Ep. 333: New Year Course Correction

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: 4 Pieces of Advice to Start 2025 [2:14] - How do I stop doom-scrolling before bed? [32:47] - What is the role of craft in Cal’s “Deep Life Stack 2.0” idea? [36:09] - How do I save money? [41:04] - Do writers need social media audiences? [50:12] - How should I make the most of 90 minutes of commute time? [53:57] - CALL: Life after a career in law [57:31] CASE STUDY: A digital declutter with LinkedIn? [1:01:53]TECH CORNER: Is Social Media Like Dying Malls? (A Debate) [1:07:46] Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?honest-broker.com/p/are-social-media-platforms-the-next Thanks to our Sponsors: landroverusa.comzbiotics.com/deepeightsleep.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:11Cal Newport?

  I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.

• 0:24Cal Newport?

  Right, so I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse. When this airs, Jesse, I believe it's what, the day before New Year's Eve or New Year's Eve? It's something right at the 30th.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:37Cal Newport?

  I don't mean to break the spell of the reality of production processes, but we're actually recording this before Christmas. But for those hearing it, you know, happy almost New Year. I always think of this as our most, one of our most important episodes of the year, Jesse, because people are coming back from vacation. It's a little bit sad. It's winter. It's dark. You kind of have a long run till you get to the fun stuff like in the spring. And you got to be brought back into the mindset of, okay, work and distraction and your phones and the world outside that you're seeing through social media. And so you need a good dose of Deep Questions, right, as to New Year approaches.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  That's true. It goes hand in hand with the NFL playoffs.

• 1:17Cal Newport?

  And it goes hand in hand with the NFL playoffs. And so you have a lot of focus on that. You got the end of the baseball offseason. There's a lot going on here. So anyways, we feel, whereas last week's episode was probably the least important episode of our year.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  I liked it, though.

• 1:31Cal Newport?

  Well, yeah, just not as many people listen, you know, the day before Christmas Eve. I did like it. We got to wear hats. That's always a plus. But we got a good episode today. So I got a deep dive that's going to give you some action to take right away to help the New Year get kicked off on the right foot. We got a good collection of questions, pretty, pretty good eclectic mix this time.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50Cal Newport?

  I like it. We got a call in there. We got a case study. And then we got a tech corner coming up at the end. There's sort of a debate going on right now online between some people we like, and we'll wade into it and make our own prognostications. That's not right. Make our own, not really prognostications. I won't be predicting the future, our own assessments. All right, enough of that. Let's get into it. Start with our deep dive.

• 2:15Cal Newport?

  So we've arrived at the new year season. As longtime listeners know, I'm not a big believer in making major changes in January. I actually think the beginning of fall is the right time to trigger big life transformations. But this is still a good breakpoint in the middle of the active year to step back, take stock, tighten up, and improve some areas of your life that could use some improving. So here's what I want to do today. I have four simple ideas. We can call them mid-year course corrections that are all designed to do two things. One, help you reclaim some depth in areas where our currently distracted world

• 2:59Cal Newport?

  might be robbing that depth. And two, be something that you can execute right away. So these are not massive multi-month changes, but small course corrections you can put into place right away. Half of these will deal with your life outside of work. Half of these will deal with your life in work. And I'm trying to keep them a little bit novel. So I'm not going to want to give a little twist to these. It'll sound a little bit new even to our longtime listeners. All right. Idea number one of four, bring a book. So what I'm recommending here is that you get into the habit of bringing a physical book with you. When you go to work, when you go out, when you're around the house, and you get in the habit of when you're bored, temporarily bored, not I have three hours to kill, but

• 3:44Cal Newport?

  I'm waiting in line, or I'm eating lunch at my desk, turn to the book instead of your phone. Make this book fun. Make it portable. You probably want to go paperback. Maybe you want to get an old used mass market paperback of like a fun novel from the like 1970s. It's like exciting to go back and read or a nonfiction book that's covering some topic you really care about, like how to get healthier. Or maybe it's like narrative nonfiction. I want to go back and read some classic crack hour and it's just straight up fun, whatever it is. Portable, fun, it's just with you. Read a book when you're bored. What's my explanation for why this idea makes sense? Well, essentially, this is a form of what's known as dopamine fasting.

• 4:25Cal Newport?

  Our modern digital environment, which is in some sense the antagonist in almost everything we talk about here on this show, has helped create these very tight connections in our reward system in our brain, where boredom activates this network in our brain as we've trained it, and we get this very strong dopamine hit that urges us to take the action of looking at a screen because we have made these strong neural connections that says that screen is going to bring us this really salient reward, right? It's going to be a really big emotional hit, outrage, hilarity, fascination, insight, information, inspiration, really strong hit.

• 5:07Cal Newport?

  And so what happens is boredom triggers the dopamine cascade, which makes it really hard not to pick up your phone. So dopamine fasting is where you specifically practice essentially ignoring that cascade, at least the behavior that that cascade is pushing, and redirecting it towards a different behavior, in this case, looking towards a book. And at first, it's difficult, and then over time, your mind sort of rewires and gets more used to this slower, more cognitively sophisticated response to boredom. And so that that strong connection of screen, screen, screen when bored becomes a weaker connection, and you're more comfortable just slowing down your cognition and turning to something a little bit more systematic.

• 5:52Cal Newport?

  It's going to feel like you're coming off of amphetamines after a multi-year binge. It really does. This type of dopamine fasting can really change your experience of the world. So that's my first piece of advice: Bring a book. Second piece of advice: Let's go from your life outside of work to your life in work, and I'm going to suggest deep, clean your email inbox.

• 6:16Cal Newport?

  Now, this is going to take two, three, maybe four hours, depending on how big your inbox is. We're going to take our time here. It's not something you're going to dash off in 20 minutes. You're going to put aside, you know, a half day, maybe like right after the new year to do this. And here's the key of a deep clean of your inbox. You're actually going to spend time with every message that is in there. As opposed to what we normally do when we turn to an inbox, which is trying to scramble to get that thing empty as fast as possible, to ignore, to defer, to play obligation hot potato where you send some incomplete, incoherent message to someone else because it temporarily takes the responsibility represented by that message off your plate.

• 7:01Cal Newport?

  This is the bots with a Z at the end, question mark, send. You know, this is not actually going to solve the problem. They're going to come back to you like you've saved yourself no time in the long run, but that message is out of your inbox. And in the moment, you just want that inbox empty. This is what we want to avoid with the inbox deep clean. Instead, we want to actually seriously consider each message. Now, what do we do when we seriously consider that message? We ask the question, what is the underlying project, commitment, or process that generated this message? And am I happy with the way I am currently engaging with that right now? All right, that sounds abstract, so let's get concrete. Here's an easy case. There's a message in there.

• 7:41Cal Newport?

  It's just some mailing list from a product, maybe you bought two years ago and now the company is spamming you or whatever. You sit there like, what is this message? Oh, it is generated by me being on a mailing list because I bought something from this company. What relationship do I want with that? None. I don't need to see what REI is up to right now. I'm going to take the time to unsubscribe. And so you deal with it, you change your relationship. Okay, next message, right? Maybe what you see is, okay, this is from a group at an organization that I'm a part of, and I'm sort of loosely involved with this group and they're going back and forth. And it's part of a discussion to try to figure out a date for the next time that group is going to meet. Let me step back and say, what is my relationship to that underlying system?

• 8:26Cal Newport?

  And maybe you say, you know what? This is probably one too many things. I don't really have time to be doing this group right now. I like the idea, but it really, I haven't been able to engage much and I'm kind of doing this half-heartedly. Let me now change my relationship to this underlying process or system and say, hey, whatever. I'm gonna have to step away for the rest of this year. I didn't have the time I thought I would. So again, we're getting to the root causes of the messages, instead of just the messages themselves. Now, maybe what you see an email from is not something you can walk away from or unsubscribe from. Maybe it's a message, this will be common in the work context, that's part of a conversation about a project that you're working on that's important and you have to do. Yeah, you're right. I agreed to be on this search committee.

• 9:10Cal Newport?

