's going to be, this was a dependable person. He was there for you. He was like a leader in our community. And Brooks says, as you get older, that second mountain values become more important, and that you need to sort of shift more towards them. You've done, and then Brooks is writing largely for high achieving upper middle class knowledge workers, which is like what Brooks is, and this is like what he went through. And Ryan, it sounds like you as well. So that's what he's talking about, these second mountain values. It's

• 45:09Cal Newport?

  hard to make that shift, right? In part because the first round values give you something concrete to do, and you can succeed at it, and they give you resources, and they can dominate your whole life. Often, the people that Brooks talks about who make this transition have some sort of inciting event. Like, for Brooks, it was his divorce. So like, often there's like some inciting event. Ryan, you might not have, like, had an exterior event yet. You're just noticing this is a shift that you're leaning towards. So it's going to be a more gradual transition. A couple of things I would recommend. Do lifestyle centric planning. Brooks leaves this out, but I'm going to put it in. Do lifestyle centric planning with second mountain values that resonate with you in mind. So what do I want my life to actually be like five years from now, day to day? Like, where am

• 45:54Cal Newport?

  I, where am I going? What type of place do I live? Am I at an office or not? Like, what's going on with my older kids at this point? How is my time spent? Am I, you know, walking through the woods? Or am I, you know, in a golf club? Like, I don't know, you're feeling it. What is, what does my life actually feel like? And make sure the second mountain values that resonate are in this image. And then do the straight up lifestyle centric planning work of let me work backwards from that. How do I steer like, what are the obstacles and opportunities and how do I steer towards that? So like, you have to be probably more systematic about this than you started this. Like, I'm looking at your question, you started this, like you wrote out roles and you're, you're trying to think like what you want to do in your life.

• 46:37Cal Newport?

  You're adding roles, probably like leader and community member that you wanted to make more important. But the question is how you do that. And that's where lifestyle centric planning comes in. Cause you're not just saying, I want to be more of a leader. You have like a specific part of your image. You know, I'm, I'm involved in like the board at my community and like really there. And I'm at a meeting and we're trying to figure something out and people turn to me and I'm like thickly enmeshed in like what's going on with, you know, some organization. You have a more concrete image of what that means. And now you're working backwards from something more concrete. The whole lifestyle centric planning methodology is all about obstacles and opportunities, leveraging the opportunities you have to help you get closer. And really identifying the obstacles and saying, how do I get rid of those or circumvent them?

• 47:17Cal Newport?

  This is probably where your current work, which is being driven by these first mountain values. This is where your, your current work will probably come up as an obstacle. And in this exercise is where you're going to start thinking about, well, how do I reconfigure this work in a way that allows me to get to these other parts of my lifestyle vision? So ultimately it's going to be changing some details of your work in the second half of your working life. But you gotta work backwards from that lifestyle centric planning. You can't just abstractly say this role or value is important to me. Let me just try to do more of that in my life. It's much more difficult than that. You also have to assume that's going to take a while. The path between the mountains is long. And you might go into a deep valley where you have an inciting event, like a divorce or a health scare. Or maybe it's, it, the path is nice through a meadow. It's not dark, but it's still going to be meandering and long.

• 48:02Cal Newport?

  So you have a vision, you work towards it, you edit, you work towards it, you edit, you work towards it. But you're beginning to turn your eyes towards that second mountain and there will be changes. The only other thing I would recommend is if you've read Brooks's book, also read Richard Rohr's book, Falling Upward. It's more explicitly religious, but it's the book that David Brooks based the second mountain on. So if you want to get to the core ideas, but sort of stripped of a Brooksian, upper middle class striving knowledge worker veneer. Like, let me just get to the core ideas without that piece. That's helpful for a lot of people to see it in a more purified form. So check out Richard Rohr's book, R O H R, Falling Upward. All right. What do we got next?

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Next question is from Rebecca. I often find myself unable to make meaningful progress with organizing my thoughts and projects, given the volume of the past materials I have. What strategies could help me move past this paralysis and build momentum towards fully getting my business and personal projects running smoothly?

• 48:59Cal Newport?

  Well, you know, I'm not a big believer in complicated information systems. I'm not a big believer in what is holding you back from a project is like you can't quite get the right information together to make progress. I think in general, people should work on fewer big projects. They should wait until they have an idea that won't leave them alone and then act on it. And then, once they're acting on it, put their perfectionism aside and say, great, I'm going to follow this through to the end to see what happens because it makes my life more interesting. So if you're exposing yourself to a lot of information, you're reading things, you have ideas, wait to see what like sticks with you. Like, yeah, I keep having this idea about something we could do at our business. It's come up a few times now. I mentioned this to someone, they thought it was a good idea. Okay, great, let's go do that.

• 49:42Cal Newport?

