Ep. 347: The Forgotten Phone Harms

Phones have been receiving a lot of criticism recently, but what if these concerns are missing the mark? In this episode, Cal introduces the difference between primary and secondary phone harms, and argues how our obsession with the former hides the importance of the latter. He then answers reader questions and reviews the books he read in March 2025. Find out more about Done Daily at DoneDaily.com! Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: The Forgotten Phone Harms [3:32] - What do you do when your writing doesn’t quite feel right? [24:32] - How should I prioritize responding to different types of communication? [33:29] - Should personal and work tasks be split into different Trello boards? [39:10] - What is the difference between a two-status board and a reverse task list? [41:47] CASE STUDY: A student adopts the Tao of Cal [45:17] CALL: Structuring weekly templates [49:00] MARCH BOOKS: The 5 books Cal read in March 2025 [57:24] - Believe (Ross Douhut) - How to Winter (Kari Leibowitz) - Letter and the Scroll (Jonathan Sacks) - I and Thou (Martin Buber) - Coming into the Country (John McPhee) Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? Thanks to our Sponsors: This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/deepquestions and get on your way to being your best self. shopify.com/deep indeed.com/deep mybodytutor.com Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:11Cal Newport?

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

• 0:23Cal Newport?

  I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

• 0:29Cal Newport?

  Jesse, we got a good show. I want to give a caveat or maybe reassurance to the audience. The, the deep dive is going to start on a baseball related topic.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, baby.

• 0:41Cal Newport?

  Again, it is baseball season, but you will see it quickly will generalize into a topic about all of us. So it won't actually be a baseball themed deep dive, but I had to throw in a little Easter egg there for baseball fans. So we got some good questions. It's our first episode of April, so in the final segment, we'll take a break for my increasingly pandemic AI themed tech corners, which I've been enjoying, to talk about the books I read in March. So it should be a good change of space. Before we get there, have you, I don't know if you've seen this, Jesse, people I know who barely use Twitter or X, whatever we call it, keep saying, hey, I've seen, I'm seeing you on there. I'm seeing you on there. Right? And, and so I looked into it and there's one of these Twitter threads that people do.

• 1:27Cal Newport?

  You know how there's, you see all the time on Twitter, these threads where it's like lots of information. And then at the end, it's like, if you like what you read here, like sign up for my whatever, whatever. Yeah. I'm like, okay, everyone must be taking the same online course about social media marketing. But I never really understood the point of this. And then I discovered what everyone was seeing is there's one of these threads about my work. And it's been viewed 3.6 million times.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  How did you do the research to find out where it was?

• 1:57Cal Newport?

  People, some people just sent it to me. Like they're asking me, they're quoting me things from this thread. So I've read it. Some of it's accurate, some of it's not. So it opens by saying, I mean, it has the heroic shot of me from the. Financial Times Magazine cover where I'm like looking up heroically into the sky.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, she was cool. I remember she was following you around at your book event.

• 2:17Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So that photographer, we took that picture in the parking lot behind HQ, by the way, because that was the only place with good clear sky.

• 2:25Cal Newport?

  It starts by saying he deleted almost every app from his phone. Then he wrote four bestsellers in nine years. Well, I didn't really delete apps for my phone. I just never had them.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  I never had them.

• 2:33Cal Newport?

  But then it's like a pretty good summary of like some research I wrote about some research I don't. And then I noticed at some point, I was just looking at this before we went on the air here. He, there's this really specific mention where he's like, yeah, and he says, like, you know, you could use apps such as, I won't use the name of the app, to help you fight distractions. It's like, I've never heard of that before. And then you get to the bottom of the thread and you're like, oh, this is someone from that company. And so like at the end, it's like, oh, you should download this like screen control app or something like that.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  So if like 3% of the people download the app, it's like a success.

• 3:05Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Which actually 3% out of 3 million is pretty good.

• 3:08Cal Newport?

  It's pretty good. So I get, so I guess that's why people do these like threads with like a call to action at the end. It's like they mainly don't work, but every once in a while, something like catches a slipstream because people kept saying like, hey, you deleted all your apps or whatever. So I guess it got on people's screens. So there you go. Twitter slash X in progress. All right. We got a good show. I figure we should get started with our deep dive.

• 3:32Cal Newport?

  The baseball season has just begun. And in honor of that, I want to talk about a new policy the Los Angeles Angels baseball team has put in place involving smartphones in their clubhouse. But as I will show, this specific rule is going to highlight a much more general issue that I think is afflicting our current discourse surrounding phones. It's an issue that I think is a problem and that we need to fix. Let's start specific with this baseball case study. I'm going to play a clip here. This clip is from Chris Russo, the Mad Dogs radio show. What do they call the show, Jesse? It's Mad Dog?

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Mad Dog Unleashed.

• 4:09Cal Newport?

  Mad Dog Unleashed on Sirius.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Sirius XM Radio.

• 4:13Cal Newport?

  Sports radio show. This clip is from Mad Dog interviewing Ron Washington, the manager of the Los Angeles Angels. So let's start this clip and I'm going to pause it to make a comment.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  He's got that purse. Hey, how about this deal that you come up with? Everybody seems to think it's worked beautifully. $500 phone with cell phones in the clubhouse. Something different? Little strictness there? Nothing wrong with it? Give me the idea about that. Go ahead. Start there.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  The, the, the, the, the price on the phone, uh, I threw that out there. I don't know what those guys are charging if you get caught in the clubhouse.

• 4:47Cal Newport?

  Stop it there. Alright, so what, uh, Mad Dog was saying there, he misspoke a little bit, but he was saying there's a $500 fine if you're seen using your phone in the clubhouse. What I heard is he empowered, uh, Mike Trout and another one of the veteran players to actually enforce it within the clubhouse. And then Ron Washington was like, well, I don't know if it's $500 that like the players are figuring out the fine, but you can't use a phone anymore in the clubhouse of the, the Los Angeles Angels. By the way, maybe I should talk more like Mad Dog on the show. You think we do his numbers? I, I don't listen to a lot of Mad Dog, but wow, he's got a style for sure.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Oh my God, he's got a great style and his numbers gone up drastically after he's been on first take with Stephen A. Smith for like the last three years.

• 5:28Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So, okay. Lesson learned. I'm just writing down some notes here. Talk like Mad Dog. Do show with Stephen A. Smith. So Jesse, you work on that last one and I'll work on the Mad Dog. Simple. I don't, I don't know why more people don't have massive shows. Alright, so if we stop here and we say, okay, why do you think the Los Angeles Angels put that policy in the place? I think a common answer for people who don't, aren't following this particular baseball story or don't know baseball well, might say, uh, oh, it's distraction. Baseball is a game of focus. Baseball is a game of, of, of disciplined attention and they don't want their players distracted by lots of stuff happening on, on the phone.

• 6:10Cal Newport?

  And so they're saying, let's get the phones out of the clubhouse. It turns out, however, if we listen to a little bit more of this clip, there's another issue that's also at play. So we'll hear this unfold. Jesse, let's hear a little more.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  On the phone, um, for me, it's no big deal, you know, it's not like I dropped a law. I talked to players before this happened and they was in agreement with it. I don't know how it got out there because I certainly didn't put it out there. Um, but, uh, hey, it's the Angels clubhouse and what we do inside our clubhouse is our business. And I'm just sorry it got out there.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  All right, but by the same token, Ron, I think it's a good idea. Everybody seems to think that it's, uh, resulted in some good team bonding instead of people. And I have kids and they're in their twenties and you all know they look at their phone all day. How about reading a book once in a while drives you crazy. There's no communication. This now creates a little something, uh, you know, in your clubhouse on a day and day basis. Think it's a good idea. How about that? Go ahead.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  I'll tell you, I think it's a good idea and it has allowed us to communicate with each other a little better.

