Do I Need a Digital Intervention? | Monday Advice

A new research study reveals that a surprisingly simple intervention into your digital life can yield massive benefits in only two weeks. In this episode, Cal takes a deep dive into this paper, detailing: the intervention, why it works, and tips for increasing your chances of success. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia (0:00) Do I need a digital intervention? (27:06) AI and academic research (33:56) Reversing brain rot with cognitive fitness (37:08) Leaving your phone in the kitchen (40:07) What Cal is reading Books: How Society Should Deal with Inequality (Frank Newport) Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/2/pgaf017/8016017 https://orgsci.substack.com/p/more-versus-better-part-i Thanks to our Sponsors: This show is sponsored by Better Help: https://www.betterhelp.com/deepquestions https://www.larridin.com https://www.calderalab.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Nate Mechler for research and newsletter. 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.

• 0:00Cal Newport?

  Imagine if I could offer you a pill that gave you the following benefits. One, your symptoms of anxiety and depression would significantly reduce. Two, your overall sense of moment-to-moment life satisfaction would improve. And three, you would gain substantially more ability to concentrate. And to make this even more enticing, let's say this pill would deliver you those benefits in only two weeks. If such a drug existed, it would be a blockbuster. Now, the bad news is, there is no such pill that can do this. The good news, however, is that according to a major new research paper, there's a

• 0:40Cal Newport?

  simple intervention for your digital habits that can deliver all of those promises. I'm talking about something that's free, and that you can put in place with minimal preparation, something that you could start implementing today. Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, and clearly, this is a perfect type of topic to dive deeply into. So here's what we're gonna do. I have the paper here, we're gonna go through it. I'll start by describing the intervention they studied and quantify the exact benefits that they measured, then we'll look closer at the mechanisms that the researchers believe explain why this intervention works so well, and then we'll end with three pieces of advice

• 1:25Cal Newport?

  of my own for how to maximize the chances that you will succeed with this intervention if you choose to try it. So if you've been fed up with your distracted digital life, this is an episode you definitely need to hear. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.

• 1:56Cal Newport?

  Alright, so we're going to proceed here by addressing three key questions. The first question, what was the intervention studied in this research paper? Well, if you look at the title of the paper, it sort of gives it away. Here is the title, "Blocking Mobile Internet on Smartphones Improves Sustained Attention, Mental Health, and Subjective Well-Being." Alright, let's look a little bit closer at this. What do they mean by "blocking mobile internet"? Well, they used an app-blocking tool called Freedom, and what they did is they set it up to block internet-powered apps like social media and the web browser, but leave things like instant messaging and phone calls alone.

• 2:41Cal Newport?

  This is key, as a lot of people know, especially parents in the audience. You need the ability to have a phone on which you can do calls, or messages, or WhatsApp. I checked it recently, Jesse. I'm on three different parental WhatsApp groups right now that I have to monitor. And with three kids in school, I would say I get called by the school nurse like roughly once a month, alright? So they figured out how to block the internet without making you have to live without the other functional benefits of a smartphone. Now, here's what's critical about this research. Part of what made it good was they could then check compliance. They could look at the log produced by the blocking software and make sure that their

• 3:20Cal Newport?

  research subjects actually kept the blocking on, that they weren't occasionally going around it. So that made a big difference. Then to get even better results, they did something even more impressive. They made this a randomized control trial. So they recruited a group of participants, and then randomly divided them into a group that was going to have the internet blocking, and then a group that was not, so that they could really be comparing what was the difference between these two groups, and not accidentally measuring things like self-selection effects. As the experiment went on, they could measure the impact with various means. They had surveys that they would have the participants filled out, they had various tests, like tests of attention that they would have the participants do at various

• 4:03Cal Newport?

  times, and they would do something called random experience sampling, where they would randomly text the participants and say, "Hey, tell me right now, in this moment, how you are feeling." This is sort of the gold standard in social psychology for measuring people's subjective well-being on average.

• 4:21Cal Newport?

  Okay, so that was the experiment and they had the intervention group do this for two weeks. While the control group did not, and then there were some more complexities after that where then they swapped and the control group started using them and they measured what happened with the intervention group for the week that followed, but that was the core of the experiment. What did they find? Well, I'm going to put a couple plots up on the screen here for people who are watching. Okay, so this first plot here is looking at sustained attention ability. I want you to look at the blue lines. This is the intervention group and between the beginning of the experience and time point two, so two is after two weeks, we see this blue line goes way up, a marked increase in the ability to pay attention. Then as we go forward, it falls a little bit, but not all the way back down the baseline. So even

• 5:05Cal Newport?

  after they started using their phone for the internet again, they still had some attention left. All right, what about mental health and even more dramatic effect here? Look at this blue line.