  Or I've got this like personal project, I don't know, I keep seeing these Instagram stories about people with their such and such like, I don't know, workshop and it's really appealing to me and I keep coming back to that. Okay, great, I'm going to go through and I'm going to execute on that project. So just wait till something sticks with you and then see it through just because it's interesting to see it through.

• 50:02Cal Newport?

  Don't over emphasize the like, I gotta get all my information right. Don't over emphasize this idea of there's a right project to do and if you choose the wrong one, you're in trouble. See what sticks, take action, follow it through, interesting things will happen, repeat. Don't over complicate it. Find value in the actual like execution of things because it's kind of fun. If this one doesn't work out, the next one will. And hopefully all that together should stop some of this sense of paralysis. I'm like that with books, Jesse. I'm like, I read a lot of stuff, I think a lot of stuff. How do I come up with a book idea? It's just something sticks with me for a long time and I just mull it and I come back to it, have other ideas, I come back to it, mull other things. If something has stuck with me for a while, it's very informal. I'm like, you know what? That could be a book.

• 50:45Cal Newport?

  And then I start seriously like talking to my circle about it. I don't have complicated information tracking systems. I don't have the ideas emerge from some sort of like content semantic graph that's on some complicated program. It's like an idea that sticks with me and my gut says this feels timely. That's all it is.

• 51:04Cal Newport?

  All right, what do we got next?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  We have our corner.

• 51:06Cal Newport?

  Ooh, our slow productivity corner. Let's hear that theme music.

• 51:16Cal Newport?

  This is the segment where we tackle a question relevant to my last book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Productivity. All right, Jesse, what is our slow productivity corner question of the week?

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Without burnout. What did I say, without productivity?

• 51:32Cal Newport?

  I said, the lost art of accomplishment without productivity. That could actually kind of be an answer. That could be, that could work.

• 51:41Cal Newport?

  The first chapter is like how to steal.

• 51:45Cal Newport?

  Steal ideas from people smarter.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  I wasn't gonna say anything, but then I was, the fans would probably have like noted something and then I'll.

• 51:52Cal Newport?

  We have to distract them.

• 51:55Cal Newport?

  We have to distract them. All right. Brandon Sanderson wrote, name of the win.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Go. Sony emailed me about that the other day. He's like, do you know that? I was like, oh, it's actually a joke.

• 52:04Cal Newport?

  That's how we distract you when you make other mistakes. All right, what is our actual slow productivity question of the day?

• 52:10Speaker 01

  All right, it's from Seeking Slow Success. I work in admin at a large university. I'm struggling with the roles, many hats, communications, marketing, scheduling, supervising, advising, event planning, financial, all sorts of stuff. It's also in the context of a thick bureaucratic process. I've heard that this type of juggling is just typical for this role in that we're understaffed. What should I do?

• 52:35Cal Newport?

  Well, this is where the book's low productivity in your circumstance might be more effective for understanding why you're unhappy than it will be for helping you become happier. Let me explain what I mean by that. A core idea in that book, which really tries to deconstruct how the way we currently work in knowledge work, why it doesn't work. A core idea in that book is what we talked about in the deep dive, which is the notion of overhead tax, right? Everything that you're working on, every process that you're responsible for, every task or project that's undergoing generates its own overhead of emails and meetings and just cognitive cycles. I have to like, think about this. The more of these you have, the more of that overhead you have, the more of your cognitive cycles are taken up, the more of your day then becomes like servicing projects.

• 53:21Cal Newport?

  Now, when this gets really bad is when these various projects exist in different cognitive contexts. So to switch from one to the other, you have to completely switch your mindset. So when you're switching from finances and development to academic and staff and over to facilities, each of these is a fully different context. And so when you have a lot of things going on in a lot of topics, you have all these different emails and meetings you have to do. You're constantly switching contexts. That is exhausting. We're not wired for it. It makes us miserable. So I can validate why you're not feeling good about this position. Now, some people react worse than others to this overhead taxing out of control and to all this context shifting. The most successful, high up university admins that I know

• 54:06Cal Newport?

  just are naturally, they're okay with it. Like, this is what I do. In fact, usually it's because they take pride in I can, I switch from this to here to here, and I find the right thing to push and the right button. And then how do I help this person here? How do I move this information here? And it's like a game. They see it like an orchestra conductor, and you're trying to keep these different things moving. And then some people can get enough pleasure out of that challenge that they can counteract the cognitive fatigue of having to do all that context switching. Other people just feel the fatigue of the context switching. They're like, this is terrible. I'm in that latter camp. Right? You put me in a high up administrative position at a university. That university's going out of business. I'm, I, this is terrible. I can't keep switching between these things. You know what?

• 54:51Cal Newport?

