Ep. 395: Should I Try a “Social Media Pause”?

Do you need social media? Which services? For what purposes? These are complicated questions and in today’s episode Cal proposes a simple route to answers: conducting a “social media pause.” To help investigate this strategy, Cal is joined by T. K. Coleman, of The Minimalists, to talk about a social media pause that they tried and the surprising results it generated. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia IDEAS SEGMENT: Interview with T. K. Coleman [3:26] INBOX: - Focused work in early modern time [1:00:18] - Tool suggestion from a programmer [1:05:10] - Staring at a painting for three hours [1:13:26] WHAT CAL IS UP TO: - Changes to the show [1:18:44] - What Cal read [1:20:04] - What Cal watched [1:21:34] - Renovation of Maker Lab [1:25:38] The Age of Extraction (Tim Wu) John and Paul (Ian Leslie) Movies: Train Dreams The Hurt Locker Three Days of the Condor 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=sgMUBMqrE7Mhttps://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/161jik7/please_share_how_you_use_obsidian_for_task/ Thanks to our Sponsors:https://www.monarch.com (Use code “DEEP”)https://www.factormeals.com/deep50offhttps://www.mybodytutor.comhttps://www.wayfair.com Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro 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.

• 0:00Cal Newport?

  Back in early 2024, I stopped by the West Hollywood studios of The Minimalist to record an episode of their popular podcast. Now, if that name sounds familiar to you, but you can't quite place why, it's probably because you've seen one of their Emmy Award nominated Netflix documentaries. Alright, so I'm doing the show. I'm recording an episode of The Minimalist, and the conversation takes a surprising turn when one of the hosts, Joshua, floats the idea of The Minimalist taking a break from social media. Well, of course, me being me, I jumped in and began pushing him to encourage him to follow up on that idea. Jesse, let's play the clip to see what happened next. ... platforms.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  I think there are a few problems here with social media as we talk about walking away. And I think we'll give it a 30-day shot. We can just, even with The Minimalist, we can walk away for 30 days.

• 0:57Cal Newport?

  You should do this, by the way.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  See what happens.

• 0:59Cal Newport?

  Do it for 30 days.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Talk to me about it.

• 1:00Cal Newport?

  Yeah, try this. Let's do it. Do it for 30 days. Sean can go discover himself without having to post it. He's gonna be like, here's this opera I wrote with my brain cells. And see what happens with your numbers. See what you hear from your listeners and your readers.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  I might want to do it. What if we do it for the rest of the year?

• 1:20Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And they did. So, right there in the room, Joshua committed The Minimalist to abstaining from social media for the rest of the year. Now, keep in mind, this was March of 2024. So, it was actually most of a year they were going to abstain from social media. Now, I have a name for this strategy. I call it "The Social Media Pause," and it's something that you can do with your own company or your own team, or even in your own personal life. Here's the key thing about the Social Media Pause strategy. It is not about detoxing. It is not about just rejecting the tech overlords. It is instead intended as an experiment.

• 2:00Cal Newport?

  The goal is to learn about yourself. What feels better? What do you miss? What did you discover about social media that was actually unnecessary? What about social media was actually playing a more important role in your work and life than you realized? All right. So this brings us back to the minimalist and their social media pause. What did they learn from that nearly a year they spent experimenting with a more disconnected life? Well, to help answer this question, today I'm going to be joined on the show by one of the other minimalist who was in the room while we recording that episode. His name is TK Coleman, and we're going to discuss the practical consequences of their decision to do a social media pause, the hits they took, the lessons they learned,

• 2:44Cal Newport?

  and critically, what they each decided to do going forward after the pause ended. After I talk to TK, I'll then step back and provide you some specific advice for taking a successful social media pause in your own work or life. So if you're worried at all about the role social media is playing right now in your daily experience, then this episode is for you. 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.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  The team was at least twice as big as it is now when I first joined. And when we would get together at the studio and record our full podcast, one of the things that we would do, yes, we had a dedicated social media person, but then, and that was the person who did all the posting and the copy and the scheduling. But then there was a separate person dedicated to sifting through the show to find great moments that can be reels and on Instagram and great moments that can be like highlights on YouTube. And we had this process where as a team, we would each pick something like our top three or four real candidates. And we would all come in and we would kind of like argue over them or deliberate

• 4:11Speaker 02

  over them and do a process of elimination. And we had it scheduled that there was a new reel every single day. So I would say this was pretty active. On our Instagram, you would have a highlight from that previous podcast every single day. YouTube was pretty heavily populated. And so social media was a pretty big deal. There were multiple posts on multiple channels, for the most part, every day. And then around the time that we talked to you. A number of things were changing.

• 4:41Cal Newport?

  This was the timeline, this was when I came out for the Slow Productivity Tour, probably, like 2024.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right, yeah. And so, there are a number of things that are all happening that converged around your appearance on our show. The first thing for me personally is, I had kind of been doing some thinking about my relationship to social media. Lent was coming up and I was trying to think of what could be something that could be a meaningful sacrifice that I can make, that isn't just a ritual. It isn't just me saying I'm gonna give up something just to be part of the club, but that can actually help me think more critically and clearly about my priorities. And I'm thinking, you know, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna give up social media for that. I think that'll be a good experiment, because I wasn't convinced that I could do it and get away with it at that time.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  And then, we have a number of people on our team, particularly social media person and our main video person, they're graduating on to different projects. And so, we're rethinking a lot of things. Do we still want to do this? How do we approach this more creatively? Do we want to bring someone else in? And you came to see us kind of at the perfect time, because if there's ever a moment where you're open to change, it's when you've got a lot of transitionings happening around you. And we all had that going on at individual levels, but also at a collective level. Josh and I were having conversations about what we wanted things to look like going forward. So you come in, and for me, you not only sort of solidified in my mind the choice I wanted

• 6:14Speaker 02

  to make, but then you also convinced me to just keep it going for the rest of the year. Why stop at Lent? That's kind of like an arbitrary stopping point. Why not just push myself and do it for the rest of the year? And you did the same for Josh, and I think that simplified a lot of things for him and gave him the opportunity to say, not only do I get to do this experiment for the personal development benefits, but also, it allows me to step back and gives me time to think about what our social media strategy should be without having to be reactive about it. And so, that's when we took that, the rest of that year off. And yeah, I'll pause there, and I can talk a little bit about what it was like coming back.

• 6:54Cal Newport?

  Right, okay, so now we're getting into the nitty gritty here. So, and when you talk about taking the year off... It's personal social media use for both you and Josh, but also the minimalist writ large, right? So it really was like a pause of most social media activity coming out of a period where, as we just described, it was like a really big piece of what was going on. What were the pain points, though? Right? This is what I'm trying to remember. I remember talking to both of you at the time and that you were eager to do this and I was giving a push. But what I don't remember exactly was, what were the pain points that you were feeling individually and then maybe as a business that really had the whole team thinking about

• 7:38Cal Newport?

  taking this pause?

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's distinct from the pain points of saying, we're going to take a break. These are the pain points that made us a little more open.

• 7:50Cal Newport?

  Yeah, and then we'll get into all of the pain of actually doing it because I do not want to whitewash that.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  Right, right. So the pain point for the minimalist side is, we had some hard decisions we needed to make about who's going to step into the role of the people that are leaving. We've got a dedicated social media person that's graduating to a different project. We've got a dedicated video person that's graduating to different projects. And if we're going to keep, to maintain the status quo, then we're going to have to bring new people in. Now, that's not the biggest pain point. Lots of podcasts, lots of shows go through transitions like that where you're, you know, hiring new people, bringing on new talent. But that was a pain point because when you've got great chemistry with the people that

• 8:39Speaker 02

  you work with, you have a system that's pretty, you know, well-oiled, it makes you say, my gosh, are we going to be able to find the right person? Should we take this as an opportunity to maybe do something a little bit different? But that was one of the pain points, you know, losing those people. Another pain point is just the time. We were starting to really enjoy things like the live shows. I'm really enjoying the clutter counseling stuff. And we've got a number of things going on that we want to do, like the course that we're working on, or the book projects that we're having discussions about. And social media has a way of keeping you pretty busy. And it takes a lot of dedication to have reels and

• 9:22Speaker 02

  highlights and tweets going up every single day. And so we started to wonder if that was holding us back. If maybe if we had more time and more attention and more energy on other things, maybe even if we took hits in that area, we could grow in new ways. And so that was a big, you know, question for us and a big what if in our minds. Trying to think, I think those would be the main pain points for what kind of made us a little bit more open to the idea.

• 9:50Cal Newport?