  This email is about this search committee. It's some question about like, hey, what about this particular candidate? In this case, what you can do is step back and say, not, do I want to step away from this commitment or not? But say, let me think through how I actually want to engage with it. Like, what should be, in this case, our rules for collaboration? Let's put a little bit of structure in here. Because otherwise, I think this thing, this hiring committee in this example, is gonna keep generating lots of messages that have to be responded and it's gonna be a source of clutter and context shifting. So this is, I'm gonna sit down and take the time to figure out, how should we deal with this? Well, okay, what we, what we, I'm just being hypothetical here. But in this example, it's like, okay, people are coming up with candidates.

• 9:53Cal Newport?

  We probably should have a shared document somewhere, where people add candidates on to it as they, as they come up with ideas, or they think of someone who might be good. We should probably have a meeting on the books for like, a month from now. And the goal there should actually be to review all these candidates that people have found. And so we should be searching for these and putting them in this document, and then we have this meeting. And the point of this meeting is going to be to review these things, figure out who we want to follow up on. And at that point, we'll come up with like, our process for doing that. Okay, great. This will be much better. This will avoid a lot of random emails. Let me now do a process centric message right now. That's a concept from Deep Work where you preamble an email message with a description of the process you want people to follow in responding to that.

• 10:38Cal Newport?

  Now you just send out this big message to everyone. Hey, this is great. Here's what I propose. I set up this document. I moved the existing candidates into it. Let us all now actively fill this document over the next three weeks. Let's put a meeting on the books for Friday. I'm just going to book it for right after our faculty meeting. And if we need to change that, we'll change that. Let me know, but let's just make that the default. And by the way, I'm going to, I'll send some reminders about this. And then you put some notes on your calendar for two weeks from then and three weeks from then to, hey, email the group and say, no response required, just a reminder. Be looking for candidates. We're meeting after the faculty meeting. This all takes more time, but now you've changed your relationship to the underlying obligation process or system here in a way that, good, I'm comfortable with this.

• 11:23Cal Newport?

  This thing is not going to generate a lot of non-scheduled urgent messages that require responses. Another thing that might happen as you're deep cleaning your inbox is you might come up with friction interventions. Like someone's asking you to do something, asking you for help or assistance. It's not a case where you just want to say no, but a lot of these are coming in. Do a friction intervention. A friction intervention is where you essentially give some more work to the person on the other side. Hey, happy to help you. Here's what you should do as your next steps. And 50% of the time, they're just not going to do it, which shows that this really wasn't that important for them. And in the 50% of the time where they do do those extra steps, you've designed them so that makes your life a lot easier. I get this. I'll give you a specific example.

• 12:08Cal Newport?

  In my role as a Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Computer Science Department at Georgetown, one of the things I do is I help advise students who are thinking about becoming a computer science major.

• 12:20Cal Newport?

  Now, I'll get a lot of messages where people are like, "Hey, I'm thinking about becoming a major. Like, what do you think?" Or like, "Can I just swing by and we'll chat about it?" And I always give a friction intervention, which makes life easier on both sides, where I say, "Here's what we need. I need a schedule. All your semesters left here at Georgetown. Your plan. Go through. Learn the curriculum and put in your plan for which courses you're going to take when. And then I can look at that and that will give me a real sense of, is it realistic? Like, do you have enough time left to finish the major? Is it going to be a stretch? Is there... Are you close, but maybe we need to think about like one summer course to make this happen? Do that work first. There's a couple benefits to

• 13:03Cal Newport?

  this. One, it sort of makes sure that you're actually serious about this. You're not just, "Hey, maybe I should be a computer science major because it requires some work." Two, it forces the student to learn the curriculum. Otherwise, every student I was meeting with, I was just teaching them how the requirement structure works for our course again and again and again. And that's kind of a waste of time. This is a way of making sure the student themselves figures out what's going on. And then, three, it makes things more efficient. Now I know exactly what we're dealing with. If we don't have to work this out together, now we can talk and write down the brass tacks. Like, "Okay, yeah, perfect. This looks fine. You should have no problem. Let's go. We don't even have to talk about it." To the other extreme, like, this is impossible, right? Like, now that you've

• 13:48Cal Newport?

  seen how many courses you'd have to take per semester, you can see this is impossible. A friction intervention. And so, again, that you're saying, "What is the underlying source of this message? How do I make sure my relationship to that source is, you know, as effective as possible?" So, that's a deep clean of your inbox. It takes forever because think about it. Each of these things might take a while to actually work through. But you do this refresh, this deep clean, once or twice a year, you pay that you receive these huge rewards. Like, for the next six months, you've taken yourself off of all of these mailing lists. You've cleaned shop on the obligations you stumbled into and now you realize you shouldn't be doing. The things you are working on are now more structured.

• 14:30Cal Newport?

  So, it's much less unrestricted emails landing in your inbox. Now, you don't have to check your inbox as much and you've sort of gotten some friction interventions in place for stuff that you do want to help with, but it's being a little bit too urgent and ad hoc and you want to make that a little bit more structured. You do this type of deep clean twice a year. The whole rest of those other months are going to actually, your relationship to your inbox is going to be much better. The frequency with which you check it's going to go down. The value of what's in there is going to go up. You're just, your overall frustration with the cognitive experience of knowledge work is going to improve.

• 15:05Cal Newport?

  All right. Idea number three, shift back to life outside of work. Take a break from online news. Especially if you're in the US, like we had an election, that's a lot of hitting you from the online world. There's an inauguration coming up. Really not much happens in January because everything has to kind of stop as you're waiting for the new president to come in. And then it takes a minute for like that to all get kind of going again. So what you get is a lot of just invented concern and outrage and people in the attention economy trying to fight for and generate reasons to have attention. It's a perfect month to say, I think the republic will stand if they do not have my

• 15:49Cal Newport?

  vigilant monitoring for the next four weeks. And what this gives you is like coming out of the holidays and family time, an ability for that part of your brain to just take a breather. The innovation of all of this high urgency, world shaking, terror inducing news, that just take that drip out of your proverbial arm for a month is going to allow the whole system to restabilize and to calm back down.

• 16:19Cal Newport?

  Now, the explanation for this, again, if we go back to the modern digital environment, I've talked about this before. Our paleolithic brain interprets, when the news is coming to us in like a social media feed or this or that, or on a podcast, like a news political podcast, we don't think about the degree to which this is delivered, it feels personal, right? Like on social media, it's individual people that you might follow talking about it. And your paleolithic brain is like, yeah, these are tribe members of ours. What it's missing is that these conversations are being curated out of 500 million active monthly users on one of these platforms and algorithms, cybernetic algorithms, half

• 16:59Cal Newport?

  optimization, half human behavior with, with reapplication are sorting through these millions and millions and millions of huge cacophony and pulling out for you this curated thing that's very tractable and feels like a conversation outside the cave 150,000 years ago. And so our mind interprets our relationship with online news because it's so personalized. It's this person I follow. It's a voice. It's a voice in my head on a podcast. It is as if like the tribe that you're a part of is having constant massive, existentially threatening crises. And of course, our brain's going to take that seriously. And so you're in a state of crisis all the time. This is an interesting, by the way, techno critique.

• 17:43Cal Newport?

  Some of this is unique to the faux-personalization of online or digital news delivery in the 21st century. If you were picking up a newspaper in 1985, like a big, thick Sunday New York Times, that does not come across to your paleolithic brain as people in your tribe are really worried and we should be worried. It's abstracted in a linguistic way. It's on paper. It's one of 500 articles in that paper written by different journalists. Like, we have a different relationship to it. It's a lexicographic relationship. It's a relationship like you would have with a book. When you read a book, you don't feel like that person is right there in your tribe. You realize that you're, this is someone distant, this is someone abstract.

• 18:28Cal Newport?

  I'm reading this book. I don't know this author, right? It doesn't feel so personal. And so we had in the sort of what Neil Postman would have called the lexicographic culture, the sort of pre-TV, pre-internet, newspaper, book-driven culture. This medium had a different psychosocial relationship with us than these modern mediums. So I could read the world news and think like, in the broad world out there, there's things that are happening, and it didn't feel as like personally salient. So take a break from online news, social media, news websites, news podcasts. Just take a break from it for a month. You'll be okay. People will tell you what's going on. Look, let me summarize all the US news.