  I would rather, I know this is urgent, that like, we're not going to have water in the east side of campus. I just think we're not going to have water on the east side of campus. I can't think about all this stuff anymore. This is crazy. I gotta go do deep work. Other people can see it as a challenge. So if you're like me, slow productivity will explain why you're having a challenge. I think some of these high level admin positions, that's the position. That's what they're hiring for. That you're someone who can oversee a complicated array of different things and try to keep all those plates spinning. If this doesn't work well with you... It might be a time to think about how do I take that career capital and take it somewhere that's going to work better for me. But the key here, if you're doing that, is to figure out what better means. And that's why you need to understand this overhead tax issue, too many concurrent projects, that that is a problem.

• 55:37Cal Newport?

  That's why you're unhappy. So you know, if you're looking to do something else that takes your career capitals, like a horizontal move, you know what you're optimizing for. Minimize the number of concurrent things happening. So you don't have so much context shifting and overhead tax. We often don't realize that's what's making us unhappy about jobs. And when people are in that situation, we don't know that's why we're so exhausted, that it's the overhead tax. And so we start looking for other reasons that seem more obvious or proximate. It's like, well, maybe the bosses are bad, or the system is stupid. And so then you shift and you make these ineffectual, high overhead shifts to another job that has just as much overhead tax, but you convinced yourself it was the people and the broken processes, and that's why you're unhappy. And you go the other place and you're still unhappy because no, the problem was you're doing 15 things at once and your brain was melting.

• 56:21Cal Newport?

  So it's useful to know that's a real problem. And I think just pointing out overhead tax is a problem. Too many concurrent tasks is a problem. I'm looking for jobs, I'm evaluating them and what they're going to do with that type of concurrent tasks. Just recognizing that's a problem could improve a lot of jobs. But when you don't recognize something as a problem, you focus on the other stuff. It's going to be the perks or the benefits or the, I call it faux autonomy. Like, yeah, you have a lot of autonomy in terms of how you spend your time, but not in terms of your workload. So you really don't have any autonomy in how you spend your time because you're trying to service 15 projects. So it's all overhead tax all day. So yeah, we don't clock your hours. You can work remote if you want. But also, who cares? You have to be in your inbox 15 hours a day or things aren't going to work out.

• 57:05Cal Newport?

  So I don't think for your position, I did little things will help. You can look in the book

• 57:11Cal Newport?

  for keeping your overhead lower and trying to differentiate active and non-active projects. But a lot of this, at that level for this type of job, a lot of that advice isn't going to work because of the nature of that job. So at least knowing what it is you don't like about the job. It's going to help you understand how to fix it, what it is actually that you want to fix. You've got to figure out the problem before you can really fix it. So it's, I don't know, I believe that, Jesse, is like sometimes knowing why you're unhappy unless you fix it. And like, the biggest problem is unhappy people who don't know why they're unhappy, because then you start just doing random stuff. Yep. And at least the problems. But what we can be happy about is hearing the theme music one more time.

• 57:57Cal Newport?

  All right, do we have a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear it.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Hi, Gal. My name is Jorge, and I have a question that really has to deal with being a good spouse. The context is that my spouse is an interesting part of her life where, one, she enjoyed most of her corporate life for the last 15 years. Two, we have a family with young kids, where time with them is very, very precious before they come teenagers and start ignoring us. And three, she recently got laid off her job. She is in the field of DEI, which is diversity, equity, inclusion, and navigating has been very difficult. It's been a very hostile environment for that industry for the past 24 months or so. It's

• 58:43Speaker 02

  not like she works in a coal mine and all the mines are shutting down, but it can feel like that at times, and she expresses that. She's been doing a lot of writing and starting to explore the idea of switching out of corporate life and doing more with crafts, cooking, general artistic things, and maybe even writing about those things. I support her. Initially, I recommended her the book Slow Productivity, as she faced this hiccup in her career and ways to explore doing new work. And then as she started talking about doing more artistic work and kind of making transition, I suggested So Good They Can't Ignore You. My question is, is there any approach I should be taking to support my spouse as they work through

• 59:26Speaker 02

  this period of life-based career planning? We are a family, can't do these things in a vacuum, and I wanted to be more than someone who just recommends books to her. I wanted to know how to best show up to be alongside her as she goes through life-based career planning, whether she knows it or not. Thank you.

• 59:48Cal Newport?

  Well, first of all, I like this approach of just give people my books. That's like a good catch all strategy. That's gonna be my answer for every question now. Well, how many of my books have you read or given the person? That'll solve the problem. Now, the actual real first thing is, first of all, it really stinks to get laid off. Like, that's just emotionally hard, it's psychologically hard, financially hard. There's a lot of empathy here, right? None of that's easy, especially if you feel like your whole industry in which you have expertise, the whole industry is struggling. So it's not just my company had issues, but there's a bunch of other companies do this. So we'll start with that. It's just hard. So I'm glad you're recognizing that. Like, that's hard. It's hard to get laid off, especially at that phase of life. So we'll start with that and not be too cheery optimistic.