  No, I like those because I think what that establishes is the experimental nature of the pause, which is something I want to underscore, right, is because it's a different framing. I think when a lot of people think about social media, or removing it from their business or from their life, it's often coming from a point of resistance, or I'm fed up with this, or I'm pushing back on this, which is all good. But there's this other element, right? You were coming into it not, I hate this technology now, let's take a stand. It was, we haven't, we don't really know, like, the full role of this in our company, like, how, it has these costs, it might have benefits, we're not sure exactly what those benefits

• 10:35Cal Newport?

  are. There's certain costs to having it in terms of like staffing and time. And it's crept up, its role has crept up in our business in the same way that the role of social media often creeps up in people's lives. I wrote about that in Digital Minimalism, where you're like, oh, I want to see the relationship status of my, my old roommate. This is great. Fast forward six years, you're on, you know, on this thing scrolling through like 19 hours a day, your eyes are bleeding, like, what did this happen? And so there's really a, what I'm picking up is there was like an actual spirit of inquiry. Hey, let's try to understand better, what is really going on with this technology? Now, in your, in terms of your personal relationship, though, because you were thinking about, even if the minimalist

• 11:16Cal Newport?

  writ large did not take a pause, you were, already had taken a pause for Lent at the time. What was your? I would almost say like spiritual relationship with social media at that time. In other words, like its impact on you and your sense of, you know, values in life. Well, like what was going on with your personal relationship? How was it making you feel?

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, first I just want to say like with with respect to the example you gave of you're looking at the relationship status from someone that you used to date. And then, you know, six years later, you're spending 19 hours a day on this thing. I think about this short story that I watched many years ago. And it was about this really old woman who knew that her day for death was coming. But the angel of death had a constraint where he needed to get her to open the door to her home before he could enter and take her home. And so she was aware of this constraint. And so she made a promise to herself that she's never going to open that door for anyone because of the sheer possibility that it might be the angel of death. And so he tried to get her to open the door under many different guises.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  He pretended to be a delivery guy with a very valuable package from a loved one or a long lost friend. He pretended to be a lawyer who has information about a great inheritance she received that they've been looking for for years. You know, he pretended to be a salesperson, a plumber coming to check on an appliance. And every single time she says, no, I'm not going to open this door. But then one day he walks up to the door and he begins to scream as if he's in pain. She perks up her ears and moves towards the door. And he says, I'm hurt. I'm hurting so bad. And he pretends to have fallen to hurt his leg. And he says, if you can just help me, if you can just provide any help. And you can see that it's really pulling on her heartstrings because she's so tender hearted.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  And she opens the door and she brings him in and she begins to help him. And at one moment, as she's helping him, she looks him in the eyes and she knows. And she just has a moment like, darn it, I bought your story. I let you into my home and now it's time for me to call it quits because it's over. Life as I knew it is over. And I think the the smartphone, I think, social media is in many ways kind of like that angel of death. It knows that it can get us, but it just needs the right story for you. There's a story that Everyone is capable of telling themselves that will make them say, yeah, yeah, I hear you, Cal. I hear all this stuff and you're mostly right, but for me, I need it for XYZ.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  And that's when the angel of death says, you got it. And we opened the door and we let it in and it's all over at that point. So that's kind of like how I, how I see exactly what you're talking about, that pattern. But you know, where I was like spiritually in terms of my relationship to the phone. This goes back to something that I did several years ago where I, I, I was dealing with the, the, the heartbreak of a failed startup, a number of projects that I was really excited about. And, and so many of the things that I was doing at that, at that stage in my life, they felt really permission based. It felt like I had to make these presentations for wealthy people that had the power to change my life. And get them to write a check, get them to green light a project.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  And if they said no, then I couldn't express my creativity. So I'm always auditioning for the money or the green light. So I could express my creativity. And one day I'm thinking to myself, I just want to do something that feels permissionless. Even if it doesn't make me money, even if it doesn't succeed. And I had the idea of starting a blog and doing what I called an experiment in personal development. Where I showed up every single day for a year and wrote a blog post. And I had in my mind, I don't care if the writing is terrible. I don't care if it's short, if it's long, if it's not very good, if no one reads it. I need to know what in the world would happen to me if I showed up every day for a year and did something

• 15:13Speaker 02

  that I thought was difficult and that I've never done before. And so I did that. And three years later, I was blogging every single day and I had a three year streak. And the person that I was after that was so substantively different in ways that I couldn't predict. I've been, I've been preoccupied ever since with that notion of experiments and personal development. Exploring the possibilities of who I might become by doing difficult things that I don't have to do for reasons that are not morally compulsive. But simply because they challenged me. And I felt that way about social media. I thought to myself, well, who might I become? What possibilities might emerge in terms of my habits?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  In terms of where my thoughts go if I take a break from this? And so that was my mentality going into it.

• 16:02Cal Newport?

  Fascinating. Who might I become? I appreciate that. Think about how many people don't have an answer to that question right now. So what did become? So this is now the question. The break happens.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:14Cal Newport?

  The good, the bad, the unexpected. What's the unvarnished view or description of what started to happen as you unfolded this experiment?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  One of my first experiences was I would have these thoughts. And my instinct was to pick them up and tweet them or to create something on Instagram or record myself ripping on it. And when I couldn't do that, I had to do something else with the thought. And you know what I did with the thought? I held on to it and I thought about it some more. And because I didn't have that release of being able to immediately broadcast a line of thought that I thought was interesting, I engaged in more self-communion. In order to get that fulfillment, I would take a walk and I'd tell myself the thought. And I'd ask myself, well, why is that interesting to me? Why do I care about that?

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Why is that even worth tweeting? And then I'd just go deeper with that thought and I'd sit with it for a while. And it would take me places that I'd begin to realize, hmm, social media is kind of preventing me from that because it gives me this easy out. But when I have to hold on to it, I go a little deeper in my thinking. And I think I'm liking this, not just the way it feels, but the promise of where that might lead and how good that might be for me. That was a big thing. The second thing is, I began to remember something that I had completely forgotten. My first job after college was as a financial advisor at American Express. And you had to have all of these financial licenses before you could begin practicing.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  And the deal they had at that time was if they hire you, they will finance the entire process of you getting your licenses and so on. But you had to come in and you had to study their materials and take their classes. And then you would be immediately terminated because of that investment in you if you went and took a test and you failed. So it was like high pressure, high stakes, but you had a ton of support. And I remember we would go to the office, me and like five other like new advisors. And from about eight in the morning until about six at night, we would do nothing other than sit in our cubicles and read books about all the different things. And we would sometimes take breaks to go into a class where we could ask questions

• 18:35Speaker 02

  and we'd have things written on the whiteboard and all that kind of stuff. And during that time, it was very difficult for me, probably for at least the first few weeks, but there came this point where I really locked in and I discovered something that my college life never brought out of me. And that was the ability to sit down and read for like six, seven hours straight and to just really be locked in and understand what I read. It was very specific to that point in life, to that stage of life. And when I'm off social media, I start to remember that. And I started to realize that my attention span wasn't as good as it used to be. My ability to follow a sustained passage of thought was really weak. Like I was out of shape.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  It's almost as if, you know, these memories begin to well up of being a marathon runner and feeling how good it was to be out there on the track and just all of the joy of that to feeling like if I go up one flight of stairs just to get into my apartment, I'm huffing and puffing and feeling like I'm gonna die. And that recognition made me hunger for more of that. And by the time I got to, hey, our year is up, I was pretty scared. I was thinking, oh, I don't know if I want to go back. I don't know if it's good for me to go back. I'm thinking more. I think my brain is starting to wake up.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  I don't see myself as a deep cat, but there's some rubble that's starting to clear that's starting to clear away and the depths are greater than I thought. And I really do love to read and I kind of forgot that. I get a lot of joy out of it. There's no sense of I need to do this to be successful, but man, this is incredibly fun. And I want more space for that. And so I'm starting to experience that fear as time is coming to an end because I don't know what I want to do and I don't have a philosophy at that time for how I what role I want this to play in my life.

• 20:34Cal Newport?

  So you're feeling as this experiment's going on, you're feeling, as you said, the rubble clearing, these new depths, reacquainting with long thought. I sometimes call it long thinking, being noticing the world, being there with their books. On the business side, how much did this hurt? Like just the day to day revenue of the company? Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

• 21:01Speaker 03

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• 21:26Cal Newport?

  It's tax season, which is a complicated time for a lot of people because it forces you to confront what you did with your money in the year that just passed. Wouldn't it be better if instead of just looking backwards, you could look at what is happening right now with your finances and make better decisions along the way? This is where Monarch enters the scene. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life, budgeting, accounts and investments, net worth and future planning, together in one dashboard, accessible on your phone or laptop. Now, let me tell you two things I really like about Monarch. First, its interface is beautiful. It shows you what's going on in your finances in a way that

• 22:11Cal Newport?

  It looks great and is easy to grasp. It makes it more pleasurable to check in, which means you check in more often and stay better on top of your money. They also have a weekly recap feature, which I love because that's the rhythm at which I personally like to check in on my money. More recently, they've added AI tools like an AI assistant, which can answer questions about trends in your spending. Or for example, help you come up with a plan to pay off your debt. It's like having a financial advisor you can talk to 24/7. So you should set yourself up for financial success for the year ahead and achieve your financial goals for good using Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes money management simple. Good news.

