How Do I Escape the “Busyness Singularity”? | Monday Advice

There has been lots of discussion recently about AI eliminating jobs. But what if the real fear is that AI will instead make existing jobs miserable? In this episode, Cal argues that LLM–based tools are poised to accelerate the worst aspects of pseudo-productivity to an absurd degree. He then shares five ideas for avoiding this fate in your own professional life. 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) How Do I Escape the “Busyness Singularity”? (29:03) Reaction to Cal’s newsletter about LLMs (33:35) Slow productivity for managers (37:26) Efforts to improve cognitive fitness (40:28) What Cal is reading (42:21) What Cal is up to Books: In Defense of Food (Michael Pollan) 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://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/05/14/prepare-for-an-ai-jobs-apocalypse https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/21/technology/newsom-ai-executive-order-california.html https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/breaking-down-infinite-workday https://www.axios.com/2023/02/15/burnout-2022-2023-slack-remote-work-future-forum https://calnewport.com/on-god-and-llms/ Thanks to our Sponsors: https://www.shopify.com/deep https://www.larridin.com https://www.masterclass.com/deep https://www.expressvpn.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production and mastering, 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?

  There are a lot of concerns in our current discourse about work and technology. Here, for example, is an Economist article from just a couple of weeks ago. The headline reads, "Prepare for an AI Jobs Apocalypse: It Is Not Here Yet, But Government Should Lay a Safety Net." Yikes. Right now, here's a Times headline from just last week. "California's Governor Signs AI Order Aimed at Protecting Workers." Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to explore an overhaul of labor policies to deal with potential mass job displacement from artificial intelligence. Now, notice what these examples have in common.

• 0:41Cal Newport?

  They're all about the potential catastrophic loss of jobs that might occur if technology automates existing roles. But there's another possibility that people haven't been discussing as much, but it's a possibility that I've increasingly come to worry about. What if the real fear with new advancements like AI is not that these technologies are going to take your job, but instead are going to make your job miserable? And if this is true, what specifically can you do to avoid this fate? Well, it's Monday, meaning it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to go seek out some answers. All right, so here's the plan.

• 1:25Cal Newport?

  I'm going to start by telling you a story, a story about how technology has slowly and somewhat accidentally made knowledge work jobs increasingly worse. And then I will talk about how the arrival of AI might take this long unfolding process and accelerate it to an absurd degree, creating what I've taken to calling the busyness singularity. Now, once I've told you this tale, I'll then share some practical advice about what you can do individually to avoid the gravitational pull of this grim fate. In more detail, I have five important suggestions to share, and we will go through each of those. All right, so we have a lot to cover today, so let's get started.

• 2:10Cal Newport?

  As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.

• 2:25Cal Newport?

  All right, I want to start by telling you a story about the evolution of knowledge work. And I should say, right off the bat, if you want the full version of this story, you need to read part one of my most recent book, which is called Slow Productivity. This is basically sort of the, the primary source material for a lot of what I talk about these days about work on this show. So you should have your own copy of it. All right. So here is the short version of the summary I tell in part one, the story I tell in part one of that book. In the beginning, we have the notion of knowledge work emerge in the mid 1950s, roughly speaking. That's when the management theorist Peter Drucker actually coins the term knowledge work. His job was to help the business leaders of America in particular, understand what knowledge work is and how it differs from the industrial

• 3:10Cal Newport?

  work that had been driving the American economy up to that point. Now, one of the key concepts of knowledge work that Peter Drucker drilled into the heads of American executives was autonomy. Unlike assembly line workers, knowledge workers are creative and have specific skills. They often know more about what they're doing than the managers who manage them. So instead of trying to give them an exact step-by-step checklist to follow, like you would do if you're building a Magneto for a Model T Ford, you need to give them autonomy to figure out how they're going to work and what they're going to do with their work. It's much more, it's going to need to be much more of a hands-off management style. Well, this created a problem for managers because how do we manage knowledge workers if we can't just have a pile of widgets we look at and say, how many did you produce today? If they're autonomous, how do we manage

• 3:55Cal Newport?

  them? The implicit answer that arose is what I call pseudo-productivity. It was a heuristic that says, let's use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. The more we see you doing, the more useful we'll assume you're being. Now, this is not a very precise way to manage productivity in the knowledge sector, but you know, for decades, it worked well enough, right? It was like, At the water cooler, if the boss comes in, change your conversation from, you know, the latest episode of Alf to instead some work like topic. This was also like the Mad Men era, like, well, we'll just be here long hours. So we look busy, but also we'll have like full bars in our offices. Like pseudo productivity wasn't the best way of actually managing knowledge workers,

• 4:38Cal Newport?

  but it was good enough. Then digital technology arrives in the office environment. And this is where pseudo productivity begins to take a turn for the worst, at least when it comes to the subjective experience of the individual workers. First, we get computers on the desk. This greatly increased the number of different things that each individual worker could work on. Many of these things would be administrative focus. Many of these things are sort of never ending. There's like endless things you could be doing. Well, that created a new level of busyness that didn't exist before we had the computer. And in a pseudo productive environment where more busyness is better than less, we began to feel like we had to run after all these different things.