• 5:15Cal Newport?

  That's the intervention group. One is right before the experiment starts. Look at how high that jumps up by the end of the experiment. It's a massive increase. And look what happens when they measured in at the third time point after they started using their phones again. The mental health began going down. They had a long after effect of benefits from spending those two weeks without mobile internet. Here's the third chart, subjective well-being. Once again, look at that blue line. From the beginning of the experiment to the end of the two-week period, we see a massive jump. And again, as we go from time period two to time period three and they start using their phones again, it falls, but we still get some after-effect benefits from the two weeks they spent without using their phone. So these are notable results and they were delivered really fast.

• 6:00Cal Newport?

  In these sort of prospective randomized control studies where you're really comparing one group to another, to see such a large jump on such important metrics in only two weeks is pretty rare.

• 6:14Cal Newport?

  It gives us the sense that maybe we were underestimating just how much damage to our ability to pay attention, our mental health and our subjective wellbeing. Maybe we were really underestimating what a hit we were taking by being, using the internet on our phone so constantly. Alright, so those results then motivate a natural follow-up question. That's what they saw, but why did they see that? What were the mechanisms that mediated these improvements in those factors when they stopped using mobile internet on their phone? So that's our section question here. What explains these results? Now fortunately, the researchers also looked at this question. They measured many factors during the experiment before and after to try to figure out what

• 6:58Cal Newport?

  changed during the period of not using mobile internet that seems at least like it's likely canon to be mediating the positive results that they saw. Well, the first thing they looked at was just the obvious top-line number. When you take mobile internet off of your phone, how much less do you look at it? And they discovered that actually significantly less. The average daily screen time before the experiment began was 304 minutes. By the end of the experiment, that had dropped down to 161 minutes. So they basically dropped the amount of time they're looking at their screens by about a factor of two when you took mobile internet off of the phones.

• 7:39Cal Newport?

  Okay, so they freed up this sort of 150 or so minutes each day that they used to be looking at mobile internet devices. How did this then lead to them being happier, less mental health impacts and ability to focus more? Well, the researchers went on to isolate four what they called mediation factors that emerged as having strong changes during the experimental period, and it's their best guesses at what is actually mediating the positive dependent variable effects. So here's the four mediation factors that they measured during the experimental period. The subject spent more time doing meaningful offline activities, they experienced more social interaction, they slept more, and their sense of self-control increased.

• 8:30Cal Newport?

  Let's think about those for a second. So the first three, meaningful offline activities, more social interaction and more sleeping. The researchers are saying this is probably just a straight up time reallocation. That is where that 150 minutes that used to be looking at internet connected apps on the phone, that's where it went. They just reallocated it towards activities that had much more positive impacts on their daily life. Now here's what this tells me. If we see pretty consistently that once you take highly optimized internet distract, power distracting apps off of phones, if we see this in the research, the subjects all move towards those much more meaningful activities. It tells me that we're wired to do the right thing.

• 9:14Cal Newport?

  That if you don't have extra constraints on us, if you put us in a situation where we're bored, we have natural drives that will drive us towards, let's go do something meaningful. Let's talk to other people. I'm tired. Why don't I actually go to sleep? And what we want to understand is happening with our phones is that it's basically just short circuiting our natural drives. It left our own devices. We tend to do the things that are good for us from a subjective wellbeing perspective. And it's only when we have these sort of outside tools come in that hijack those drives that we end up in trouble. I mean, we see similar things with drugs and alcohol where it will make our lives worse because it's hijacking our drives or our mind in a way that gets us away from the activities we normally would be doing to be beneficial. It looks like the phones are doing the same thing.

• 9:58Cal Newport?

  If we could just get those highly engineered distracting apps out of our life, we will naturally start doing things that are going to make us much happier. But what about that fourth mediation factor, which was a sense of increased self-control? Here's my understanding of what's going on here. And this is sort of my theory based on my own study of these issues. So one of the things that happens when you have your phone with you at all times, like most people do, and you have these internet based apps that are highly distracting on the phone, as I've talked about many times before on this show, the short-term motivation centers in your brain learn that picking up that phone and tapping on one of those apps is very likely to give you a reward signal. The expected value is high.