• 19:13Cal Newport?

  I'll do a summary now of like every news article for the next four weeks. Democrat does something Republicans think is the worst thing that ever happened. A Republican does something the Democrats think is the worst thing to ever happen. People trade quotes. Someone's nasty online. There you go. That is January 2025. I just summarized what you're going to miss. All right? So take a break. Let your mind restabilize. All right, idea number four. Back to the world of work, simulate status meetings.

• 19:49Cal Newport?

  All right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start here with the explanation, then I'll get to the solution. We have this big problem, this is at the core of my book, Slow Productivity, first part of the solution section. We have a real problem with the modern digital environment is the abstraction of work in the knowledge sector, where it's just people plugged into computers and phones and passing emails and Zoom, and everything is digital, and it's information, and it's in this hyperactive hive mind of just back and forth communication, where it's, we're sort of all working together, and we're kind of on our own. In that environment, where work is non-tangible, overload becomes very easy. It is very easy just to have too many

• 20:33Cal Newport?

  things you've committed to do, because there's no barriers to asking someone to do something, and there's no physical instantiation of the work itself. Right? If I'm a cobbler in the 17th century, if I have too many shoes that I'm working on, there's a big pile of shoes next to me. And if you're bringing in a new pair of shoes, you can see that big pile of shoes. And if I say, I have too many shoes to work on right now, you're like, I get that. That's gonna take a while. I see these physical things that I can directly translate into a time cost. You've got a week's worth of shoes to repair there, that makes sense. In the digital world, there's no shoes. It's just a bunch of emails that you've answered in an inbox that has 2,000 messages, that if you really go through there, actually

• 21:16Cal Newport?

  work itself out to be 25 different ongoing commitments, each of which generating their own conversations and expectations. And of course, you're drowning. You're the cobbler who the shoes are so crowded that they're falling out the door. All right, so we have to be more careful about workload management. That brings me to the idea, which is simulate status meetings. In a perfect world, and I write about this in Slow Productivity, in a perfect world, the team you work with would have a centralized place where they keep track of all the things that the team needs to do. And most of those things will be in a column that's like waiting to work on these. And then over here, you would have a column for each of the people on the team, and you have the specific things they're working on in those columns. It would probably just be one or two things. You would have a very

• 21:57Cal Newport?

  clear work in progress limit in Kanban, which uses these boards, they call it the WIP, the work in progress limit. And you would also have very structured collaboration, every day, 10-minute status meeting, who's working on what, and what do they need from other people? Great, now we can just go rock and roll. Make sure you get them that by this time, you get them this by this time, we all agree. Now just go work. In an imperfect world where you don't control your team, you can simulate something like this. And what I recommend is on Monday mornings, you actually have your own board. You could do the digitally, of course. Here are all the different things I've committed to work on. I gotta face that productivity drag and I can't pretend like it's not true. Here's all the stuff I've committed to work on. What is the statuses of these things this week?

• 22:40Cal Newport?

  Like, I'm gonna have a column of like, I'm actively working on this week. I can only fit so many. I mean, look at my calendar, I have all these meetings and stuff. I could probably make progress on three of these things, so I'll move those three things over. Now I'm gonna update those people. Hey, I'm working, the people related to the three things I'm actually working on. Hey, I'm working on this week. And I'm gonna, as if you were in the room with me for an old fashioned, agile style, status meeting, in that email on Monday, like, hey, I'm working on this this week. Here's what I need from you this week. This information by this time, put it in this place. This information by that time, put it in this place. If you can do that, I'll finish this.

• 23:15Cal Newport?

  Now, what you've basically done is you've simulated a status meeting. You know what you're working on. You're going to get the stuff you need without having just sort of like ad hoc bother people along the way.

• 23:27Cal Newport?

  And the people you're working with are happy because they know exactly what you're doing and that you're working on their things. You can do the inverse for the things you choose not to work on. Update those people during your simulated status meeting. Hey, I just wanted to let you know, this is, I have this. It's not one of the three or four things I'm actively working on this week. But I just want you to know, I haven't forgotten about it. And it's here, and I keep track of this stuff very carefully.

• 23:50Cal Newport?

  They're happy, you're on the ball, you're organized. They're not gonna bother you with emails or meetings because they know you're not actually working on it. You've solved their problem of having to worry about this, they know you're on the ball. You're basically, you're tricking, people don't realize this, but you've sort of secretly created status meetings and work in progress boards without other people knowing. These simulate status meetings can go a long way towards at least sanding the blunt edges off of the worst of overload and bad workload management. All right. So those are my four easy course corrections. You can, you can do all of these in the next couple of weeks. I'll just say them again, real quick. Bring a book, deep clean

• 24:32Cal Newport?

  your inbox. That's a one time thing. Take a break from online news and simulate status meetings. That's something you're going to do once a week. Lots of other things that work, but hey, there's a lot of mismatches between the modern digital environment and our paleolithic brains and the other culture. So here's a couple of places where you can reduce that mismatch just a little bit.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  I've heard Ryan Holiday talk about his rule where he just buys any book that piques his interest. Do you have a similar rule?

• 24:59Cal Newport?

  Yep. Yep. I just buy. I mean, I gotta say, throughout my career as a writer, there's been different milestones in terms of coolness, right? Like, oh, I could do this now. I could do that now. I still think one of the, the best milestones in my writing career, it was early in my blog, before it's a newsletter, when it was just the study hacks blog at calnewport.com. And I, I used to have the only income source from that was Amazon associates. I listed some things I liked, like the notebook I use and some books I liked. And you know, you get a commission if people buy it through Amazon. And I was getting the commissions delivered to me monthly as Amazon gift certificates. I remember this point, this would have been

• 25:41Cal Newport?

  like 2007, 2008, where I was getting a hundred dollars a month or something in gift certificates. And I would just add them, you could, you could just add them into your Amazon account. So that like, if you bought something, it would pull from your gift certificates first. And I remembered at some point, I was like, I can buy books with impunity. There's like enough of this Amazon gift certificate money that I really don't have to worry about it. Right? Because it was outside of our normal budget that we had. I just was putting gift certificates into the Amazon account. And to me, that was like the biggest thing. If I heard of a book that was interesting, I could just buy it. Right? And spend 50, 60, 70, a hundred dollars a month, just like buying books. That was a big deal for me at the time. Obviously, things have been more remunerative since then, but I still think

• 26:26Cal Newport?

  that was one of the coolest things. So I have a big believer, if you can afford it, buy books. You know, it helps authors. Books are awesome. It's the best deal for the money. 20 bucks, you're getting like years of expertise distilled carefully with a team that has spent months and months just trying to get it as carefully crafted as possible. Then you can simulate that mind and intake that into your own head. And you can do this all for like 20 bucks.

• 26:51Cal Newport?

  Get not only like new wisdom, but 20 to 40 hours worth of of good, high quality distraction out of it. It's the best deal. It's the best deal, I think, in entertainment. So yeah, buy books, buy books. And who cares? You have too many of them? Give them away. Like, I don't think it's a problem. They're very imminently recyclable. So I'm a big believer. Buy, buy, buy.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  And then second question, how many of the students actually do the follow up work of the friction stuff that you discussed?

• 27:22Cal Newport?

  It's, um, in this case, it's pretty high because typically if they're, if they are interested in majoring, they're interested in majoring. Yeah. The interesting thing is the students who they'll try a few times to get out of it. Like, so, yeah, I don't know. Like, I have a lot of courses to take or whatever. And it's an important obstacle. Like, no, no, no, you got to sit down. It's going to take you 20 minutes. Like, you got to do the 20 minutes of work, you know? So there's a lot of like, like, yeah, you know, my schedule would be probably reasonable. I've taken this many courses so far. Like, I want to see, I want to see the list. You know, the prior, there's a lot of that in academic administration. I didn't do this, but an earlier director of undergraduate

• 28:03Cal Newport?

  studies did this with applying for credit. Like, I'm going to take this course overseas when I'm studying abroad. And can I get approved for this to count towards like the major? That got very systematized at some point in a way that puts a little bit more work onto the seat of the student. But the thing about those type of things is a little bit more work for one student doesn't mean much to that student. It's another 10 minutes of their life. Putting that same work on the single person who has to process all those requests could be hours and hours and hours of extra time. So I do like friction interventions. Friction interventions are a good, they're a high quality thing. I'm in favor.

