How Do I Build “Cognitive Fitness”? | Monday Advice

In his recent New York Times essay, Cal argued for a “cognitive fitness” revolution to resist the onslaught of digital tools degrading our ability to think. But how does one actually strengthen their brain? In this episode, Cal details a sustainable cognitive fitness routine built around five key components. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Send an email to [email protected]. Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia 2:25 DEEP DIVE: How Do I Build “Cognitive Fitness”? | Monday Advice INBOX: 30:51 Message from a social media influencer 33:02 Reaction to Amy Timberlake interview 38:01 Putting Cal’s advice into practice WHAT CAL IS UP TO: 41:20 What I read 43:45 What I’m doing Books: The Noonday Devil (by Jean-Charles Nault: translated from original French) 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.youtube.com/watch?v=PdvqpqHSQas https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/opinion/technology-mental-fitness-cognitive.html https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/what-kind-of-writer-is-chatgpt https://i0.wp.com/www.americamagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/MertonCover.jpeg-427330.jpeg?w=992&ssl=1 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/opinion/sunday/steve-jobs-never-wanted-us-to-use-our-iphones-like-this.html https://anjalibanerjee.com/paws-and-platen/from-typewritten-draft-to-published-page Thanks to our Sponsors: https://www.calderalab.com/deep https://www.vanta.com/deepquestions https://www.shipstation.com/deep https://www.zapier.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for mastering and production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Nate Mechler for research and newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Cal Newport?

  Not long ago, I published a splashy op-ed for the New York Times. It was titled, "There's a Good Reason Why You Can't Concentrate." Now, it argues that technology is rapidly diminishing our ability to think and that this is a major problem for both the individual as well as the success of our society more broadly. In it, I propose that the solution is a revolution in cognitive fitness, not unlike the physical fitness revolution that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. Here's how I conclude the piece. I write, "My intention is to spur a shift in understanding that can build into a larger revolution. I'm done seeding my brain, the core of all that makes me who I am, to the financial

• 0:44Cal Newport?

  interest of a small number of technology billionaires, or the short-sighted conveniences of hyperactive communication styles. It's time to move past fretting about our slide into the cognitive shallows and decide to actually do something about it." Now, this essay's made to rounds, and I'm proud of it, but there's one question that I've been asked more than any other by people who read it. How do I become more cognitively fit? I gave a few ideas in the essay, but people want a more systematic brain fitness routine, a sustainable way to push back against the digital forces trying to make us dumber." Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for a Monday Advised episode of this show,

• 1:25Cal Newport?

  which seems like the perfect opportunity to dive deeper into this question. All right, so here's the plan. In the week since this piece has come out, I've refined my cognitive fitness program into five different components, and I'm going to go through each of these. I'll justify why each makes sense and then give some practical advice for making that component work. Now, these five components add up to a basic cognitive fitness plan that I think basically everybody should consider adopting. So if you've been feeling like you've literally been losing your mind to technology and you're ready to start taking back control, then this episode is for you.

• 2:06Cal Newport?

  As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music.

• 2:24Cal Newport?

  Alright, so let's get started with our first component here. We'll do a reveal. And it is, "Read Every Day." I think this is a very effective tool, in physical fitness, rather, there's a very effective idea is that you need to lay a base of regular activity. This is my inspiration here. So in physical activity, physical fitness, we might say, for example, you need to walk at least 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day. This is associated with all sorts of positive health benefits. Well, I think we need a similar base layer of fitness when it comes to cognitive training, and I think that should be reading. "Reading rewires your brain in a way that literally makes you smarter."

• 3:07Cal Newport?

  I want to actually read a quote from my New York Times piece about exactly this effect. "Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Mary Ann Wolf calls 'deep reading processes' that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance of what we're able to understand. Deep reading is our species' bridge to insight and novel thought," she writes. Alright, so what's being said here is that the more time you spend reading, the more you're rewiring your brain to basically harness together different regions that were originally evolved for different purposes, but when combined, gives you this intellectual superpower: complicated thought. Nuanced thoughts that brings more of your brain matter to bear

• 3:52Cal Newport?

  at trying to understand and produce original ideas and original understanding. But there's another justification for daily reading as well. It gives you practice with the fundamental skill of aiming your mind's eye at a desired internal target. Now, we're already naturally born to be very good at aiming our attention at a salient external target. So if I say, "I want you to really pay attention in this basketball game to player number 23," we're very good at that. "Oh, I can fix my attention and just watch that player." But when it comes to putting our mind's eye... On an internal topic like a thought or an idea that requires practice,

• 4:36Cal Newport?

  that doesn't come naturally, reading is giving you that practice. So if we read more, we're going to rewire our brain to be capable of smarter thought, and we are getting practice directing our mind's eye in a way that will help us actually take advantage of that wiring. Alright, so if that's the big idea for the first component, let me give you some practical tips for actually succeeding. If you're not a big reader, I think the key is to start with reading things that you are excited to read. Do not be snobby early on. Do not think, "I need to be reading a good book that's going to impress my book club friends," or "I need to be reading a big profound book," or "otherwise it's a waste of my time."

• 5:21Cal Newport?

  Now, the act of decoding the symbols themselves at first is what we want to get used to. The act of putting your mind's eye on one target for a sustained amount of time is something we want to get used to. So pick something you're excited to read. It doesn't matter if it's simple, or fun, or trashy, if it's a romance novel, or like a highly emotional Colleen Hoover novel, or if you're reading really trashy genre, you know, adventure fiction, doesn't matter. Whatever you're excited about coming back to. Now, I would start with 15 to 20 pages a day. Let me tell you how you hit that target consistently. Read with your lunch, read in bed before you go to sleep. That'll get you to 15, 20 pages, no problem. So it's a good automatic way to get to that base layer.

