Ep. 362: The Texting Dilemma

When we think about unhealthy phone usage, we think about the flashing apps, like TikTok and Instagram, in which billions of dollars have been spent to grab our attention. In this episode, Cal points to an unassuming culprit that may be just as responsible: simple messaging apps. He explores research that connects the social stress of pending messages to phone addiction, and explores ways to free yourself from constant messaging without having to isolate yourself socially. He then answers listener questions and discusses what he’s been reading. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: The Texting Dilemma [5:35] How can I structure my mornings with my sales job if I don’t have two hours for deep work? [31:44] How should I handle mandatory overtime at my aerospace job? [33:18] How can I handle too many open loops with my shutdown ritual? [35:54] How can I better organize communication with my university students? [40:38] Should I take on extra-curricular roles during my first year of my PhD? [44:00] CALL: Household chore task list [48:01] CASE STUDY: 30-day declutter [51:45] WHAT TO READ: An author quits social media [59:45] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563214007626journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9671478/carolinecrampton.com/im-done-with-social-media/ Thanks to our Sponsors: calderalab.com/deepmiro.comshopify.com/deepgrammarly.com/podcast 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.

• 0:11Cal Newport?

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

• 0:21Cal Newport?

  Once again, I'm recording from an undisclosed location up north, but Jesse, my producer, is joining me from the Deep Work HQ. Jesse, there has been some requests for an update on my writing up here, so I'll give it to you. Last week, we started the episode with me saying I had just thrown out, what was it, like two or three days worth of work? Something like that. Yeah. All right. I was, I was working on a chapter. I thought I had cracked it. I spent two days actually executing my thoughts and then threw it all out moments before we started recording last week. Now I'm happy to report I have finished that chapter. It worked. It's polished and it's submitted.

• 1:02Cal Newport?

  So, you know, it, it took another five days, but I got it done. Now I'm working on the next chapter. So today, again, to give you some insight into what's going on, I thought I knew, I was like, okay, I, I know how this chapter starts. Like the first third I get, the second two thirds, there's some, it's going to take a little bit more research, but let me just write the first third. That was my idea. So I went to a place to write this morning, not to give away too much information about my undisclosed location. But let's just say it was the, the tower room at Dartmouth College for people who know what that is. And I wrote for about 10 minutes and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't really have this worked out as well as I thought.

• 1:43Cal Newport?

  So I walked out of that room and I hiked seven miles. And when I was done with that seven miles of hiking, I had the right pieces for the first third of the next chapter. All right. At least I thought so. I was like, okay, this is, this is much tighter now. I hadn't really thought this through. But then I started getting a little bit of a tickling, a little resistance a little bit earlier again, before we recorded today, I was thinking, This is too much. Like, I think the ideas are right, but I have like one too many ideas here and it's sort of collapsing. So I went for a walk with my wife. We worked it through some more. And just before we started recording, I'm like, okay, there we go. There we are. And I'll start writing that tomorrow. So that this is just updates from what it's like when I'm up north in writing mode. But it's always a battle.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  When you went off that walk initially, did you think you were gonna walk seven miles? Or is that it just took that long?

• 2:34Cal Newport?

  No. So for people who know Dartmouth, I walked down to Pine Park down by Occam Pond. And there's a loop. This is near where my family lived when I was was teaching up there, that fellowship a couple of summers ago. And I did the loop. And then I was like, I gotta do it again. Because I was not done. I was making progress, was not done. So I then did the loop again. So doing that loop twice, plus the time to walk to there and then back in the town afterwards, it, you know, it added up like 12,000 steps, something like that.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  So you submit every chapter?

• 3:05Cal Newport?

  No, it's a good question. No, what in this case, what I was submitting, what I had promised to submit while up here, was a polished version of all of part one of the book, plus the first chapter of part two, so that my editor could not only like, check in on how part one came together. But I wanted to add the first chapter of part two, so she would have a sense of where part two is going. And so, you know, what I actually submitted the other day was 40,000 words. It was all a part one, but plus that chapter. So I had to get that chapter right, before I could submit this massive thing. So it was like the last piece of a large chunk of text I was submitting.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  And that was a deadline set six months ago, or something like that?