• 10:42Cal Newport?

  And because of that, because you have such a clean reward signal coming out of those apps, your short-term motivation center of your brain is constantly voting for picking up your phone.

• 10:52Cal Newport?

  And you feel this as like a constant urge for distraction that pulls you away from other things you might want to do, or prevents you from doing those things in the first place. And it can make you feel like you don't have control over your own body or mind. You're like, why did I just spend 150 minutes on TikTok? I didn't want to do that. So it leaves you feeling like you don't have much self-control. Now, on the flip side, when you get those apps out of your life, the short-term motivations in your brain is no longer voting for picking up your phone so strongly, and you find yourself able to do other things more easily. Because you do not have to overcome the vote of your brain saying, hey, let's pick up the phone. It's not nearly as strong anymore. What is that going to feel like? I have more self-control. And so, of course, that was going to pick

• 11:35Cal Newport?

  up on surveys is when you turn off mobile internet on your phone, you will begin to experience your day as one in which you have much more control or autonomy over what you do, which is also going to be obviously a very positive factor. But go to the end of the paper. Here's one of the things the authors say. I'm quoting here. "These results provide causal evidence that blocking mobile internet can improve important psychological outcomes, and suggests that maintaining the status quo of constant connection to the internet may be detrimental to time-use cognitive function and well-being. And to put that conclusion more plainly, constant access to the internet through mobile devices

• 12:16Cal Newport?

  is causing way more problems than most of us guessed. It is making us miserable. It really is an emergency. But for all the urgency of this problem, the solution fortunately looks to be pretty simple. Block mobile internet on your phone. After even just two weeks, you will realize just how much you were missing in your life." Now, let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 13:12Cal Newport?

  Hey men, you need to take better care of your skin. The best way to do this? With Caldera Lab. Caldera Lab makes high-performance skincare designed specifically for men's skin. Now, this is important because men's skin is 25% thicker, oilier, and ages differently from women's, which means men need clean formulas engineered for their biology. Now Caldera Labs has you covered here because they offer three great products. The first is actually called "The Great." It's a lightweight anti-aging serum which absorbs in seconds and leaves your skin looking firmer, brighter, and just healthier overall. The second product is called "The Hydrolayer," which just won the Men's Health Grooming

• 13:57Cal Newport?

  Awards for Best Anti-Aging Moisturizer. You put that on daily. And finally, they have their Eye Serum, which targets the most visible signs of aging: puffiness, dark circles, and fine lines around the eye areas. Look, let me tell you from experience, these three products work like I didn't know that you're supposed to put on moisturizer, but it really does make a difference. If you use these daily, it is a small habit that will produce big results. So, go to calderalab.com/deep and use the code DEEP for 20% off your first order. I also want to tell you about another new sponsor, our friends at Laredon. Now, here's something I've learned as someone who writes about technology.

• 14:41Cal Newport?

  Sometimes figuring out how best to use a new tool can be just as hard as innovating the tool in the first place. And this certainly seems to be the case with AI right now, where we have teams that are rushing to deploy dozens of different tools with no clean way of figuring out which of these tools is actually helping. And sometimes, without this feedback, new tools can make things worse rather than better, which is all to say, the real challenge right now isn't adopting AI, it's understanding how it's being used and how to maximize its value. This is exactly what Laredon focuses on. Laredon gives a clear view of AI tool adoption and how teams are using them daily. No more guesswork.

• 15:24Cal Newport?

  It tracks real usage data and outcomes, so you can connect AI activity to actual business results. It can even help you enforce internal policies and manage risks, both of which are critical as AI continues to grow.

• 15:39Cal Newport?

  If AI is already part of your organization, now's the moment to get control of it. Head to Larridin.com today and book a demo to start maximizing impact from AI. That's Larridin, L-A-R-R-I-D-I-N.com. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so that's where the paper ends, but this leaves us with our third, final, and most practical question. How do I successfully stick with this intervention? If you know the thing to do is to spend 14 days blocking mobile internet on your phone, you get all these benefits. How do we make sure we'll stick with this? Well, this is a relevant question.

• 16:23Cal Newport?

  There's a key data point from early in the paper that should give us pause. They had originally recruited right around 500 participants for this study, but only 25.5% of the participants remained compliant throughout the whole experiment. Now, remember, they could check compliance exactly because they could look at the logs of the blocking software. Now, I assume some of this noncompliance was actually unrelated to the internet blocking, just people got busy or tired of the surveys and the tests and the experience sampling. They're like, I forget it, I don't want to do it. But the sense you get from reading the paper is that a lot of this measured noncompliance was people getting around the mobile internet blocking. They could turn it off. Now, it would be logged if they did, and then they wouldn't be counted into data, but you could turn it off.