• 22:52Cal Newport?

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• 23:04Cal Newport?

  I also want to talk about our friends at Factor. Look, I'm working on my health this year and a key part of my strategy is automating breakfast and lunch. Just easy and healthy things I do without thinking about it. So I can just simplify like two-thirds of my eating throughout the day. This is where Factor has really helped me out. It provides fully prepared meals designed by dietitian and crafted by chefs. They're ready in two minutes with no planning and no cooking. Now you can select options online from 100 rotating weekly meals to help keep things fresh and delicious. Options include things like high protein meals or calorie smart meals or Mediterranean diet or GLP-1 support, and even ready to eat salads. Now they ship them right to your door fresh. You refrigerate them. They're not frozen.

• 23:48Cal Newport?

  No prep. You cook them in the microwave, takes a handful of minutes and you are good. What I like best about it is that the food itself is good for you. We're talking quality functional ingredients, including lean proteins, colorful veggies, whole food ingredients and healthy fats. No refined sugars, no artificial sweeteners, no refined seed oils. Just good tasting food you know is good for you. So you can just automate, throw in a Factor meal, you know you're getting the good stuff. Head to factormeals.com/deep50off and use the code DEEP50OFF, DEEP the number 50 OFF, to get 50% off and free breakfast for an entire year. That's factormeals.com/deep50off

• 24:30Cal Newport?

  using code DEEP50OFF. Only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with Factor. All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it hurt in a few ways. First, when we announced it, there were a lot of people, and I was surprised. There were a lot of people who felt very disappointed. There were some who felt like it was a selfish move. You know, we're taking our spiritual journey, or we're taking kind of like this emotional driven need to experiment. And we thought you guys were one of the positive forces on social media. There's so much junk out there, and your show was part of a short list of shows that I watched to get my mind off of the news, to get my mind off of the controversial stuff. And now you're taking that away. Maybe you should think about something more than yourself. That was.

• 25:23Cal Newport?

  Is this like when you leave the bar, and your friends at the bar are like, you're a reasonable drinker. If you go, it's just going to be us and the drunks at the end of the bar, and I don't want to be hanging out with them. It's like, come on, you gotta stay.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. So there was definitely some of that. But then there's this other part where you're not posting on social media anymore. And the algorithm says, well, you're not being very useful to me. So I'm not going to remind people that you exist. Because we're not in the old world of social media anymore, where you decide who you're going to follow, and you see the people that you follow. And I know you talk about this a lot. But the algorithm says, all right, I'm going to show your followers the people that are posting. And since most people are consuming social media based on what's showing up for them, we stop getting served up, our social media traffic sort

• 26:22Speaker 02

  of dwindles down. And that means a lot of the onboarding into the larger ecosystem begins to dwindle. Fewer people showing up on YouTube, fewer people signing on for Patreon, and we're taking a hit. And. You know, you feel nervous and you wonder, is this something that you can get away with? Especially when you're in a space where so much of what you do seems to depend on views. So that was a problem. That was a challenge. And it definitely stirred a lot of conversations around, all right, we're keeping this commitment, but what does it look like when the commitment is over?

• 27:02Cal Newport?

  You're seeing dollars go down. Ultimately, you're seeing a concrete.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 27:07Cal Newport?

  And then what are, just so we understand better how these businesses work. So what are the various funnels in which people, when you say coming into your ecosystem? Just so we understand the business, like what, becoming a subscriber to like the podcast, becoming a subscriber to the newsletter, like what's ultimately, what's the destination? And then what were the funnels in which people get to those destinations? And then which of those funnels now were effectively turned off?

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the primary way we make money is through Patreon subscribers. I would say it's a pretty small percentage of Patreon subscribers who finance everything. We don't really make any money off YouTube, off social media, off ads or any of those things. Now, there is a change that we can come back to later where YouTube turned on the ads for our videos. They persisted in turning them on. We can't get them to turn it off. And so now we have ads on our videos as a qualifier, but that's something that we can't control. But everything leads to, in terms of like financing things, it comes through the Patreon subscribers. And so the social media channels, the YouTube channels, the Spotify, all of that stuff,

• 28:18Speaker 02

  it's designed to create interest so people like what they hear and they say, hey, we want more. And we try to deliver a high quality product for all the free viewers. But we do record, you know, two and a half hours of a maximal episode. And we invite people after anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes of an episode to come check out the second half. And that's the primary way. And so when all of that other stuff dwindles down, then that's essentially the commercial, if you will. might hate that language, but that's kind of the commercial for the Patreon. That's how they find out. No one's Googling Patreon's channels that I can support. That's how they

• 28:58Cal Newport?

  So like I might see a couple Instagram videos and like, oh, I like this. I might move from there over to the podcast, either audio or video like, oh, this is great. And then when I'm there, they're like, oh, I want the maximal episode. And now I join Patreon. So you were lopping off the front of that pathway.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. Yeah, it's almost like you've got a clothing store that's located right on the corner of a major intersection. And you get a lot of people who come in who didn't even know about your store or care about your store because they're on vacation. They're out with family. They're waiting on their table for the restaurant next door. And just a lot of people come in and then you say, I'm going to shut this store down. And everything is off, everything is online. That's how you get our clothes. That's a, that's a major change in your, your business.

• 29:49Cal Newport?

  Was there adjustments made? I mean, was it, this is unsustainable, but we can, we can make adjustments. It'll make it sustainable. Or was it sustainable, but you're now just, it's a different level of growth. And like, you know what? That's not what it was before, but hey, this is still a business. We're all still doing okay. Like, how, how are you thinking about the future of the business? Or was it clearly this is unsustainable? We're going to have to turn this back on. What were the thoughts that were emerging about the long-term viability of the business during this period?

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this is interesting because this is where Josh and I are, I think, are processing things a little bit differently. I, I think Josh would say, anything is sustainable if you're willing to make the trade offs involved. Right? And so you can make money and continue building an empire, which we know he'd never call it that. Even if you're not on social media.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  I think for him,

• 30:45Speaker 02

  social media is a positive space where you can do a lot of good things. There was nothing about his time away that made him feel like afraid of social media or afraid of his relationship to it. He learned a lot of things that helps him return to it in a more healthful manner. And so for him, it's, hey, look, if you don't want to do social media, there are things that you could do to make money. But I like social media. I think it's valuable. I think it's a good space. And so let's return to it. But let's not return to it out of fear like, oh, no, the business is breaking down. Let's do all the things that we used to do. But let's return to it mindfully. We're not going to post highlights every day just for the sake of doing it. We're not going to do whatever the algorithm tells us to do.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  We're not going to speak in the language that the algorithm commands us to speak in. Or if we want to say words that the algorithm threatens us for saying, we're going to ignore that and we're going to still do our thing, but in a modified way. And so if you look at social media, minimalist social media today versus minimalist social media before that year, it's a more laid back vibe with less frequent posts, but things that are still kind of like consistent with the mission. That's what I think Josh would say. I think that's a fairly decent representation of his position. Maybe there's some nuance he would have to fill in.

• 32:05Cal Newport?

  And that describes, and that describes basically the, what the company as a whole is doing now. Right. So the people who are working on social media.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 32:12Cal Newport?

  And then what was, because I want to hear, yours is interesting to me, but just to close the loop on the effect of that. So then what's the, this more laid back approach to social media? Where you basically, as you're saying, you eliminated the stuff that like you really didn't like, the like, the drive of every day we have to produce something and that feeling of clutter. Is it, did you find, A, that, you know what? This new style is just as effective. So we just had some wrong assumptions. Or did you find like, maybe it is less effective than the maximal style we're doing before, but it's a good trade off. It's yielding enough growth that like things are sustainable again.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  I think a lot of those things as a team, we're still learning about. But I think the suspicion is less actually can be more. That you don't have to be posting multiple times every day in order to get those benefits that you want. And there's an increasing respect for just how flighty the algorithm could be. And just how careful you should be if you're on those spaces of building your entire vocation or game plan around what the algorithm rewards. Because that might change next week. Next week, the algorithm might be like, hey, a cup of coffee needs to be visible on the screen in order for it to show up in the feed. As a matter of fact, I've got a funny story about that, a funny discovery we made.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  So there was this period where our Instagram views seemed to drop down like out of nowhere. And there was no major change in our posting schedule or the types of stuff we were putting out. And one of our guys looked into it and he was just sort of like Sherlock Holmes-ing this thing, right? Just really digging in. And he finds out that the problem is these mics that we're using are covering our mouths. And so when we're speaking, it's kind of like this. And because our lips are not visible, and it's one of the ways that Instagram detects that this is a video versus a picture. It was sort of showing up as a picture, which is being more suppressed because the thing

• 34:17Speaker 02

  to be promoted is the video. This was his hypothesis, which we kind of laughed at and thought was totally strange. The experiment was let's move the mics and show our lips.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  And so everything went back up after that. And so something like that is so...