• 6:04Cal Newport?

  Over time, you want to increase those pages, maybe get closer to 30 to 50 pages. This might require that you develop a little bit more of a reading habit. "Oh, like I have some time before dinner, I'm going to actually sit and read. I'm on the subway going to work, I'm going to sit to read." So as you get more used to reading, it'll be easier to develop a reading habit where you read in more times during your day. The final place I want you to get is, once you're used to reading, you can aim your mind's eye, you're starting to build those connections, is to integrate more what I am going to call "hard" books. So you start with books you're just excited to read, so you do it. Once you're up to this 30 to 50 pages a day and aren't having much trouble hitting it, make one book in three, quote unquote, "hard."

• 6:50Cal Newport?

  And by hard, I think of that as if it's nonfiction, it's presenting sophisticated, original ideas or analysis. And if it's fiction, it's going to be a more challenging literary genre that is ultimately going to be more rewarding, but takes more concentration to understand what's going on, who's who, slower consumption to make better sense of what's actually unfolding. So you can think of the difficulty of the book you intake, like your mile time, if you're an amateur jogger.

• 7:22Cal Newport?

  If you're new to running, you're not going to be like, hey, I'm just going to whip off a 530 mile because I really want to do it. You're not going to be able to do it. But on the other hand, if you're continuing to train and you're running more and you're building up your endurance, then you can see that mile time coming down. That's the way to think about hard books. The more you read and the more sophistication you begin to interleave in, the more ease you'll have with tackling more and more difficult books. And so where you want to end up here is this, a solid amount of reading every day, one out of three books hard. One little addendum I'll add to that is you should feel free to reduce the daily page count if you're reading a very hard book. So what matters there is the slow contemplation, not the raw pages at that point. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

• 8:09Speaker 01

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• 8:38Cal Newport?

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• 9:23Cal Newport?

  There's a reason why over 1 million businesses have trusted ShipStation. Now, you can try ShipStation free for 60 days with full access to all features, no credit card needed. Just go to shipstation.com and use code DEEP to get 60 days for free. 60 days gives you plenty of time to see exactly how much time and money you're saving on every shipment. That's shipstation.com code DEEP. Shipstation.com code DEEP. I also want to talk about our friends at Vanta. If you run a company, you've probably noticed recently that risk and regulation are both ramping up.

• 10:03Cal Newport?

  Customers now increasingly expect proof of your security before they'll even consider doing business with you. Now, this can take up a lot of your time unless you use Vanta. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. Now, here's a stat that caught my attention. Vanta customers report a 526% return on investment over three years. Here's another. Vanta boosts compliance team productivity by 129%. These are big time results. So whether you're prepping for SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, Vanta keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving.

• 10:49Cal Newport?

  Get started at vanta.com/deepquestions. That's vanta.com/deepquestions. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so that is component number one of five of our plan for cognitive fitness. Let's go to component number two.

• 11:09Cal Newport?

  Don't avoid writing. Now, here's something I've learned. Most people don't like writing. They avoid it if they can. And now that we've introduced generative AI tools that are capable of doing more and more of especially like the low stakes everyday writing for you, many people are writing less than ever before. What I'm suggesting here is that you consider rejecting this trend in your own life and seeking out as many opportunities to write as possible. Now, to be clear, I understand why people don't like writing. This is not a moral failure. It's actually a physiological reality, a rational response to a physiological reality.

• 11:52Cal Newport?

  I want to read a quote I wrote in a New Yorker piece I published a couple of years ago about what happens in the brain when you write. All right, so here's what I wrote. "Writing is hard. It requires us to use multiple parts of the brain in an improbable symphony of high strain effort. Our hippocampus summons relevant facts. The prefrontal cortex tries to organize them. A brain region known as Broca's area helps us narrate in a familiar inner voice. Our verbal memory stores and manipulates the narration as we transfer to the page. Meanwhile, our brain recruits our spatial working memory, which evolved to track our location in physical space to orient our words within a whole." Right, so this is why we feel resistance to writing. We basically have to orchestrate many, many regions of our brain to work together in a way that they weren't evolved to do.

• 12:37Cal Newport?

  It's hard and we feel strained. But here's the thing, that sense of strain or difficulty that you experience when you face the blank page serves a useful purpose from a perspective of cognitive fitness. If we think of reading as helping to rewire your brain in a way that makes it capable of smarter thoughts, then writing, we can think about, is an activity that actually then makes use of those capabilities. It makes your brain more capable. It takes those yoked together regions of your brain, reverses the flow and says, "Let's use this to produce original thoughts. We wired these to understand complicated thoughts. Now we can use them to produce original thoughts." So if we want to follow the fitness analogy we've been using here, reading is sort of

• 13:22Cal Newport?

  like building a cardiovascular base and getting your body used to activity. You know, I jog, I walk every day, I stretch, I'm no longer inactive. Writing is like the intense gym workout. You need that base to be able to go to the gym and do a hard workout without just ripping every muscle. But it's that hard workout that's actually going to then grow demonstrable strength. So writing creates more strain and resistance than reading. It's harder, but it gives us a lot of cognitive strength. And if you think about it that way, I think it makes more sense. Like you can walk and do steps and maybe even get in light runs every day. So you should be reading every day. Writing's like your gym workout. You want to, you want to seek out writing, but also recognize it's going to require more concentration. It's harder.

• 14:04Cal Newport?