• 1:00:33Cal Newport?

  Everything's gonna be fine immediately. The next thing I would say, and you picked this up in your call, so I'm gonna underscore it. The next thing I would say is that when you have a family with kids, lifestyle centric planning, the lifestyle you're planning is the full family's lifestyle. It's no longer, what is my ideal lifestyle? What is your ideal lifestyle? And we're both gonna try to do our own planning towards those ideal lifestyles. Because what's gonna happen is, when you're looking for obstacles and opportunities, the other person's opportunities might become an obstacle to you and vice versa. And then you get resentment, or at least you get confusion. So I like what you said, that we're a family. That is critical here. This is a good time, this disruption is a good time to say, what is our lifestyle centric plan?

• 1:01:18Cal Newport?

  And when you have young kids, you really should have three plans. That's the way my wife and I did it. What is our ideal lifestyle for the pre? We thought it was like the pre elementary school period, the sort of the preschool and nanny period. Right? And that was the period we were in when we were doing this initial planning. So, you know, given what we have now. Then we look ahead. It's like the elementary school period. You start to have young kids that are first, second, third grade, or this or that. And then there's this third phase, this sort of in high school going off to college phase. And then there's a phase after that, but that seems so distant. You're like, we'll get to that later. You say, what do we want our lifestyle to be like during those periods? Like, what is it? What's the vision we have? And people have all sorts of different visions of this.

• 1:02:00Cal Newport?

  Some people envision my kids having like a real city, like urban upbringing and they're on the subways and we go, you know, take the subway to see the baseball game and going to blah, blah, blah. Other people see, man, I really want, when I'm thinking about my kid being in third grade, like I'm there, we pick him up from the bus stop. Like they're coming home from the bus stop and like I'm there and get them snacks and there's like people coming over like, I don't know, you get these visions, like what do I want it to be like? Then you work backwards from those. So you should have a vision for pre elementary school, during elementary school, and then sort of like late junior high, high school, like what you want those to be like. That's what you're planning backwards from as a family. So it's not about individuals so much anymore.

• 1:02:45Cal Newport?

  It's like, what's going to work with stress, finances, and the sort of flexibility or time required? Those are all really important. And then there's the bigger things like location. All those factors matter for family centric, lifestyle centric plans. Like where do we want our stress? What's our time or flexibility constraints? Is it like we're walking the kids to school and picking them up? Or is it, you know, there's a nanny, but we're home in the evenings? Is it like, how is that? Like you figuring that out? The finances, we don't want to be stressed by money. So where do we want to be financially? We don't need to be farther than it, but like where's the place that's going to make us with the things we want to do with our family? Like where do we want to be financially? And like, what do we want the environment to be like? So location, like where we live, schooling comes up too.

• 1:03:30Cal Newport?

  Like what type of school do we want them to be going to? All of these factors go in and you're making a plan as a family and then you figure out the right configuration to get that done. And this might require doing all sorts of like interesting hacking or arrangements with careers and jobs. Like, well, you got this skill, I have this. My skill is actually very flexible. Yours is less, but very high paying. So I could do mine kind of lesser hours. It's very flexible. You know, I'm a writer or something like that. And that could then cover, but then I could be around to pick up the kids. But your job is it's, you have to be in the office, but it makes a lot of money. And if you did that, but we went this path instead of that path, it's not going to be too bad. You begin to figure out these different kinds of configurations. You have two people, two skillsets.

• 1:04:13Cal Newport?

  Two sets of career possibilities available and you can start mixing and matching to figure out your vision for like the whole family lifestyle. So that's what I would say is like, this is a time to start doing that planning together. And there are so many different paths that might come out, you know, like, okay, I'm going to take a maybe like your spouse takes like a year off and then goes into this type of career over here and you switch to this career, you move over here where it's much cheaper. And I don't know, I've seen everything. But you don't get to the cool, unique configurations unless you're doing the lifestyle centric planning. So that's what I would say, family, unit, lifestyle centric planning, three phases. It's actually pretty fun to do because you have a lot of possibilities. You're two very skilled people. You probably have a little financial flexibility of young kids, which is fun. You could figure

• 1:04:56Cal Newport?

  out something pretty cool. I love going through this planning process, you know, and we've been executing our plan pretty well. And it's unique, I would say, we have kind of a, it's idiosyncratic.

• 1:05:08Cal Newport?

  People don't really understand what I do for a living, but that's on purpose because there's all sorts of factors I get out of that in terms of flexibility and seasonality, etc. So it's fun, but do the planning as a family. And there might be sacrifices involved. Like this is not about making sure every, both of you are as, have some sort of like individual self-actualization to the highest extent. You know, you kind of got off that train when you had a family. Family happy, that should be the goal. All right. We've got here a case study. And these are where people write into [email protected] and they share their experience putting the type of advice we talked about on the show into practice in their everyday life. This was a cool one from Erica.