• 3:48Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I mean, no, that was more recently. That was like, before I went on the trip, I knew I was close. And I was like, this is my goal for the trip. So, that's the life of a writer, folks. It's a, it's not romantic. I'm sure I'll be back next week saying, I threw out everything. I wrote on my seven, my seven mile hike. But that's all it is. You, you battle for ideas. And then you do your best to execute them. And if it's not quite right, you feel physically uncomfortable. And you throw them out, you try again until you're comfortable with what you have. And then you realize later, you're not. And that's just how it goes. But progress is being made. Anyways, we got a good show for today. We're not just going to talk about my writing. The original plan for the show with which Jesse talked me out

• 4:31Cal Newport?

  of is I thought we needed to do 90 minutes on the firing of Mike Rizzo and Davy Martinez from the Washington Nationals. I thought we need to do like an emergency pod where we get really deep into potential picks for the replacement, you know, president of baseball operations. But Jesse thought that maybe 90 minutes of my thoughts on the proper role of analytics in modern baseball management wasn't quite going to be what you all expect. So instead, we've got a deep dive about a topic that we often overlook when we think about repairing our relationships with our technology. So you're going to get some insight and concrete advice that hopefully allows you to find some depth. We got some good questions. We have a case study and a call in there. And then final segment, what I'm reading, I want to talk about two things. I'm going to talk about a book that just

• 5:16Cal Newport?

  came out that I blurbed and I like, and it reminds me of where I am now. And I'm going to recommend that. And then there's an article I recently read that I also think you are going to enjoy. So stay tuned for that. All right. It sounds like a plan, Jesse. Why don't we get started with our deep dive? Today, I want to talk about a topic that we often overlook when we discuss building a healthy relationship with our phones, and that is messaging. I'm talking texting and iMessage and WhatsApp. We tend to worry more about flashy apps like TikTok and Instagram into which we know that billions of dollars have been invested to try to keep us coming back to them again and again. And by contrast, when we think about messaging, we tend to

• 6:01Cal Newport?

  think of that as sort of simple and old fashioned. It's, you know, getting a note from your kid that they need to be picked up from soccer. It's something that we were doing before smartphones existed. Those apps are plain. They're not flashy. There's not a lot of money invested to them. And so we don't think much about messaging. But what if it's not actually something we can ignore? What if instead of being at the periphery of our issues with smartphone addiction, it is actually at our core, and we just haven't realized it, sort of like the digital version of Kevin Spacey's character in The Usual Suspects? What I'm trying to say here is maybe texting was Kaiser Soze all along. So these are the claims I want to investigate in today's deep dive. I'm going to let this

• 6:41Cal Newport?

  proceed in three acts. All right. So act one, I am calling the problem hiding in plain sight. Now, not long ago, I came across a study, Jesse, I don't know if we can put this up on the screen here. Yeah. It was published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior. It was written by a group of researchers from the Netherlands. So there it is for those who are watching, so just listening. As you can see, the title of this paper is sort of innocuous. It's called Modeling Habitual and Addictive Smartphone Behavior: The Role of Smartphone Usage Types, Emotional Intelligence, Social Stress, Self-Regulation, Age, and Gender. It featured a pretty straightforward experimental design. They just surveyed 386 respondents.

• 7:25Cal Newport?

  But what's interesting is what they found in these surveys. And it's going to set up our whole discussion of textiness, this sort of hidden driver for some people of excessive smartphone use. I'm going to read you three quotes from this study. Quote number one. People who extensively use their smartphones for social purposes develop smartphone habits faster, which in turn might lead to addictive smartphone behavior. Quote two. Social stress positively influences addictive smartphone behavior. Quote three. Men experience less social stress than women and use their smartphones less for social purposes. The result is that women have a higher chance in developing habitual or addictive smartphone behavior.

• 8:10Cal Newport?

  Those three claims, they might be stated sort of simply, but really have in them some really big ideas that I want to highlight for you right now. Here's the first idea we need to pull from those three quotes. They're arguing that a big driver of phone use is not just the addictive nature of what you're using on the phone, but social stress. Right? This is how this works, if you dive deeper in this paper. We are wired to be wary of ignoring or disrespecting other people in our social circles, right? If we go back to our paleolithic path in which the social circuits in our brains actually wired, if someone in our tribe is tapping us on the shoulder, you better turn around and see what they want.

• 8:52Cal Newport?