• 34:40Speaker 02

  It makes sense as to why it's the case, but there's something about it that just feels so arbitrary and so silly to build your life around, right? And that might not even be a thing in three months or in three years. The game might entirely change. And so a lot of the formulas we come up with, well, you have to post at this time or this many times. A lot of that is stuff we make up or stuff that we correctly guess, but is only true for a time. But it turns out that things are improving and doing better without as much work as what used to be the case. So that closes that loop on that. Now you want to get to

• 35:20Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  my struggle.

• 35:21Cal Newport?

  Yes, and just so we're oriented on a timeline perspective, when was it? When are we talking about now? When did the formal, the broad experiment end? What?

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Professor, you know that? Beginning of 2025. Beginning of 2025.

• 35:36Cal Newport?

  Okay, and I was there in the spring of 2024. So this was like almost a year. Okay, all right. So that's the decision for the minimalist writ large. It's like we're going to be more, a little bit more laid back about the social media and just be more flexible and it'll do what it does. And okay, now let's get into the mind of TK. It's 2025. We get towards the beginning of 2025. How are you feeling?

• 36:02Speaker 02

  I'm feeling very conflicted because I'm enjoying my time off social media, but I'm also convinced that I need to be on it. The sense of needing to be on it is very strong. The sense of you would never make it without this tool is very strong. And there's a rebellious part of me that hates what I believe to be true. You know, it's almost like someone telling you, hey, Cal, in order to be a somebody in this world, in order to be relevant, in order for anybody to watch your podcast, you have to wear Nike clothes and the logo has to be visible. I suppose you could live with that, but there might be a part of you that's self-respecting enough to say, I don't like that.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't mind Nike. I don't really hate them, but I don't like believing that I have to do that in order to succeed. Something feels wrong about that. And so that's where I am emotionally at that time. And I guess I come on to social media in a very casual sense. I download the apps again and I I log back on. But every time I try to post, it feels like I'm forcing it. It feels like I'm posting something for no other reason than that I can and that I probably should because I probably should keep things going. And you have a channel that's got, you know, your personal channel over thirty thousand followers. And that's not a whole lot comparatively speaking,

• 37:29Speaker 02

  but it's probably irresponsible to not take advantage of that in some kind of way. So I probably should be posting. And there was never any post where I'm thinking, this is something that I gotta put out. This is something that I gotta share. Every time I shared something, I just felt a little bit cheap. You know, I just felt a little bit cheap. And I'm thinking, hmm, I don't know. I don't like this. I'm not doing this very well. I'm back on here, but I have no consistency with my posts. My posts have no theme at all. I probably should be more consistent, but I I don't want to do that. And I start to even think, and I'm not done with this thought process.

• 38:11Speaker 02

  I start to think, maybe, maybe I should be an electrician like my brother. Really? His career doesn't require him to be online. He does very well. No one knows who he is outside of physical space. And

• 38:34Speaker 02

  I could focus in on that. I could learn on that. I think I have a pretty solid ability to, you know, enjoy things and and manufacture meaning and passion out of mastery, like you talk about in So Good They Can't Ignore You. Maybe I should do that. And I go, where's that thought coming from?

• 38:55Speaker 02

  And it was an expression of my desire to be free of feeling like I have to be on here. You know, and so I started to think like that. And when I say that thought process is still ongoing, what I mean is I haven't closed the door on the possibility of choosing something other than this media space as the primary means by which I provide for my family. That's still an open topic for me. And that could take many different forms, and I'm still sort of wrestling with that. I think I love media space so much that in some shape, form, or fashion, I'll always show up and do stuff.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  But that could just be TK showing up and doing stuff in a way that's entirely separated from money, and that's just TK doing a hobby. Now, it also could show up as TK next week, launching his new podcast, having sponsorships, and doing his thing. I'm not dogmatic in either direction, but my wheels have been turning that way, and that's kind of a, just gives you a sense of how deeply uncomfortable I felt with this stuff and how much I'm wrestling.

• 40:03Cal Newport?

  Did you realize you were feeling that way before you actually took that time to pause? To what degree did the pause help clarify for you the fact that there is this conflict going on internally?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Well, remember how I talked about the thoughts that I wasn't tweeting out and how I was spending more time thinking about those thoughts? I also had experiences where the impulse to take pictures of things went away when I couldn't share them on social media. And that sort of got redirected to talking with my wife more about the day or about interesting observations. And I noticed in a way that wasn't quite intentional that I started to do more things, like more volunteering at my church and my wife and I trying out new things more, like, going to the botanical garden more.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  And it was almost as if there was kind of like this, this natural desire for novelty, this natural desire to connect with humans, to see things, to even show off what I saw. And it wasn't being fulfilled by social media, and so I'm starting to experience this in space. And

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Those are things that I experienced before all this smartphone stuff. But I was starting to wake up to them again and experience it at a later stage in life. And so as I, so that kind of led to me being nervous about getting on. What is that going to take away from me? But once I get on, the things that I was doing just felt so empty and vacuous and kind of vain compared to what I was doing before. You know, I have these, I mentioned Steve Patterson. I have an hour long conversation with him every month. And it's just us arguing about philosophy. And we basically just take a topic. The assignment that we most recently talked about was Barclay's Dialogues.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  And we both just committed to reading those. And then we just got on the phone for an hour, no cameras. We argued about it. We didn't record the conversation. Those are the kinds of things that started to happen more. And I feel like those things give me more meaning than the stuff that I was doing on social media. And that's not, that's not a moral position. That's not a, that's not a judgment about other people that are on there and the content they're creating. But that was sort of the dominant feeling. Does that make sense?

• 42:34Cal Newport?

  So it's, I mean, it's kind of ironic. The part that makes sense is you are exposed to things, more of things that were important to you when you were taking the break. And then that helped you understand their importance. And then when you returned, you saw the vacuousness. But there's this ironic piece as well to this, which I think is, social media has this self-defense mechanism where it puts enough rubble around your brain that you don't actually have the practice or cognitive space to actually work through the thoughts about, hey, how is this thing affecting me? Or what are my possibilities? It distracts you too much from being able to think about the cost of the distraction. Because that's a complicated, uncomfortable thought that requires you're on a long walk and you're coming back to it again.

• 43:17Cal Newport?

  And you're seeing a feeling and you're noticing a feeling and you're sticking with the feeling. And then you're evolving the feeling and then it comes back. And you're updating the frameworks of structure within your own psyche. And so it's like the, maybe the strongest defense that social media has to its own propagation is make it difficult for people to actually think clearly about, hey, what's going on here? But you would say, so people have, what's interesting about this is Josh had a different response. So. Like, the value here is clarity, right? Like, this is not really like, this is not a PSA for this is bad, this is good. And you don't, you won't realize this is bad until you do X, Y, or Z, right? It's a PSA for clarity of, you know, you get clarity about your life, what matters,

• 44:02Cal Newport?

  what doesn't, how things fit in, visions for how your life might go forward. And you can't develop those visions without clarity. And that's, and that's what came out of, not that you're still struggling with it, but you're, you're struggling with the right things now. Like, you, you didn't even know to struggle about that before the bots.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. You know, when, when you talk about the, the struggle and the self-defense mechanism of, of social media, I think of two, two categories of that. The first is the social category. Whenever you talk out loud about these things, no matter how many qualifications you make, no matter how many prefacing remarks you make, you can spend 10 minutes issuing out disclaimers about how non-judgmental you are about all this and how all the people you love are on social media and you realize they're getting a lot of good out of it. And you're going to have to suffer through, with great patience, a number of people responding to that by being like, well, maybe it's just the way you're using it, man. Like, social media is still good, it's positive. Hey, I wouldn't even know you. We wouldn't even have this conversation if it wasn't for social media.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  I love your conversation with Cal Newport, but you know what? If it wasn't for social media, you wouldn't have it. And, and there's something about that that's not just possibly irritating. It, it, it kind of tempts you to think, you know, I am kind of being over-serious about this. And, and, yeah, they're right. What the heck am I doing by even rethinking any of this? That's, that's a powerful social component. The second component is, is this sense of it. Being pragmatically necessary in a way that just you just can't possibly shake it. So the example that I use is imagine that that you're a gambling addict and you're an alcoholic.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  And you want to live a normal life like anybody else. And you're the only grocery store where you can buy your food is in the casino. Your barber is in the casino and all of your friends are in the casino. Now, you know your own weaknesses. And when you walk to the front doors of that casino, you can feel it. You could you could feel yourself like, you know, on the cusp of something that's going to move you in a direction. You don't want to go in. But at the same time, all your friends are there and you don't want to be antisocial. You definitely don't want to be irrelevant and you want to get your haircut, right? And and you need the groceries. Just go in there, stay focused, don't drink, don't gamble, do your thing.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  And somehow every time you do this, it's five hours later. You've knocked back several drinks. You spent several hours at the roulette table. You're a lot poorer because you've spent so much money and in the heat of the moment. You just kind of like, even though you intended, even though you told yourself, you know what? I'm just going to sit down for and play fifty dollars on roulette. And and the only reason I'm sitting down is because my buddy's here at the table and he called me over. And he says, just hang out with me for a few minutes and I'm and I'm here like it's. I'll put a limit on it and then like five hundred dollars later, I'm just I'm miserable and I leave the I leave the casino. And I didn't get my haircut because I used my time on the roulette table. I got some groceries, but not as much as I needed.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  And all of the people who gave me those great arguments about how it's necessary and gave me all of those awesome pointers about how to manage it effectively. I think they're right, but there's something about it that's inconsistent with my lived experience. And at some point, I got to start being true to that, even if it makes me uncomfortable. Well, I'll say this about my appreciation for your work. I think the things you're talking about, and I've been listening to you your entire career, but a heck of a lot more lately as you talk about AI, you talk about the smartphone, you talk about habit formation.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  I think we're at a time where the world is just getting so noisy, but in a way that's good. Entertainment is more addicting than it's ever been. Even the cheapest forms of entertainment are so well-produced that it's difficult to not watch them. Even the commercials that we use to skip past are starting to get so good that they make us want to watch them. It's so easy to just get into that hypnagogic state and then wake up later and say, where did my time go? Where did myself go? And I think about the lyrics to this Kurt Elling song called Finding Neverland, where