• 1:05:48Cal Newport?

  It's about commuting. We mentioned in last week's show, we were talking about commuting when we were talking about remote work. So I thought this was a appropriate follow-up case study to last week's deep dive. All right, Erica says on episode 337, that's last week, Cal mentioned the benefits of having to commute prior to and after work. I have developed a great appreciation for my daily commute routine to and from the office. I've also done a little bit of lifestyle centric planning with my commute. I started working for a new company in 2024, which reduced my daily commute from over an hour each way to about 20 minutes each way. Secondly, I love driving as a hobby, so I found the job where I can drive into the office and have free parking. On the way to work, I drink my smoothie and listen to a podcast, Monday is always deep

• 1:06:33Cal Newport?

  questions, because I'm driving, I'm not using my phone and looking at social media. And so I'm able to get my mind cleared out of various nonsense and be ready for work. On the way home, I generally listen to music and either go to the gym or go window shopping, like trying out perfumes at various department and beauty stores. The commute going home allows me to let work melt away until the next morning. Note, I also use the time block planner and a Kanban board to help me feel set for the next day, but the commute is a great shutdown routine. When I work at home, I have in the past eschewed stimulating a commute, so I feel cranky most of the day. So I'm trying to use my treadmill and my bicycle indoor trainer to do a little bit of exercise in the mornings. It helps some, but it's not the same as my morning drive. So I found that I work from home as little as possible and will even go into the office,

• 1:07:18Cal Newport?

  even if it's half a day at work. While changing locations and adjusting my commute is not the typical big idea lifestyle centric planning changes somewhat, this small change has been a very large positive outcome. I feel that this one small change has helped my general mood and focus in a large way. Well, I like this idea that you do not need big ideas for lifestyle centric career planning to have a big impact. In fact, I often make a contrast between lifestyle centric planning and the alternative, which is the grand goal approach. The grand goal approach is like I have some big thing I go after and it makes my life magical from there on out. Almost never works. Lifestyle centric career planning could lead to some things that in retrospect kind of look radical or interesting, but they don't have to. And a lot of the biggest impacts come from these smaller changes.

• 1:08:03Cal Newport?

  So like in Erica's case, shifting to a job with a 20-minute commute, that was a key shift for the things she valued in her lifestyle centric plan, because the commute was actually helpful for her. But an hour-long commute is brutal. And so now it was like, I can do this commute. It's long enough to be effective as a phase transition, but not so long that it's brutal. 20 minutes is not bad at all. Trust me, in Washington DC, 20 minutes is roughly what it takes to like get out of your neighborhood before you could even like get to a major road. So 20 minutes is not bad at all, just long enough to change your mindset, but not so long that it's a problem. So now she could say, let me just go to work then.

• 1:08:44Cal Newport?

  I'll go to my office, I'll park, I have a transition, work real hard, shut down, complete on my time block planner. I've got things stored on my boards, like I can let my mind go and enjoy that commute back and I'm in a better mood. Like that's a great configuration. Like we forget this, a lot of the discussions about remote work that early on, a lot of the people who were arguing for remote work, it was in part because their commutes were really bad. You know, it's a really long commute and it's kind of grinding on me. So it'd be nice not to have to do that all the time. But there was a whole middle group of people where the commute's not so bad. They're not worried about for it's, it's, they have a plan for the childcare. That's the other thing. But they have a plan for the, you know, my work ends two hours after school and like that's figured out and they actually like it. So you do the drive, you're there when you're not, when you're home, you're home and you have some separation. So that's a great example of sort

• 1:09:29Cal Newport?

  of small scale changes from an LCP leading to big positive improvements.

• 1:09:37Cal Newport?

  All right, we got our final segment coming up. We'll talk about the books I read in January, but first, let's hear from another sponsor. So I think one of the harder things about raising a family, we're just talking about families in the call before, is food. It is difficult. You're trying to find food for your family that is healthy, that doesn't have junk in it, that's not like a bowl of red dye number five, or whatever the thing is they just banned and floating in the middle is a marshmallow, but also that your family will eat. I mean, this is so much of what my life and my wife's life has been, been about is like, as each kid goes through this certain age band, it's like, we gotta find food they'll eat. It's got to be healthy. And then they'll decide that essentially all food is bad. And so food is something you think about all the

• 1:10:20Cal Newport?

  time if you have a family. This is why I like Thrive Market. Thrive Market makes it simple to find trusted, family-friendly brands without spending hours in the grocery store. From snacks and school lunches to pantry staples, everything they offer is 100% non-GMO. And with their onsite filters, you can shop based on what matters most to your family. So like, maybe it's low sugar, or it's gluten free, or it's organic, or it's high protein options. All of this is just a click away. Like, for example, the low sugar filter is a great one on Thrive Market, because my kids, some days of the week, I mean, essentially their energy level is what you would get if you gave,