• 17:07Cal Newport?

  And it seemed like a large number of people at some point circumvented it at least a little bit. So this motivates a critical question. If you want to do this experiment in your life to get these benefits, what can you do to maximize the odds that you're like the 25.5% of the participants who stuck with the blocking and not like the 74.5% who gave in and started using their phone again? Well, I came up with three tips, and if you're going to put this into practice, I came up with three tips that I think would be helpful. Okay? All right, let's start with the first one here. I'll reveal it.

• 17:44Cal Newport?

  This is dramatic, Jesse. Those who are listening again are missing avatar-style visual effects. All right. Tip number one: block precisely. So if you're gonna block internet-connected apps, you have to be a little bit more precise than basically saying, "Leave the phone, leave text messaging, everything else is blocked." The problem is, and I'm sure a lot of the participants face this, is that there's many pragmatic apps on our phones in the modern world that use the internet or the cellular, and you need them just to function practically in the world, right? So I'm looking at my own phone,

• 18:25Cal Newport?

  and I can see on here, for example, Park Mobile, right? You park somewhere. It's how we pay for parking here in DC that uses the internet, but I need that because I'm often parking in places. The two-factor authentication that I use to like login to Georgetown, or if we're logging into our system here at our production company, I need that on my phone so that I can do two-factor authentication. There's a couple other apps like that as well. So if you want to succeed, you can't have those type of frustrations. So you need to block more narrowly. Whatever blocking software you're using, you have to go through and choose specific apps to block, not just all. The simple advice I would give is look at the so-called S&G apps, social media, news, and games.

• 19:10Cal Newport?

  These are the ones that are really engineered to grab your attention and therefore create that sense of motivation to pick up your phone. So go block every S&G you can find, but you can leave the other pragmatic apps, the weather app, the parking app, the two-factor authentication app. You can leave those open so that you're not going to have the issue where you're like, "Oh, I really need this app. Let me turn off my blocking," and now you never turn it back on again. All right, so that's tip number one if you want to succeed with this intervention. All right. Tip number two.

• 19:43Cal Newport?

  Strengthen controls. So one of the things that they did in this paper is that the software they were using to block mobile internet access, it wasn't particularly strong. The subjects could turn it off or circumvent it. It would take them out of the sample study, but they could do it.

• 20:01Cal Newport?

  This is partially experimental design, like the researchers didn't want to take over completely the subject's phone. I mean, what if they were in an emergency and they couldn't use it? But it also has to do with the reality of iOS, which several years ago made a change that made it very difficult for third-party apps to really have strong controls over blocking on your phone. They didn't like the idea of a third-party app being able to strongly block other third-party apps. But if you can have stronger blocking, by which I mean blocking in which there's more friction involved than actually turning it off, it will significantly increase your probability of compliance with this intervention. So if you want to move just one step above the sort of basic controls they were doing, you can think about a device like BRIC.

• 20:44Cal Newport?

  BRIC has a physical key fob that becomes involved if you want to actually turn off a particular blocking mode. You have to touch it to your phone. You can put this in another room or keep it in your car or your bag. So you still have access to anything if you need it, but the friction of going to get a device and touching to your device is often enough to give pause and to prevent that short-term motivation circuit from winning because it sees a real cost to you having to actually demonstrably go and get this thing and make it clear to yourself that you failed with your own rules. You want to go a step above that, you can configure your phone. So if you have a partner, right? You can configure your phone such that it's protected with iOS's screen time, but it's like you're the kid and your partner is the parent,

• 21:26Cal Newport?

  right? And only they know the PIN code for actually changing what settings are on your phone. So if you want to change the blocking software, you would have to get the number from someone else. Again, that's a higher level of friction, but that's really going to work as well. You're going to think, okay, I'm not going to go bother like my husband or my wife or my girlfriend or my boyfriend to get this PIN number. That's just admitting I failed. I guess I'm going to have to do without checking Instagram right in this moment. All right, those are three tips. Let me give you the third tip to succeed with this intervention.

• 22:03Cal Newport?

  Lean into boredom.

• 22:06Cal Newport?