• 48:38Speaker 02

  he says, "My friends, every day we go to our everyday work, we return to our everyday homes, we sit in the everyday chair and drink from the everyday cup, but we never allow ourselves to go into the extraordinary places in our hearts and our minds." I ask you, my friend, how do you think a book is written? How do you think a song is born? How do you think a picture is painted? How do you think a race is won? How do you think a world gets started? "If a little daydreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time." When I think about that lyric, I think about how the greatest adventure is to journey

• 49:20Speaker 02

  deep into the interior self, not for the sake of withdrawing from the world, but for the sake of cultivating this ability to look out. Upon the world from the vantage point of of being in those deep spaces in yourself. It's as radical of a change in perspective as it is to like, look at the world from the mountain top, you know, to go to the Grand Canyon and then look at things or to to experience a neighborhood by riding on a bicycle rather than by walking or by driving in a car. How you experience things is so different based on your vantage point. And when your vantage point is being connected to your deep self, it's the most amazing vantage point to have in life.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  And what you're really showing people is not just tips on how to handle technology, not just perspectives on the smartphone or social media, but really how to find those spaces within themselves where when they look out on the world again, when they have conversations, when they read a book or do things, they're looking at it from the most exciting vantage point possible. And that's what's become most exciting to me. And in this stage of life where I've got the gray on my beard, I'm more excited about life than I ever have been because I just can't wait to know who I get to become by by minimizing my time on these apps, my time on these devices, my face being in the screen.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  And I'll be showing up in some some manner, but my priority will be engaging life from the deep self. And and I and you've really done a lot to help me and others minimize the sense of loss that comes with that.

• 50:58Cal Newport?

  Well, TK, I can't think of a better, more elegant, inspiring way to to bring this conversation to a to a close. I think that captures beautifully like what's at stake here. Going deep into yourself is a journey that we've forgotten about, but it is a it is the best journey. But you have set yourself up now that if you release a long series of TikTok dance videos, we're just going to be disappointed now. See, that's the problem. You've you've you've you've put yourself into a box or those videos where you snap and like different items of clothing change on you or whatever. When we start seeing hours of TK close switching TikTok videos, we're gonna know, we're gonna be disappointed. That's it, man. You're you've boxed yourself in.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Believe me, if you ever see that, I'll be disappointed.

• 51:44Cal Newport?

  There's something else, yeah. If you see that, call call the authorities. Sean has a gun right off screen. We need more subscribers, TK.

• 51:55Cal Newport?

  More TikToks. All right, TK, always a pleasure. Thank you for coming on the show. We had a great conversation.

• 52:03Speaker 04

  Likewise, man. It's an honor.

• 52:05Cal Newport?

  All right. So there we go, Jesse. That was my conversation with TK Coleman. I'll tell you, probably the most poignant part of our discussion for me is when TK started to get sort of self-reflective about the role social media was playing in his life and him being uncomfortable about it being back in his life. The most poignant point for me is when he said, and I'm kind of paraphrasing, "Sometimes I feel like I should just become an electrician like my brother." And he went on to elaborate, "If you're an electrician, there's no audience that has to like follow what you're doing. There's no one to get mad at you or to applaud you for your take on things. There's no one that's waiting for your next missive. You just go into the world and do a skilled thing that people appreciate." So you could really

• 52:50Cal Newport?

  tell he was struggling.

• 52:52Speaker 04

  Two of my best buddies are electricians. It's actually a pretty tough job.

• 52:55Cal Newport?

  It's a really good job.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  It's also tough because they have to deal with like a lot of like the whys. They're very difficult and like they can-

• 53:01Cal Newport?

  Are they residential electricians? So I have a buddy who's a builder, like a commercial real estate family. And he said, "The best job is commercial electrician." So you're not dealing with like the homeowners who are terrible, let's be honest. And it's like really complicated, big jobs are way more interesting because I think the residential jobs are pretty straightforward. Who writes about this? Matt Crawford writes about this. The shop class is Soulcraft. He was an electrician apprentice. And he talks about in that book, he has a very poignant scene about the art and simple satisfactions of bending wire conduit. So if you're doing commercial electricity, you might have, you know, 30 major wires come

• 53:44Cal Newport?

  into a giant junction box and they all have to have metal pipe that they come in. And how do you bend them all so all of those pipes can come out and fit together? And he was like, "That was so much more satisfying than all of my work as a think tank knowledge worker." But anyways, I think that was a good discussion. And I loved how TK got personal. I loved how his takeaways were different than Joshua's. And that gets to the core of the social media pause, which is learning. And I really want to emphasize that because I think, again, I mentioned this in the intro to the show, but there's often emphasis in a social media discourse about detoxing. I just want to sort of clear out these toxins for my system before I return to the activity, which I don't think is particularly useful. Or a sort of more reactionary, I don't like Elon Musk. It's a political statement, which is fine.

• 54:27Cal Newport?

  I think anything that gets you off social media is probably good. But what most people really need, they have a complicated relationship with social media. It's a love, hate, practical, impractical relationship. They need self-knowledge about what was I missing? What is it doing to my life? What was actually useful? If that's what's useful, and this other stuff was garbage, can I reintroduce just this into my life and not these other things? Or you get that feeling like TK had. He described the feeling of rubble in his brain. He didn't realize what's happening until he took a social media pause. It was like, oh, I'm not, I wasn't thinking clearly. And I didn't realize I wasn't thinking clearly until I stopped. So I love this idea as an experiment. All right. I'm going to give you advice about this.

• 55:09Cal Newport?

  I've got four points for successfully deploying a social media pause in your own work or life. All right. Point number one, define the pause with specificity. Okay? So you need to be clear about what you're going to stop do, what you're going to stop doing during the pause and what you're going to continue doing. And the things that you're going to continue to do, what rules you're going to put around it. A lot of people have some sort of background activity, it might be related to their job or connected to something else they do, like a running club that they're a part of, or they need some social media engagement. So just be clear about it. I'm doing A and B with these rules and nothing else, right? So be very clear about the parameters of your pause. If it's just, I want to try to use this stuff less, but I still have to use some, it'll fall apart. Piece of advice number two, define its duration.

• 55:53Cal Newport?

  Specifically, how long are you going to go during the pause? I think 30 days is a good amount for most people. That was the minimalist original idea. It's also the amount I suggest in my 2019 book, Digital Minimalism. And so there's a lot of success. 30 days is enough time to gain some real insight, but it's not overly onerous. Advice number three, you need to experiment and reflect during the pause. So you need to try out other things to try to rediscover other modes of living and activities that are important to you that have been diluted through the use of social media and do self-reflection. What's going on? What am I feeling? Why am I feeling it? I mean, we saw TK doing this type of self-reflection in real time in our conversation.

• 56:34Cal Newport?

  He was trying to grapple with, why do I feel this antipathy towards this technology? What is it doing to my life? What am I going to lose? He was being really clear about it. There's huge cost for someone in his job to not be aggressively engaging in these tools. And you've got to do this self-reflection during the pause. And then finally, when it's over, you have to debrief and decide. What did I learn? What concrete changes in my life going forward does that point towards? If you miss that last stage, you're going to miss all the value of actually doing the social media pause. So there you go, Jesse, the social media pause. My social media pause experiment is just coming up on its 20th year. So it's a pretty long pause.

• 57:18Cal Newport?

  It's been a long one, but we'll see what happens. I'm going to end it one day, like I've decided I need to spend, I missed a lot. I need to be on TikTok a lot more.

• 57:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:27Cal Newport?