  To ignore your tribe members, to hurt your pairwise, or what they would call dyadic social bonds between your tribe members, puts you in danger of not being supported by your tribe members. You could be outcast from the tribe. Your reproductive success is on the line. So we take sociality very importantly. We're wired to be very socially aware.

• 9:13Cal Newport?

  So here's the problem, though. This means when we imagine in the modern context, messages arriving, a text message, a iMessage, a WhatsApp message from people in our social circles. Our paleolithic brain says, someone is tapping on their shoulder. Our survival of our genes are at stake. We better answer it. And if we're not, when our brain imagines that communication from our tribe is building up and we're ignoring it, and that this ignoring of it might be creating friction, what's the result? What the researchers called social stress. And that is an acute type of stress because we're so social, it's not a very comfortable type of stress to feel. All right. So idea number two, once you start checking your phone a lot because you worry about

• 9:58Cal Newport?

  social stress, you get in the habit of using your phone for other things. This is a huge concept that comes out of this paper, that it might be the social stress that drives you to your phone a lot, and now you get in the habit of looking at your phone a lot. This is what then allows those flashy apps with billions of dollars invested to make them really sticky and exciting. This is what allows them to then get their hooks in your brain and become a big part of your phone usage routine. In other words, TikTok and Instagram and these type of apps are in some sense potentially monetizing your instinct to be loyal to your friends. So for some people, the social stress from texting is what drives you to your phone,

• 10:40Cal Newport?

  and only once you're there do these other apps then become a part of your routine, and you end up with a more generalized feeling of smartphone addiction. That's backwards to the way that most people think about it, which is, texting's not that important, but TikTok's really addictive. We might have that backwards. The third big idea I want to point out from those quotes is that women are more susceptible to social stress than men, on average. This is because of just well-known differences in personality type and wiring. So they end up more likely to face smartphone addiction. In other words, there's a sort of unfair technology penalty here for being more socially conscientious. Men are more likely to be a little bit more loners, be a little bit more antisocial.

• 11:24Cal Newport?

  It makes us a little less prone to phone addiction. So I think this is important because often if it's men talking about this issue, we don't realize that The relationship women might have to this issue could be different. That we might not feel the same level of social stress around texting that then causes these other issues. And advice for improving your behavior with your phone that ignores those realities is not going to be complete advice. All right. So those are the big ideas. Let's go to act two here, diffusing the social stress trap. Now, I call this the social stress trap, the situation I just described, because we have sort of these two things that are in contradicting contrast to each other. Right?

• 12:07Cal Newport?

  So on the one hand, it's hard for us to address or reduce other habitual behaviors that we don't like on our phones, or like the addictive use of our phone, if we feel social stress about messages that we're ignoring. But it's hard to avoid feeling social stress about messages we're ignoring unless we become significantly less social, but that could make us feel just as bad. So even with, either we have to feel bad about using our phone too much because social stress drives us there, or we have to eliminate social stress, but then we're lonely and we feel bad anyway. So it feels like a trap, like there's no way out of it. I want to talk about some concrete ways to escape it. Basically, we need to find a way to rewire the social brain so that long stretches away

• 12:50Cal Newport?

  from messaging apps does not create that sense of really distressing social stress. As you will see, this is going to be just as much about rewiring your brain as it is rewiring the brains of the people that you know. All right, let's get more specific about it. The concrete thing you're going to do first to try to work on this social stress trap is break what I call the constant companion model of phone use. This is an idea I first introduced in a New York Times op-ed from five or six years ago. The constant companion model of phone use, as the name implies, is that you have your phone with you essentially everywhere you are. If I'm at home, it's in my pocket. If I'm at the gym, it's in my pocket. If I'm at work, it's right next to me on my desk.

• 13:34Cal Newport?

  If I'm in bed, it's right next to me on my bed. It is a constant companion.

• 13:39Cal Newport?