• 28:47Cal Newport?

  Alright, so we got a bunch of cool questions coming up, but first, let's hear from a sponsor that makes this show possible. I want to talk about our friends at Eight Sleep. I'm sure you've heard of Eight Sleep. Their buzz-worthy sleep technology called the Pod can be added to your existing mattress like a fitted sheet to automatically cool down and warm up each side of your bed and in turn, improve your sleep quality dramatically. Athletes, business titans, and celebrities all swear by the Pod, but more importantly, I swear by the Pod. My wife and I love our Eight Sleep. We've actually spread the gospel of Eight Sleep to other people in our friend circle as well. We both like to sleep cool, and it just is fantastic.

• 29:32Cal Newport?

  Like, the way it works, I'll explain it real briefly. You put like a mat, it's like a mattress cover, but in this mattress cover is a fine capillary of all these little tubes, and then it connects to a box that looks like a computer tower that's next to your bed. And it cools or heats liquid, which it then can send through these capillaries that cool or cool down or heat up each of the side of the bed. And it's really fantastic, right? Because we have like a lot of blankets on in the winter, just having like a little bit of coolness in your Eight Sleep just pulls away just enough heat that you don't oversleep. Anyways, we become addicted to it. It's kind of a problem because we have trouble in hotels, we have trouble when we're like, we're gonna have trouble next week when we're away for Christmas vacation because we don't have our Eight Sleep with us.

• 30:17Cal Newport?

  That's how used to it we've, we've become. They have a new version, that's what I wanted to tell you about. Their newest version of the Pod is called the Pod 4 Ultra. It cools, it heats, now it elevates automatically. It's clinically proven to give you one more hour of quality sleep per night. If you want the details, it can cool down each side of the bed to 20 degrees below room temperature. So even in a heat wave, you're gonna feel plenty cool. It also has an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame to add reading and sleeping positions for the best unwinding experience. So this sort of mechanical element, that's new to the Pod 4 Ultra, which is fantastic. It could also even detect snoring and automatically adjust your sleeping position to stop you from snoring.

• 31:01Cal Newport?

  So anyways, Eight Sleep, it is a luxury that I swear by.

• 31:07Cal Newport?

  I'm spoiled for it. I highly recommend it. This is one of these things I'm happy to endorse because I use it all the time. So if you head to 8sleep.com/deep and use the code DEEP at checkout, you can get $350 off the pod for Ultra. That's 8sleep.com/deep, spell out the word eight, and use the code DEEP to get $350 off. Currently ships to the United States, Canada, the UK, Europe, and Australia. Also want to talk about Defender. The iconic Defender line of vehicles has been reimagined for a new generation of explorers.

• 31:49Cal Newport?

  The Defender 90, 110, and the 130, which can seat up to eight passengers, all maintained a legendary off-road capability for which the Defender is known, but now combined with legendary new on-road capabilities as well. They are a pleasure to drive with all the fancy driver assist technology you might like. They also look good. Look these up online. Go over to LandRoverUSA.com to look at how these Defenders look, because I think aesthetically, they feature compelling proportions and precise detailing. They're combined with that tough, rigid body design, however, that makes them so famously durable in the cargo capacity. A fantastic balance between comfort and exploration, durability, and aesthetics. A good-looking car that performs.

• 32:34Cal Newport?

  Perfect for finding adventure as you cultivate your own idea of the deep life. Visit LandRoverUSA.com to learn more about Defender. Hi, Jesse. Do you have some questions?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  First question's from Declan. Do you have advice on how to stop doom scrolling before bed? I find myself spending 30 to 45 minutes before bed on social media, and I want to replace that time with reading books. I've never been a big reader, so I find it tough to break the habit.

• 33:03Cal Newport?

  Well, the obvious advice is you keep your phone somewhere far from your room. So now the friction of scrolling is much higher. You have to get out of bed, go down to where your phone is, unplug it, and bring it back to your room. Hopefully, that friction is high enough that it's easier to resist. So that's part of it. If you worry about having a clock or phone in your room, just get a standalone phone or clock. You might consider, for example, one of our sponsors of this show is Lofti, L-O-F-T-I-E. They have these sort of beautiful alarm clocks you can put next to your bed. They have all sorts of cool features.

• 33:36Cal Newport?

  You also want to make what you do when you're in bed without your phone. You want to make that as compelling as possible. So find books you're really excited to read. They're just fun. You don't need to read a tome at night. You don't need to read the latest great novel because people told you this is a smart novel that everyone is supposed to read, but you find it kind of boring. This is for fun reading and it could be memoir, nonfiction of just someone you think is really interesting, or you know, I like to read about movies. You could be reading about movies or movie making, or whatever your interest is, adventure novels, romance novels, something that's just really fun to read. You can make that a fun habit. Something I sometimes suggest, which the phone, not anti-phone people, but the sort

• 34:21Cal Newport?

  of digital hygiene people don't always agree with, is I don't think it's the worst thing to do a little bit of stimuli reduction here using something like an iPad. So hear me out. If you have an iPad that has no social apps on it, right? You don't, you don't use it to go on the internet, but you have streaming services on it. I actually think it's not so bad if as part of your routine, you say, first I do is I read, and it's always one or two chapters, right? So you're just used to doing it, it kind of calms you down. But then you know that you're going to be able to, you have something you're going to watch a little bit after that in bed on your iPad that is completely comforting comfort

• 35:03Cal Newport?

  food, you know, that series you've watched 100 times before. I'm just going to watch like 20 minutes of an episode. That's not the worst thing. And for some people, what it does is it gives them the sort of stimulation matching that they need. Then what happens is when they're, they're not used to reading books and all they're going to do is read a book, when they're so saturated in that dopamine mediated digital experience, it's not enough stimulation and it's like you're trying to fast and they get antsy about it. Like, oh, man, I'm a little antsy like I this is I'm used to this type of stimulation and all I'm doing is reading and they have a hard time falling asleep. So just do a little bit of this step down. It's, it's, I don't know, we could call it dopamine, methadone, or something. I read and then it's, you know, an episode of The Office that I've seen

• 35:47Cal Newport?

  five times. It does work. People their minds like, okay, I got that relief. But it's not doom scrolling. It's not social media. It's not so algorithmically salient. It's, you know, it's, it's comfort food. So I'm, if you need that, I think that's perfectly fine. But make yourself earn it with books first, and then the books will become much more appealing because of that. All right, who we got next?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Next question's from Nelson. Can you please dive further into the deep stack from your three small daily habits video? How can you do the craft part if you haven't figured out what you want to be good at because you don't even know what your values are? Or are you supposed to excel at one of the areas from the discipline box?

• 36:26Cal Newport?

  All right. So I had to, I had to go back. It's a little complicated because the, the video that Nelson is referring to is not from that long ago. It's from a month ago, but it's a clip. It's a clip collection. So our YouTube guy will, will sometimes grab some clips from older episodes and, and put them on the feed. It's from a much older episode, actually, where this clip was taken. So I was, I was giving a variation on my deep life stack, my sort of step-by-step approach for cultivating a deep life. In that, in that video, so in that particular variation, I don't really remember where the original video was from. I first divided, I said, we really need two stacks. The first

• 37:10Cal Newport?

  stack is focused on what you need to do first, which is becoming like an imminently capable human being. The second stack I said in this video is cultivating depth. It's where you actually work to make specific changes in your life that aren't made, designed to make your life more intentional. It's where you get very systematic about reshaping your life. And my argument was you got to do the first thing first. You got to become a, just a capable person and get your act together before you can then make high level complicated intentional changes to your life. That was basically the argument. Within each of those two sides of the screen, I then gave a stack, a sort of step-by-steps to go through. And on that become an imminently capable person side, one of the things in that stack was

• 37:51Cal Newport?

  craft. Right? So this brings us back to Nelson's question, because the other side...