• 7:13Cal Newport?

  All right, so there we go. So the real answer, and this is elaborated if you read the, uh, article coverage on this issue. The real answer was not that the phone was directly harming the players, distracting them from the baseball game. Because as it turns out, actually, baseball is one of the most focused professional sports activity there is out there because the games are very long and you, there is no technology, you know, in the clubhouse. You're, you're only allowed to have specifically prescribed technologies. You can have these iPads that have clips of opposing batters and pitchers on them. And they use an old fashioned phone to call the bullpen. No technology in these long games. You don't have technology in the dugout when you're practicing for the most part. So baseball players already spend so much of their time just focused watching a game, playing the game,

• 7:57Cal Newport?

  focusing on, you know, exactly what they're doing in the field. Focus was not the issue. It was community building. So they were worried that the players were on the phones in the clubhouse. They didn't care what they were doing on the phones, but they cared about the impact on building a sense of community within the Angels clubhouse. They were on their phone instead of talking to each other. And they're not talking to each other. You don't get that sense of community, which can be really, uh, important for a baseball team to go here. So what we hear, get in this story is an important distinction about phones that we too often miss in these conversations, which is there is a difference between primary harms and secondary harms.

• 8:37Cal Newport?

  So primary harms are when the things that you are doing on a phone directly harm you in some way. So when we think about our concerns about phones right now, these tend to be the things that come up first, right? So this involves, for example, algorithmically curated content that could outrage or even radicalize people. The mental health issues that teenagers have as they get lost down different rabbit holes on Instagram. The brain rot, a phrase we hear more and more. The brain rot that's caused from excessive use of highly distracting tools like TikTok. Or for people who are older and in the workplace, the distraction, so the constant checking

• 9:20Cal Newport?

  back in and out of your phone puts you into this state where you're constantly switching your cognitive context back and forth. You never give yourself a chance to settle into a singular context, so you're operating in a persistent state of reduced cognitive capacity. These are all direct examples of direct harms caused by phones. But these are not the only issues we deal with when it comes to our phones, just like we saw in the baseball example. So what I want to do here is actually take a passage from my book, Digital Minimalism. I'll hold this up here for people who are watching instead of just listening. This book came out in 2019, but I started working on it as early as 2017, and I want to go back to a key observation I made in this book.

• 10:00Cal Newport?

  So it's going to be a little bit of a time travel trip back to this like 2017, 2018 era. So at the time, I had just published Deep Work. That came out in 2016. So I'd really been thinking a lot about technology in the workplace, distraction, email, knowledge work. I had started work on a follow-up to Deep Work, which eventually became A World Without Email. But I kept hearing from people, when I was doing press about Deep Work, "I wanted to talk about distraction in the office that was being caused by what was happening on your computer," and people kept bringing up their phones.

• 10:32Cal Newport?

  And so I had this shift of attention around this 2017, 18 period where I began looking into people's relationships with their phones, coming at this issue fresh. I want to read you from Digital Minimalism about what I was seeing at that time. All right, I'm reading now. "The source of our unease is not evidenced in these thin sliced case studies, but instead becomes visible only when we confront the thicker reality of how these technologies as a whole have managed to expand beyond the minor roles for which we initially adopted them. Increasingly, they dictate how we behave and how we feel and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable. What's making us uncomfortable, in other words, is this feeling of losing control,

• 11:15Cal Newport?

  a feeling that instantiates itself in a dozen different ways each day, such as when we tune out with our phone during our child's bath time, or lose our ability to enjoy a nice moment without a frantic urge to document it for a virtual audience. It's not about usefulness, it's about autonomy." So that's what I was seeing back then, when the people first began to become uncomfortable with their phones at a large scale. The issue was not what they were seeing on their phone. The issue was not specifically what Instagram was doing to them, or what something like TikTok, which didn't exist back then, was doing to their brain, or the political valence of the content. It was them losing autonomy about how they wanted to spend their time. When they spent more time on the phone, other stuff was getting neglected, but these choices

• 11:58Cal Newport?

  were not choices they were making with intention. Stuff they cared about more wasn't happening. And more and more time was going to these phone-based activities that they had less value on. So there's this sense of losing control. Those are secondary harms. It's what you lose when the phone takes over more of your time and attention. These are two different things, right? So in the baseball clubhouse, secondary harms is what we care about. When you're on your phone, I don't care if what you're doing on your phone is great. You're looking up statistics for the picture you're going to face. You're not communicating with your teammates and you're losing that connection. In our life outside of the clubhouse, right? Secondary harms are really piling up.

• 12:38Cal Newport?

  What are we losing when more and more of our time is being dedicated to the highly salient apps that are on our phones? So what has caught my attention is that the way this conversation has unfolded since 2017, when I started working on this book, has been way more towards primary harms. When I was first working on digital minimalism, you were only first starting to get a general acknowledgement in public circles or journalistic circles that phones could be a problem. So the book was sort of at the beginning of that becoming a big movement. Once there was a mainstream movement of concern through phones, almost all of the attention turned towards primary harms.

• 13:23Cal Newport?

  Now, the thing is, primary harms are important. These are important. We should care about those things I listed before, and we do need to talk about them. They are not only important, I think they probably are worse than they were when I was writing Digital Minimalism. The sort of direct harms of phones has gotten worse. But when we put all of our attention on primary harms when it comes to phones, this helps us avoid confronting some of the real danger that they pose for our lives. Right? It allows us to say, "Look, if we could just fix these tools, we'd be okay. If we could just get the right people to be in charge of these companies, or the right

• 14:06Cal Newport?

  features, or the right moderation, we could return to this sort of phone, social media, app utopia that we were promised in the early 2010s." The problem is, someone came in and broke these things, but if we could just fix them, then everything will be okay.

• 14:23Cal Newport?

  It sort of feels sometimes like the alcoholic who's saying, if we could only just reduce the alcohol content of the beer or whatever, then I'll be okay. And not confronting the issue of the drinking in the first place. I think this was in part due to the primary harms getting worse, but in part due to the entrance of mainstream journalistic analysis of these issues. I mean, I have this theory that when you, when you had sort of mainstream tech journalists enter into this picture, they were coming out of a context where a lot of these tools, especially social tools, were key to their career. And not only were they key to their career, but they were being told by their employers, this is key to your career. I write about in Deep Work 2016 about how at that time, the New York Times had just

• 15:08Cal Newport?

  come out and said, we want all of our reporters to be using Twitter. And I write about how that was a mistake, right? But this was in this period, of course, these things must be important. Like where, if you're a journalist, I use these all the time. So when you turned your skepticism towards these phones, it was not towards secondary harms, it was towards, well, who's running these companies? Are they doing it wrong? We have our own, there's a, there's a way this should operate. There is like some nostalgic period of time, like Twitter in 2016, that like captures exactly what this should have been, and then got corrupted, but we'll find, we'll, we'll recover it, we'll redeem it, we'll redeem the technology. So I think the people writing about it were coming from a perspective like, of course, we need these tools. Also, it's better copy to have an enemy.

• 15:52Cal Newport?