  When it is your constant companion, it is very difficult to get away from habitual phone usage. So what we want to do is try to break that constant companion model. So let's talk about how to do that first, and then second, talk about how to deal with the social stress that might create. So the easiest thing to do is to plug it in. And what I mean by that is, in the primary locations where you operate and have a phone with you, you find a different location for the phone where you plug it in. So when you're at home, it's like in your kitchen or your foyer, you have it plugged in, in that location. When you're in your office, you have it on like a bookshelf or a chair across the room, plugged in. It is not with you as a companion. When you're at the gym, you keep it in your gym locker, which means, and I know this

• 14:21Cal Newport?

  is going to be shocking for people who go to the gym, you're going to have to bring a paper notebook with you to keep track of what you're doing, and you're going to have to have a simple music player if you want to listen to music. Not your phone. You can't just sit there and stare at your phone in between sets. All right? So that's the physical thing to do. Get some physical separation between you and your phone. What do you do about messaging? Well, now what you're going to do is batch check your messaging apps on a semi-regular basis. You should let probably at least an hour go by between checks. It's something you can schedule. At the top of the hour, at lunch, I'm going to go check and catch up on my messages, my text messages, WhatsApps, etc.

• 15:00Cal Newport?

  Now, when you do this, be ready for it to maybe take more time, right? If you are social, you might have a lot of messages. You might not realize like how much you're tending to these conversations throughout everything else you're doing. So when you batch this more, it might take you more than a few minutes. "Oh, I have a lot of messages I have to catch up on here. This is going to take me, uh, this is going to take me some time." Okay. How do we then deal with the social stress situation? Here, I think the idea is to manage expectations and emergencies.

• 15:40Cal Newport?

  So based on experience, first of all, you do not want to explain to people in advance, your new plan. Oh, I'm checking my phone less often and here's why and I want to tell you and I want to apologize in advance. Do not preemptively apologize. Most people don't care. Some people don't know they care until you preemptively apologize and then they start caring. There's no reason to sort of waste people's time with that. It's also a little bit self-focused. People don't really care what your texting strategy is as much as you think they do. Only explain what you're doing if people complain. So if someone's texting you, "Hey, where are you? Are you mad at me? How can we not respond to the text?" That's when you say, "Hey, you know, I've been having trouble with my phone use. So I'm trying a new thing or I keep my phone across the room for big swaths of the day.

• 16:24Cal Newport?

  So I'm not always seeing texts anymore as they come in." Now, over time, people's expectations will change. If they hear that enough times from you, the small fraction of people in your circle who care will adjust internally their expectations. "Oh, this is someone who doesn't necessarily see texts right away, so I'm not going to text and expect to have an immediate response." They just refile that away in their head. There's lots of people who are in this situation. People are completely possible. It's very easy for people to refile in their head your availability. Like, I think about, like, my youngest sister is an ER doctor. We just know when she's on shift, she's not going to be answering her text messages. It's easy for us to adjust our expectations

• 17:06Cal Newport?

  over time, and now we just know that. So people can't adjust their expectations. The other thing you're going to have to do here is get better at batch responses. So when you're responding to a lot of text messages at once, because you're only checking every hour or so, you can't respond to these text messages in a way that just bounces the ping pong back to their side of the proverbial conversational net, and they're going to have to bounce it back to you and you're going to have to go back and forth. If you're not going to be on your phone all the time, you have to be much more definitive. You have to find a way to answer a text with enough detail and options and plans that it's okay that you might not see their response to that for another hour or two. So instead of just being like... Yeah, they say, do you want to grab dinner before the movie?

• 17:51Cal Newport?

  Instead of responding, yeah, what are you thinking? Which is not going to work because you're not going to see the response to that. You might be like, yeah, we should definitely do that. Let's plan to meet like roughly at this time. I might not see my text again for a little bit, so here's my, here's a couple of suggestions. You choose, or we'll figure it out when we meet. Let's just meet at this location at this time. And then when we meet, we can figure out the dinner. Like you do a little bit more time to transform back and forths into more just like, here's a response and then we can take this conversation out of the text thread. All right, so I said you have to manage expectations and emergencies. What do I mean about emergencies? Well, there's certain things that are time sensitive and emergency is one of them.

• 18:33Cal Newport?

  You know, what if someone needs to reach you, not when you next check your phone for text messages 20, an hour from now, but they need to reach you right now? Or what if there is some sort of logistical thing going on, right? I need to hear from my kid when practice is over. And I don't know when that's going to be, they're just going to text me when it's over. Right? How do we deal with emergencies? This is often the thing that prevents people from batching or changing their texting or messaging behavior is they worry about logistics, time sensitive logistics or emergencies. Don't let the existence of these force you back completely into a constant companion model. There's a couple of things here you should do instead.

• 19:15Cal Newport?