• 5:22Cal Newport?

  And suddenly we were switching our attention back and forth between different, many more tasks than we had been before. Then we get networking technology. We networked up these computers, giving us tools like email. Well, this increased both the granularity and rate at which you could now demonstrate to people that you were doing a visible effort, right? It used to be you had to just be at the office and kind of hide the martini glass when the boss walked by. Now, how quickly you respond to an email thread is an indication of useful effort. How many emails you send to people is an indication of effort. So now there was this incredibly fine-grained granularity at which you could be demonstrating that you were pseudo productive. And then finally, we got mobile computing, laptops, and then smartphones, which meant the times and locations in which you could be working became nearly endless, which again,

• 6:06Cal Newport?

  in a pseudo productive environment, was a disaster because now every moment that you weren't in the office, you still were navigating this question of, should I in this moment jump on my phone or my laptop, answer some emails, jump on Slack, demonstrate some sort of effort? Because the more busyness, the better. So it became a never-ending tension. So digital technology, computers to networks to mobile computing, played poorly with pseudo productivity. And in the 90s into the 2000s, these jobs got increasingly frantic and busy and all-encompassing.

• 6:41Cal Newport?

  The result of this sort of supercharging of busyness has not been great. I'm going to bring up on the screen here, for example, this report I like to talk about from Microsoft, the Work Trend Index Annual Report. This is where Microsoft used data from their online office products to figure out what online workers are actually doing. There's a chart in here that I think is really telling. Here's what they found in their data. The average number of emails received per employee each workday is 117. The average numbers of Teams messages received per workday, 153. The portion of meetings that are ad hoc, called in the moment without a calendar invitation, 57%. The average time between interruptions by a meeting, email, or message during core work hours?

• 7:26Cal Newport?

  Once every two minutes, right? So what we're seeing there is a portrait of work getting insane and not because of some deep capitalist plot to exploit the workers that for some reason we weren't implementing until we got to the 90s or 2000s. It's because technology played poorly with pseudo-productivity. I'm going to load up another headline here. This is another natural consequence. This headline from Axios says, "Global Survey: Worker Burnout Reaches New High." This is going to be the obvious consequence of a work that is now hyper-busy. And so this is sort of the story I tell in Slow Productivity. I think it's one of the defining stories of office work in the 21st century.

• 8:09Cal Newport?

  But all of this happened before generative AI began to make its move into the workplace. So what's the effect of this new technology? When we add this into the mix, what's its effect onto this ongoing story? Well, this is where things get even worse. People often talk about LLM-powered tools as providing some sort of productivity miracle, right? We hear reports of computer programmers who are handing off the actual writing of computer code to AI. And we imagine this is coming for all of our other main work as well and all these other jobs. And this gets us either terrified or excited about AI's possibility. But what's really happening with AI in most non-computer programming office jobs right now? It's much more mundane. Here are the most common uses of AI in most non-programming

• 8:54Cal Newport?

  office jobs at the moment. Writing long emails automatically, summarizing long emails, automatically creating slide decks, transcribing meetings and turning transcriptions into some sort of work product that can then be shared, creating verbose reports and trend analyses. So having to do some research and then write a report. What unifies those examples is that they're all more or less pseudo-productive activities, the type of things you do to demonstrate effort, to show that you're busy, but that bring not a ton of actual value to the bottom line. Clients aren't paying for the reports or emails you're sending back and forth. So, AI right now is often being used in the office to support pseudo-productive activities as

• 9:38Cal Newport?

  things you do to show that you are being busy. Now, the problem is, is AI has essentially reduced the cost and friction of these existing pseudo-productivity act, pseudo-productive activities down to zero. So what happens when you set up a work environment in which visible activity is rewarded, then you give everyone a machine that can automate those efforts, making them essentially free? Well, what's going to happen is work will become a mad performative dash of button mashing. Who can churn out more slop quicker than the next person? Soon we'll be managing teams of agents that are producing emails and slide decks on our behalf while intercepting, summarizing, responding to those incoming AI decks that have been generated by other people's agents. It will be a digital blitz

• 10:20Cal Newport?

  of back and forth nothingness. The density of shallow work here will become infinite. It will collapse in on itself. You will end up with a busyness singularity. It's productivity reducto ad absurdum. Alright, so if we step back here, what we're facing is not really an AI problem in the sense of, oh, everything was fine and then AI came along and created a new problem. Pseudo-productivity was never the right answer for measuring useful effort in the knowledge work. And with each new decade and new technology came along that made these shortcomings even more apparent. And it's on this trajectory that when you then throw AI into the mix, we now are collapsing towards a self-destructive conclusion.