  This is one of the more interesting things I saw in the paper was this idea that many of these subjects naturally drifted to the same high-value activities. Once you took the mobile internet, that that sort of potent distraction out of their life. The point is our instincts are good.

• 22:25Cal Newport?

  If we get rid of these sort of artificial constraints in our lives, our instincts for how we want to alleviate boredom tend to be good. I want to go hang out with people. I want to go do something interesting.

• 22:36Cal Newport?

  I want to make my man, my intentions made manifest concretely in the world. So you're going to feel discomfort when you don't have access to the same apps that you're used to delivering you numbing or diversion. That's okay. Feel that discomfort, feel that boredom. And tell yourself, rewire yourself to think the solution to this boredom is not circumventing the blocks and going back to having access to apps on my phone. Let me try other things that might get rid of this boredom unrelated to my phone. And that's going to drive you really quickly towards activities that are actually very good for you. It's like if you're very hungry and you're put into a food environment where you don't have ultra-processed foods that are hyper-palatable.

• 23:21Cal Newport?

  You're going to eat the things that are good for you. You're like, oh, I want, you know, I have like meat here and vegetables and fruit, like stuff that your body recognizes and likes. So in the absence of the artificial, our instincts work really well. So in the absence of our artificial diversions, the boredom will drive you towards good behavior if you let it. Just take your phone off the table as the solution and see what other solutions arise in that roiled wake. And you're going to find yourself drawn to activities that make a big difference. All right. So what's the long-term vision here? Let's say you do this intervention for two weeks. You feel much better, you can concentrate, your subjective well-being is better, your mental health is feeling stronger. The idea is, once you get to that point, you will follow something like my own lead,

• 24:06Cal Newport?

  like what I do in my life, and permanently quit or disable these apps that are on your phone that are causing these diversions, to make your phone boring, like losing your taste for junk food. And now you can be around potato chips and have no desire to eat them. You will get there when it comes to these digital diversions. If they're not normally on your phone and you don't normally spend much time with them, they become less alluring. And what becomes more attractive is all of the other interesting things going on in your life, getting a full night's sleep, interacting in the real world with other people, meaningful offline activities. So this is my advice. Take the lesson from this paper, and right away, go ahead

• 24:47Cal Newport?

  and do a 14-day mobile internet break on your phone. Keep all the apps you need for your day-to-day life, just takes off the ones you don't. Remember the three tips that I mentioned so that you're more likely to succeed with this. And if you make it to the other end, then ask yourself, like a true digital minimalist, what role do I really want these technologies to play in my life? And then it might be time to make some permanent changes. So there we go. That was a well-done study, Jesse. It actually involved, one of the co-authors is a colleague of mine at Georgetown.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 25:19Cal Newport?

  Yeah, from the psychology department. So there we go. It's a pretty international group of researchers. I see a lot of these papers. Some are good, some are bad. This is a high-quality one. It appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus Open Access Journal. So that's actually a really solid one. That paper's been read like 200,000 times.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Did you know about it before it came out?

• 25:37Cal Newport?

  I had heard rumors. I mean, there's a lot of papers. I kind of heard people mention it. And then I think it was Newsletter Director Nate, who was like telling me about this two-week paper. And I went and read it and was like, oh, this is a good one. So that's how we decided to do it on the show. I want to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 26:28Cal Newport?

  This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp. So it's May now, which means it's Mental Health Awareness Month. This seems like a good opportunity to remind you that if you're struggling with your mind, you don't have to deal with this all by yourself. Having someone with you to listen, to understand, and to support you can make all the difference. This is where BetterHelp enters the scene. It's a service that makes it easy for you to find and meet with a qualified therapist. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you, so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences, and their 12 years of experience and industry-leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get that match right on the first time. But if you aren't happy, you can switch to a different therapist at any time using their

• 27:13Cal Newport?

  tailored recommendations. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US. You don't have to be on this journey alone. Find support and have someone with you in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/deepquestions. That's betterhelp.com/deepquestions. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, well, that's enough hearing from me. We also like to hear from you, because it's a Monday Advice episode. We often introduce a second segment in which we open our inbox to get questions, comments, and reactions from my audience. If you have things you

• 27:55Cal Newport?

  want to send in to be covered on the show, you can use [email protected]. All right, we've got some time today, Jess. Let's do a few questions. Who do we have up first?

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Our first question is from Tyler, and it's about AI and academic research.

• 28:10Cal Newport?