  This person broke this. These people are doing, you know, if we could just, they're an enemy, if we could just fix this, like that's more exciting copy. But all along, those issues I first pointed out, digital minimalism had been rolling along. It's the secondary harms that really, I think, impoverish our lives, just like it made the Los Angeles Angels less connected to be looking at their phone in the clubhouse. Think about all the other things in our lives that we're missing because of the phone. And then what are we left with? We're left with a little bit of a shallowness, a little bit of an anxiety, a little bit of a loneliness and emptiness. And all we have to soothe ourselves is that phone itself. And then we get this cycle where we become basically enmeshed into this digital, algorithmically curated world, and that's really no way to live. So I think what we need to do is remember the importance of secondary harms. And the way to, the way to do that...

• 16:39Cal Newport?

  Is to keep remembering what it is that you do care about. This is the key message of digital minimalism. What do you value? How do you want to spend your time? If you don't have good answers for that, and don't worry, you probably don't, especially if you're young, this takes time and experimentation. Go start searching. Try things, connect to people, reflect. Begin to find the things that gives you a deeper, richer, thicker sense of value. And then begin to assess these other things in your life about whether that's helping those things or getting in the way. Right? The secondary harms are reduced when we begin to embrace stuff that really matters in our lives. It completely changes our relationships with our phone. So unless you're like a tech journalist or a technology investor, I don't know how much time you should be thinking about how exactly specific tools are being run, or who is in charge of them, or what's good or bad about them.

• 17:24Cal Newport?

  What you should be thinking instead is what is this doing in my life? Am I spending more time on things I care about or less? If it's less, then I'm going to curtail this either completely or put a lot of fences around it. There's another big point I made in digital minimalism is I was pretty clear that the technology supporters that I was butting heads with back then would always deploy a useful versus useless binary to try to defend these tools. They would say, it's not the case that this tool is useless because here is a use number one, a use number two, and a use number three. Therefore, we win and we should all use the tools. And I would always come back and say, this is not the argument. It's not whether these are useless or useful. It's whether on the whole, you spend more time with the stuff you care about or less.

• 18:10Cal Newport?

  Is it making your life richer or less richer? And when you look at it that way, it completely changes your relationship to technology. All right? So this is all to say, the primary harms matter. Don't forget the secondary harms. You might not recognize the degree to which you've been alienated from the things that makes human life rich and meaningful because of all the time that's been captured by this phone. We don't need necessarily just a fix to a particular app to fix your life. We might need a lot less digital in your life in the first place. So there is my excuse to bring some baseball into our, our world here of technology. I don't know, Jesse, I think maybe the Nationals. Need to take the phones out of clubhouse. They're, they're having a bit of a rough start to the beginning

• 18:53Cal Newport?

  of the season. Actually, because I nerd out on this, the Washington Nationals, my baseball team, they have a great clubhouse culture. The, the young, there's a young team and they have this card game they all play. It's like really popular and they spend a lot of time doing it. So I guess that's not enough to overcome a bullpen that has, one of our pitchers has thrown more balls and strikes.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  At least in opening day, your starter had a pretty good showing.

• 19:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah, our, our starting pitchers have been fine, but we have other issues. We have other issues and they'll all be solved if they could just fix their, their phone issues. All right, there we go. So we got a bunch of questions coming up, but first, let's hear briefly from a sponsor.

• 19:36Cal Newport?

  So here's the thing, the people I know who run businesses, e-commerce, but like they're selling things online or in-person businesses, small businesses, Tacoma Park has a lot of businesses. The technology they keep coming back to is Shopify, right? They say Shopify makes selling easier, whether we're talking about in a world of clicks or in a world of bricks. They use Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US. 10%. That's crazy. From household names like Mattel and Jim Shark to brands just getting started. Do you know what Jim Shark is, Jesse?

• 20:15Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 20:16Cal Newport?

  I think it's, if I had to guess, and I think this is a reasonable guess, it is a company that brings in large water tanks with live sharks into, into gyms.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  I actually do think I know what it is now.

• 20:29Cal Newport?

  It's not large tanks of water with sharks being brought into gyms. I also want to tackle all the important, it allows you to tackle all the important tasks in one place from inventory to payments to analytics and more. Shopify makes the marketing minefield easy with built-in tools for running social media and email campaigns. You can find new customers and keep them. And if you're looking to grow your business internationally, Shopify has global selling tools to help you sell to over 150 countries. I wanted to use Shopify. I have an idea for a brick and mortar store here from Tacoma Park that Jesse keeps talking me out of it, but if, if he would ever let me start it, I would use Shopify. Jesse, you've heard my idea to have a store that is just hardcore Halloween decoration prop controllers.

• 21:10Cal Newport?

  And I want to run it like the record store in high fidelity, right? Where, you know, it's like I'm behind a counter and it's pretty dismissive. If you don't have pretty expert technological knowledge about like the different prop controllers, I'd be like, yeah, okay, maybe we'll just like replace your Arduino with like a Raspberry Pi, you know, kind of like laugh a little bit. And then one of my, someone will chortle in the back as they're like walking with a tray of soldering irons. Jesse won't let me start that store. He says it won't make money, quote unquote. People don't want to buy multiple expensive Halloween prop controllers and be made fun of, but I don't know what he knows. But if I did start it, I would use Shopify because it makes things easier.

• 21:53Cal Newport?

  If in person is your thing, Shopify is award winning point of sale connects your online and offline sales all in one place with 99.99% uptime and the best converting checkout on the planet. You'll never miss a sale again, only with Shopify. So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/deep. Go to Shopify.com/deep, Shopify.com/deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job posting on other job sites. Indeed sponsored jobs helps you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidate

• 22:38Cal Newport?

  so you can reach the people you want faster. Look, this makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored job posts directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. I wish I had known about Indeed back when I was looking for someone to help produce the podcast. Jesse, do you remember how I advertised for this? My memory is I had an index card and I just put it up with a, outside a CrossFit gym. And I wrote on it, audio, audio help, studio good. And then I just put a phone number. It took a while to find someone that way. If I had used a sponsored, Indeed sponsored job posting, I don't know, maybe we'd have

• 23:22Cal Newport?

  like Matt Gorley, producer, you who Matt Gorley is?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 23:26Cal Newport?

  Famous podcast producer. He produces Conan O'Brien's podcast. It's the only podcast producer, oh, and Jamie from.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Jamie's like the most popular.

• 23:33Cal Newport?

  That's right. Jamie from Joe Rogan and Matt Gorley from Conan. Those are the only two podcast producers and then Jesse. From Deep Questions. Plus with Indeed sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed? In the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. Bad news is they all are hired by us. I didn't realize I clicked the wrong button. So I guess we have 23 new. Be careful. It's so powerful. You might accidentally hire 23 people in a minute. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of the show will get, ooh, a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility. If you go to indeed.com/deep, just go to indeed.com/deep

• 24:17Cal Newport?

  right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/deep. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, Indeed is all you need. Alright, let's do some questions.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Alright, first question's from Lucas. When you hit a point in your writing where it feels off or not up to par, how do you navigate through it?

• 24:41Cal Newport?