  It's a harder thing, but we get the bigger gains from it. So I want you to change your mindset about writing. Instead of thinking of that strain of facing the blank page to write that group email and as an intolerable feeling, like I would do anything to get away from this. Instead, think of that strain you feel when facing the blank page like the burn of a muscle in the gym. And if you're working out, you learn to retrain your brain to say, oh, I like that feeling. That means I'm about to get stronger. Yeah, it's hard in the moment, but I'm going to feel good afterwards and I'm going to get stronger. That's how I want you to think about the strain of writing. Do not flee it. Do not say, Gen AI will do this and somehow this will make me more productive, as if

• 14:46Cal Newport?

  that's really the bottleneck to your value production is how quickly you write the occasional email. It's just you fleeing the strain. Don't, you want to get that muscle stronger. All right. So here's some practical tips. Your self-perception matters. So you say, hey, I'm someone who likes to write. Just keep telling yourself that. Make that part of your identity. When our group at work is like, hey, who wants to send this message to the client? You be the one who says, I can do it. I can write it. I like writing. I'm good at writing. I don't mind doing it. Two, study technique when you read. Hey, why was this article good? What's the art, what's the, what's the author doing here? Why is this flowing so well? Oh, look at this rhythm. Look at this switching back and forth between A and B. Look at this integration of quotes.

• 15:28Cal Newport?

  It's like quote, sentence, quote, explanation, callback. Begin looking for it, analyzing, understanding and appreciate the art of writing in your reading. What you're doing there is you're pulling out techniques that you can then utilize in your own writing. It's going to make your own writing feel better. Use journaling, or if you have a newsletter, or whatever it is, but have some way that you are writing regularly, but also doing it in a way that forces you to structure your thoughts. That's why I like journaling, or maybe if you're publishing a small newsletter. These activities force you to not just write words, but to use the writing to organize your thoughts, to take something that seems kind of clear in your head, and have that feedback loop of like, "How do I express this clearly on words?"

• 16:12Cal Newport?

  "Oh, it wasn't as clear as I thought in my head," and that feedback makes me clarify it, and then the writing helps me again, and you get much more complicated thoughts out of it. You have to practice structuring your thoughts with text. You need something that you're doing semi-regularly that does force you to do that. It really could even be, if you're reading interesting books, just taking notes in a Word file somewhere about the core ideas from each chapter as you read it. Even that internal exercise alone can help you make sense of thoughts, and add much more structure to the thoughts that are in your head. I also want you psychologically to acclimatize to the 10-minute rule. So, the hardest part about writing is the first 10 minutes. That's the part where you feel the peak intolerable seeming resistance, because again, remember

• 16:56Cal Newport?

  that symphony of brain regions I talked about earlier? You have to coordinate a lot of your brain together before you can effectively start producing words. That takes time. That could take 10 minutes. So, until all of those areas are successfully connected together and firing together, the writing's going to feel really bad, but then, once they are, it gets easier. So, if you're used to that, "Oh, the first 10 minutes are going to stink, and then it's going to feel better," it feels much more tolerable. Like, "I know how this movie plays out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is really hard, I'm writing nonsense, but it's going to get better." Once I get to the side of that 10 minutes. So, really, acclimatize yourself to that, and I think you're going to find writing to be less demanding. Alright, so we've got two components in my cognitive fitness routine.

• 17:40Cal Newport?

  Let's bring up the big board again. It's time for component number three. Here comes the big reveal.

• 17:49Cal Newport?

  Go on thinking walks. Alright, here's what I mean by that. Go on, Jesse's amused by my, my tape. I think it's dramatic Jesse, what do you think? I kinda like it. Oh, there we go. Alright, those who are listening don't know, you're missing, you're missing a real, I would say, and Jesse tell me if I'm, correct me if I'm wrong here, avatar caliber effects. We are deploying in this episode right now. Just that's what I want you to imagine is actually happening on the screen. Alright, let's keep going. What do I mean by a thinking walk? I want you to go for a walk several times a week. Do not bring your phone. If you have to have your phone, have it buried in a bag, put on the ringer and put a headphone in your ear. So if it rings, you'll hear it, you don't, so you're not checking it. It's actually going to be a pain to get it out.

• 18:31Cal Newport?

  On the walk, I want you to think about something important to you. It could be professional, it could be personal, it could be a problem you need to solve. It could be something you're working through, or maybe you're brain, brainstorming or daydreaming about something you're excited about, but a solitary target that you're turning your mind towards.

• 18:47Cal Newport?

  The key is to get practice on this walk of turning your intention inwards and making sense of some sort of information or yourself. That there's exterior distractions around and you're able to turn your intention internally. And actually operate in an internal world of abstract thoughts. Now, in an age of constant, algorithmically optimized diversion, we're sort of losing our comfort with this type of self-reflection. And I really think this is a problem from a cognitive, fitness standpoint. Self-reflection is where you make sense of your life. It's where you develop your sense of self. It's where your best ideas come from. And it's very cognitively demanding because again, we love to look at the tiger, we have a hard time turning inward. So it requires practice. And thinking walks are a great way to do it.

• 19:33Cal Newport?

  I really think we underestimate now what we're losing when we don't spend time with our own thoughts. There's a famous book, for example, it's published back in 1948. It was called The Seven Story Mountain. It's the autobiography of Thomas Merton, who goes from being a sort of a drift academic in New York to a Trappist monk down in Kentucky. If you read this book, and I reread it recently, I have a first edition of it, his transformation from this unhappy academic to a monk is all about self-reflection. He dramatizes throughout this memoir, his thoughts, his engagement with his thoughts, his dialogue with himself, it's all discernment, it's all exploration of what is going on

• 20:18Cal Newport?

  inside his own head. Like, let me read you a quote from the book. This is a key scene. When Merton gets this big feeling of inspiration from reading a Gerard Manly Hopkins poem, Hopkins is a sort of Jesuit poet and thinker, and he turns inward to try to make sense of this feeling and has a big revelation. Alright, so let me read from the book here. Suddenly, I couldn't bear it no longer, and got into my raincoat and started down the stairs to walk to the local Catholic parish. And then everything inside me began to sing, to sing with peace. Later, while walking the late-night streets after a particularly debaucherous night, a crystal-clear thought emerges. I'm going to be a priest.