  All right, so Tyler says, "I imagine you've gotten many emails with this link already, but just wanted to make sure it got to you. Keep up the good work, fellas." All right, so what he sent me was a Substack essay. I'll put it on the screen here. It's from a Substack called "So Here's the Idea: The Organization Science Substack," and the essay is titled "More Versus Better, Part 1."

• 28:35Cal Newport?

  Now, I actually went through and read this essay and enjoyed it so much that I wrote a newsletter about it. So the newsletter that came out today at calnewport.com goes deep into this. So if this sounds interesting to you, go over to calnewport.com and check out my essay today, right into the details on this essay. You should subscribe. I mean, this is dispatches from the front lines of the war of depth versus distraction. So if you listen to this, you should subscribe. But let me, let me go over some of the high points here on the podcast. So here's the, the basic idea. This is a task force. The authors are a task force that were organized by a particular well-known journal in organization science. It's called organization science. This task force was pulled together to answer

• 29:18Cal Newport?

  the question of what role is AI having in the submissions and publications? Like what role is it having on the academic research community that is publishing in this journal? And they gathered really good data because these are researchers from a field where what you do is gather really good data. So they know what they're doing here. I want to show you a couple of charts. I'm going to bring this up here. All right. Here's the first chart. So this is labeled monthly submission volume at organization science from January 2013 until the end of 2025. The key thing here is at the far right, we see this massive increase in submissions and it happens right after this vertical line is labeled chat

• 30:01Cal Newport?

  GPT. So the first thing they noticed is there was a bump during COVID-19. It was, it bumped up from what was happening before, but it was pretty steady. And then post chat GPT, they've been having an increasing rate of submissions per year. All right. So that's chart number one. Here's chart number two. This is monthly submission volume by AI use category. So that black line is the total submissions per month. That dotted line in the middle is chat GPT gets introduced. These lines down the bottom are measuring how much AI was used in the paper submitted. The orange line is zero to 15% AI. And what you can see is as the total volume of submissions go up, the total fraction of those submissions

• 30:46Cal Newport?

  or volume of submissions that don't use AI is going down. So they're clearly measuring they are getting more AI submissions ever since chat GPT came out.

• 31:00Cal Newport?

  I think, let's see here, okay. And then here we see a chart that measures essentially the readability of papers. And Jesse, as you'll notice, it's pretty flat from 2013 through COVID-19. And then what happens at the ChatGPT line? It takes a nosedive, just a nosedive. So the papers become massively and notably less readable right around the time ChatGPT is emerging. Here's a couple of numbers from the paper. Among manuscripts that were high AI submissions, so 70% or more of the manuscript was generated with the help of AI, nearly 70% were desk rejected, which means an editor determined they should not be sent out for review. So they were so bad, the editors are like, we're not even going to do peer review on this.

• 31:45Cal Newport?

  By comparison, the desk rejection rate for low AI manuscripts, manuscripts where there's very little AI used, was 44%. So it almost doubled the chance you would get rejected right off the bat if it was written with the help of AI. Now, remember, the editors don't know that. They labeled these after the fact. This is just strictly based on their assessment of the quality of the paper. Later on, the researchers fell that found that the percentage of high AI papers that made it all the way through to the final stage, where they say revise and resubmit for publication, was around 4%, whereas for low AI papers, that rate was 12%. So you have a 3X reduction in the probability that your paper would actually make it through and be published.

• 32:29Cal Newport?

  So what they're finding is this is a real problem. AI made it easier to write and submit papers. And because of this, they're getting a ton more submissions, which really is actually taxing their resources because editors have to look at these submissions and peer reviewers have to peer review them if they're sufficiently good. Now, this would be okay if these were all good submissions and we're just strictly increasing the amount of good science. You know, great, we're going to now have a productivity boom in this actual academic field, but it's not what they saw. What they clearly measured is AI made it faster to produce papers, but the papers you were producing were bad. They weren't readable, they were way more likely to be desk rejected, way, way more likely to not make it through to acceptance.

• 33:10Cal Newport?

  And I think this is a good, specific case study of a more general issue.

• 33:17Cal Newport?

  That we've been talking about recently on this show, which is when it comes to productivity, making things faster doesn't necessarily make things better. Making it easier to technically finish and submit a paper doesn't necessarily necessarily mean that you are a more productive scientist or science is proceeding more productively. And often you can have a reverse effect where producing lower quality things faster gunk up the works and prevents the good stuff from happening. And that's for sure is what's happening to this particular journal. By flooding the works with significantly more submissions that are lower quality, I am sure that now the energy required and the rate at which good research is produced is down.