  Well, Lucas, first of all, from a writing perspective, it's important to recognize that that is a default state. I think there's this myth sometimes with new writers that the appropriate state that you're looking for in writing is the sense of the words are coming relatively easily and you're kind of hitting your word counts and you're writing good stuff. It's where you get these naive word calculations where you say, okay, you know, maybe you've been watching a lot of Brandon Sanderson videos. You're like, oh, I get it. Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna have this target. I can write 2,000 words a day. This takes me about however many hours. So if I do this this many days, I'll have 200,000 words and I'll have a book. But that's not actually how writing goes. It's a lot of writing, rewriting, throwing things out, coming back to things. That sense of this

• 25:24Cal Newport?

  doesn't, this isn't quite right, is the feeling, in the large part, is the feeling of writing itself. So it's not writing block. It's not a problem. It's just writing. And that's because the main mechanism for producing sort of writing of non-trivial quality is the mechanism that was pointed out in that famous interview that Ira Glass did. I write about it in Slow Productivity.

• 25:47Cal Newport?

  And I've talked about it other places as well. But it's this famous interview, it's on YouTube. So I don't know, no one really remembers the original context in which Ira Glass, the host of the long-running NPR show This American Life, was giving this interview. But what he was saying to the people he was talking to, it was young kids or like college students, is he was saying, what matters is taste. You have this sense of taste of what's good and what's not. And then creative work is to struggle to try to live up to that. So it's the evaluation of what you're doing and the saying, this, my taste is telling me this isn't really good or isn't good enough. And it's that stretch to close that gap between where you are and what you know to be good.

• 26:31Cal Newport?

  That's where good creative work is produced. And that's what's happening when you're writing, is you are constantly evaluating what you've written by whatever your internalized sense of taste is, your idea of this is what good writing is for this type of genre. And it's hard. What you're doing really is exploring the configuration of different ways you can write what you're writing until you match your definition of, oh, this feels good. For me, it's very visceral. I've told you about this before, Jesse. I feel like in my gut uncomfortable when writing's not quite right. And it's actually, you know, this is why I think there's a lot of connection between the work I do as a theoretical computer scientist doing algorithm theory, mathematics, basically, and writing. They feel like they're very different magisteria, but they're not really, because when you're

• 27:17Cal Newport?

  working on a math proof, people who do math proofs for a living will tell you this, it's definitely my experience. It's a lot of it is you feel this isn't quite right. These pieces aren't clicking together. And then there's another point where you're like, ooh, this is right. And then like a really nice proof falls out of that. What's really happening here is your head has been exposed to a lot of proofs, you have an analytical brain, and in the background, it's trying things out. And it's kind of projecting ahead, and if the proof isn't really working, it sees things not quite clicking and it feels uncomfortable. So people who do applied mathematics for a living feel physical discomfort when pieces aren't clicking together right. The same thing happens when I'm writing. The structure's not clicking together right. This example doesn't really follow exactly from that example. I repeated this, but I didn't repeat that.

• 28:02Cal Newport?

  I'm calling back to this, but this I didn't really mention before, but the callback looks like a similar form. This sentence isn't quite right. This tonality seems unnecessary. I don't know quite in the, the structure of meaning, what is this really adding? Your mind is evaluating the writing and all these factors. And if it doesn't quite work, you don't feel good about it. And it's all about what you're producing doesn't yet meet your taste. That's why writing is often hard. It's what leaves like what happened to me with the book I'm working on now, where I largely threw out most of what I wrote between July and December. I kept a lot of the research and stuff and the, the ideas, but a lot of the prose I threw out and then restarted again in February.

• 28:45Cal Newport?

  And now when I'm coming out at a second time, I'm feeling better about it. I'm like, okay, yeah, this is getting up to my taste. And I think what was happening in this instance, I was reflecting on this is I, at the first time through, I was trying to get the ideas out. Here's what I want to say. I wanted to do the right research. I want to have the right points. And that was taking up a lot of my attention, but it wasn't flowing right. It wasn't, you know, the best possible way to convey that information. And so now my second time through, I could put all of my attention on craft and structure because I already have the information and research, and now it's flowing much easier. So it just takes time to write. One thing I do want to point out is a point about the Ira Glass taste interview that I made in my book, Slow Productivity. And I want to point this out because it gives me a secret reason to play the slow productivity theme music.

• 29:30Cal Newport?

  Because Jesse, this is my new plan is to sneak in references to slow productivity. The corner, the slow productivity corner might be gone, but I'm going to find references to my book, Slow Productivity, so we can still hear the music. In that book, I argue there's a nuance that Glass misses in this interview, which is improving your taste. So when he's talking in the famous interview about taste and creative work, he's just saying you have this taste and the whole thing is just the struggle to live up to the taste. And in that struggle is where creative work happens.

• 30:03Cal Newport?

  But you don't start with a really refined taste. An equally important part of the creative process is improving your understanding of what good actually means. It's improving your taste. And we knew, because I'm devious in this way, I went back and found other interviews with Ira Glass, where looking back on those early years of being a radio producer, he admitted, "I thought the stuff I was doing was good back then. And now, looking back at it with the hindsight of where I am now, I can see it was really bad." So he had to develop his taste. So there's a notion of, you also have to focus on reading good stuff, being around good stuff, writing for editing. You have to improve your idea of what good is, and always be straining to hit your current definition of good. That's how creative growth in production happens.

• 30:48Cal Newport?

  Jesse, let's use that as an excuse to hear a little bit of the Slow Productivity theme music.

• 30:58Cal Newport?

  It actually is good for Indian in answer, because it sounds, again, the more you know, NBC stinger, right? The more you know.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  I have two quick things. David Brooks had an article recently about how every morning for 40 years, he goes to his office and it's always a struggle to write.

• 31:16Cal Newport?

  Yeah, yeah. That was an interesting article.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Oh, you read it?

• 31:20Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then the second thing was, we've gotten a lot of requests from fans that want that thrown out prose as a bonus. After we discussed it.

• 31:29Cal Newport?

  No, no, no.

• 31:33Cal Newport?

  Thrown out prose.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Is thrown out.

• 31:35Cal Newport?

  Is thrown out for a reason. You don't want, man, it is, oh, man, I get into a lot of detail. I talk a lot about monks in that thrown out prose, like more details than you need to know about the rise of monasticism. I have this huge, long section that was coming from a new translation of the confessions. It's not, whatever, it's an early Christian monastic touring through the Skeitas Desert of the early monasteries and figuring out from the early desert fathers, like here's how to, here's what's important in running. The monastery and these ideas they had and visiting Abba Moses and developing these

• 32:17Cal Newport?

  these notions of what monasticism should be. And it's all like connecting back to me talking about preparation that if you want to make a big change in your life, you don't want to just jump into and run riot a wave of inspiration to a radical change. You got to kind of be prepared for radical changes and like monks figure that out like, oh, we need like monastic rules and practices to get ready to become closer to God. We can't just wander into the desert and hope that's going to work. All of this history of like monks and the right translations and read multiple books. In the new form, this is like three sentences.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Just like references of the recent White Lotus?

• 32:54Cal Newport?

  Basically, yeah, it's just a lot of white. It's mainly talking about Jason Isaacs, the use of like a prosthetic male anatomy in that scene. He didn't want to use his actual. So I'm doing a thousand words on that. But anyways, like all of that was like interesting to me. And I was working out, understanding this. But once I really understood this, I could just summarize it. Like, oh, yeah, look, the monastics figured this out. Here's the key thing you need to know. One quote, let's move on. So I'm not going to show you that text. All right. What do we got next?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Next question is from Erica. How should I prioritize and address different types of communication like voicemails, calls, IMs, emails, and texts? I'm good at setting boundaries and I've set times during the day to respond, but I'm not sure what to prioritize.

• 33:42Cal Newport?

  Ever see that? Do you watch The Office?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  No, never got into it.