• 11:04Cal Newport?

  This busyness singularity to me is going to have a much more widespread negative consequence, society-wide, than the threats of jobs being fully automated. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

• 11:22Speaker 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.

• 11:52Cal Newport?

  All right, so what can you, as an individual, do to try to escape the worst effects of this coming busyness singularity? Well, I have five suggestions that I'm going to offer. I'll go through these one by one, and we will discuss. All right, the first suggestion,

• 12:15Cal Newport?

  plan weekly. All right, let me talk about that. Here's what I want you to do, and then I'll explain why. On Monday morning, I want you to look at the week ahead. I want you to ask what important things, things that create nonambiguous value for your organization, do you want to make progress on that week? Then I want you to find and protect time for it on your calendar, like you were scheduling a meeting or an appointment. This might mean canceling or rescheduling less important things that are already on your calendar to open up bigger swaths of time to make progress on the things that are actually important. Now, why do I want you to do this? Because when you zoom into the moment of a given day, it's easy to get lost in pseudo-productive busyness. There's always more emails to send,

• 12:59Cal Newport?

  or slide decks to create, or transcriptions to mess around, things that look like you're on it and you're busy. And so if you're just saying, what do I want to work on next? The obvious answer will almost always be something pseudo productive. So if you want to make, open up some space between you and pseudo productivity and actually start producing value, you got to plan in advance. And the weekly scale is a very good way of doing that.

• 13:23Cal Newport?

  All right. What's my second tip? Let's go back to our big list here. Number two, maintain a portfolio. All right. So what I mean by this is you actually want to keep somewhere, like in the document, like a professor would with their CV, a growing list of the important initiatives, projects, or accomplishments that you are responsible for. So if tip number one was about finding more time to do valuable activities, tip number two is about keeping a record of the valuable things you actually did.

• 14:01Cal Newport?

  You want an alternative to just let my visible busyness be how you judge me. You want an alternative to that that's actually grounded in actual value-producing accomplishment activities and initiatives. So actually keep track of it. Here's what I did this month. Here's what I did this quarter. I took on this project. We did this. It had this positive consequence. I did this with this product. We made these changes. Here's the hardest part about it. Here's where I brought my expertise. It had these positive consequences. You're going through and creating a portfolio of things you did that actually brought value. Now, you actually want to share this. This could be something that you bring into your quarterly reviews. It could be something that you show to your bosses. It can say, here's what I was, did last quarter.

• 14:45Cal Newport?

  What should I focus on for the quarter ahead?

• 14:49Cal Newport?

  What you're trying to do here is rewrite their understanding of you and your value away from pseudo productivity and towards the actual pursuit of things that are valuable. Try to free you from this trap of just trying to automatically generate busyness.

• 15:05Cal Newport?

  All right. I have a third idea here. Bring up my, my big list.

• 15:11Cal Newport?

  Avoid what AI can do. Well, if you read my 2016 book, Deep Work, I have this suggestion in there where I say, "Hey, when thinking about what activities to spend your time on in a professional context, ask yourself the question, is this something that a smart 22-year-old recent college graduate could do on my behalf with just like a little bit of training?" And if the answer is yes, I wrote, "That's an indication that this is not an activity that's really making use of hard-won skills, and so it's a lower value-producing activity, and it's something that you shouldn't spend as much time on. You want to find activities that a smart 22-year-old without your particular skills and training could do." Well, we have a better version of this test today, which I think, is this something

• 15:55Cal Newport?

  that I could have, you know, Claude cowork do? Is this something that I could largely automate with chat GPT queries? And if the answer is yes, you say, "Then I want to avoid that activity to the extent possible. I want to move my work away from things that AI can do and towards things that it cannot." If most of what you're doing is just automated by AI or soon will be, then you are vulnerable. You're kind of bringing this on yourself. If you say, "Yeah, I go to the meetings, I get the transcripts, I create slide decks, I write a summary of the points with AI, all this in AI, I have an AI agent send this out to everybody," you might feel like you're doing a lot of things, but these efforts that AI is doing or could do, so you're producing very little value yourself, you're more vulnerable.

• 16:39Cal Newport?

  So just do the AI test. Is this something that like an AI agent or chatbot could do or do most of? Then I want to move away towards something else. If the answer is no, I wouldn't even know how to use AI to really help this except for like at the edges, then good, I want to spend more time doing that. So you need to move away from activities where it's obvious that AI can do them. You're not being productive if you're letting AI automate your work. You're working on things that is not very valuable. All right, my fourth piece of advice, do the big reveal.

• 17:13Cal Newport?