• 1:11:02Cal Newport?

  like, a lot of PCP to hyperactive, super criminal. They don't need more sugar. So you get these low sugar, like, let me just look at the low sugar options, because, you know, one of the things we buy a lot of is like snacks, snacks for school and for when they come home. Great, I could just filter for those and select what it is I want. One feature that's really cool is the Healthy Swap Scanner in the Thrive Market app. Here's how it work. You scan a project, a product that you're used to buy, like, oh, here, here's a thing I usually buy. And it will instantly recommend a cleaner, healthier alternative. This is also a game changer, especially again, the snack thing is where this is really a cool game changer. All right, pretzel sticks or whatever, we kind of get these.

• 1:11:46Cal Newport?

  Snap it. Oh, here is like a salty snack that's no GMOs, no like less artificial stuff in it. So again, it just makes it easy to get family food for your family that you can trust. Cool app, easy to use, it's delivered, that's great as well. You're not going to the supermarket and standing there. So I've become a big fan of Thrive Market.

• 1:12:09Cal Newport?

  Thrive Market's Smart Cart feature takes the guesswork out of healthy shopping. When you create an account, they ask you about your family's needs and automatically build a cart full of cleaner versions of your favorite brands. I love this, so tired of going to the store. You can tweak it before checking out, but it's a great way to get started, especially if you're trying to phase out junk food. If you're ready for a junk free start to 2025, head to thrive market.com/deep and get 30% off your first order plus a free $60 gift. Good promo, actually. That's T H R I V E market.com/deep, thrive market.com/deep. Also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Look, I'm in the, what do you call it?

• 1:12:54Cal Newport?

  Online world, a podcast, I have a newsletter, so I know a lot of people in the online world. And the people I know who sell stuff online, they use Shopify. It is just the industry standard. It's a fantastic backend experience for you, the person selling. It's a fantastic shopping cart experience for the person buying. Their shopping carts have an incredible conversion rate, so you're not going to lose people at that final step. They go beyond online selling as well. They have point of sale technology, so now you have your store that's actually in the real life. Shopify can integrate and help you right there. I mean, it is, it is a no brainer.

• 1:13:37Cal Newport?

  If you're going to sell things, you need to be using Shopify.

• 1:13:43Cal Newport?

  So you can upgrade your business and get the same checkout that so many people I know use when you use Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/deep. Now you need to type that in all lowercase, but you go to Shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today. That's Shopify.com/deep. All right, let's move on to our final segment. Every month, at the beginning of each month, I talk about the books I read the month before. Longtime listeners know my goal is to read five books a month. So this is our first episode of January, or February, rather. So I will talk about the books I read in

• 1:14:25Cal Newport?

  January 2025. All right, I started with film appreciation book. I don't know if it was called The Film Appreciation Book or Film Appreciation Book by Jim Piper. I'm an amateur cinephile, so I like to randomly read sort of pseudo textbooks or books about movies. And this was like a, almost like a textbook, right? It just went through like a lot of different aspects of film and talked about how they mattered. I like this one because it had a lot of pictures and scenes. You could go on the YouTube and watch the scenes. They had pictures in the book. So when they're talking about different types of shots or different types of compositions, I really liked being able to actually just see it. So it was fine. It was, it's one of these like systematic books. You're just going to learn a lot of terminology and learn a lot, learn about like a lot of like stuff you should know if you want to know the lingo for film. So it was a good one.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  A lot of your fans are interested in, because it's movie season, is your take on the films of this year?

• 1:15:19Cal Newport?

  We should do more film stuff. Last year, my wife and I watched all 10 Best Picture nominees. I don't know if we're going to do that this year. I've seen a bunch of them.

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  There's been requests.

• 1:15:30Cal Newport?

  I'm not super excited by.

• 1:15:34Cal Newport?

  I'm trying to think what in the best pictures nominations this year that I've been super excited about.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Mad Dog saw Dylan like four times.

• 1:15:40Cal Newport?

  Yeah, that was good. I saw them in the theater. Yeah, Complete Unknown was, I thought that was very good. That, that move, that, that for a over two hour long movie, that thing rock and rolled in more ways than one. Right. So that thing really moved. Chalamet was great. I liked the, the direction was very good. That, that director also did the Walk the Line, Johnny Cash, which was also very good. That, that's a favorite. Dune Two, I saw last fall, last spring, doing my book tour. So I was in Austin doing Ryan Holiday's podcast and Chris Williamson's podcast. I think those are the two I was doing. So I was in, I was in Austin and then one of them got canceled. I had an afternoon free

• 1:16:20Cal Newport?

  and I walked over to a cool indie theater in Austin and saw Dune Two, like right when it came out. That was cool. I enjoyed that. That was fun. So like, that was pretty good. I saw Conclave recently. It was okay. I mean, yeah, I thought it was, I mean, I liked the high contrast cinematography. I thought it was like kind of beautifully shot. It was cool. It's based off a Richard Harris book. What else is out though? I've been hearing bad things about Emilio Perez. Like people just don't like it.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  There's the one-

• 1:16:48Cal Newport?