• 33:46Cal Newport?

  There's a reference BJ Novak's character starts a startup company kind of late in the show's run, a company called Wolf. And the premise is it's based off of Kelly, played by Mindy Kaling, who I should add a former, what'd you call it, a peer of mine, we went to Dartmouth together.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:07Cal Newport?

  Yeah, she was a couple of years ahead of us back at Dartmouth. Her name was different back then. She changed it to Mindy Kaling. And she worked for the, she was on the improv group there. And which was kind of antagonistic with the humor magazine where I was. So it's like both doing humor, but they're kind of antagonistic towards each other. But I remember talking to her like soon after she, when I was just getting advice from alums, I remember calling her soon after she left. And she was doing Matt and Ben, that play, the off Broadway play that is about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. And this is like was her break. Was this, this play that she wrote, um, but I remember talking to her about the biz back, back in the day.

• 34:50Cal Newport?

  All as a side to say that her character in the office was upset that she couldn't get her boyfriend, played by BJ Novak, to respond to her. So she invented a tool that like, when you sent a message to someone, it used all the possible mediums. So you would get like a call and an email and a text and a fax. It would all come at you at the same, all come at you at the same time. So this reminds me of that. Um, but returning to this, you know, she actually not to, not to divert anymore, but improv troops, they feel like they're more like, kind of cool and artsy and that the humor magazines are sort of like weird trolls, which is like, kind of true. They're like, we're weird trolls doing like robot fighting bear jokes.

• 35:32Cal Newport?

  While like the improv group was, you know, it's like Amy Poehler and we're all like more kind of like cool, nerdy cool. So in one of Callie's shows, the one that takes place at a college, uh, there's a whole plot line taking place at a college humor magazine about like how nerdy they all are and they're all trolls or whatever. And I was like, that's a shot at me. And one of the characters was named Bal Buport. It's, I don't know. I don't know. This, this hit me like a little bit strange, but she gave him like really thick glasses and like, he was always embarrassing himself and was like running in the walls and be like, uh. So, okay, shots fired, Callie. I'm coming back at you. Anyways, back to this. All right. Original question.

• 36:16Cal Newport?

  How do you prioritize different types of communications? Uh, like typically, okay, I'll give you a, for instance, maybe calls if you know the person you take, because these days people don't really call unless like they actually want to talk to you now. Voicemail calls where you don't know what it's from. Texts should be checked regularly, but not continually. So you don't want to establish the expectation that anytime you text me, I'll get back to you right away. This, this was an expectation that grew up in the office around instant messenger and email tools. So this hyperactive, high find expectation of like, can't we just like have an ongoing conversation? It would make life easier and it does, but it requires you to constantly be checking the channels for that to happen. Well, this has migrated over to the world of text messages.

• 36:58Cal Newport?

  It is easier for all of us if we all agree to answer all people's text messages as they come in, but it doesn't scale because you're not the only person texting me. There's 30 people texting me. So the right thing to do there, I feel like is you have these semi-regular checks. It could be every hour where you go in and you try to like respond to things and kind of clear out what texts have come in. But people get used to it of like, oh, if I text Cal, I don't know if I can hear back from him right away, but I'll hear back from him in a little bit. And it just changes their, changes their expectations. The exception, of course, being if you're in the middle of a back and forth with someone, like trying to figure out where they are, you're meeting them or something like that. When it comes to emails and IMs, norms are not the solution here. You have to put in place alternative means of collaboration. So, I mean, look, I wrote a whole book about this called The World Without Email.

• 37:43Cal Newport?

  But the problem with email and IM, I know people still use that for Messenger, Chat. I think people use Chat. I think about like Slack or Teams. You don't call it IM anymore, do you?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 37:54Cal Newport?

  No, okay. Well, whatever it is, Chat, real-time Chat, whatever it is. If the way things unfold in your office is through real-time back and forth communication, it's hard to just say, here is the new expectation about when I'm going to check email or Slack. Because they'll say, no, we're trying to figure something out and we have a bunch of back and forth that we have to do. And if you wait an hour before each of these responses, we're not going to get this done in time. So really, the key to reducing the frequency of email and chat checks in the office is to have alternative modes of collaborations that is not based on unscheduled messages that require quick responses. And now you have particular communication processes put in place for specific types of work that's recurring.

• 38:38Cal Newport?

  Here's how we collaborate, when and where the information goes. And things like office hours and group status meetings that allow you to defer things that require back and forth communication out of inbox and channels and into these sort of real-time, regularly structured, real-time. These type of things work better. Also, reducing the number of things you're working on concurrently. So the number of things that could be generating communication that requires responses going down. So really, you have to re-engineer workflows to reduce the amount of time or expectation for you to be talking about work. All right. What do we got next?

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Next up is from Katya. How should I organize my Trello boards? Specifically, should personal tasks like parenting, household, travel, and entrepreneurial responsibilities, client services, admin work, stuff like that, be split into separate boards or combined into fewer boards?

• 39:27Cal Newport?

  Well, so if you're using status boards, so something like Trello, where you have stacks of cards representing things and a column representing statuses. My typical recommendation is have one board per role, broadly speaking, right? So looking to your example here, entrepreneurial responsibilities, you would probably have one board for the role of entrepreneur. Then these things within it, client services, admin work, creative projects along, you know, these could be on that same board. Unless you have like a major break, like as an entrepreneur, I have two major roles, day to day and setting up for like the next big idea. Okay, then you could break those into sub roles.

• 40:10Cal Newport?

  But typically, boards in my approach are dedicated to roles and not projects or types of works, like having a household board is a standard thing. And that can cover parenting, travel, chores around the house, etc. So you don't want too few boards or too many, so think about roles. That idea comes from, I guess originally Stephen Covey. The idea of when you're thinking about organization of work, having different roles in your life is a Stephen Covey idea from Seven Habits, a highly effective people. That's what I would do. And, you know, it's subjective. But I have my boards, household, personal, like that's like non-professional is a board,

• 40:53Cal Newport?

  writing's a board, like being a writer.

• 40:58Cal Newport?

  Academia is another professional board. And then, okay, here's an example. Because I have a particularly complicated, task-rich role in academia as Director of Undergraduate Studies at the moment, I broke that out to its own board. So there's a subjective.

• 41:16Cal Newport?

  way I did it. And then when I'm done with that, that board would go away. So like typically I have like those three boards. And then sometimes if there's a big thing going on, I might have that has a lot of tasks I need to track. I might have a fourth board or if I have to share it in that case, I also share that board, I believe with our associate director. So I, I, I break it out for that purposes as well. No one right answer, but that's roughly speaking, what I try to do.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Do you have a board for the podcast stuff?

• 41:37Cal Newport?

  It's under the writing board. So it's like my role as a writer involves like writing stuff and doing podcast.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the way I see it.

• 41:46Cal Newport?

  All right. Who we got next?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Next question is, uh, next question is from Derek. What is the difference between a two status board and a reverse task list? One should each be deployed. What granularity of task should live on a public board that is shared with your team?

• 42:00Cal Newport?

  So reverse task list, this is where you keep track of the stuff you've accomplished. So instead of a list of things you want to do, you keep track of here's all the things I did today. To status board, I'm assuming they're talking about a board that has like working on and done as statuses. I have a couple of thoughts on this, but my problem with the reverse task list is that it goes back to more of a David Allen style idea of like, look, you're a widget cranker. And what work is, is like cranking through widgets, getting things done, right? Going to the name of his book and his goal, for example, was let's do this with reducing stress. Like, I don't want you keeping track of things in your mind or being worried about forgetting things.