• 37:59Cal Newport?

  Where you had to now you like cultivate depth. That's where you figure out your values and come up with your lifestyle centric plans and really get into what I want in my life. Nelson is saying, how can I work on craft first? If it's not till I get to the second side, the second stack that I figure out what I even care about. How do I figure out? This is what I, how I read his question. How do I figure out what to do for craft? If I don't even know what matters to me? The answer Nelson is if you go back and watch that video, the craft that shows up on that first becoming imminently human stack. The way I explained that was just get good at something. Choose something to get better at. It could be professional. It could be personal, just like learn a craft. And this was not figure out like what your job is going to be.

• 38:44Cal Newport?

  Or spend 10 years mastering something that you're going to build your career around. It was instead, just get used to the feeling of getting good at something. What does it feel like to get better at something? So this really could be, I'm going to learn, I'm going to learn how to wire up like an Arduino light controller. Like just, I'm just learning a thing. And for me in that video, I say it doesn't matter what it is. I just want you as part of becoming an imminently capable person to get comfortable with deliberate practice and improvement. Oh, if I give things attention, I get better at it. So then when you go to the second half and say, now I'm going to shape my life, you have confidence and experience with how to, when I need to like master something as part of that much more sophisticated plan, I know how to do that. So that's what I meant by that.

• 39:29Cal Newport?

  But I will say, let me fast forward to today. Let me revisit this topic because I'm writing a book about this, a book called The Deep Life. Which by the way, it'll be a while till that comes out. I'm taking my time, just FYI. This is the problem, I'll say this as an aside, my publisher noticed this. The problem with me writing slow productivity before I wrote The Deep Life is slow productivity is about slowing down. So now it's going to take me a long time to finish The Deep Life. If it had gone the other way, they would have got that book much faster, but, excuse me, I learned writing slow productivity, like, oh, you can take your time. It's okay. Take an extra year. No one is going to notice in the grand scheme of things, but like the next three years are going to be much nicer.

• 40:12Cal Newport?

  Anyways, in, in that book, as I'm thinking about the book, I've simplified this even more. I mean, I've kept that same structure. Become a capable human, get your act together. Then start caring about what you want to do with that. I've kept that structure. I'm not as rigid within that structure anymore. You know, within that structure, how do you become a more capable person? I'm not going to give you seven steps to go through that are too ordered. It's going to be, I want to give you a little bit more breathing room in there. So like right now, the part of the book that's about preparing, I talk about discipline. I talk about getting organized. I talk about reclaiming your brain, you know, from distractions, learn how to think again. But it's not presented as like A, B, and C.

• 40:56Cal Newport?

  It's like, these are these three things you have to grapple with before you're ready to make change. All right, what we got next?

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Next question is from Timmy. After listening to your most recent episode on money, I have an overall question about budgeting as I'm in my twenties. I want to save for a house, but also want to have enough for unexpected expenses.

• 41:17Cal Newport?

  All right. Yeah, excuse me. All right, um, let's think about this. How do you save money when you're in your twenties? It can be pretty daunting to think about saving for a house when you're that early on. All right, so I have three books, well, two books and one article to recommend. And then I'll talk a little bit about what I did, which I actually don't think is the right. I would recommend it. I don't think I'd recommend it. All right, the first book I would recommend relevant to this topic was written by my friend, Ramit Sethi. It's called, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. I've known Ramit forever, we're the same age. He was graduating Stanford at the same time I was graduating Dartmouth and, you know, we've known each other off and on for a long time. That book is great because he wrote it in his twenties.

• 42:02Cal Newport?

  I remember when he was working on it. So it is actually very well geared, Timmy, for exactly the stage of life that you're in right now. The cool thing about it, I'll just give you the, the main idea, like a big part of his idea is automate the savings. And then you don't have to be as obsessive about what you do with the money that's left, because the money that's left is the money that's left. So his whole system is not hard. Is you're automatically pulling money out of your paycheck and saving it. And you set it up to do it automatically. And then, hey, don't overspend what remains, because you'll just, you'll, you'll.

• 42:37Cal Newport?

  You'll go, your bank account will, whatever it is, it'll empty out, right? You'll, you'll, there's no trick in yourself here. This is the money that remains. But the automatic saving is his key thing. And then, eh, don't oversweat it. Like, don't spend more than you have. But like, if you're 20 and single, you don't have to have a complicated household budget. Just you kind of figure out, how much can I afford before my, my debit card says you have no money? The key thing about this is, then as your income goes up, you already have the framework in place for automatic savings. So you're just increasing the amount you're automatically saving. And that's kind of, he's basically saying that's kind of your best bet from a financial engineering perspective. All right. If you want to get, consider more extreme options of that, the classic article is Mr. Money Mustache's article, "The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement."

• 43:22Cal Newport?

  This is one of the, the articles that sort of helped make the FIRE, Financial Independence Retire Early, community go mainstream. And basically, the idea there is, if you live on a very small fraction of your incomes, like you really push your expenses down, and you have a good income. So like, this was typically thinking about people in their twenties, but who were computer programmers, for example. If you could live on 25% of your income, and save 75%, the math works out so that after, I forgot what it was, like 10 years or 15 years, you'll have saved enough money, that that 25% you were living on, you can now just withdraw that from your savings into perpetuity. So in theory, you could retire.

• 44:07Cal Newport?

  Obviously, it doesn't quite work out, because your cost of living goes up, and also you don't want to live on a fraction of your income, or whatever. But the cool thing about the FIRE community, and that article in particular, is it'll just expand your mind a little bit, in terms of what it means to save, right? That saving could mean, I'm putting 30% of my income away. Like, you don't have to spend every dollar. That it could be very aggressive. Or that maybe at first, you do a savings ladder, or at first, my income's not great, so I, just symbolically, I'm saving 5%. But then, you know, after I get to a certain place, like, okay, I'm getting raises, but I don't really need to change much about my quality of life right now. I'm just gonna

• 44:49Cal Newport?

  put the whole raise into the automatic saving, or I'm gonna do a 50/50 thing. Every raise, 50% of that is gonna be automatically saved, and the other 50% brings up my quality of living, so my quality of life goes up. But I'm actually, over time, as my income raises, soon the percentage of my income that I'm saving is really high, but I'm still getting the benefit of making more money because I'm still raising my quality of life. Like, it opens up all this sort of creative thinking about how aggressively one could save, and how cheaply one could potentially leave, live. The final knob to turn here is make more money as quickly as possible, especially in your twenties, where I know we, we talk a lot about hustle culture being bad right now, but the, the one time in your life where actually hustling might make sense is you have nothing else to do in your 24. I mean, it's probably not

• 45:33Cal Newport?

  the worst thing. Is it really better if you've escaped hustle culture so that you can play three hours of Call of Duty a night? Like, I don't know, maybe, maybe hustling more, making more money in your twenties is like a better use of that time. So, I put that out there. So if you want to make more money, check out my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. The central idea in there is get good at stuff that matters. No one cares about how valuable you think you are. No one cares about your scheme that you want to work. No one cares that you read The Four Hour Work Week and are convinced that if you could just set up a dropshipper to send striped print sailor shirts to people around the world, and you put the right Google Adsense ads, you're gonna be making a fortune automatically. No one cares that that's what you want to do. Get unambiguously good at things that

• 46:16Cal Newport?

  matter by training like an athlete trains to get better at their sport. And that's the quickest way to raise your value in the marketplace, and having more money allows you to save more. Right? So, those are the books I would have written. I mean, that was my thinking in the twenties. Those are my influences, and that's why I would recommend. What I did, I don't know if I'd recommend this. So I put all of my eggs, my financial eggs in the writing basket. I said, okay, after college, I had a fair amount of student debt. Right. And I went to grads to get my doctorate. So if you're going to grad school, you can defer paying your student debt back. But it's still a cruise interest.

• 46:59Cal Newport?