  For example, set up a custom do not disturb mode that allows text from a certain number of whitelisted numbers to still come through. If your kid's at sports practice, you can have a do not disturb mode in iOS that allows their text messages to come through. Now, they're not going to be texting you a bunch of stuff because they're at practice, but their text will come through when practice is over. So then you can have your phone's ringer on, still across the room, but you'll hear a text sound when they text you. And it's like the only text sound you'll hear because everyone else, it's in a do not disturb mode. Do the same thing with calls, right? Tell people if there's an emergency, call me.

• 20:00Cal Newport?

  And that really works. In my book, A World Without Email, I call those an escape valve strategy. If people know there's a way in an emergency they can get in touch with you. Now, it's high friction. They wouldn't normally do it, but they'll call you if there's an emergency. They feel better and you feel better. Because you say, I'm not taking something off the table. If there truly is an emergency, if my parent has an accident and is going to the hospital, people can call. Most people don't call me normally, but they can call and have my ringer on. And I'll be able to hear a call. And so I don't have to worry about emergencies. So if you're a little bit careful, you can have something in place for emergencies and logistics that doesn't just let you go back to like, I better just have my phone with me all the time, engage in conversations with anyone that I see.

• 20:45Cal Newport?

  All right. So my argument is, if you manage expectations and emergencies, breaking the constant companion model of your phone is going to be, long term, is going to reduce the social stress you feel to check it. As you get a sense of emergencies are handled, people's expectations have shifted over a period of a couple of months. They understand it now. And I'm getting better at texting back to people. So we don't need back and forth. Your social stress will die down. It will be pretty easy not to have to check the phone often for text. When you don't have to check it for that, it's much easier to deal with all the other habitual uses as well. So all of these things are tied

• 21:27Cal Newport?

  together. All right. The third act of this discussion, there is a couple nuances I want to mention. In fact, I have three in particular I want to mention because there is some care that is needed when dealing with these issues with messaging. Nuance number one, people worry, if I'm less available like this, does this make me a worse friend, or a worse sibling, or a worse child? Is it because this ongoing back and forth digital conversation can feel like connection?

• 21:54Cal Newport?

  I'm in these constant conversations with people I know on text messages. Doesn't that mean we're really connected? Our brain, however, doesn't really think so. We don't know what digital text-based communication is. We don't, we don't recognize that as social. It's not really strengthening your connection. It's just on paper, you feel like maybe this makes me social. So the solution here is with the people you really care about, couple this shift away from constant companion texting with reinvesting new time into in-person analog interacts with that person. Yeah, I don't text all day anymore, but we should start going on a hike every Wednesday morning. We should have a phone call. I'm going to call you for my commute twice a week. We should just check in, right?

• 22:40Cal Newport?

  You have a more analog way of communicating and you emphasize that. So it's like a trade-off. I'm trading off this social snacking sort of lightweight connection for something that's more meaningful. I'm actually going to feel more connected to people. And if you do that at the same time that you cut back to constant companion model that has you on your phone all the time, that'll make a difference. Right nuance number two. What about extenuating circumstances? Something's going on where you have to be on your phone, right? There's a, your parent is going to the hospital. Your siblings are on this text thread. One is there, you're trying to handle logistics and like it needs to happen over text. What do you do in that situation? You get on your phone. Yeah, there'll be extenuating circumstance. That's okay. We're just trying to change like your normal relationship with your phone, your average case.

• 23:24Cal Newport?

  Go easy on yourself. The key thing here is changing your relationship to this messaging. It's not like the alcoholic abstaining from alcohol. Whereas you really can't go back to this at all. You don't know what's going to happen. It's not like that. If you need to be on your phone for an afternoon texting because of something that's going down, that's not going to necessarily make you back into a constant companion texter. You can just go back when you're able to, to your default. All right nuance number three. If you're a parent, this is not just about you. It's also about what your kids see. This is the problem with the constant companion model, the phone driven by texting is

• 24:09Cal Newport?

  you know, as the parent, what I'm doing on this phone is actually somewhat noble. I'm making logistics for the upcoming carpool. I'm checking in with friends. Like this is all good stuff. I'm not on TikTok. I'm not doing the stuff I don't want my kid doing on the phone. This is like meaningful, good old fashioned, like adult communication. Your kids don't know that. They just see you looking at your phone all the time. And now you're normalizing to them, regardless of what they say, see what they do. A phone is something to be using all the time. It's something very desirable. Look at all the attention it gets from my parent. So when you break the constant companion model and stop doing communication all the time on your phone, your kids will see that you're not on your phone all the time. It will be modeling to them that the phone is a thing