• 42:41Cal Newport?

  We want like work to be a, a, a relatively calm process of just sort of cranking through tasks. Reverse task list also has a similar, it's less structured, but similar psychology of like, hey, it encourages you to keep doing things. It's like the, the, the specter you're fighting against here is doing fewer things. Like, no, I'm, I'm doing stuff. Look at all this stuff I got done. As long as I'm growing my list of stuff I got done. That's a productive day and that's less stressful than having a list of things to do that I might not get through. The problem is that you're, you're not having deploying any intention at any sort of non-trivial granularity about what you're doing and when. You're just saying, I want to do something next. And you kind of grab something that seems reasonable or easy.

• 43:22Cal Newport?

  That might not necessarily be like the right allocation of your energies and like in knowledge work in particular, these jobs are complicated. There's big things that are due, pieces that need to be done with some time sensitivity. There's differences in energy levels between different times and days. It's actually a relatively difficult scheduling chess problem to figure out like what you should do when. So I'm much more a fan of systems that have you be intentional thinking through what do I want to do at different time scales? And not just saying, okay, let me just grab something to do next. The other piece of talking about two taskboards or reverse task lists is the idea of keeping a record of stuff you've accomplished. And here I think it's very specific to the needs of your job.

• 44:04Cal Newport?

  So, you know, in some jobs like where you have a task board that a team is sharing, it's useful to have a list of what's done right there. You move things to done when people do them, just so you'll remember, okay, we already did this, we already do that. If you don't need this record of what you got done, then there's no reason to laboriously maintain these massive lists of everything else you've done. Right? If you need the psychological boost of like, I'm actually getting things done, just be intentional about scheduling your time. You'll know every day what your plan was, you'll know that you're getting things done. You might also consider other formats. If it's important to keep a record of some things, you might consider other formats. Like I have a special document I use in my role as Director of Undergraduate Studies where on decisions being made for things like external course approvals.

• 44:48Cal Newport?

  I have just like a dedicated document where I keep track of like what decisions were made and why, right? Because those are important, I want to have a record on in case I forget. Students like, hey, whatever happened with whatever, I can go look it up. Oh yeah, here's what happened, but it's not on my task list. I have like a special place to store that. So there's sort of two things here, the psychology of tracking what you've done instead of what you need to do. And then the logistics of having a record of what you did. So two different things going on there. All right, looks like we got a case study here. This is where people write in to talk about them putting into action the type of advice we talked about on this show. Today's case study is a student case study from Leo. Leo says, I'm Leo, an international student from NYU,

• 45:32Cal Newport?

  who started listening to the podcast around December 2023. I just wanted to share how listening to the podcast and Cal Newport lore changed my life. At around this time last year, it was my freshman year. I didn't have the grades I wanted. I was clinically obese and I felt alone. But then I listened to the podcast and was really intrigued by the concept of the deep life. I realized I wanted to be healthier so I could be able to do more in college. At that point, I weighed about 220 pounds. And so I resolved to walk 10,000 steps every day. It wasn't that hard, but it also wasn't trivial. Wanting to get in the most steps in as little time as possible, I started running. I focused a lot of my energy on improving my running and I lost weight in the process. In about a year, I went from 220 pounds to 140 pounds. That's amazing.

• 46:15Cal Newport?

  He mentions a slide, but we'll skip past that. My grades were another thing I wanted to improve this year. And so I needed to recognize what sucked out my time the most. It was my time on social media and my phone. After reading Digital Minimalism, I realized nobody really cared whether I had social media or not. The only person who cared enough that had social media was me. When I first deleted all my social media accounts, I was really jittery. I started carrying books around with me again and started reading in my dead time on the subway or waiting in line. I had more time to dedicate to running, playing the violin and talking to people who actually mattered to me. I also walked around alone to meditate. Being a social media-less college student feels weird at first, but ultimately is the most freeing thing I've ever done. I've also used some tips from How to Become a Straight-A Student and How to Win at College.

• 46:59Cal Newport?

  Without my phone and the internet, I found the tips easier to follow. I went from a 3.6 GPA in the spring to a 3.9 this fall with more challenging coursework like organic chemistry and molecular biology. I'm also doing 20 hours of paid lab research per week and am the president of NYU's undergraduate medical journal, all while having the free time to watch Broadway shows every two weeks and hang out with my friends. That's far from the 360 I got when I was beyond stressed studying 12 hours a day and doing zero undergraduate research. Pretty neat. All this took a year into making and I'm definitely far from being somewhat of a relaxed Rhodes Scholar, but I think I'm heading in the right direction thanks to the podcast and the books. If ever you use this for the podcast, please let people know that these things take time. As someone who followed your advice,

• 47:40Cal Newport?

  it was definitely not easy at first, but it did get easier in time. I also teach an introductory Welcome to College course for NYU freshmen, and I try to wedge in the values to deep life and the importance of not using social media. I hope I can extend the message to other young people like me. We are sure missing out on life. I sure was. It's a great case study. A lot of different ideas I talk about played out well in Leo's life. The studying thing that completely rings true. People just say, "I study all the time." To get better grades, I'd have to study even more. But often what's happening is you're distracted. You're studying in ways that's not particularly effective, and you're distracted while you're studying. And someone like Leo comes along, and they're just scheduling their time, doing a few hours here and there, and are killing it in their classes. More does not necessarily,

• 48:24Cal Newport?

  more studying does not necessarily translate to more grades. How you study matters just as much. I also love the deep life ideas of taking small steps, having daily things to track, and then building on that like he did with fitness. And just notice all the good stuff that came from social media being removed from his life. This goes right to our secondary harms discussion from the deep dive. You don't realize how much good stuff you're not doing because of the mediocre stuff that's happening on your phone. As Leo said, no one really cared when he left. No one's tracking. And his life got much better. So I appreciate that. That is a good case study. All right. Do we also have a call this week, Jesse? We do. All right, let's hear this.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  Hi, Cal. My name is Lindsay. I work for Texas's Cooperative Extension Program as a project manager for a community nutrition program. And I'm currently working on my doctorate in health education. I was first exposed to your work and podcasts a couple of semesters ago in a writing class, and I've enjoyed listening to you and Kinder Adachi on my commute to class. I noticed you had reviewed her latest book, and I thought your perspectives and advice blend well in my life as I balance work, school, and home. Which brings me to my main question, balancing the interconnectedness of these three. Several of my interests and hobbies also bleed over into work and even school, while school classes are sometimes during the workday. Lately, I've had trouble not thinking about all three of these things at the same time.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  I recently listened to you talk about the weekly template and think this might be where I need to start, especially at the beginning of each semester or during extended breaks like the holidays or summer. I would love to hear your thoughts about creating the balance and separating, yet connecting together these parts of my life.

• 50:07Cal Newport?

  Well, it's okay, I think. It's okay, I think, to have some overlap, right? That you're at school, but you're also thinking about a related hobby. Like, that's okay. Or you're thinking about a paper you're working on for school while you're also working on some other unrelated work thing. Like cognitive overlaps, okay, that's kind of inevitable, especially when you have a sort of blended, like what you're working on is it's not just a traditional, I'm going to work from nine to five, and then I have my time outside of work where I'm doing other things. So I wouldn't worry too much about it. I mean, I have, I still have memories of being in courses at MIT and the blog post I was reading, because that's back when RSS readers were big and reading these blog posts and feeling inspired by them, but also paying attention to the course.