• 34:01Cal Newport?

  And we see this in our individual lives as well. I've talked about this effect like in last week's podcast with Dave Epstein, right? You speed up one part of your life at some work process you're doing, like I'm going to use email, like very quickly bounce back and forth ideas with people, but it leads to too much work on your plate that all piles up at the bottleneck of you actually doing the hard work. And because you're so distracted, keeping up with all these email conversations, the rate at which you actually finish things goes down. And you made one thing in your work process faster, but you made the rate at which you produce useful stuff slower. And this happens time and again, when we bring in digital tools, that makes one thing faster easier. And we assume that's going to mean we'll just become strictly better at what we do, but they can make things worse. So I think it's a great experiment, but if you want to, if you want a shareable version

• 34:46Cal Newport?

  of this discussion, or you want to get some more details, go to calnewport.com. I just wrote about it today. All right, Jesse, what, uh, what do we got next?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Our next message is from Emily, who had a question about our recent episode on reversing brain rot with cognitive fitness.

• 35:01Cal Newport?

  That was a popular episode.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:03Cal Newport?

  Yeah, especially online. The kids like the term brain rot. I guess is what's going on. Um, so for those who missed it, I gave advice for how to get your brain back in shape in a world in which we have lots of distractions. So obviously today's episode follows up on some of those ideas. I would add the 14 day intervention we talked about today is like idea number six from that how to reverse brain rot episode I did a couple of weeks ago. All right. So Emily is writing in reaction to that episode from a couple of weeks ago. Here's what she said.

• 35:32Cal Newport?

  I really enjoyed your recent episode on building cognitive fitness. I am currently using the composing of this email to not avoid writing, so thank you for the motivation. My question for you is also related to this writing portion of your proposed regimen. My expertise is in architecture and design, and I have found that my journal and notebooks tend to fill with drawings and schematics as much as with words. Do you think that there are equivalent alternative forms of creating, composing, and communicating that require the same sort of brain processes that writing does? Or do you believe that written language is uniquely superior for practicing that mental orchestration?

• 36:11Cal Newport?

  Well, I think exercise is a useful analogy here, Emily, because there's different types of exercise that can promote fitness in different ways, all of which is good. And in general, variety is good, and I think that's what we're talking about here. Technical drawing and schematics are going to work your brain in useful ways from a cognitive fitness standpoint. They're not the same ways that writing works it. There's some overlap, and there's some ways where they're both different. And so they're both good. And a life where you're doing some writing and you're doing some technical drawing and schematics, I think that's like an athlete who cross trains. You know, you're, you're, you do a lot of running, but now you're also doing some cross-country skiing. There's some overlap and you're going to get fitness in the same, same sort of fitness boost in both cases.

• 36:53Cal Newport?

  But there's also ways in which you're going to get different types of fitness from each of those. I think it's all just good. Hard cognitive activity is good for your brain. It's never been more important because we're out of shape mentally. The more you do, the better. But I just think fundamental, reading and writing are fundamental activities. This is like jogging and lightweight training. Like you, you do need that, you want that foundation in there, no matter what other things you are doing as well. So I sometimes hear from people who are like, well, look, I don't write that. I'm just not a good writer, but I, I, I kind of fake write. Or I'll use like chat GPT and talk to it and still express myself and, and, but I do other things that help me concentrate. And I would say the other things are good.

• 37:36Cal Newport?

  But you want that reading and writing is like the core dynamic duo of the post-patolithic human modern experience. It's where like all of the ideas that defines modern humanity came from, our morality, our technology, our politics, our philosophy. All of those brain circuits were forged in reading and writing. So you do not want to take those out of your routine, but adding other stuff in the routine can only help. All right, what do we got? Message number three.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Our final message is from Tyler, but a different Tyler than our first message. It's about your suggestion to leave your phone in the kitchen.

• 38:14Cal Newport?