  Pursue upskill projects. So what you should be doing is always have some sort of new skill that's valuable and relevant to your job that you're working on, something that will make you more rare and valuable in your field. If possible, to find a way to connect this skill to a project you're doing for your job, right? So like, hey, I will take on this responsibility, boss. And in order to do this project, I have to learn a new skill. So at least you can get credit for doing it. But if you can't do that, then just take a half hour every day to be making slow and steady progress on learning something new that is going to be valuable for your job. It's a hard, the harder your skill, the more rare and valuable the skill, the more you can escape the trap of AI accelerated pseudo productivity, because you're now playing the

• 17:55Cal Newport?

  game of hard-won value that you can point to and say, I did this and it's valuable. You can, the better you are at things, the more valuable things you can do, the less you have to play the game of using visible busyness as a proxy for useful effort. All right, the final tip I am going to suggest.

• 18:15Cal Newport?

  Write well. Differentiate yourself by the, from the AIs by writing well, taking the time to write well. Make your emails, your reports, anytime you're putting down professional text, make it super clear, make it super concise, make it succinct, make it well crafted. Make it clear it's from a human. While everyone else is going to be sending out these long reports with bullet point lists with emojis next to the list for some reasons and all sorts of sort of convoluted language where you're like, this, this seems like it's smart, but when I look closer, I have no idea what it's actually saying. Coming succinct, coming clear. This is the issue. We can do it. This is a trap. This is the right way forward.

• 19:00Cal Newport?

  Here's what we should do. We can make this happen, right? Clear, succinct, and smart. Care about your writing. So when more people are trying to automate their writing, You should spend longer on your writing than you were before. It's a huge differentiator from you and what's going on with AI. It means that people value the things you send more than other things. So if you're sending less because you're avoiding the pseudo productivity trap, that's okay, because everything else is going to seem sort of sloppy and your things might be more rare, but it's to the point when you send it. You're trying to set yourself up as the sort of alternative to what's going on with some of this AI auto gen. So let's look at these five things again. I think this is what you can do right now to help escape the busyness singularity. Use weekly plans to make sure you're making time for what values.

• 19:45Cal Newport?

  Maintain a portfolio so you can point to other people. Here's the stuff I'm doing that's actually valuable, that's unrelated to how busy I am. Avoid what AI can do, tasks that could be easily or substantially automated by AI or tasks you need to spend less time on. Always be pursuing upskilled projects. You want to be better, better, better, better. You have to rely on skills, not busyness if you're going to survive this moment without going insane. And value your writing. Be succinct, clear and valuable when you write so you don't have to write as much and yet still get a lot of value or acclaim for what you do produce in your professional, in the professional context. All right, so this is what, you know, it's an idea I've been developing. If you're, and look, computer programmers have their own issues. You should listen to a couple of weeks ago.

• 20:30Cal Newport?

  I did a whole AI reality check episode on what's really happening with computer programming. There's all sorts of issues with AI in the fields. Last week I did something on what's happening in mathematics with AI. These are the fields where AI is best suited to play. But when it comes to like normal knowledge work jobs, you're not a professional mathematician or computer scientist. You're not a programmer. This is what I'm worried about. The busyness singularity, pseudo productivity being pushed, reducto ad absurdum. And these are the type of things, this is what you have to be doing now. Is you have to leave the pseudo productivity trap. This is the time to start leaving pseudo productivity and moving towards depth. It's the time to stop relying on visible activity as your main marker of value in the workplace and instead relying on actual hard won things you did and can point to.

• 21:14Cal Newport?

  Now, it might seem scary at first because there's a certain predictable comfort that just sitting there and sending emails and having AI make that even easier. But that is a trap. That's not sustainable. It's going to become increasingly exhausting and you will become increasingly vulnerable. Do the hard work of actually doing hard work. That is the key to differentiating yourself in our current technological moment. Alright, so there we go, Jesse. I got all the tape off this time.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:39Cal Newport?

  That's the, that's my, my protest against technology is using painter's tape and a notebook. It's like our main graphical element on this show.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Do you have new terms in your new book that you've developed, like pseudo-productivity?

• 21:52Cal Newport?

  Um, yes, I always have new terms.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, you always have great, great new terms.

• 21:56Cal Newport?

  Yeah, so, so for the Deep Life book I'm working on, uh, which I'm, the final edits for the pre-cop, like just the main edits, the final edits are being done, you know, as you hear this episode, by the end of the week, you're hearing this episode, in theory, I will have submitted the, the sort of polished version of that book. Yeah, that's if lifestyle, you've heard these on the show before, lifestyle-centric planning, the face shift model of the deep life has been worse than the lifestyle-centric approach to, to the deep life. I, I get into lifestyle visions, lifestyle properties, uh, keystone habits, things like property scraping, residence isolation, I got a lot of terms in that book. It's a very practical book, which is, which is the way I'm trying to write it. And then the new book idea I have, if I end up writing it about thinking, is all going

• 22:41Cal Newport?

  to be about cognitive fitness, which is a term that I'm also really trying to promote. I was, I was actually brought, that, that idea is kind of making the rounds. There was an Atlantic piece last week where the president of Amherst, I think, was basically reacting to my idea of cognitive fitness. He thought it sounded too grim and that college would be more fun, but I've actually written tons of stuff about how to make the intellectual life of college fun. Go back and see like five years of my writing from the, the late 2000s. So we're actually more on the same page on that than he might realize. But the key thing here is the idea is out there, it's being reacted to. So, you know, the more I can change vocabulary, the happier I am for whatever that's worth. Alright, I want to take another quick break to hear from our sponsors.