• 50:52Cal Newport?

  And it's okay for those things to mix. I used to write my blog post at my office at MIT, so those things were kind of mixed in. But I do think the weekly template, sure, I think that's a good idea. This is a way of just saying regularly each week, like, this is when I largely do this hobby. This is when I'm largely doing school stuff. It just gives you some predictability, even if it's different from day to day. If it's the same each week on those days, it gives your mind some predictability and makes it easier to move. I would also throw in shutdown rituals. That's really important, especially for schoolwork. When you're done with schoolwork for the day, use a shutdown ritual to try to keep your mind from having to excessively think about stuff that was going on in school. I invented the shutdown ritual idea as a graduate student to stop me from thinking

• 51:36Cal Newport?

  too much about proofs for my dissertation while I was doing other stuff. After I was done working on the proofs for the day, they were too sticky in my brain. So I would put a shutdown ritual there as well. It's like weekly template. Sure. Shutdown ritual. Sure. And then also just like a little bit of grace. I think it's okay. It's not affecting, it's not causing harm. You can let some thinking of one thing bleed over to the other. I think that that works. Like when I'm here on this podcast, I would say Jesse probably like 95% of the time I'm checked out. I'm just, I'm thinking, I'm thinking baseball. I'm thinking like computer science proofs, you know, I'm giving this at best like 5% of my

• 52:13Speaker 01

  We have to do like 20 takes a episode, you're mistaking all the time.

• 52:17Cal Newport?

  Constantly, just constantly like cursing or being like incredibly inappropriate and or just like mumbling. Yeah, constantly. It takes us, it takes us about eight hours an episode to record. I'm not sure if this is, if this is known. We have to stitch it together over several days. I'm lazy and I'm distracted as you might have met. I'm on my, you don't realize it, but I have three different phones mounted under my teleprompter here. So I can keep up. I have Tik Tok. I have Instagram and then I just have YouTube playing on like a recommender loop. So most of the time I'm just sort of like scrolling through things on there. So anyways, I think you'll be okay, but thanks for the call. All right. We got a final segment coming up. Talk about the books I read in March, but first let's hear from another sponsor.

• 53:01Cal Newport?

  This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I think it helps sometimes to talk about the numbers involved with therapy. Traditional in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session. That adds up fast, but with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save on average up to 50% per session. So the way this works is that with BetterHelp, and I think these details are important. You pay a flat fee for weekly sessions and this saves you big on cost and on time. It helps therapy feel more accessible and not just like a luxury. I mean, the online therapy model, I gotta say, I just think it is a great way for getting if you, if you feel like

• 53:43Cal Newport?

  you need to work on your relationship with your mind, it is the, this sort of easy way into it. It removes the friction of getting in there. Online therapy is going to give you that quality care at a price that makes sense. Can help you with things from anxiety to everyday stress or whatever else is hurting you in your relationship with your own mind. There's over 30,000 therapists in the network. So BetterHelp is now the world's largest online therapy platform. They've served more than 5 million people around the globe. It's convenient, too. You can join with a click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life, plus switch therapists at any time. We hear from listeners all the time about this. They're fixing other parts of their life, their productivity systems, the way that

• 54:26Cal Newport?

  they approach their deep work to try to produce more with their brain. And they say, "I don't know why I was neglecting the piece of just like the relationship with my own brain." It's at the core of all the types of things we do here and talk about on the show. "I don't know why I waited so long to make my relationship with my brain stronger." Therapy can help you. Online therapy through BetterHelp can get you there easily. Your well-being is worth it, so visit betterhelp.com/deepquestions to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com, slash, deepquestions. I also want to talk about a sponsor, another longtime sponsor, MyBodyTutor. Founded by my friend Adam Gilbert, used to do some health advice on my blog way back in the day.

• 55:11Cal Newport?

  MyBodyTutor is a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is lack of consistency. It's because you get assigned a coach. The coach works with you, develop your plan for nutrition and exercise, and then you check in every day with the coach. And that accountability gives you consistency, and consistency gives you results. Best of all, because you have this coach that you have a relationship with, you can adjust. "Hey, I'm going on a trip. How do I adjust my exercise routine?" "Hey, the holidays are coming up. I'm worried about what's going to happen with my eating. Let's have a plan for how I can enjoy the holidays without feeling like I'm overeating stuff I shouldn't be." So you can adjust as needed on the fly. It really just helps to have someone there.

• 55:55Cal Newport?

  And because it's online, of course, it's much cheaper than having like an actual trainer come to your house, or an actual nutritionist come to your house. That's why I think MyBodyTutor has been so successful. Now, I was thinking about it, Jesse, if I had, if I was like in Hollywood and can bring like one of those trainers to my house that they use for like the Marvel movies, I think what I would do in between the movies is I would have them train exactly one half of my body. Because I think this will be super distinctive. It would be a brand identity thing that would really get associated with you. If like one side of your body was super jacked and the other side was Tom Hanks in the second half of Cast Away.

• 56:38Cal Newport?

  That would be really cool. And then people are like, oh yeah, that's like his deal, right? And then like it'd become distinctive. It could be like a whole thing. That's what I would do. The good news about My Body Tutor is their trainers won't put up with that nonsense. You bring them that type of idea, they'll think, yeah, that's that we're not gonna do that. Let's, let's get you healthy. Let's stop being weird. Those Hollywood trainers, all in on that. Yep, half your body's strong, the other half not. We can do this. That's a great idea. My Body Tutor won't put up with that nonsense. They'll get you healthy the right way. If you're serious about getting fit, Adam is giving Deep Questions listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention the Deep Questions podcast when you join. Just let them know when you join to get $50 off your first month. That's at mybodytutor.com, mybodytutor.com and mention Deep Questions to get $50 off. All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment.

• 57:24Cal Newport?

  All right, what did I read in March 2025? My goal is five books a month, which I did hit in March. Kind of a weird list this month. I don't know. I have some baseball books I'm reading for the current month because we're in baseball season. But okay, I read in March, I started with Believe, the new book by New York Times columnist Ross Douhut. This was like an apologia for religion, like why you should be religious.

• 57:52Cal Newport?

  It felt a little hasty to me compared to some of his other books. It's, he published with a smaller press. I don't know if that, if that's relevant. It was more like gods of the gaps-y than you would expect. Ross Douhut is like a really smart conservative columnist who's also a religious, I think he's Catholic, religious Catholic.

• 58:13Cal Newport?

  But the book was a lot of like, I don't, you know, there's a chapter on like miracles. It's like, well, they can't all be fall, all that, can't all these accounts be false? Like the sort of UFO argument, can all of these? So it was a little bit less.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  I listened to his interview with Tyler Cowen.

• 58:29Cal Newport?

  How would, how'd that interview go?

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Tyler pressed him pretty good.

• 58:32Cal Newport?

  I heard his interview with Andrew Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan pushed him good too. Yeah. So because I mean, it really was a little bit of a more old fashioned argument. Also like, um, you know, a lot of this is hard to explain, dot, dot, dot, God. So it was okay. I mean, it was an interesting book. It was an interesting book.

• 58:52Cal Newport?