  So every year you spend, if you're getting your doctorate in the sciences, it's not like you have to pay money to go to school. They pay you a stipend, but it's small. That debt raises every year. It doubled for me, basically, in the time I was in grad school. But my, here's my gamble, right? Because I turned down lucrative, I was a star computer science student. Like I turned down lucrative tech jobs. My gamble was as a grad student, and then if I succeed in this, I'm going to become a professor. I will still be able to write. It's a world in which people write books. Right? I want to become a successful writer. Writing scales. The same amount of effort goes into writing a book that sells few copies that goes into the, went into writing Atomic Habits.

• 47:44Cal Newport?

  Like, so you have this like sort of uncapped up end. It's not trading your hours for money. You have this untapped sort of upper end. I said, okay, I'm going to take this risk that I will accrue this debt as I'm making like no money as a grad student. Onwards to a professorship job that's also not going to be super lucrative. I mean, it would go to take a long time to pay back this debt, you know, as a, starting as like an assistant professor. But I am going to guess that the flexibility, this gives me the ability to write. I'm going to put all my, my eggs in that writing basket that this is going to, I will become successful enough that this will all be moot. That happened, but man, that was a risky gamble. That's probably a risky gamble.

• 48:26Cal Newport?

  I remember it happened, my fourth book, like right as I was leaving my postdoc, the deal for my fourth book was like my first real book deal. And that allowed us to like buy a car, spent $18,000 on a Honda Fit Sport, which we just sold this year.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Really?

• 48:44Cal Newport?

  Yeah, just sold it this year. A great car, but I have three kids and we need to use both of our cars for transporting. So we finally, we sold it and got a, we have a plug-in hybrid. And in DC, like you can't drive distance. Like you're just, you could drive a long time, but you can't drive distance. So we're, it's all electric, basically in this bigger and we can fit the kids or whatever. It was end of an era though, sold that. So I could, we bought, this is true, we bought that car for $18,000. We bought a Tempur-Pedic mattress for $2,000. We're like, whoa, this is the big thing. And then more importantly, it was the down payment for our first house.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:21Cal Newport?

  Right, but I still had the debt, uh, which I had to start paying. But like it allowed me to sort of get on my feet in a way that I don't know how I would have done any of those things coming out of grad school. You know, I just wouldn't have had the money. And then when deep work started doing well, then it was, it wasn't till then that I was able to actually pay off the student loan debt and we could move to a new house and pay that largely off. And like, it worked out finally, but not till, uh, 2000, probably like six years out of grad school. So that was a risk. So I would not recommend, Timmy, um, just write a book that sells a couple of million copies. And then that does simplify things, but that was my gamble.

• 50:05Cal Newport?

  The advice I'm giving you here, I think is probably more replicatable. Right, what do we got next?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  Next question's from Lauren. I'm a lawyer with expertise in legal writing. I'm interested in writing a nonfiction book that's relevant to my field. I took your advice and met with a book agent who delivered some news I didn't want to hear. For debut, nonfiction authors nowadays, agents and publishers want an existing social media audience of 10 to 20,000 followers. I don't have any desire to engage online.

• 50:36Cal Newport?

  That's not, that's not a hard and fast rule. So I mean, here's what you need. You need a book idea that there's a sizable audience that's going to feel like, I have to read this. You have to be the right person to be writing that book. It makes sense that you're writing it. And you have to be a non-bad writer. So you have to be able to write well enough that it's not going to be a liability. It'll be publishable. If you have those three things, there is a place for your book. Remember, agents are desperate to sell books. Publishers are desperate to buy and publish books. They have to keep their pipeline full. They want good stuff. And if there's something that really meets that criteria, they want it. They do not want to be the ones who like, I missed out on that because you didn't have 10,000 social media followers.

• 51:21Cal Newport?

  10,000 social media followers aren't going to do anything. It's not going to sell a lot of books. Conversion rates on social media is very low. If you have a sizable email list following, that matters? Sure, that does matter. If you have a large YouTube following, that can help as well, though not necessarily. But that can be pretty useful as well. Those are two very hard things to get. You're not, probably not, as a... You're a lawyer? What is this? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, good luck. You would have to have a very specific angle and point of view with an original idea that like build up that audience. So I don't think that's realistic. So you basically just have to find an agent that doesn't think you need that. And again, the way you convince the agent you don't really need that is the quality of the idea.

• 52:04Cal Newport?

  So probably what's happening here is you have an idea that's like, yeah, like this makes sense for a book. You know, some people will buy this. It's not going to be a big bestseller. It doesn't have this like energy of like, this is going to be a big thing. Books are in that sort of meh territory. Sometimes publishers, I guess, are thinking, well, at the very least, we want you to sell this to your own audience. Like, we want to know, at least you're going to sell 500 copies to like your 20,000, whatever, so that we can like make back minimal money. But you don't want to be playing that game anyways. If that's the game you're playing with your book, it's not worth taking the time to write the book. So if the idea is good enough, people will want to publish it. And they don't care. I mean, have a good marketing plan. You should be like, here's all the podcasts I'm going to go on.

• 52:49Cal Newport?

  Here's all the people I'm going to reach out to who I think would like this book, whose audience... Talk about all the audiences that exist that you are going to engage with, even if they're not yours. But if the idea is good, you shouldn't need that minor audience. And if the idea is good and an agent says you do, talk to some other agents.

• 53:08Cal Newport?

  I mean, I don't have social media. That's not really fair because I do have a lot of email followers.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:13Cal Newport?

  But man, I have not. The most successful books sell because something about the idea hits the timing right. The most useful thing that social media can offer your book is other people's channels talking about it. Yet you don't can your own audience converting to book sales is like, if you want to make money off your own audience, sell them a product, right? Good books spread, bad books don't. Mediocre books go somewhere in the middle. That's just how that works. All right. Who do we got next?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  We have our slow productivity corner.

• 53:42Cal Newport?

  All right, let's hear some theme music.

• 53:49Cal Newport?

  All right. So people don't know, we have one question each week that is based on my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. All right, what's our slow productivity corner question of the week, Jesse?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  It's from Don. I return to the office five days a week in 2025 and will have about 90 minutes total commute time. I want to start the year off with your audiobooks. Do you recommend reading your books in chronological order or some other way?

• 54:15Cal Newport?

  I see them, well, it's more of a series plus one offs. So assuming you're not interested in the student books, I think of Deep Work, A World Without Email and Slow Productivity as a coherent trilogy that is confronting knowledge work in the age of digital technology. So that's like my work, tech and culture work trilogy. Digital minimalism is standalone. Technology in your own life, your personal life, your phone, so good they can't ignore you, sort of standalone. It's about thinking, rethinking how one cultivates a career that they they really like. So the order in which you read or where you read those two books doesn't matter, but Deep Work to Email to Slow Productivity, that it's a coherent sequence and they're all dealing with the same topic. A

• 55:00Cal Newport?

  couple other pieces of advice I want to give you though, because you have like a semi sizable commute here, I mean, not by DC standards, but 45 minutes each way. Consider also audio courses.

• 55:10Cal Newport?

  You get like masterclass or great courses where you can listen to them. You can get through quite a few courses over the course of a year if you're systematically using your commute. One hack there is use dictation. So like voice to dictation, like on your phone, for example, to sort of take notes or summarize what you just learned on the fly. Like I listened for 20 minutes and I'm going to dictate a summary notes of this and then collect those notes when you get to your office and put them in like some sort of shared document. You want to summarize in your own words what you're learning immediately and then have a place you hold that all. That's how you actually learn from these courses. The other thing I would recommend you consider if you have a commute of this length is using the afternoon commute as office hours.

• 55:52Cal Newport?

  Here's when I am in the car from 5 to 5:45, five days a week. Leverage that to minimize to the degree possible unscheduled back and forth messaging, both within work and home. So if there's like something, hey, it's like a work colleague who wants to like catch up or has a question to run by me, you just say, great, call me, I'm always in my car from 5 to 5:45, whenever you want, just call me. It's a great time to reach me, we'll chat it, we'll figure it out. Same thing like text messages are coming in during the day. It's like your cousin wants to work out, like some plan for an upcoming reunion or whatever. Like, yeah, 5 to 5:45, just call me, any day you want, I'm here, right? Love to catch up, call me.