  A lot of TikToks. A lot of, a lot of inappropriate TikToks are coming your way. Once I'm done with my social media pause, so be ready for that. All right, we're going to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 58:07Cal Newport?

  I want to talk about MyBodyTutor, a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, lack of consistency. Now, here's how it works. When you sign up, you're assigned a coach. The coach helps you figure out a nutrition and exercise program that fits your goals and your life circumstances. And then, and here's the key part, you check in with that coach daily using the MyBodyTutor app. You report what you ate, what exercise you did, or what questions you have. This is why MyBodyTutor works. That accountability, you know, you're going to check in with your coach every day. So you're much more likely to stick to the plan. And the fact that the plan is customized for you makes it much easier to stick for it.

• 58:50Cal Newport?

  Let's say there's some issue, like you're going on vacation, or you're sick, or whatever. Your coach can help adjust the plan. So that the friction points that might knock you out of your, your health journey are reduced. I really think if you want to get healthier this year, you have to look at MyBodyTutor. It's a system that actually works. So go over to MyBodyTutor.com and sign up today. That's MyBodyTutor, T U T O R dot com to sign up. If you mention deep questions when you sign up, they will give you $50 off your first month over at MyBodyTutor.com. I also want to talk about our friends at Wayfair. Something I'm going to discuss at the end of today's episode is our ongoing efforts to renovate part of the Deep Work HQ.

• 59:34Cal Newport?

  We're talking stuff on the walls, all sorts of new lights. We're even putting in a video arcade machine. And you know what my secret weapon is in this process? Wayfair. Wayfair makes it easy to find exactly what fits your styles and needs. What you need to upgrade your space with quality pieces that work, that will stay within your budget, plus also give you fast shipping and easy assembly options. Wayfair can match your aesthetic, like whatever aesthetic you like, you can do it. Like here in the Deep Work HQ, Jesse and I are leaning into 19th century circus. We thought that would be kind of like the appropriate vibe that we're going for. It's not just indoor furniture. They have outdoor furniture. They have decorations. They have organizational solutions. They have kid stuff, desks, chairs, and more. They make it easy to order.

• 1:00:18Cal Newport?

  The shipping is fast, the prices are good, and the pieces are quality. It's everything you need to make your spaces your own. Find furniture, decor, and essentials to fit your unique style and budget. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W A Y F A I R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show. All right, you've heard from me. Now we want to hear from you. So let's open up our inbox. A quick reminder, if you have a question for me, or you want to share a case study, or you want to try to trick me into doing a rant, we have a new email address for you. You can send that in straight to [email protected]. We'll try to get the most

• 1:01:02Cal Newport?

  interesting stuff on the air. All right, let's get into it. We have some messages from the inbox to cover. Jesse, what message do we have here first?

• 1:01:10Speaker 04

  First message is from an Oxford professor named Nuno.

• 1:01:14Cal Newport?

  Oh, I like this one. We're getting a high class of correspondence here, Jesse. I'm impressed. We got Oxford professors. All right, I'm going to read this message here from Nuno. "I'm a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. I'm a big fan of your work, and I am always on the lookout for deep work stories in history. Here's one below, which I published in my newsletter." All right, so Nuno sent me a newsletter. He had written about a historical figure who basically discovered deep work and why this was important during that period. So what I'm going to do here is I've captured a few excerpts from this newsletter. I'm going to read to you now. There's a lot of allusion in here, so just keep in mind, I'm cutting things out. But let me read you these

• 1:01:58Cal Newport?

  excerpts from this newsletter, because I think it's really interesting. All right, it starts as follows. "Those who are into productivity know the New York Times bestselling Deep Work." Bestseller Deep Work. "A little aside, Jesse, Deep Work was never a New York Times bestseller. I've had many New York Times bestsellers, but Deep Work was not. It's never been on the list. Two million copies in, never been on the list." All right, anyways, what I'm trying to say here is, Nuno, I'm fact checking you, and I'm going to drum you out of academia. You can't make those type of mistakes. None on my watch. All right, let's get back into it. "In this book, Cal Newport argues that having uninterrupted blocks of time for work leads to a more productive life. But did these distractions exist in the early modern period? The short answer is, they did. Yet they took a different

• 1:02:43Cal Newport?

  and more interesting form than current distractions." All right, later on, Nuno elaborates. "Books were a leading distraction in the early modern period, and how envious we should be of those times. From the 1500s onward, with the development of the printing press and the humanist revival of ancient philosophies, knowledge became available at a much greater pace than ever before." As this great Harvard historian explains, scholars felt there were too much to know. In order to capture and control the avalanche of information that came their way, a question that we still have today, readers developed new note-taking techniques. In the 16th and 17th centuries, they copied excerpts of what they read into notebooks, which they were later recopied into a master notebook called a Book of Commonplaces. Yet, even then, there are problems.

• 1:03:27Cal Newport?

  Nicholas Stino, the main character of my new book, The Traveling Anatomist, faced all these challenges during his university studies in the late 1650s. His way of tackling them shaped his work productivity in significant ways, making him one of the most significant scientists of his time. As an advanced university student, he learned to focus on specific themes. Rather than letting his mind read multiple things quickly, a "harmful hastening should be avoided," as he put it, his solution was to "stick to one topic." In practice, this meant blocking specific moments of time to go through the hardest tasks. As he wrote in his personal notebook, "Before noon, nothing must be done except medical things." I'll stop there, Jesse, because I think this is fascinating.

• 1:04:12Cal Newport?

  We see, early on, or in the 1600s, we see the emergence of psychologically-oriented productivity. This is the type of productivity I talk about, where you acknowledge the reality of your brain and how it functions when thinking about the best way to approach your work. And they realized, because knowledge work was becoming a thing that didn't exist before, you had to have knowledge to even process and produce new knowledge for there to be knowledge work. And the printing press actually made knowledge work something to still have a small number of people, but you had a whole class of scholars now, so it became a job. I think this is important, because if you go back to the actually ancient period, let's go back to the Greek philosophers, there were like six dudes doing this, right? It was Socrates and a couple others.

• 1:04:56Cal Newport?

  It was Pythagoras or whatever. Because it was just really hard to get even the information you needed to process and think about, right? But by the early modern period, as talked about in this essay, you had books. So now, more people, more people could be a professional scholar class. And what did they invent right away? Time blocking, deep work, focus. All right, you've got to be careful of what you want to work on. You want to keep your mind on one thing at a time, and you want to block the time, because it requires time that you otherwise aren't going to spend concentrating unless you put it aside ahead of time. So a lot of the ideas I talked about seem like they emerged at the very beginning of knowledge work. What don't you see in this study? How do I optimize the number of tasks I get through? How do I build, you know, a complex system to automatically prioritize what I'm working on?

• 1:05:41Cal Newport?

  Let me build like really elaborate productivity philosophies. No, it was the main thing is the main thing, which is focusing hard on a, in a narrow area for time that I've blocked off in advance. Those key ideas were there from the very beginning. So there we go. Interesting letter. Nuno. All right. What's the second message we have, Jesse?

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

  All right. Next message is from a programmer named William on a tool suggestion.

• 1:06:07Cal Newport?

  All right, let's see here. Let's get, let's get technical. William says, I'm going to keep it brief. Try Obsidian. You'll love the flexibility of the system and the utility. A simple Obsidian system has felt like a digital revelation to keep an eye on task and not let it become overwhelming. Make up at what you will. Backlinks is by far the best feature for me, capturing hardware engineering notes, meeting and daily notes. It's hard at first and it becomes easier every day. I strongly encourage you to go through it and understand it before you think of it like a normal task manager. It's the ultimate system of systems designer. All right. Have you heard of Obsidian, Jesse?

• 1:06:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, from you.

• 1:06:43Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it kind of is around, I mean, programmer and programmer adjacent people like this. So I kind of know it from computer science circles, but it's, it's kind of spreading. It's a little bit technical. Here's the main idea. Okay, so let me give you the quick primer on why people like Obsidian. It is a system for organizing information that is based on plain text files. So there's not some proprietary database existing in the cloud somewhere where all of your data is stored and then some sort of application on your phone is talking to that database to retrieve information, which it then shows and it's all locked in there. Instead, all of the information in your Obsidian system is just plain text files on your computer.

• 1:07:22Cal Newport?

  And what you do is there's a special collection of formatting tags and I don't know what you would call it, formatting elements, plain text formatting elements that you can add to these plain text files. So like if you want something to be a header, you might put two asterisks on either side of the phrase, right? And that indicates this text is supposed to be like a header. Or if it's part of a to do list, maybe you have two square brackets and a square next to something and that indicates it's all plain text. Like this is a to do list element, right? So it's all plain text. This is called Markdown, where you have this particular plain text elements you add to try to put formatting cues. And then anyone can write an Obsidian Viewer app that can load up these files from your

• 1:08:06Cal Newport?

  system and then display them properly. So where it sees you have the asterisks that mean there should be a header, it'll display that text as a header. Or where it sees the square brackets next to an item that you're trying to say this is a task, it'll make it like a to do list when it displays it. So you can have a whole competitive ecosystem of different people writing readers to display what's in these text files and for you to write and have them store in these text files. So there's like no one program you need. It's like an agreement of here's how we're going to format information in text files and anyone can write a reader for displaying those text files and an editor for editing them, right? So that, so it's all sort of simple and it's all local. Now, what makes this really exciting for people is it's easy to process text files.