  I've read other stuff by him that was better. All right, then I read Kari Leibowitz's book, How to Winter. Just a really cool premise. Kari studies how people in Scandinavia deal with really long winters, where it's dark all day long and this and that. And the kicking off premise, she's known for this. She's like done, she's always doing the circuit of news shows and stuff during the winter. But the motivating research on this is here in like the Northeast. We're like, ah, the winter's, it's rough, it's dark. I don't like it. I want it to end, you know? So you would assume in places where the winter's even rougher, that people would be less happy, but they're not.

• 59:34Cal Newport?

  And so she talks about like the mindsets and philosophies they have about how to deal with winter. So it's pretty cool. I think it's interesting. I love the idea that she's a winter, she's academic who studies how people deal with winter. Then I read a better, a much better religion book, in my opinion. Jonathan Sacks's book, Letter and the Scroll. Another religion apologia, but whereas Ross Douhut was coming from Catholicism, Jonathan Sacks was coming from Judaism. I mean, the late Rabbi Sacks is a fantastic writer, really just one of the better, you know, I read a lot of his books that comes up a lot just because I think he's one of the better religious themed writers out there.

• 1:00:12Cal Newport?

  Original analysis and the classic Sacks mixture of religion with other ideas from other types of thought, from, you know, the history of writing systems, of the development of philosophy. Like, he's very good at mixing the secular with the religious and pulling them together into a tapestry when he writes his history. So he's a very good writer. Like, one of his ideas from this book that's, I think, really interesting is he was talking about, okay, look, you get the, the rise of what becomes Judaism is coming out of the Levant, is coming out of Eastern Mediterranean in this 1500 B.C., roughly speaking.

• 1:00:53Cal Newport?

  And the real innovation of this emerging religion was this notion of like this, the person. The individual as having infinite value, like everyone's made in the image of God. We're very used to this idea now. I mean, all of our notions of the Enlightenment and human rights and everything is based on this idea that like people have rights and fundamental value, but it didn't really exist as a formal idea in the world before then. It's not the way you would have thought about humans in the ancient Egypt or in like ancient Greece. There's much more of a disposability, like you would kill babies was like pretty common or like suicide if things weren't going well. Like rulers would be like they're just better than the other people, right? And this is kind of like the way things are and the ruler

• 1:01:37Cal Newport?

  should be better than the other people and the other people, you're there to serve the rulers. And then Judaism introduced this idea that that spread all over the place. Christianity picked it up, Islam picked it up, the Enlightenment picked it up. No, no, individuals have it. They're made in the image of God and have value, right? Sacks is like, hey, here's something that's interesting. Where, what is happening to, let's put on our history hat. What's happening in the Eastern Mediterranean, this sort of 2000 B.C. 1500 B.C. What's happening? Well, we get the very first, these early Semitic languages, the sort of Proto Hebrew, these early Semitic languages is like some of the very first alphabet based languages. So like until then, we had writing, right? We had Egyptians had hieroglyphics.

• 1:02:21Cal Newport?

  We had cuneiform and this or that. But it was, it was pictographic typically. You'd have to learn thousands and thousands of different symbols and only the elite scribes could actually learn this stuff. Alphabetic languages is like, no, we have like 20 or 30 symbols and all the words are made out of this. So now like basically anyone can, anyone can, you can make all these words with relatively simple rules and now literacy can become widespread, right? Like everyone can read. And there's a lot of evidence that these sort of early cultures and canon at the time, especially the culture that became Judaism, they were there where like these first alphabetic languages were formed. Some of the first people that like almost you had widespread literacy. And, and he has

• 1:03:03Cal Newport?

  this argument that out of being able to read it like and confront ideas directly, everyone became a source. It just, it was a form, a ferment in which the idea of like individuals having value arose. So it's interesting, like this sort of like historical context. You think about like revelation, like in the Bible, there's the actual literal revelation story of like Mount Sinai, but there's also this sort of historical analog of like the emergence of alphabetic languages completely changed humans' conceptions of people. And that's kind of like a sense of revelation itself. And out of that came the ideas on which like all of our notions of like humanity and the core of a lot of ethics like came out of that revolution. Anyways,

• 1:03:48Cal Newport?

  that's like Saxon type thinking. He merges the theological with like, you know, this other cool historical thing was happening and these two things merged. So that was a really good book. Then I tried. So now I'm like, okay, I'm reading some smart stuff here, right? Like, I know I'm gonna do a recommendation of someone. I'm gonna read Martin Buber's I and Thou. And that kicked my ass, or butt. I shouldn't say ass, but that was a hard book. And I didn't, it's like, it has religious implications, but it's in, it's written in, it's a secular philosophical work that is-

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Is it long?

• 1:04:24Cal Newport?

  It's not long, but it takes a long time to read. It's, you have to use secondary sources to make your way through it. I didn't fully get it. It's post Hegel, sort of this like very precise language. And it's a difficult one. So that one kind of gave me some, it got me some humility after that one.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  How often do you read a book where that happens? Like, once a year?

• 1:04:46Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it's, you know, usually you're going to like a primary source that's like from a time in which, and highly specialized in academic. Yeah, that's when, that's how it'll happen. Then to clear the palace, like, okay, let me go back and read a classic, John McPhee's Coming Into The Country. So this is John McPhee's book about Alaska. He wrote the book in the seventies. Classic John McPhee. I mean, probably, you know, McPhee wrote long books back then. You could be like, you could probably have cut off the last 150 pages and still be like, we get it, you know, like, it's a- I should say that we should enjoy it, but when you have five books to get through in a month, you're like, all right, yada, yada, yada. The cool thing, what this book is famous for from writing nerds is the opening story. So, and he writes about this in his nonfiction memoir, Draft Number Seven, about how he came up with this idea.

• 1:05:31Cal Newport?

  But if you read the opening story, did I talk about this on the show? The circular timeline, I might have talked about it again, but I'll just say it again real briefly. It, it opens with him in a canoe with these people canoeing up in Alaska with these workers for like the environmental agency in the state and him like the hot day and he has his bandana in the water. And he, um, see, I want to get this, I want to get this straight. Okay, it's, so he's like in the water, it's in present tense. And he's canoeing and his bandana is in the water.

• 1:06:11Cal Newport?

  And he, it's a before or after, like, okay, there's a bear encounter in here and I'm kind of mixing this up. I think then they encounter a bear pretty soon. And then they make it to this village and they get to this village and they're in the village waiting for this plane to come. And there's this subtle shift where he goes back into the past tense. And he's shifting to remember like how this whole trip that's ending began. And now you're sort of back at the beginning of the trip when they left from this village. And they make their way through and it's this whole story in the past, in the past tense.

• 1:06:51Cal Newport?

  And you realize, again, I guess it's the same trip as earlier in the tense and that the chapter ends with their, he's in the canoe. And maybe it's right, I don't remember if the bear encounter was at the very beginning or at the very end. Um, but they're in the canoe and it's hot and then he puts his bandana in the water to cool it down. And then the chapter ends. So it's like this whole circular thing where he starts like towards the end of a story, goes to the end, then goes back to the beginning of the story and then the chapter ends when it catches up to where he started. So he was just playing with timelines and form back then, it was pretty cool. Um, and like typical McPhee stuff, he just went and like lived in Alaska for a couple of years with his wife. So he just met all these people and really got to know them and, uh, classic McPhee. Cool book, it's really like three books he puts together that each look at a different part of Alaska.

• 1:07:35Cal Newport?

  All right, those are my books that I read in March. I'm underway with some new books. For April already, I'll report on those when the month is over, but that's all the time we have for today's show. So thank you for listening. We'll be back next week. And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:07:53Cal Newport?

  Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions Podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.