  It's on Netflix though, so it's easy to see. I watched Substance with Demi Moore. I had, my wife was like, I'm done with this. She does, it's a body horror movie. She hates that type of stuff. You know, where it's like, that was good. I was like-

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Who's supposed to win best actor, other than if it's not Chalamet?

• 1:17:02Cal Newport?

  I don't know. I was reading an article that said it's like everyone could win.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was the one guy, Brody, in the other one.

• 1:17:09Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So that's Brutalist is still hard to, it is here in DC, so I should see it. It's three hours.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's an intermission.

• 1:17:16Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  I haven't seen it.

• 1:17:18Cal Newport?

  I gotta get my back in better shape, I think, before I see the Brutalist, or I have to wait till it comes. I love to see the, so last year I saw almost everything in the theater and I loved it. I couldn't get everything. I saw almost everything. Brutalist I do want to see. And it is playing in a couple of places here in DC. But I should see it. I like Brody. I don't know what else the other nominees were, which is like a problem, right? That, that means it's not, it's not a super exciting year. But this was the year with less movies because of the strike. The after effect of the strike two years ago was the things not going in the pipeline then meant last year was, just not as many movies were out. So I don't, I don't know. We'll see. Maybe I'll end up seeing more of them. All right. Second book I read, I had originally read this years ago, but I went back and reread Rich Roll's

• 1:18:02Cal Newport?

  memoir, Finding Ultra. He'd actually updated it. So I guess this is the newer version of it. It's just a cool story. People forget back when Rich Roll, who show up done twice now, I like Rich a lot. When his, he was coming up, this is what he was really known for. Like today he's known as like the wise old man of the podcast. I don't mean old, he's not that much older than me, much better shape. But you know, like he seems like an imminence in the podcasting world, but he was known for doing these crazy ultra athletic events. Like that was his thing was like, I'm going to do, he came out of nowhere and he started in, at the age of 40, at the age of 40. Now it's not quite fair

• 1:18:43Cal Newport?

  because he was also like an Olympic hopeful D1 swimmer for Stanford. So he's got the genes and there was a part in his life where he was a fantastic athlete, but then he had a alcohol problem. And then that swimming fell apart, became a lawyer, finally had to get sober because of like the DUI, like he was going to get sent to jail and finally like rehab stuck. So he put that addictive personality into eating junk food. So he was like in bad shape, which is hard to imagine, right? So he's in, and there's pictures in the book. You should buy the book just to see the pictures of Rich Roll. It's a different person. Pictures like in his 30s. I saw the cover. Yeah. Yeah. So look at 10 years before that and he's, you know, Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:27Cal Newport?

  50, 75 pounds heavier or whatever. Yeah. And he just in his 40s. So now he's clean, but he's eating junk food all the time, runs out of breath or walking up the stairs or something. And it's like, I gotta change this or whatever. And so he just gets into it. He becomes a vegan. And starts like serious athletic training and ends up becoming like a very successful like triathlons and then ultra marathons. And then he does this thing where he does five ironmans in seven days. It was like almost one ironman per day. Like he starts doing these crazy challenges. The frustrating thing about the book is it's like, I start changing how I eat and just like all the weight falls away. You know, his body is like an athlete's body. He starts training and he's like really good at these things, you

• 1:20:11Cal Newport?

  know? But it's a great book and that was his story. And he was like on the cover of maybe it was men's health as the fittest man in the world or something like in his mid to late 40s. So yeah, he became just like got in super good shape. A very inspiring story for me. If I know to be an aspiring guy, I don't, I have not heard what happened with his house in the fires. I know they evacuated. He's in Calabasas, which was in the crosshairs. I don't know what happened. When I, I've been to his house once when I did his podcast the first time. And that, that was after the 2017 fires had been kind of recently. And he showed me, we like went down the road and he showed me like the burn line. He's like, there it is. Like this was really close to my house. And I think this

• 1:20:56Cal Newport?

  one was much worse. I hopefully, hopefully his house survived, but I know they got out of there. So anyways, it's a great book. People forget that backstory. Ritual has an awesome backstory. He's an awesome guy. All right. Then I got into my, this is my like, I need to learn math because my, my back hurts and I'm in surgery and my mind still works. So that's what I'm going to do. So I read Why Machines Learn by Anil Anitha Swamy, well-known science reporter. It's a book about the mathematics behind machine learning, sort of starting with the beginning with like perceptrons and then moving all the way up to what's happening with like deep learning networks. And I don't really know who the book is for outside of like me, right? Because it's

• 1:21:41Cal Newport?