• 21:01Cal Newport?

  Now, I'm adding there, there's a little bit of the quotes from the book, and some of that is my own summary of it. But basically, what I'm capturing here is there's these key scenes in the book where he's reacting to this strong feeling from a poem, goes walking, thinking about it, thinks about it the next night after a hard night of partying, introspecting, turning his attention inwards, and realizing, I think I need to be a priest. That's self-reflection, that's discernment. But it's not just about understanding yourself, it's also about cognitive fitness. If you can turn your mind inward and keep it on a target, not only does it make your own life better, it makes your brain stronger for almost any type of purpose. Alright, so here's some practical tips. These walks can be

• 21:42Cal Newport?

  short at first, maybe you do like one long one each week, like on the weekend, but otherwise, these can be like relatively short walks, I'm just going around the block, just get used to that rhythm. As I mentioned before, if you absolutely have to bring your phone, put it in a place where you can't do a quick check. Right? Because your short-term motivation system is always measuring the cost of various activities towards the benefit. So if the phone is in your pocket... It's saying, we could pick that up and look at it. That's very low friction to do, but we're almost certainly going to get a reward for doing that. The reward wins over the cost, let's do it. But if the phone is in the bottom of your bag, it's like actually the cost of having to stop and open the bag and go in and get it, that might outweigh the reward of what we see on like TikTok. So actually, I'm not going to generate a sense of motivation to do it.

• 22:27Cal Newport?

  So it's easier to avoid distraction if you make the distraction less available. I think the gold standards just don't have your phone, but if you do, make it less accessible. It could also help if at the end of these walks, you journal your insights. So it forces you through this exercise of like, let me try to structure and make clear in a physical artifact, what it was that I was wrestling with inside my mind. That's a feedback function that over time clarifies your internal thinking.

• 22:58Cal Newport?

  So you need to think about, um, what did I figure out on this walk? And when you write it down, you're like, oh, maybe that's not as clear as I thought. And that's going to actually help you get more cognitive fitness out of this actual exercise. All right, we're making good progress here. Let's go back up to the big board. It's time for our fourth item, the fourth component of my cognitive fitness routine. Plug in your phone. You may have heard me talk about this before, but I think it's absolutely vital. So I actually want to emphasize it. When you're at home, do not have your phone with you. Keep it plugged in. I suggest keeping it plugged in in the kitchen. You can put on the ringer. So if someone calls, you can go look for it.

• 23:42Cal Newport?

  You can go in there to check in on messages or to look things up. If you're waiting for someone to text you about something important and you worry about missing it, tell them, hey, my phone's in the other room, so call when you're ready and I'll hear the ring and then I'll know to come see what's going on. The key is to spend hours each day in your house without your phone there as a constant companion. Now, this might seem weird at first, like, why am I artificially not holding on to my phone? But actually, the weird thing is always having your phone with you.

• 24:11Cal Newport?

  I call this the constant companion model of phone usage and it's not intrinsic to the device. This is actually an idea I've been writing about for a while now, that the original idea for a smartphone was not to be something you have on you at all times. That actually evolved later, after the advent of the Apple App Store and the discovery by the social media companies, that if people keep their phone with them at all times, they could exponentially increase the amount of engagement they get. So the constant companion model of using your phone is not some deterministic inevitability of having a smartphone. It's a business model based on fracking your attention. So the weird thing is actually having the phone with you at all time, not keeping it plugged in while you're in your house. So this is one of the best ways to fight back against this.

• 24:56Cal Newport?

  Now, why does this matter? Because it gives you lots of practice doing things without that constant short-term motivation ping of pick up the phone, pick up the phone, pick up the phone. You don't realize the extent to which you're battling against your short-term motivation system with every single thing you do when the phone is with you. People report when they run this technique that it feels like a weight has been lifted off of their brain, or they've been given some sort of like highly potent synthetic Adderall. Because without that constant battle against your short-term motivation system, pick up your phone, you focused effortlessly. You get clarity you didn't have before. So think every show you watch, conversations at the table, reading a book, doing chores,

• 25:39Cal Newport?

  like doing all these things without that temptation to pick up the phone, completely changes your experience of what it can be like in the world and that makes your mind much stronger. This is a great way to build up cognitive fitness. So here's some practical tips about it. If you want to listen to a podcast like mine during chores, use AirPods. If your house is large enough that you're going to another floor and the AirPods can't reach to where your phone is, then you can bring the phone to whatever floor you're on and plug it in somewhere there, but don't put it on your person.

• 26:09Cal Newport?