• 23:22Speaker 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.

• 23:52Cal Newport?

  All right, well, that's enough about my thoughts. Now it's time to hear what you have to say, as is our tradition on Mondays. We like to open the show's inbox to read some of your messages. Remember, if you have a question, comment, or interesting article or idea to share, you can reach us at [email protected]. All right, Jesse, where are we going to start this week?

• 24:14Speaker 02

  We received a bunch of notes and comments and reaction to your newsletter from last week about LLMs and the sacredness of speech.

• 24:21Cal Newport?

  Yeah, we did. People were into this one. All right, so let me just load up the essay real quick on the screen. It was called "On Gods and LLMs." It opens, you know, I talk about Genesis. I talk about the identification of humans as speaking beings. I'll just read one quote from the Rabbi Shai Held. "According to the medieval commentary, Rashi, speech is thus not only essential to who we are as human beings, it is also key to our uniqueness. Alone among God's creations, Jewish tradition affirms, human beings are capable of speech." The essay goes on to say, "There's something sacred about the production of ideas, whether it's vocalized or written. It's a telepathy. It's a mind state from one human being recreated in another human's mind.

• 25:05Cal Newport?

  It's the foundation on which we democratize holiness and from that, all the ideas we enjoy today about things like human rights and justice. That speech is at the core of the human experience." And then the point of the article is asking the question, the ethical question. So is there something profane then about letting a machine produce speech as well? Is this like unique to humans, something we should cherish? Or something like, "Oh, machines can do this as well. We'll just automate it around." So I asked that question. This generated a lot of feedback. I'll read a few of these pieces of feedback here.

• 25:40Cal Newport?

  Yeshua said, "Great piece. I'm an Orthodox Jew and I had not, had I not known otherwise, your piece could have come straight out of a rabbi's Shabbat sermon." Well, this does seem, I don't know Jesse, like a good place for a blasphemous Cal Network joke. Here's one I came up with. Cal Network doesn't give sermons about God. God gives sermons about Cal Network. I'm going to go to hell for. All right, let's see what else we have here. Thomas wrote and said, "I consider LLMs to be practice for communicating in real life, not a substitute. What I do is similar to what Ben and David of a choir do. They use Claude to train themselves on their spiel and test the coherence of their

• 26:23Cal Newport?

  ideas, and then they hit the recording booth and talk to each other. I think that's the model." I mean, I get that, Thomas. I know people do that. They test out ideas, the back and forth. It's like a, it's a way of thinking that lowers the energy required to think because you get all these mental breaks while you're waiting for the chat bot to say things and to do some thinking on your behalf. I get it, but it also still makes me uncomfortable. It still makes me uncomfortable, the sort of interacting, using something as uniquely human and sacred to speech with a machine. If there's a sort of emotional, spiritual fraud there where our mind, even though part of our mind knows this is a matrix being multiplied a bunch of times to create tokens autoregressively, a deeper part of our mind thinks it's talking to another being and treating it as such, and it's not. And there's just something there that makes me uncomfortable, but I can't quite articulate what to do about it.

• 27:08Cal Newport?

  France writes in to say, "It's hubris to think that because other species do not use our speech, they have no speech with which to communicate." Well, I'm sure all species or many species have different ways of communicating, but I think the point here of Jewish tradition is that speech as we know it, that is the ability to transmit arbitrary mental states from one individual to another, this deeply human thing, is core to the human experience and therefore should be treated with care. Alex says, "You nailed it. I couldn't put my finger on why AI-generated emails and messages just feel inhuman, like we can now see through it and know that it did not come from a human. So we just feel jaded when we read AI-generated communication. I will be crediting you when I say the sacredness of speech."

• 27:52Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm there, Alex. There's something, we should think about this. It's an ethical question. Like, here's how I end. I'm going to read the final paragraph of my essay here. I said, this is all to say, before we blindly embrace whatever AI product Sam Altman or Dario Amade declares to be inevitable, we still have a lot of work to do in figuring out what we're willing to accept. We have to be asking these questions. This is my philosophy of techno-selectionism. We don't just have to take whatever technology comes our way and just try to survive the waves. We have agency here and we can ask hard questions. We can make hard decisions. We can change our usage patterns. We can push back. We

• 28:33Cal Newport?

  can change our mind after we adopt the technology and cut back on how we use it. We have control and this is the case with LLMs as well. All right, let's move on from AI. Jesse, what other, what other messages do we have here?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Kevin has a question about slow productivity for managers.