  All Tyler's today, all Tyler's all the time. That's Jesse Nice motto. All right, Tyler, thank you for what you do. Oh, here's his message. I'm not, I mean Tyler, thank you for what you do, whatever that is, but I'm now reading his message. Thank you for the, thank you for what you do. Deep work and slow productivity have been transformational in helping me move away from distracted, lazy forms of working from home to more focused, satisfying days as a data scientist. Deep questions help me, helps me remember why the increased cognitive effort is so worth it, and it's easy to get excited after reading a book than fall back into bad habits two weeks later. My wife and I adopted leaving our phones plugged in the kitchen as a sort of mindfulness challenge during Lent and

• 38:58Cal Newport?

  couldn't believe how impactful this was for both of us. We now call it landlining and have continued to practice this even after Lent. It's easy to just tell my wife, I'm landlining, so please call if she needs anything while she's out. I like that terminology. I think it's useful. So this idea of leaving your phone plugged in the kitchen is one I talk about all the time. I think it's one of the easiest ways to begin to de-addict your mind from the attraction of your phone, especially if your phone just fundamentally has things attractive on it, is keep it plugged in your kitchen. So you would have to get up and go get it if you want to use it. Do not have it on your person while you eat, while you watch TV, while you read books, while you socialize with your family. It makes such a big difference, but I like having a term for it. So Tyler

• 39:39Cal Newport?

  and his wife call it landlining. I think that's useful because it gives you a shorthand for explaining to people. Don't expect me maybe to immediately see, for example, a text message you send. That's one of the big hooks that keeps us near the ocean so that the jaws of distraction can grab us and pull us under is this idea of people might expect me to answer a text message and I don't want to seem like I'm being rude. So I need my phone with me to check those text messages and now it's on you. Now they've got you and all the other stuff are there. So if landlining caught on, you could use it in the same way that Tyler uses it with his wife, right? You could say, I'm landlining in the evening. So you're going to have to call

• 40:21Cal Newport?

  if you have something urgent to get my attention. Right? So I like that landlining. People should use, I like the terminology. People should use it. Alright, so because it's Monday, I want to close out by talking about what I am up to. I'm actually loading something on my phone.

• 40:44Cal Newport?

  Jesse, see here. You know what I'm seeing as I go through my phone, looking through the photos.

• 40:51Cal Newport?

  A lot of baseball photos. It's a lot of little league coaching photos. Alright, what we're going to do now is we're going to break down multiple pitches for my son's last little league appearance. That'd be a good episode of the show. No, I was looking up a thing, a book title. Alright, I finished my fifth and final book of May. It was actually an early release version of a new book written by my dad. That's called How Society Should Deal With Inequality. So my dad's a sociologist who then went on to become the editor in chief of the Gallup poll before retiring from that role to be a senior scientist at Gallup in 2018. He's also currently a visiting scholar at Stanford's Institute for Excellence in Survey Research. It's a cool book because it mixes

• 41:32Cal Newport?

  positive psychology, which was bigger a few decades ago about using sociology to try to figure out how to make society function better as opposed to negative sociology, which is just about trying to highlight issues with current society. And as one of its core sources of information and motivation for what is proposed is survey research, actually, public opinion polls. So it's sort of like a great merging of roles in which he is a world-class expert. I enjoyed that book. That was my fifth of May. And now I am, I'm deep into recording this on what the third, the fourth, what day is it?

• 42:06Cal Newport?

  All right, I gotta get rolling. I'm in my first book of, that was my last book of April. I'm moving slowly through my first book in May, so I gotta kind of pick up the pace. I've been busy recently.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  We talked about last week having, counting longer books for multiple books.

• 42:22Cal Newport?

  I want to try that. I definitely want to try that. So I think what I'm gonna do, so I'm reading a sort of long enough, it's a long book, but it's gonna count as one. I'm also reading the book that you got me, which is short, so I'll be able to finish that pretty quickly. I think I want to finish three regular books by the halfway point and then go for a twofer. Like a 600-page book or something like this to be, count as the final two books of May.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I kinda, as a fan, I want a twofer.

• 42:48Cal Newport?

  I want to do a twofer. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I got some ideas. I gotta, I gotta be, I got some, I got some ideas. There's various constituencies in my life that are arguing for different things. My son wants me to read more Brandon Sanderson. Those are usually twofers. Those are long.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:06Cal Newport?

  He reads these doorstops of books. There's some nonfiction twofers I've been meaning to read as well. All right. Oh, I got one in mind. All right. So I gotta get through my three because I really wanna, I really want to dig into a twofer. And I'm building up my strength, Jesse, for a threefer.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:25Cal Newport?

  750 pages or more. I'll count. So like an 800-page book would count as three. I have some options, but I gotta, I gotta get my speed up. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for this week. We got an AI reality check coming out on Thursday and then another advice episode on the Monday that follows. So hopefully I'll see you or you'll hear me both those occasions. Sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com. And until then, as always, stay deep.