• 56:31Cal Newport?

  You'd be surprised how car commute office hours, how much otherwise distracting unscheduled messaging gets deferred and also how much more you talk to people. Cause now you could actually like to say, hey, I'd love to catch up, call me in a way that you want it to do if you actually had to schedule that call into a specific slot. This is an idea, I'll give credit to Chris Yeh. This was his idea from years back and I think it's a great idea. So take advantage, if you have the commute, let's take advantage of it. Also make sure you do a, if you're in the office five days a week, make sure you do a really great shutdown ritual at the end of each day. Put aside 15 minutes to do a good shutdown ritual so that that car ride home is not

• 57:12Cal Newport?

  just a physical transformational location, but a psychological transformation as well. I've closed the loops and in that drive as I'm taking my calls or listening to my audiobook, my mind transitions away from work and then you're going to get home and there's a refreshed like at-home mindset you can lean into there.

• 57:31Cal Newport?

  All right. Do we have a call this week?

• 57:33Speaker 01

  We do.

• 57:33Cal Newport?

  All right, let's hear it.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  Hi, my name is Jeff Amon. I'm a lawyer in the Tampa Bay area in Lutz, Florida. And I'm a big fan of the podcast and all of your work, Cal. I've been reading your books. Think I've read all of them, but the, the college book at this point, but one of the references you made in the podcast was to a book called The Intellectual Life that you stumbled across in the library in the stacks. I think it was as an undergrad, but I've been

• 58:12Speaker 02

  reading that book. And I'm also trying to transition. I'm 65 and gonna wind down my law practice. What am I gonna focus on in terms of retirement? Interested in writing and a few other things, but he says, "Do not be ashamed not to know what you could only know at the cost of scattering your attention." And then later in that chapter, "Know what you have resolved to know. Cast a glance at the rest." And so, given the call to the

• 58:57Speaker 02

  deep life, which is really what you're asking of us, which is a great call. For someone like me who's transitioning away from a career in the law, what, what should I be doing to think about what area that I want to focus in and cast a glance at the other stuff? Thanks. Appreciate it.

• 59:27Cal Newport?

  Well, I think the argument in the intellectual life is that there is deeply human value in the focused intellectual pursuit itself. And this is to some degree agnostic from content. So I think that the argument there would be what he's trying to say there is pick something that seems interesting and meaningful and get into that intellectually and don't sweat all the other stuff that you're missing. Don't sweat, but I don't know about this or that or this because there is an endless universe of ideas that you could be exposing yourself and learning and you don't have enough time to do all of them. So get the enjoyment out of I am intellectually engaged with something. And

• 1:00:12Cal Newport?

  that's a cool book. I talk about that book in Deep Work. I found that in the stacks at Georgetown, actually, because I think it's a Catholic thinker. He might even be, I don't know if he was a Dominican.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  I'll look it up.

• 1:00:25Cal Newport?

  Yeah, look it up. Seren Tilenge. I always say his name wrong. But anyways, I found that in the stacks at Georgetown. What's cool about that book is that like he talks about the intellectual life as just an aspirational goal and he gets really practical about it. Like, how do you build a life of the mind? And he gets into the details, like, what's it like reading? What's it like reading hard things? How do you figure out what it is that you want to read? So it's a cool, there's not enough books like that. So I highly recommend it. But again, I think the point there is use your mind in deep ways and you will be happier. And this really, this matches the type of advice I give. Like, think about my reading advice. I read a lot, but I don't sweat too much what I read. Like, what am I in the mood for? What's interesting? I follow weird flights

• 1:01:09Cal Newport?

  of fancy. I don't have a concern of I got to read the right things, the new things, the things that everyone else is reading. Because the enjoyment is out of the intellectual engagement as much as it is any particular thing that you are, that you're engaging with.

• 1:01:24Cal Newport?

  That's cool. Intellectual Life. I like that book. I always see the guy's name wrong.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Sir Talanges.

• 1:01:30Cal Newport?

  Sir Talanges, which can't be how you pronounce that. Sir Talanges.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Insidious?

• 1:01:36Cal Newport?

  It's an insidious name.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  I said insidious right there, I guess.

• 1:01:41Cal Newport?

  You said it right. Insidious. Yeah. You actually said it right there. I'm sure we'll look it up and our readers will tell us that you pronounce that name Smith.

• 1:01:51Cal Newport?

  Just the pronunciation is wrong. We got a case study here. That's where people write in to talk about their personal experience, applying the type of advice that we talk about on this show. Today's case study comes from Jonathan. Jonathan says, I was feeling very cognitively overloaded last month. I took inspiration from slow productivity and deep work and decided to detox digitally for the last two months of 2024. I deleted all social media apps for my phone and resolved not to check social media at all until 2025, a vow I have maintained. It's so much easier to do it with the apps deleted. Since doing so, I'm no longer viewing my phone as a source of entertainment. A number of things have happened. I'm much more focused when working.

• 1:02:33Cal Newport?

  I started a major project to revise and relaunch part of my business in January. I've been finishing books at a rapid pace. I started studying Dutch. Physically, I do not feel tired and overloaded anymore. My sleep has improved. My mind is clear and I'm much happier without constant reminders about the state of the world. But here's the problem. I depend on LinkedIn, the prospect for new clients for my business. It is without question the best method I've found to market my business. I cannot stay off LinkedIn forever and need to get back in on January. My relaunch requires it. However, given the peace of mind and productivity I've experienced in last month, I'm absolutely dreading going back on LinkedIn, even though I will not download the apps to my phone again. And I've decided to limit social media use to my computer in the future.

• 1:03:16Cal Newport?

  What advice do you have for going back on social media and necessary evil without sacrificing the happiness and productivity I've gained by eliminating social media for my life over the last two months? Well, first of all, Jonathan, I love that example, that testimony about how much is gained? When you're not using social media on your phone is a default response to boredom.

• 1:03:37Cal Newport?

  We tell ourselves it's not that big of a problem. It's important to stay up on the news and you meet interesting people and it's kind of cool to be connected. But it's like the problem drinker who doesn't really realize till she or he stops how much you're actually losing with his behavior. So see all the positive stuff that happened when Jonathan took these apps off of his phone. He is reading, he's exercising, he's doing projects on the side, he's reading books faster than he ever has before. I think it's all fantastic. So Jonathan, what do you do about LinkedIn? You're basically all the way there. Access it on your computer, have a schedule, three times a week, twice a week, 15 minutes at a time. This is what you do. You like, I don't know what you do on LinkedIn, but like you have to post an article three times a week so people are keeping up with you or checking on messages that are people

• 1:04:22Cal Newport?

  sending to you. You gotta treat it like taking out the garbage. I do it 15 minutes, I do it on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I do it right after lunch. It's not going to push you back to where you were before because the thing that kills us about social media is when it begins to mediate our life, like when it's constantly there, when we never go more than a few minutes without seeing it. That's where our life begins to blend with the digital. That's when our ability to do other things begins to degrade. Going onto your computer three times a week for 10 minutes to check for LinkedIn DMs is not going to bring that all back. Just keep the fences around that super, super high. That's a key idea for my book, Digital Minimalism. When you know why you're using a technology, you can put really high fences around it and the damage is minimized.

• 1:05:07Cal Newport?

  If you know I'm using LinkedIn to do exactly this, you can put up these high fences. It's three times a week, it's 10 minutes and that's it. And none of the other social apps get access back to you, none of the other apps get back on your phone. I think you'll be fine, Jonathan. Don't worry, you're not about to go back to a world of constant distraction and all the harm that causes by just having a carefully fenced LinkedIn habit. All right, so we've got a cool tech corner coming up next, but first, I want to talk about another sponsor. If you're hearing this show, it's either right before New Year's or it's right after. If it's right after, maybe you're still shaking off a bit of a rough morning. And if it's right before, maybe you're thinking, man, what could I do to not have a rough morning on New Year's Day?

• 1:05:50Cal Newport?