• 28:50Cal Newport?

  This is well connected to today's deep dive. All right, Kevin says, I have gone down the Cal Network rabbit hole and am sold on your productivity ideas. I recently was promoted manager of a small team of two other employees in my knowledge work job. How can I ensure I'm encouraging the slow productivity principles for my teams? All right, interesting side note, Cal Network doesn't go down rabbit holes. The rabbits come out of the rabbit holes when he wants them. Not going to go down a hole, they're going to come out. All right, here's some notes. You're, you're, you want to take my ideas of slow productivity? I feel like I should show the book again. Hold on. There we go. And you want to make sure that you're implementing them in your workplace. All right, a couple of things I

• 29:35Cal Newport?

  want to, I'll tell you right off the bat. Make workloads transparent. Who is working on what? Do not let that exist implicitly implied by a bunch of messages and static, you know, stack Slack channel transcripts. Here is a central place where we keep track of who is working on what task. The central place needs a holding pin for things that need to be done eventually, but that no one is working on. Do not play the game of all potential work has to be distributed among people. And now you have each individual with these huge workloads that are unworkable at any moment and they have to kind of figure out how to juggle all these things and try to make progress on some, but not others. Keep the workload transparent and have a place for things, things that need to be

• 30:16Cal Newport?

  worked on, but no individual is working on in the moment. Have clear work in progress limits for how much any one individual should be doing. Two, you need docket clearing meetings at least twice a week. These are meetings where your team gets together and you review a shared document where when anything new pops up on any team member's plate as something that needs to be discussed or potentially done, an issue to be handled, a task to pursue, there's a shared document called a docket where you put it. So it's off your mind. You don't email it out. You don't jump on a Slack channel. You don't call an impromptu meeting right there. You put it in the docket. It's a shared Google Doc. Two or three times a week, your team gets together and goes through that Google Doc thing by thing. And what are we going to do for each of these? We don't need to do this. This we need to work on now. So

• 30:58Cal Newport?

  let's add this to the workload for you in our transparent workload document. This is something we need to do, but not now. So we're going to add it to our transparent workload management system in the list of things that need to be done, but no individual's doing. Oh, this we could do right now as a team. Let's just handle it right here. And you go through and you clear out that docket. Doing this two or three times a week, 30 minutes at a pop saves so many context switches of just ambiguous back and forth messages as you try to sort of toss these things around. Three, insist that your team holds daily office hours at posted times. As much as possible, move any discussion that requires more than a single message to answer to the office hours. Come by my office hours. Come by my office hours. If you have an issue that you need feedback from multiple people on, do a reverse meeting. You go to each of their office hours one by one, instead of making all of them

• 31:42Cal Newport?

  come to you. Office hours can make a huge difference. And finally, borrowing one of the pieces of advice that I talked about in the deep dive of today's episode, have your employees maintain a portfolio of high value accomplishments, right? So that you can cut through pseudo productivity and really be monitoring who is doing what that's valuable. If someone is not growing that log, you say, what, we have to change it so that you're being more valuable to us. This cuts through pseudo productivity. We no longer care about visible busyness. We care about this list growing. And when you have transparent workloads, this also becomes clear because you're like, I know exactly what you're supposed to work on. Why is this not done? Right? So it's a really, all these things work together to create a system that is based off of actual value producing accomplishment and not on

• 32:27Cal Newport?

  just visible signs of busyness, which again, in an AI world, is just going to collapse into a busyness singularity. We could do one more. What else do we have here, Jesse?

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Evan reports on his efforts to improve his cognitive fitness.

• 32:40Cal Newport?

  All right. So Evan says, "I started the Deep Work process again and feel so much better in my entire life because I have my focus back. The main things I am doing are landlining and memorizing the Bible. I have completed all the book of James. Is there anything else I can use as a mind workout that requires my attention so deeply like memorizing?

• 33:02Cal Newport?

  A, I like the use of the term landlining, which one of our listeners, I don't know, this was a few weeks ago, right? So one of our listeners suggested this idea. Landlining is the idea of keeping your smartphone plugged in in your kitchen when you're at home. You treat it like an old fashioned landline. You have to ring her on, you go there if someone calls, you go there to check text messages, you go there to look things up. It's not on your person as you do everything else in your house. And it's a great idea. It really helps your focus. Memorizing is a way to get more cognitive fitness is an interesting idea because I talk about it in my book, Deep Work. I actually talked about a particular, it's a cool story. It was a student in Australia who was struggling academically. It's a university student, struggling academically. He gets involved in competitive memorizing. So

• 33:47Cal Newport?

  there's competitions you can go to where you, you memorize, like you memorize a deck of cards and stuff like this. It's memory competitions. The techniques he learned, so he's doing this in this memory competition, this helps him, right? This helps his general ability to focus and sustain concentration. And what happens to his schoolwork? All his grades go up. And he, when I, you know, when I talked to him, he was on his way to like a prestigious Australian graduate program. And so I use it as an example of like, hey, you can train your brain to be better at focusing and get all sorts of general benefits. And memorizing is like the type of thing you can do to, in general, make your brain stronger, to get more cognitive fitness. So that's, that's interesting what you're doing there, Evan. Other things you can do to actively strengthen your concentration muscles.