  Train people who are used to texting you and getting rapid responses that you don't have the phone on your person when you're in your house. So if it's in the evening or the morning, they might have to call if they want to get your attention. And of course, the other advanced tip here is make the phone itself less desirable by taking off any app that makes money from your engagement, any social app, for example, take that off your phone. And this will give you a sort of diluted simulation of the phone plugged in effect when you're away from the house and the phone might be with you. The less interesting the phone is, the less strongly your short-term motivation system fights to try to get you to pick it up. And you get more training and practice, just keeping

• 26:52Cal Newport?

  your focus on whatever you happen to be doing. So it's a great way to pick up cognitive fitness. I sort of think of this as the like, stop smoking analogy. That's like the right analogy here. Spend a lot of time each day without your phone. It's like if you're trying to get stronger, yeah, I think you should stop smoking. That sort of background activity that over time is making everything else harder. That's how I think about this. All right, we're down to our fifth and final piece of my cognitive fitness components. Let's give the big reveal. Learn a hard skill. This is the final component of my plan. Master a skill that requires you to focus, to get better, but that also gives you clear

• 27:33Cal Newport?

  rewards. You get a clear signal that, oh, I am getting better. So I have to focus to get better, but then I get a clear reward when I do. I think athletic pursuits fall into this, golf, or tennis, or pickleball, or whatever it is. As you work harder on this skill, you get a clear reward of, oh, I'm getting better shots, or I'm scoring more points. I think musical pursuits are obvious as well. Oh, I can play this song that's hard and it's cool, and I couldn't play it before. I'm clearly getting better. Artistic crafts or pursuits, you can see the same thing. Oh, I'm better at knitting, and you can see it because the sweater is more impressive. So I think this is a great way to build up skills. Now, actually, last week, I had the author Brad Stolberg on the show to talk about how

• 28:17Cal Newport?

  building a disciplined practice can make you less distractible. Right? So for example, he uses weightlifting, powerlifting as a centering force for his own cognitive life. And so that's part of it, right? If you're learning a hard skill, it builds up a sense of discipline so you can resist distractions easier. But there's other cognitive fitness advantages here as well. One of the big ones, I think, is it helps train your long-term motivation system that when we focus on something hard, over time, we get really meaningful rewards. The more your long-term motivation system can get involved in the game, the more of these sort of hard-won, meaningful rewards that you introduce into your life, the more

• 28:59Cal Newport?

  primacy your long-term motivation system gets over the short-term system. The long-term system can swap it. Right? So the short-term system is pick up your phone, pick up your phone. You know what can squash that? The long-term system can come in and say, no, we're going to keep practicing the guitar because I have learned the rewards of mastering these songs are great. And it's much bigger than the reward of seeing something interesting on TikTok. So I can just turn down the volume on that short-term motivation system and you're much easily able to keep your attention focused. So the more experiences you give your long-term motivation system of successfully reaping long-term rewards, the more you have the ability to modulate the influence of the short-term system.

• 29:41Cal Newport?

  And in other scenarios as well, that short-term system no longer is going to have as much of a bite. The other cognitive fitness advantage of learning a hard skill is just practice focusing. You know, it's hard to say, let me just sit down and focus just to practice it. But if I have a reason to do it, I'm trying to learn this chord and then I learn it and then it sounds better. It's easier to sustain your concentration. But that is just practice, again, with aiming your mind's eye, which a lot of cognitive fitness comes back to this facility with blocking out noise, modulating your short-term motivation system, sustaining focus on a target of your choice. This is an excellent way to practice that on a regular basis. So we get the three benefits of this one. What we talked about with Brad, in general, you're just more disciplined, makes you easier

• 30:26Cal Newport?

  able to resist distractions or diversions. Two, it specifically rewires your long-term motivation system to help you with that. And three, it's a great way to practice sustaining focus on a complicated target for a longer piece of time. Some practical tips here, this needs to be something that you do on a regular schedule, not just when you feel like it. It should be a more disciplined pursuit. It needs some sort of skilled component that improves with deliberate practice, but then gives you clear indications that you're getting better. That's what's going to help your long-term motivation system learn. There's some sort of coaching you can do here. It helps. Any sort of feedback or coaching from another person can really help you stick with it. All right, so there you have it.

• 31:07Cal Newport?

  I gave you five components for improving your cognitive fitness. This is like a standard exercise routine before your brain. Read every day. Don't avoid writing. Go on thinking walks. Plug in your phone and learn a hard skill. This is like the cognitive equivalent of having a reasonable health and fitness routine just to stay in reasonable shape. You don't have to do these five, but you really should be thinking about your cognitive fitness like your physical fitness and health and say, well, here is what I do. Here are my rules. Here are my regular activities. And maybe you customize this to yourself, but what I would like you to avoid is having none, to not be thinking about that at all.

• 31:49Cal Newport?

  Because we live in an environment now with so many, so much digital junk food, so much incentives, digital incentives for mental inactivity, that if you're not thinking about it, you're going to end up the cognitive equivalent of being really out of shape and unhealthy. All right, so if you want to go deeper into these ideas, definitely read that New York Times piece. It'll kind of lay out the whole philosophy there. My book, Deep Work, which came out 10 years ago, lays the foundation for a lot of those ideas as well. So check that out. But there you go. Get your brain smarter.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  So when you incorporate the reading 30 to 50 pages, that can all be books, New York articles, magazines as well.

• 32:30Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I think that's fine. Yeah, I think, I think articles are fine. Make it physical or Kindle, you know, not 50-page equivalent of tweets. Like, well, you know, hey, I scrolled Twitter for three hours. And if I really add up all those words, that's like 50 pages. Because what you want is that sustained concentration of following the structure of the thoughts and getting lost in a particular piece without changing your cognitive context. Yeah, I think articles are, articles are just as good. Books, you read on a Kindle if you want, that's physical. It just uses electricity to change the physical configuration. So there you go. This is all an excuse. You just like the fifth one because it's an excuse to play golf. Like, I'm just working on my cognitive fitness.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  I was thinking about that. Effective feedback. Your handicap goes up. Is that effective feedback? I don't know.

• 33:15Cal Newport?

  It's feedback. That's for sure. Okay, before we move on to our second segment, I want to take a quick break to hear from some more of our sponsors.

• 33:25Speaker 01

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• 33:54Cal Newport?