• 1:08:49Cal Newport?

  So like, let's say you want to add a special feature, right? Like you're like, you know, what I want is because this is like very relevant to my work is that certain types of phrases that I think are inspiring, I want when I see those, them to be next to like, you know, a picture of Cal Network flexing or something like that. Well, you could invent, you're like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to have a special little formatting code, like two tildes next to each other. And to me, that means put a picture of Cal Network. And now I can just write, you know, an Obsidian Viewer tool that like when it reads these text files and sees that, it shows a picture of Cal Networks. You can, these are called plugins. You can add all sorts of extra different formatting things, different ways of displaying the information that's all stored underneath it and just plain text files.

• 1:09:33Cal Newport?

  No fancy databases, no fancy format. So that's, that's what Obsidian is. There's a lot of plugins that have extended common Obsidian readers so that you can do a lot of task management stuff. So like you can show task list, you can tag things and just show things that have a certain tag. You can move things in the calendar view or into a Kanban type of board view. And so you can build up in a sort of Lego brick style, complicated bespoke.

• 1:10:01Cal Newport?

  Productivity task management systems on top of the core of just obsidians and plugins for obsidians. You can write your own plugins because it's just text file processing and if you vibe code it, it's like you can do whatever you want. So anyways, programmers like this because it's highly customizable and they love the conceptual simplicity of you could write the most complicated viewers in the world, but the underlying data is just text in text files. Alright, so now the question is, are there, other than the customizability, are there advantages to building task management systems on top of obsidian? I don't personally do that. So what I've done here is I've loaded up a Reddit thread. This is from a few years ago, but the technology is, you know, it's been around

• 1:10:43Cal Newport?

  for a while. And it says, please share how you use obsidian for task management. I thought we'd quickly read a few of these responses to get a sense of what do these obsidian-based task management systems actually look like in practice. Alright, so here's one response. Honestly, after trying all the various plugins and getting as creative as possible, I decided not to use obsidian for task management. It was never designed for this. And even though so much work has gone into various plugins and their abilities, it all just feels really clunky and not as flexible as what I need for task project management. Alright, let's see if we can find another response here. Someone says, I use Obsi, which is an obsidian

• 1:11:23Cal Newport?

  task manager on mobile. Another one says, I'm using Proletarian Wizard for a couple of days. I like it so far, simple and exactly what I need. If I go back up here, someone else says, it's important to have an effective way to organize all your tasks in one place, especially with a heavy workload from uni. Have you tried using obsidian's plugins? If not, might be a good start. There's a plugin called Tasks in obsidian you could check out. It allows you to create, manage, and filter tasks across all of your notes, which sounds exactly like the functionality you need. You can even add due dates to your task and filter them based on priority or deadline. There's also another plugin called Calendar. This might come in handy if you like to see your task and events visually laid out in

• 1:12:04Cal Newport?

  calendar format. It integrates seamlessly with tasks and so on. Alright, so I think we get a feel here, right? Like you find these plugins, you build sort of customized setups that might be hard for the novice user. But if you're used to sort of messing around with text file based systems and scripting, it does give you a big sense of control. This is not new in the computer programmer world. This idea of like organizing your life in text files goes all the way back. We see in like the early 2000s when the term life hacker was coined. I mean, that's kind of a blast from the past, Jesse. People don't use that anymore. But life hacking actually came from a talk where a programmer talked about how people were programmers

• 1:12:46Cal Newport?

  were organizing their lives with text files, with codes and little scripts. And they're doing this in Vim or in Emacs or something like that. So this sort of Obsidian task manager is in the long line of that. Now, in a day of like terminal agents, like Claude Code, where everything is about files and file systems, a lot of programmers are now really thinking about their life as files and file systems and building Claude Code agents to help them organize it. So here's where I land on this. I think this is kind of programmer stuff. It's sort of like model trains a little bit for programmers. It's fun to fit these things together and feel like you have some customization. A little bit of coding might be involved, but easy coding. I don't know that the average person needs this for tasking, tracking task.

• 1:13:30Cal Newport?

  I mean, keep in mind, last week when we had Sarah Hart Unger on the podcast, she doesn't even list task in any system. She just writes them onto her calendar. She has a list somewhere, a big picture of stuff she's working on. And then just each week, she writes tasks on her calendar on particular days or time that she needs to get done. I keep track of tasks, you know, largely in Things 3 and some Trello. I look for just low friction in the interface. I just need a place to store them where I can get to them quickly from multiple devices when I'm planning. So this is probably overkill for most people, but it's interesting to hear about. Obsidian, I mean, it's just one of these things that conceptually is so clean and cool, but it doesn't necessarily mean in practice you're getting something out of it that functionally is way different than you would get from other simpler systems.

• 1:14:13Cal Newport?

  We're kind of in, I like this type of stuff, Jesse, but it's probably not for everyone. All right, do we have one more episode, or one more message, rather?

• 1:14:18Speaker 04

  We do. We have a note from Russell about our film student episode.

• 1:14:22Cal Newport?

  Yes, film students who cannot make it through movies. We'll talk about the end of the show, Jesse, I've watched three movies since the last episode.

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  I like this new addition to the show.

• 1:14:32Cal Newport?

  Like what I'm watching?

• 1:14:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Cal Newport?

  Yeah, three movies last week, and two books. Got a lot to talk about. All right. Well, let's see what Russell said. Russell said, "In my newsletter, I wrote about my experiences doing an exercise I first encountered in Oliver Berkman's 4,000 Weeks, staring at a painting for three hours. It's one of the best actions I've taken ever. I'm forwarding you a copy of the essay because it seemed relevant to your recent episode on film students who can no longer sit through films." Russell's newsletter is called Solvitur Ambulando, S-O-L-V-I-T-U-R-A-M-B-U-L-A-N-D-O, and the essay I'm reading from here is called Solvit, oh no, Solvitur Ambulando is, translates to solve it by walking.

• 1:15:16Cal Newport?

  And the title of this essay is called Staring at a Painting for Three Hours. All right, I'm gonna read a few excerpts. This is like his, from his essay describing, it's notes from his journal, from doing this exercise of staring at a painting for three hours. So he starts by saying he bought a painting the year before by a French-Canadian artist named John Claude Roy, and he had it hung up in his house, in his office in downtown Louisville. And he said, "That's, this is the painting that he was gonna do the three-hour exercise." All right, here's some notes from his first hour of staring at that painting. "I brought my chair around the face to painting. I kept my pen and journal nearby as I wanted to record my impressions, and for use in my essay.

• 1:15:59Cal Newport?

  My phone stayed on my desk. I started a three-hour timer. Besides glancing over to the phone for a time check four times, I did nothing with my phone during those three hours. I didn't touch it. In that first hour, I scrutinized the painting, asking myself, 'What is going on in it? What have I missed before? What patterns exist?' My pen hummed with new observations coming at me thick and fast." It'd be funny, Jesse, if it turned out it was a modernist painting, and it was just a black canvas. Still black. All right, notes from his second hour, second straight hour staring at the painting. I kept asking my what question and it birthed a growing set of why or what really questions. Again, let me share a sample of my notes. Much more pink in this painting than I initially saw. What a curious place to build that red building, rocky, no trees,

• 1:16:43Cal Newport?

  no shade. Why not build it on the brown ridge to the far right, except that where it is, you can see the building clearly. The red building on the gray cliff, is that really a church or a schoolhouse? All right, here's notes from his third straight hour of staring at the painting. Time sped by in the first and second hours, no bathroom break needed now. I steamrolled on, I felt absorbed and wanted to continue my enriching engagement with the painting. In the third hour, again, my questioning made a subtle shift. The why questions from the second hour evolved into who questions. Who was in the painting? Was I in it? And if so, where? Who else was in it? What exactly might those three fishermen be? And how did I experience the painting? This is where he discovered he was actually looking through a window. And why are those people moving? And why are they coming towards

• 1:17:25Cal Newport?

  me? All right, here's a couple reflections that he had from this exercise. It might be obvious at this point, but just in case, let me write it down. I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise and it significantly enhanced my attachment to and appreciation of a piece of art I already admired and savored. In a profound sense, I cannot convey the feelings and wonder of this exercise, like reading the Bhagavad Gita or the Bible, or even noble literature like Jane Eyre. You have to do it yourself. Were we humans meant to scroll, taking snippets of a rapidly passing global experience, or to stare with fixed attention, appreciating our corner of the world and our place in it? I can't answer for all humans, of course, but last week I found the answer for myself. All right, that's a cool essay.