• 34:32Cal Newport?

  The three things I talk about a lot on this show is read, write, self-reflect, right? Reading has a unique value to your brain because it's not just practicing using your brain, it actually rewires your brain in a way that you can make more areas of your brain work together to produce smarter thoughts. So, reading literally makes you smarter, not just from the content, but by the way it rewires your brain. Writing is where you reverse those circuits and actually produce original thoughts using them. You get better at actually focusing these circuits to producing new things of value in the world. So, care about writing, don't automate it with AI. Hard is not bad. Strain is not bad. It's like lifting a weight you want to burn, you want to feel the burn of a blank page. And self-reflection is going for a walk and thinking about something in your head without a phone.

• 35:15Cal Newport?

  Can I maintain my mind's eye on an internal subject like myself, some problem I'm having, something I'm trying to figure out, and make progress on it with just internal dialogue? Those three things, reading, writing, self-reflections, I think are the primary activities to strengthen your cognitive fitness, right? It's like, what would be in the athletic context, like doing cardio and strength training and stretching? I think it's roughly that equivalent. All right, that's all we have from our inbox for this week. Also, on Mondays, we like to finish with an update about what I am up to. I finished last week my fifth book of the month, Jesse. I reread In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, because again, my rough idea for a new book, which I'm not sure if I'm doing yet or not, but I have

• 35:59Cal Newport?

  this idea for a book tentatively titled In Defense of Thinking, and I want to go back and read Pollan's manifesto about eating to see what did he do there that might be relevant for how I think about structuring this book about thinking. And so, it was interesting to go back. It was kind of nostalgic. I remembered when, this was 2006, this book came out, all these ideas were big back then. It's so non-surprising today, like the ideas in that book have been so, because he was successful, have been so well inculcated to our culture that like it didn't, I remember the freshness that book has, which it, you know, doesn't have anymore because like he was successful in changing the way we thought about thinking. So, but it was good to go back and reread that.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Is it like no processed food?

• 36:36Cal Newport?

  Well, he has three pieces of advice is eat food, mostly plants, not too much. But it's a three-part book. Part one kind of lays out the problem of nutritionism, which is like focusing on individual macro and micronutrients when you're thinking about health as opposed to like thinking about food as, you know, a whole. And then he talks about... Getting beyond nutritionism and then the third part is like he goes into those specific pieces of advice and actually like gives a lot of advice. So you know, it's a it's a very good book if you haven't read it before. A lot more science reportery than I remembered. It's deep. It's a lot of like science reporting on like this study came out and this legislation happened like very much. It's very more repertorial than the

• 37:20Cal Newport?

  book that inspired it was his previous book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is based around four set piece stories. And it's also I reread that not long ago as well. And that's also a good book. In terms of what I'm up to, again, as I mentioned, I'm in the line edits of my, my, the book that's coming out next, coming out next spring is called The Deep Life, a one off book about cultivating a deep life. Takes all the ideas from the show, puts into a system, step by step, boom, now you have it. This is the source guide for making your life so interesting that your phone will seem less exciting. I'm in the final line edits. So that's like we've, you go back and forth a lot with writing, you, you, you kind of, as you write, you go back and forth with your editor until you get something that kind of works. And then there's like sort of higher level notes of like, work on that here, like chapter by chapter, we need something here, this doesn't make

• 38:04Cal Newport?

  sense, maybe cut this. And then you get to sort of the line edit piece of the first round of editing, where your editor will actually go through and, you know, make particular, let's cut this sentence, this isn't clear to me, you know, those type of things. And that's where you do your final like out loud read of sections two to really try to get the language working. You hope that's what leads to what's then called the manuscript acceptance. Like, okay, now we have a manuscript, it works. There's still a lot of editing that happens after this because you still go on the copy editing where you, you have like professional copy editors getting into like the precise grammar and languages and word repetitions and fact checking. And we have a professional footnote editor to come in and get all the in notes in the right format. So there's a lot more editing to come, but it becomes much more lower level and production focused. So anyways, I'm hoping

• 38:47Cal Newport?

  to be done with that by the end of the week this comes out. When this airs, I'll actually be on my way to Asheville, where I'm going to hang out with friend of the show Brad Stolberg, and I'm going to edit in the morning. I'm staying in some mountain lodge up there in Asheville. I'm going to edit in the morning and the afternoon, we're gonna, we share a trainer. So we're going to train and then think big thoughts about the world of writing. So that's going to be a cool trip. So as you hear this, I'm on my way to finish my edits among the, the crisp mountain air of Asheville, North Carolina.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  Is editing easier than writing?