  We talk a fair amount on this show about AI. And longtime listeners know that the AI future I'm most excited about is one in which you use this technology to build custom tools or workflows aimed at specific efforts, automating the shallows so that you can focus on the deep. Well, this is exactly the approach offered by Zapier. With Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to any workflow so that you can do more of what matters. Whether we're talking about an autonomous agent, or a customer chatbot, or something else, you can orchestrate it with Zapier. Here's an example I thought was really cool. Let's say you're tasked with summarizing customer feedback that gets stored in a spreadsheet.

• 34:38Cal Newport?

  With just a few clicks, you could set up a mini AI agent in Zapier that at a set time each week can automatically gather that data from the spreadsheet, summarize it.

• 34:49Cal Newport?

  Put in an email, send it to the people that need to see it. Zapier is for everyone, tech expert or not. This is why teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. So join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com/deep. That's Z A P I E R dot com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Caldura Lab. Hey men, you need to start taking better care of your skin. The best way to do this? With Caldura Lab. Caldura Lab makes high-performance skincare designed specifically for men's skin. Men's skin is 25% thicker, oilier, and ages differently from women's, which means men

• 35:34Cal Newport?

  need to need clean formulas engineered for their specific biology. Caldura Lab's three-step regimen is powered by clean, clinically-tested ingredients and breakthrough patent-pending technology that delivers visible results. All right, so here's how it works with Caldura Lab. Step one is to use their cleanser clear, which will, their cleanser, which will clear dirt, oil, sweat, and buildup. Step two, you use their serum, which is clinically proven to reduce wrinkles, firm skin, and improve elasticity. And look, if you're a tired old man like me, it helps reduce the puffiness under your eyes, which is, trust me, something you want to try to do. Step three, you use their moisturizer when you're done, which is lightweight and non-greasy,

• 36:18Cal Newport?

  and helps your skin stay healthy. I really hadn't done much with my skin until I got these three products from Caldura Lab. I didn't realize how much I was missing. This is a small habit that produces big results. So go to calderalab.com/deep and use the code DEEP for 20% off your first order. All right, let's get back into it.

• 36:41Cal Newport?

  All right. Well, you've heard enough from me. Now it's time to hear from you. As is our tradition, at the end of the Monday advice episodes, I like to open my inbox and see what you, my audience, has to say. So if you have a question, a reaction, or something interesting to share, you can send it over to [email protected]. All right, Jesse, what's our first message we have today?

• 37:01Speaker 02

  The first message is from a former social media influencer.

• 37:05Cal Newport?

  Oh, interesting. All right. So I'll just call this anonymous because I don't know if they knew if I was going to read this or not. During my time in school, I accidentally became an influencer of sorts, which sounds weird, I know, on Instagram and TikTok in the nutrition space. I gained followers, had millions of views, went viral, etc. At first, I was over the moon, but I quickly felt the mental impact of being chronically online. I walked away from the slot machine and stopped posting on the platforms in 2024. My experience with social media and the decrease in my mental health, productivity, original thought, individuality, happiness, etc. really shook me. It's become a topic I'm extremely passionate about. I share my journey on my blog and plan to start a community group here for those looking to

• 37:50Cal Newport?

  leave these addictive platforms. It's definitely isolating being a 25-year-old who's not on social media, but reading your book was a nice reminder of why I chose this path and how I know I'll be happier for it. Thank you again for standing on your beliefs and being a guiding voice in this space. I also find it extremely admirable that you're not on these platforms. You walk the walk.

• 38:09Cal Newport?

  Well, that's great to hear, right? That when this person left their influencer role, they're like, oh, my God, everything is so much clearer. I'm actually happier. I didn't realize how much this is weighing on me. One thing that captured my attention is that she said it's isolating being 25 and not on these platforms. I'm interested in that. I think that is becoming less true as these platforms over the last three years have, to their doom, followed the TikTok model of breaking away from following people, following friends, choosing who you're trying to get content from, and have instead moved to a model of just, we're going to algorithmically show you random short-form stuff that'll press your internal buttons. The more these become just abstracted, slop entertainment, the smaller

• 38:53Cal Newport?

  the impact becomes on, oh, I don't use these anymore. Because there's no one to notice it. There's no one that you're talking to on there. There's no one who's following you on there. So no one knows that if you're on there or not, with the exception of like some memes you may or may not know. So hopefully that is, that's becoming easier. All right. What else do we got, Jesse?

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Our next message is from a writer reacting to your interview with Amy Timberlake.

• 39:16Cal Newport?

  Okay, interesting here. Alright, so this is from Anjali Banner G who knows Amy Timberlake. So, we interviewed the acclaimed children's book author Amy Timberlake, I think, two weeks ago. Because we were interested in the idea that she uses a typewriter, which is a slower piece of technology than a computer and has fewer features, but makes her a better writer. And we use this as a metaphor about slowing down can actually produce more and technology doesn't always understand that. It's always about just speeding up. So, Anjali Banner G wrote and said, "I wrote stories as a child on a typewriter, but switched to the Mac when it first came out and used computers thereafter. But then about seven years ago, I decided that screens notifications were too distracting.

• 40:01Cal Newport?

  So I went to my local typewriter shop about an electric typewriter, but I had to keep programming the margins. So I took it back and bought my first completely manual typewriter, a Hermes Rocket Circuit 1956. From there, I caught typewriter fever and now own over 100 manual machines." That would be me, Jesse. If I start getting typewriters, this whole office will be full of typewriters. Everywhere. "I'm curating my collection focusing on keeping typewriters with typefaces that can be easily scanned into Word using OCR apps or unusual models with unusual typefaces. I wrote much of the first draft of my 14th novel on a typewriter and I posted an image of the typewritten draft of the first paragraphs versus the final version on my blog." Oh, we should look at that. Let's bring this up here, Jesse. This is the blog post.

• 40:46Cal Newport?