• 1:18:09Cal Newport?

  Staring at a painting for three hours. I'm a big believer, this is like this developing idea I have, I've been working on a few pieces about this, more on that later, kind of confidential for now, but more on that later. This idea that- Cognitive fitness is something we really need to care about in the 21st century. It'll be what physical fitness became in the 20th century, that we need to defend thinking as a tier one skill, not just economically, but at the core of the human experience. And we're going to get more used to in the 21st century, talking about exercises like this, just like we got used to in the 1970s and 80s, talking about doing cardiovascular exercise, an idea that never would have occurred to us before the late 1960s.

• 1:18:50Cal Newport?

  This would be, I think, the physical exercise equivalent of running a half marathon. Took a lot of training. It was hard. It was significant. You felt good about it and it made your body a lot more healthy. Same thing with this. It's non-trivial. It's hard, but it could be a real life-changing experience that makes your mind a lot more healthy. So I like these ideas of treating the mind and focus and concentration and thinking as tier one things at the core of both our economy and our human experience and practicing them and prioritizing them. All right. So Russell, I appreciate you sending in that case study. All right. Before we wrap up this episode, let's quickly check in with what's been going on here in

• 1:19:34Cal Newport?

  the Deep Work HQ. All right, Jesse, we've got a lot to cover here quickly. People like to know what's going on, so we'll give them a quick summary. Changes to the show. Changes to the show. I sent out a request for feedback about the idea of taking my AI content and separating that out into like a separate episode or a separate podcast and not in this main Monday episode. And the feedback was pretty clear. People like, yeah, I think that should be separate. Right? And so I kind of split the difference. My sort of AI reality check content, I'm bringing it out of these Monday episodes, but I'm keeping it in this feed for now. And for now, we're releasing these on Thursdays. Not every Thursday, but Thursday will be the day going forward where we have a short

• 1:20:16Cal Newport?

  episode called AI Reality Check, where I put on my computer science journalist and humanist hats. I put them all on together and it looks really cool. And I look at big, worrisome or attention-catching news from AI from the week before and try to give you a measured response. So. It's out of the Monday episodes, but still in the podcast feed. The first one aired last Thursday. We're doing one this Thursday as well. So check that out. For now, I think in the newsletter, I'll probably keep it as a separate section of our main newsletter to avoid newsletter bloat, but we'll see. Maybe at some point I'll separate that out. Again, always happy to hear comments or feedbacks on this. You can go to [email protected].

• 1:20:56Cal Newport?

  All right. What did I read since we last recorded? I read Tim Wu's book, The Age of Extraction, which is a real, I really like Tim Wu's writing. He's a law professor at Columbia, but writes a lot about technology and technology in the economy and technology in law. And it really talks about the economic model that was ushered in by the large platform monopolies like Meta, like what's going on with Twitter, like what's going on with Tik Tok, how it's economically unproductive and fundamentally extractive of value of the economy in a way that should be corrected in a regulatory sense. And I think it's a great argument that this is not normal. And it's an argument we need to practice as we look ahead to AI. So we don't make the same mistakes that we made back with

• 1:21:39Cal Newport?

  the extractive platforms. I really like that book and I really respect Tim Wu. Also finished up, Ian Leslie has a book out called John and Paul about John Lennon and Paul McCartney. So it's about their song, their history of songwriters. It's broken up into, it's a long book, it's like 400 pages. It's broken up by actual songs. So each chapter focuses on one song that they wrote. And as it tells the story of that song, you learn more about their relationship and the history of the Beatles. There you go. I didn't know that much about the Beatles. I learned a lot. The thing I did reading that book, which I'm sure every single person who read this book did, iPhone, Apple Music right there, constantly playing the songs. Like you get to a chapter, like, oh, I gotta hear the song first. There's a lot of like, hear the song, read about the song, hear the song, read about the song.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:24Cal Newport?

  Which is pretty cool. I've seen three movies since the last time we talked as well. I watched Train Dreams, Netflix movie. It's nominated for Best Picture, beautifully shot.

• 1:22:36Cal Newport?

  So it's director did it almost entirely with natural light. So it's sort of similar to the Alejandro in your A2 movie, The Revenant, which I really like, where they they just use natural light and you can kind of, you could tell. I always think that's a real flex. It had a little bit of that annoying sort of new Netflix thing we talked about a couple of weeks ago, where they have to add every once in a while, heavy handed narration to explain to the viewer who's not fully paying attention, what's going on and what it means and how that person felt. You're not going to see that in like a Terrence Malick movie or something like this, which was of a similar style. So I thought that was interesting. I watched The Hurt Locker, Catherine Bigelow, haven't seen that in a long time.

• 1:23:18Speaker 04

  So you saw it twice?

• 1:23:19Cal Newport?

  I saw it when it came out.

• 1:23:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:22Cal Newport?

  Yeah, but that was, you know, 2009.

• 1:23:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So I was just watching it on wherever it's on. Real shaky cam, naturalistic, high stress, vignette based. It's a good movie. She got best director for that. And then in honor with my, I have a group of friends who watch, we do movie watching. In honor of Robert Redford's passing, we watched Three Days of the Condor, which, which I like. It was one of the first movies to have, which we're now so used to. So we don't recognize this was new, looking at it now, but it was very new then. The, in a paranoid thriller, which was kind of new, this was two years after Watergate, you know, this, Parallax, Humanitarian, Candidate, All the President's Men, you have scenes where Robert Redford is doing inscrutable things with technology and wires and you don't really know what

• 1:24:08Cal Newport?

  he's doing, but it just feels like high tech and super competent. So he's like down with phone, in the phone interchanges at like a hotel and taking out wires and plugging them into like the, the maintenance headset and touching things together. You don't really know what he's doing, other than like, yeah, that's, that's, that's pretty high tech. That's standard now, but that was kind of new back then. They had a computer.

• 1:24:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:24:32Cal Newport?

  They had a computer in there in the opening scene. It was like kind of supposed to be like scanning books and taking in. It was like one of the first movies to do this like techno thriller stuff in a movie. I mean, I guess Adrona Mistrain had that, the Robert Wise version of the, the Michael Crichton book, which would have been earlier. So this, this was around, but it was still kind of new. Westworld was around this time. They had one, a kind of hilarious technology. Where they were tracing the phone call and they're in the headquarters. And so they had a machine and just had like these big like light up options like phone trace and option trace done. And on the screen, they're trying to show like where the phone, you know, it was trying to show like, okay, here's where the call is coming from. It was like a, almost like a microfiche viewer of maps.

• 1:25:17Cal Newport?

  You like saw physical maps behind this like screen, like shifting around rapidly. Like it was actually moving physical maps to show you where the call was coming from. As opposed to just like whatever technology knew where the call was coming from and was translating it into like physical commands to move a map around to show you physically where it is. Why not just display the location? So I thought it was funny. Uh, good movie. Probably the most like 1975 thing of that is that he kidnaps Daryl Hannah by gunpoint because he's like, you know, we got to, I don't want to give away the plot, but he's trying to escape from nefarious dark government forces that are trying to kill him. Kidnaps her, gunpoint, brings her back to her apartment.

• 1:25:58Cal Newport?

  You know, keeps her at gunpoint, ties her up and gags her because he has to go, you know, investigate something and doesn't want her to tell her. Comes back from that love scene. She's like, well, you know, you gotta break an egg to make an omelet. And this guy's pretty attractive. He's got a good haircut. She's like, yeah, he's a good looking guy. Sorry, 1970s. Kidnapped her, tied her gunpoint, like all the worst things. Like, eh, he's a good looking guy. Uh, anyways, uh, that was in tribute of like the late Robert Redford. Uh, all right. Uh, finally upcoming projects. Jesse, I'm finally going through. We're renovating, we're renovating the, the Maker Lab slash producers office here in the Deep Work HQ. You can attest, I have tape on the wall that's now marking up all different things we're going to hang up.

• 1:26:43Speaker 04

  There is tape on the walls.

• 1:26:45Cal Newport?

  It's an impossibly complicated project. There's so many things involved, like this, the things to hang and who's going to hang them, but the things to buy to put in the things you're going to hang and the lights you need, the display on the things that you're going to hang, but also the task light for here and you need a rug that's going to fit here, but you gotta replace the chairs. And it, it had been like really overwhelming, but I spend more time working here now and I really want this space to be like bespoke and like a place like I love being in that is very conducive to being creative. And I have microelectronics maker stuff next to like books where I write and have all of that mindset like in the same room. And so. I'm doing it.

• 1:27:23Speaker 04

  It's a good thing we were next to a hardware store.

• 1:27:25Cal Newport?

  It does help. It does. We're next to a hardware store and above a bar. So like, we're set up. So I can get all the stuff I need, and then after I destroy things and fail to properly build it, I can get a drink. So I think we're doing well. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the main podcast. And on Thursday, check out an AI reality check short episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.