• 39:17Cal Newport?

  Um, yeah, I think writing is hard. Like today I was struggling with.

• 39:24Cal Newport?

  Because this is the type of thing I struggle with. You know, chapter one, right, chapter one of the book. Here is the, what is our approach? Here's what the deep life is. I'm going to kind of get to it in the intro, but I'm like, let's get the formal definition of the deep life. What is the approach we're going to pursue in this book? And I set up two contrasting approaches. There's what I say is like the most common model that people think when they think about the deep life is something called the phase shift model, which is like a singular event. So either a radical change or really impressive accomplishment will deliver me a deep life. So I need to like move to an island or, you know, win this major award and then, and then I will have a deep life. Right. And I argue that doesn't work. Right.

• 40:09Cal Newport?

  No singular achievement is actually, it doesn't last. That's not going to work. You get a lot of examples. They said the alternative notion is the lifestyle centric approach that obviously is going to be the right approach, because I talk about all the time in the show, where you say, no, no, no, actually the, what generates your subjective experience of your life is like all of the aspects of your day, like what is your daily life like, like all the aspects of your life? It's what you really need to do is engineer your lifestyle so that it, every single day is making, you know, producing depth. It's your daily lifestyle, not any singular event that really determines what your life is like. So you need to think about re-engineering all the aspects of your lifestyle, not just pursuing a single sort of like major change or accomplishment.

• 40:51Cal Newport?

  But there's these subtleties, because the way my brain works is like the definition of the deep life is too much overlapping the definition of the lifestyle centric approach to the deep life. And I need good separation. This is the deep life. These are two potential ways to pursue it. This is the better way. But the definition of the deep life I was using, and I was using like an old definition I, you know, written about five years ago, was a little process oriented itself, you know, amplify this, reduce that. And so it would, anyway, so that's like the type of thing, this is the type of thing I really care about is these little details about how the pieces fit together. You get that just right. It's implicitly felt in the reader's mind of like a pleasing sensation of things are clicking together and their mind gets it and you can make progress.

• 41:36Cal Newport?

  If they don't quite fit. They won't be able to articulate what's making them uncomfortable, but the book will. You know, that doesn't quite match with that and it just gives you a sensation. So like the key to my books, part of the sensation my books create is all the pieces are gears that mesh.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100%.

• 41:53Cal Newport?

  And it's supposed to be, you're like, all of this is, and then your brain is like, this makes sense. It can grok the whole thing. And so anyways, that's what I'm working on.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  I think I noticed that a lot during your promotion of your last book. People would ask you a million different questions, but you'd always bring it back to like a core set of fundamentals. And I was like,

• 42:09Cal Newport?

  That's what works, right? That's what works. It's like, it has to, people's minds are uncomfortable. I've been doing this for 20 years now. People's minds are uncomfortable and the pieces don't fit. And I think too many pragmatic nonfiction writers come into it like, I just have a bunch of good ideas. And they're thinking about how they present each idea and they want to zig here and zap and yeah, and capitalism, this and that, and duh, duh, duh. And they want to have like these moments of, these sort of rhetorical moments where you're like, boom, oh yeah, I'm on board with that. Or, oh, that's funny. Or yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm fired up or whatever. What they miss is, if the pieces, the big level pieces don't click together beautifully, the whole thing is going to be, make the reader uncomfortable. Like, oh, these like ideas and this kind of fit, but doesn't this push back on that? And what are you trying to say here?

• 42:54Cal Newport?

  Idea first. All the pieces have to click and then you got to deploy craft. And when you explain things or explain things well and clear, and that's, that's all fine too. You need craft as well, but the ideas, the ideas have to, the ideas have to click.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 43:07Cal Newport?

  And so, yeah, I'm obsessive about it, but that's what I do. All right. That's all the time we have for this week.

• 43:17Cal Newport?

  I'll be back next Monday with another advice episode. We usually on Thursdays have AI reality checks. I have to, I mean, I'm going to be on the road, so maybe we'll see. So don't be surprised if there's not one this week, but we'll be back with an advice episode next Monday. Hey, sign up for my newsletter, kallnewport.com. If you want my dispatches from this fight for depth versus distraction, you know, it's my thoughts on the fly of things I'm thinking about. So if you really want the most up to date view of like new thoughts I'm having about this fight for depth and distractions, kallnewport.com for that newsletter.

• 43:51Cal Newport?

  By Slipper Activity was the star of today's show. If you haven't read this book, you need to, because I talk about it all the time. It's the source. You can buy that book if you have it. All right, that's it. See you next week. And as always, stay deep.