  So, Anjali Banner G publishes under the name AG Banner, and I'm putting this on the screen here. Okay, there you go. So, look at that, old fashioned typewriting. And then, this is actually an interesting article. And she talks about what her final published opening was versus this. So she cut most of this. But she wrote about how this is how she got out all the relevant thoughts and then she realized what's actually core here and then she cut a lot to get to the final version of it. But the essay helped her, the typewriter helped her work out, helped her work out those views. So I think that's, I think that's pretty cool. And again, the idea here that this comes back to, it's all about bottlenecks. In fact, I think we might get into this in more detail in an upcoming episode.

• 41:32Cal Newport?

  But it's this idea that there's a lot of steps involved in doing creative or cognitive work. And a lot of the tools we come up with, the digital tools that are supposed to make us more productive, speed up parts of that process. But it's like an assembly line, and what really matters is the bottleneck pieces, right? So if you do the other steps faster, it's just going to pile up work at the bottlenecks. You're still not going to get more actual results out. And often, the bottlenecks in cognitive or creative work are not sped up by just having better tools. And in fact, sometimes they require that you step away from tools to be able to actually improve your output there. And I think typewriting is a big piece of this. Like, the bottleneck for book writing is often producing really good words.

• 42:17Cal Newport?

  And improving that bottleneck is often not about some tool that makes you go faster, but actually being able to spend more time in a cognitive state where you're more likely to come up with the good things. And so you can have as many AI sped-up research database tools as you want, but if that bottleneck stays small, you're still not going to be producing books much faster. So I think that's cool. Also, I didn't realize this, Jesse. It's a good idea that what people do who write on typewriters is they scan it. That was new. So she was saying she finds typewriters that have fonts that can be easily scanned into, like, Word with an optical character recognition program. So you do it, you type, and then at some point, you scan those in a computer, and now you're editing on the computer. I kind of like that workflow.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Just some insider baseball for the audience. It is incredible, like, how fast you type.

• 43:02Cal Newport?

  Did I type?

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was, I was thinking if there was typewriters all around here, it'd be kind of loud.

• 43:09Cal Newport?

  It would be loud. I do have a loud keyboard, which I want to say Jesse refuses to use.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  I like the other one.

• 43:14Cal Newport?

  Oh, the other one's so much worse.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  You don't like the other one?

• 43:17Cal Newport?

  I, that's, okay, so, audience, I have a beautiful mechanical typewriter that lets me type at an incredibly fast speed, very good, springed up, it's loud, but it's a very good mechanical typewriter. And Jesse insists on using the Apple Magic, where it's like the little flat keys on the rubber gaskets.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  It's like soft, I don't know, I kind of like it.

• 43:34Cal Newport?

  It's hard to go fast, so the mechanical one, the finger springs back up, so you can get back into action a little bit quicker.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  I think that's, you type a lot faster than I do.

• 43:42Cal Newport?

  Well. We are going to start recording this podcast on wax cylinders and then we can later like remaster them. See, I'm going to embrace this and then we can later remaster them in the digital, but that way we'll, we'll focus more.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  The other insider baseball is like you not only type fast, but you keep on typing, like you don't stop typing.

• 44:01Cal Newport?

  I've been writing for a long time.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  So you just like go.

• 44:04Cal Newport?

  I do go. I write, I write a lot and I write fast.

• 44:09Cal Newport?

  Without AI. All right. Do we have any more? We have one more message, right?

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do. All right. Our final message is a case study of someone putting your advice into practice.

• 44:16Cal Newport?

  All right. Let's see what we got here. This comes from Solomon. Solomon says, I run a textile company in Pakistan. I employ about 200 people and it's growing fast. I came across your podcast and then picked up deep work a couple of months ago. I want to share what happened because I think you'd find it interesting. I deleted Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter from my phone, not my accounts, just the apps. If I need them, I can log in on a computer and that's it. That was the whole intervention. The first few days were rough. I didn't realize how deep the habit was until there was nothing to scroll. I literally asked my wife if I could use her Instagram. Her feed was built for her though, and I quit after two minutes. A week later, I forgot those apps even existed. My phone usage dropped from 6.5 hours a day to 3.5. That's 90 hours a month. I

• 44:58Cal Newport?

  was just handing over two feeds, but the numbers aren't even the main thing. I started sleeping better, started working out again, and this is the one that hit me hardest. I'm actually present with my six-year-old daughter now. More drawing, building and playing in the last month than the previous four. I didn't need a vacation to be a good dad. I just needed to put down the phone. I wrote about this experience on LinkedIn and it kind of blew up. People messaging me saying they're deleting their apps, others saying they've been struggling with the same thing for years. Wasn't trying to preach or anything, just shared what happened honestly. Your work was the push that started all of it. I'm now doing deep work sessions from more, most mornings, 60 to 90 minutes, no distractions, still figuring out how best to use them as a CEO. Turns out removing noise doesn't automatically give you clarity. That's a different problem,

• 45:44Cal Newport?

  but even the early sessions have produced some of the best thinking I've done in years. All right. I love that story. I mean, look. If you take the benefits that you get from stopping using social media on your phone, and you just listed them abstractly, people would pay huge money for those benefits. If you said, "I have a productivity tool that is going to gain you back 90 extra hours, it's going to significantly increase the time with your kids, your ability to work out, you're going to feel better, you're going to produce better thoughts." If I had said I had an app that did that, or a pill that did that, this would be the Ozempic of intellectual activity. Everyone would be all over it. But it exists. Just stop using social media on your phone. Just these huge benefits are just sitting there. It's like

• 46:29Cal Newport?