  Well, I want to tell you about a game changing project. You can use the night before a night out with drinks. It's called pre alcohol. Let's face it, after a night out with a few celebratory drinks, if you're like me, who's not exactly a spring chicken anymore, you might not bounce back as quick as you used to. This is where pre alcohol enters the scene. Here's how it works. Zbiotics pre alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct, not dehydration, that's the blame for your rough next day.

• 1:06:34Cal Newport?

  Pre alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. So we're recording this before the holidays, so I will for sure have my Zbiotics ready for New Year's Eve. You can have a bit of that celebratory champagne without having that sort of next day groan. So it's nice to find a way to sort of keep a few of those pleasures in life and minimize some of the after effects. So cool product, smart idea. So look, this holiday season is not just upon me, it's upon you too. And you know, I know I'm going to be consuming a bit more alcohol than usual. You probably will be too with that pre alcohol.

• 1:07:18Cal Newport?

  We'll all stay on track to be our deepest. So go to zbiotics.com/deep to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use the code DEEP at checkout. Zbiotics is backed with a 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com/deep and use that code DEEP at checkout to get 15% off. All right, let's go to our final segment. I want to do a tech corner here, take a kind of like technology topic and get into it a little bit. So there's a newsletter post from Ted Gioia's The Honest Broker Substack that's been going around the internet. It's been getting some discussion. It's been going

• 1:08:03Cal Newport?

  a little bit viral. Here's the title of this post. I have it on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. The title of this essay, which was posted December 12th, like a week ago when I'm recording this, "Are Social Media Platforms The Next Dying Malls?" And what Ted does in this article is he argues that the trajectory of shopping malls is perhaps the trajectory that we're going to see or are seeing already unfold for social media. So he gives these points, which I'm going to summarize real quickly, for the ways in which these social media platforms are like the ugly malls that

• 1:08:45Cal Newport?

  expanded greatly in the 80s and have been closing down at a rapid clip in the 2000s. Reason number one, people go there because other people go there, but this is a fragile foundation for a community. Right? So this was the case about malls, like, oh, that's where people are. So I want to go to the malls. That's where my friends are. This is what seems to be happening with social media platforms as well. Their main argument for a lot of these platforms Ted is saying is just everyone is using this, so you should use it as well. That didn't work out so well for the malls, and he argues that might not work out so well for social media. Point number two, malls died because there are too many

• 1:09:23Cal Newport?

  of them. Social media is now entering that same phase. All right. So he talks about how once malls over expanded, they began to close down. He says the same thing is now happening in social media where, quote, "hundreds or thousands of platforms compete for community members and more get launched every month." Ted says, "People keep telling me that I need to move on the threads or Blue Sky or Twitch or TikTok or Discord or Truth Social or Snapchat or Rumble or YouTube Shorts or whatever. I've set up profiles on some of these platforms, but then sooner or later I just walk away. Who has the time to post on all of these apps?" His next argument is malls start to look identical with the same merchandise, tenants, architecture, and ambiance.

• 1:10:06Cal Newport?

  Kind of made a little bit depressing and non-exciting to go to. He's saying, "Yeah, we're seeing this on social media as well." Ted writes, "In the last three years, social media platforms have started converging, imitating the endless scroll of TikTok." Number four, he says, "Many malls, like social media platforms, become magnets for lurkers, losers, and toxic behavior of all sorts, and this made community building impossible." Clearly, we see that in social media. And finally, he says, "These bunkers were never real communities and never will be. They're just businesses, often run with distrust or contempt for their users." And that's true. Social media is not a philanthropic community town square, virtual town hall, or whatever people call it. It's a money-making venture. And because of that, it's not really meant to be a true community.

• 1:10:51Cal Newport?

  All right, so that was a cool argument. That went around a lot. There's like 186 comments on this and thousands of likes. On the other side, our friend Michael Easter, who was featured in an in-depth episode just a couple of weeks ago, he wrote in his newsletter a response to this, right? He says, "Gioia compares social media to shopping malls, arguing that social media will become like shopping malls, irrelevant and dead, but I respectfully disagree with him." And then he goes on to give his three reasons why. One, "Social media is on us 24/7, not a place we physically visit." Two, "Social media is engineered to give us what we individually respond to.

• 1:11:36Cal Newport?

  Malls are not." Three, "Malls have fewer, slower, random, and unpredictable rewards, whereas social media is much better at triggering what Easter calls our scarcity loop, and it's much more sort of addictively appealing." All right? So Easter concludes, "For these reasons, I think the closest physical location comparison to social media is casinos, and casinos and gambling are here to stay." All right, so that's an interesting debate. Are social media, is it more like malls? Or is it more like casinos? So...

• 1:12:11Cal Newport?

  I'm thinking, I thought about this, I don't see why both of these aren't right. I think Ted Giorgio's points are right. Like, these are things that make social media not nearly as important as it claims to be. His points, I think, argue why social media is not as central to our culture and experience as its proponents like to say, or how everyone believed, you know, 10 years ago. That it is more fragile and arbitrary, right? It's these, it's fake community, it has all these toxic elements, there's a lot of it, it's all starting to look the same. We don't have a good reason to be there, other than it seems to be the place where everyone was, we're just there because everyone says it needs to be there.

• 1:12:56Cal Newport?

  Where Easter's points come in, is I think this is what is keeping people from leaving even faster than they are. That you have this nice addictive reward element. So really, I think the right way to think about this is not, is it a casino or is it a mall? But it's like, it's a mall where they added slot machines. And there's people who are, you know, doing the slot machines as they're there, so even as the model is kind of dying, it's propping them up, or it's what's keeping them alive, or it's drawing out that death a little bit longer. So they do have a casino-like flavor, but, I mean, I guess the difference is, people go to casinos to go to a casino. I want to gamble, it's fun, I like the chance of winning money. People tell themselves they're going to social media for very different reasons.

• 1:13:40Cal Newport?

  And it's this, the more implicit casino factor that keeps them there. And that's why I think both of these things are true. People are realizing, the thing I think social media is, it's not. And I'm really just around because it's secretly a casino. But I didn't sign up to go to a casino, I wanted to go hang out at the community where my friends were. And so I think both are true. What Easter is talking about is slowing down the death of social media, but the flaws that Giorgio talked about, I think are there, and they're becoming more aware. And I do think, I've written about this before, in The New Yorker and elsewhere, I do think the age of the dominance of the major social media platforms is over, just people don't realize it yet, it's on the down slope, we just haven't realized it yet. Cool debate though.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  Do you, in terms of the casino, does that carry over to DraftKings apps and stuff like that?

• 1:14:25Cal Newport?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, those are, that's like more explicitly that.

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:28Cal Newport?

  It's like, I want to bet money to see if I can make more money.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Well, it isn't. It isn't because they're hearing it all the time now. Like, for instance, just, you know, the ads are on sporting games all the time, like in-game betting.

• 1:14:39Cal Newport?

  Yeah, you're right. It's like.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  So it's kind of like, it's in the back of their brain and they're just hearing it and then they just might, you know.

• 1:14:46Cal Newport?

  It's like a casino that you're allowed to put on a phone. Like, I think that's, I mean, that's actually playing with a money scarcity loop. Where like, I want to make more money. I want to turn my money into more money. And, and sometimes it does. And it's, yeah, I mean, that, that's emerging, by the way, is for techno critics, that's emerging as like, this might have been a mistake. Like, giving everyone access to a casino in their phone, that's going to create a lot of problems. Like, it's kind of the equivalent as if you built major casinos in every single town and just like constantly, like, they're just everywhere, like, set the gas. Come by the casino, come by the casino. You're gonna have a lot more problems when like, everyone is around a casino all the time.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:25Cal Newport?

  So, yeah, it's interesting what's going on out there. Anyways, cool discussion, cool tech corner. So we're back in it. New Year's, back to our normal episode rhythm. We got some good in-depth we're working on as well. So we'll see some more of those Thursday episodes as well sporadically as the new year unfolds. There's our last episode of 2024, so we will see you all in 2025. We'll do the books next week. So I'll see you then. And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:15:51Cal 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.

• 1:16:12Cal Newport?

  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.