  It's mathy. It's not all the math. It's not a textbook, right? So it's like not, not all the math you need to know. But it's also, you know, multivariate derivatives are in there. So there's still math, like you gotta know math to like follow it. But he's just giving you enough math that if you know math, you're like, oh, I get a sense of how this works, right? So it's kind of, I don't know who the audience is. I loved it because I'm a computer scientist, but I'm not a machine learning person. So I was like, oh, cool. This, I see what you're doing here. Right? So like, I can come away and understand better about like what's happening with support vector machines. Right? Why you might want to take like a, a, a particular vector and you want to sample it up into a higher dimensional space where you have more of a chance of actually finding a clean margin on your hyperplane

• 1:22:26Cal Newport?

  that you can actually have like an optimal boundary on. The problem is you can't actually do these optimal hyperplane boundary algorithms in these multi, high multi-dimensional spaces. It's too computationally expensive. But if you use these special types of functions, you can actually compute these, you can compute these planes and discover them without using just like low dimensional computation, without actually having to leave from the high dimensions and therefore find these really good boundaries to it. Otherwise be hard to separate spaces like that's what support vector machines are. Like for me, that's useful. I can't tell you exactly how the math works. But like, I have a sense of like what type of math is involved. So I'm a great market for this book.

• 1:23:11Cal Newport?

  I know more about the math and it's great too, to understand why when deep learning came around, it just blew the doors off and frustrated everyone who had been working on the, I call it boring machine learning, but this sort of theoretically rigorous provable. This is these algorithms and here's what we're doing and here's how the math works. And these guys came along with these, these multi-layered, huge number of parameter models. And we're like, I don't know, let's just train the hell out of this thing. And they were like, no, this won't work. It's going to overfit. That's not how this works. And it just worked. They made it bigger and it just got better. So it must've been frustrating for the mathematicians. So it's kind of a mathy book, but I, I got this right. This is the part of my recovery when my back started hurting.

• 1:23:55Cal Newport?

  And I was like, okay, well, I'm, I can still use my mind. So I got that book from Labyrinth Books in Princeton over the Christmas break and just enjoyed that. All right. Then I also read Burn Math Class, which I actually started this book right before my surgery, when I was, my mobility was restricted as I was waiting for the surgery. And then I finished it in January. And this is a crazy book. This is Jason Wilkes's book. I love it. Jesse stole my copy. I bought another copy. I don't think he wrote anything else about this, but it's this crazy program of a book where he basically just derives from first principles, all of mathematics up to multi-dimensional calculus. And just from scratch, like why it's not, here's a chain rule. It's like, let's derive, like,

• 1:24:37Cal Newport?

  get to like, why the chain rule works, like here. So I don't know. I think it's a kind of a tour de force. He formatted the whole thing in LaTeX. He wrote it in a few months. It's a little bit crazy. There's these like longest into diagrams between like mathematics and like the author of the book. It's a little bit strange, but his mathematical program is fantastic. So I followed this all the way up. I lost steam at the very end. I got through like multi-dimensional derivatives for calculus, like the last 30 pages, I kind of lost steam on, but I got through basically all of it. Anyways, this was me, like my mind works, even if my body doesn't. And I think that book should be more well-known. It should have had a better title. This guy, Jason, if you're out there, you're a creative guy.

• 1:25:21Cal Newport?

  You're obviously very, very smart. Write more books about math. Be the Sean Carroll or the Brian Greene of mathematics. You could do it. I should find him and tell him that. It's a cool book, but Burn Math Class was not the right title. And then I read The Intentional Father by John Tyson. It was a book on parenting adolescent boys. My oldest is 12. I was like, oh, I need that advice. So I grabbed this book on Kindle. It was more Christian than I thought. I didn't realize it was like super Christian. Not necessarily a bad thing, right? I mean, religions have good ideas for parenting. I'm still digesting it. I think Tyson's approach is like very structured. Like we are as a father, so it's about being a father to adolescent boys. So like right in my wheelhouse. It's a very

• 1:26:03Cal Newport?

  structured approach. Like we're going to do these initiation routines and set aside this time and have these conversations every morning. And it was like a lot of structure that maybe I'd be comfortable with, but I'm letting the ideas marinate. But I'm looking for good parenting books. That's a call. A call out to the audience is I'm about to hit adolescence full out. So if people have good books for that, especially like Boys, Fathers, Boys, send those along to [email protected]. I need to read basically all of those. I already see it coming, like the emotional, everything. It's, uh, it's for real, folks. All right. That's all I got for today. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:26:51Cal 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.