  people in physical fitness are like exercise. If you could put the benefits of semi-regular, moderate exercise into a pill, it would be a blockbuster. Well, it's the same thing. The benefits of not using social media on your phone, especially as a grown-up with kids, are immense. Sometimes you just need a push. You've just got to stop it. Just like I said in that New York Times piece, stop with the moderation, stop with the, "Well, I just use this in this case, and I have these apps to control this or that." It's digital ultra-processed food. It's digital Doritos. It's digital Oreos. You're a grown-up. Don't eat Oreos. Don't eat Doritos, right? We just need to move on from algorithmically curated, short-form content. It adds no value to your life, and you get massive value if

• 47:11Cal Newport?

  you stop using it. So I think that's a great example of what can be gained. So thank you, Solomon, for sending that in. All right. Like we like to do, I want to end our Monday episode by quickly bringing you up to speed with what I'm up to. So I read the other day, the book I read last week was The Noonday Devil. This was recommended by one of our listeners. It's written by Jean-Charles Nault in French, and forgive me, but I didn't write down the translator's name. So this is, it's the, he's a Benedictine monastic, I believe. So it's a religious book as published by the Ignatius Jesuit Press. But it's interesting. This is why the listener suggested it to me because he thought there'd be some overlap with what we've been talking

• 47:55Cal Newport?

  about here with the deep life. It's about the Greek term acedia, A-C-E-D-E-I-A, which you can translate as like spiritual sloth. And it was this really big issue for the early monks, right? This is something that the desert fathers, the original monastics in the Near East deserts of the early common era, they struggled with in their sort of desert monastic cells. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote a lot about this in the medieval period. And then it sort of fell off the radar. And this book is bringing it back. It said, we should bring this term back because it's really useful. And I did find some interesting, I mean, anytime we have people writing about one of these mental states or productivity issues for 2,000 years, I'm interested. I was like, ooh, I like these older takes. And there's a couple of interesting things I'll mention real quick I learned from this

• 48:39Cal Newport?

  book. So this idea of spiritual sloth or acedia, part of the definition is a certain lack of activity, right? So part of it is you could just not do stuff. You just stop doing stuff. And they, they captured that as a problem. But what was interesting is they said the other way that acedia can show up is essentially busyness for the sake of busyness. Now, the term that the French author uses is confusingly translated as activism, because obviously activism has a clear meaning in English of like you are, you are advocating for a cause. But they actually, the author means activism differently here as like pseudo productivity. Busyness for the sake of busyness, being active for the sake of being active

• 49:23Cal Newport?

  without an actual meaningful goal to it. So I thought that was interesting. They're like spiritual sloth, this sort of sense of despair could either lead to, I just stopped doing things, or I'm just doing nonsense all the time to distract myself. And the real cure is meaningful activity aimed at meaningful goals. So that was interesting book. I mean, these are like religious academic books are not necessarily like the most fun reads, but I got a lot of good information out of it. And otherwise, the main thing else that's going on in my life is I'm still trying to figure out, I have summer coming up. I'll keep you posted, but I always have my summer schedule. That is how I run my weeks during the summer when I don't have class responsibilities at Georgetown. And I am thinking about a shift

• 50:05Cal Newport?

  this year, Jesse. My, my traditional summer schedule has been, uh, deep work every morning till late morning or lunch. And then I would do Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in the afternoon is when I would do other things like podcast recording or meetings or calls, keeping Monday and Fridays open of calendar things, professional calendar things. So I can just like have long days thinking and reading or even just recharge. I'm thinking about switching it to, uh, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday as the days with my active afternoons. And then Thursday, Friday leading to the weekend being the days where I don't schedule things on the calendar. And I think that's going to match better our podcasting schedule.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  You're still gonna deep work in the morning, right?

• 50:49Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Uh, deep work every morning. Yeah. That's, that's the gimmick. So anyways,

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Like if you stop doing deep work, like nobody's gonna listen to the show anymore.

• 50:55Cal Newport?

  Well, you know, it all falls apart. Which is like, yeah. Which by the way, it's like all the pressure of the internet is

• 51:01Speaker 02

  You better keep on doing deep work.

• 51:02Cal Newport?

  It was, I mean, all the pressure of the internet is like, hey, just work on the stuff you do afterwards. But if you don't have anything to talk about, what's the point? Then you just get like obsessive about, I don't know, your thumbnails or something. But like, you still actually have to have something to, to talk about.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  You gotta do deep work with Huberman. He said he wanted to do it with you.

• 51:18Cal Newport?

  Um, yes. Yeah. Yeah, we could do it together.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  He said he wanted to do it.

• 51:23Cal Newport?

  All right. Me and Huberman do some deep work, do some deep work together. Um, as long as you don't go in the gym. He's a strong individual. Strong individual. Man, they're out there.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. He like set some record on that one, uh, Cameron Hayes podcast. Cause like whenever they come on his podcast, he puts them through this gauntlet of exercises and he like carried the boulder up the mountain or something and didn't take any breaks.

• 51:46Cal Newport?

  I'm not going on Cam Haynes's, I'm not going on Cam Haynes's podcast. That's like the worst way to get people out of your show. Like, hey, come on my podcast. I have a pretty good audience. Um, you're going to have to carry a boulder up a mountain.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And run 10 miles and then lift.

• 52:01Cal Newport?

  Uh, my, my equivalent's going to be like, all right, I'm going to make you spend an hour reading in translation, a book on Asidia. That's my equivalent of pushing the boulder up the mountain. Or we'll do a typing speed challenge.

• 52:14Cal Newport?

  Might be, might be strong. But what's your, what's your WPM? What's your words for a minute? All right. That's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. Uh, we got an AI reality check themed episode coming on Thursday and then another advice episode Monday to follow. So we will see you soon and until, until then, as always, stay deep.