• 24:52Cal Newport?

  you go and use where it's plugged in when you need it, but it is not a companion that's with you all the time. So this is not just about you. All right. So when it comes to our ongoing efforts to reform our relationships with our phone, this might be one of the trickiest and most overlooked areas. Messaging is a huge driver of habitual and unhealthy phone use, and it is so hard to shake because social stress is something we hate. But we can get around it. If you understand what's going on, you can find ways to change your relationship to messaging that will over time change the expectations of the people you know. You can get away from constant companion checking without having to feel

• 25:34Cal Newport?

  social stress. And if you do this, it really will, this is a classic digital minimalism move, will really improve your relationship with your phone. Not everyone has this issue, but a lot of people do. And I think it's often ignored. So I was happy to have an excuse to talk about it. Now, the irony of this, of course, is this entire time that I was talking, Jesse's just been like texting me and named things. So Jesse, I don't think you understood.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  I do have a couple of thoughts.

• 25:59Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  One thing that happens, like say you're doing the batching method and you said, all right, and your working memory file, like text so and so, and then you go to text so and so, and then you see like three other texts. Is there a way that you know of, of, I mean, I sometimes I go into the contacts, but I rarely do this, like where you pull up the contact and just text them as so you can't see other people's texts?

• 26:23Cal Newport?

  If you're maybe.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:26Cal Newport?

  Maybe like.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  It doesn't really matter, I guess.

• 26:27Cal Newport?

  But if you're a battery, it doesn't really matter. Like, the point is, you're like, I am waiting. I'm waiting into a lot of stuff right now.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:34Cal Newport?

  And I'm gonna try to find my way to the other side. But I'll tell you what, though. Here's the advantage of waiting is a lot of stuff gets worked out before you get there.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:41Cal Newport?

  Like, if I had answered this initial text on this text group, I would have been in the mix of it, but because I waited an hour, like, they kind of figured it out. And so it actually, a lot of the stuff you might not have to actually answer. And other stuff you might just say, I'm just not gonna answer. That's another expectation thing.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:58Cal Newport?

  Is on your group threads, like, don't always answer. And it just changes the expectation. You chime in when you, when you can, but you don't chime in all the time. And that takes a lot of social stress off the, off the table as well.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  And then for other, like, non-group texts or whatever, do you delete texts? Or do you just keep a long thread history of texts?

• 27:16Cal Newport?

  I guess I just keep a thread history. I mean, I'm bad at my phone. I don't know how to delete a text, so I'm gonna say no.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 27:24Cal Newport?

  Probably not. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, like, more complicated things you can do, but I'm like, eh. Just check it less and manage expectations, and it works itself out.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:35Cal Newport?

  All right, well, we got, we got a bunch of good questions coming up. But first, I want to briefly hear from a sponsor.

• 27:42Cal Newport?

  So here's the thing about being a guy. When you're young, you don't think about your skin. You can spend the summer in the sun, basically, just like, once a week or so, cleaning the grime off your face with a Brillo pad and some axle grease. And you're still gonna end up looking like Leonardo DiCaprio in Growing Pains. Jesse, as you know, I only use the most up-to-date references in our ad reads.

• 28:08Cal Newport?

  Then one day you wake up, and suddenly, you look like a grizzled pirate captain. You know, and you're like, wait, why did anyone tell me I'm supposed to take care of my skin? Right, this becomes, you get surprised by this reality. I want to help you avoid this fate, man. And how are you gonna do this with the products of Caldira Labs? Their high-performance skincare is designed specifically for men. It is simple, effective, and backed by science. Their products include the good. Which is an award-winning serum packed with 27 active botanicals and 3.4 million antioxidants units per drop. Jesse didn't believe it. He was like, that's like a 3.2 million antioxidant units tops. And I counted. It's true. It's 3.4 million. They also have the eye serum,

• 28:52Cal Newport?

  which helps reduce the appearance of tired eyes, dark circles and puffiness, and the base layer, which is a nutrient-rich moisturizer infused with plant stem cells and snow mushroom extract. Look, this stuff works. In a consumer study, 100% of men said their skin looks smoother and healthier after using Caldera Labs products. So men, if you want to look more like a growing pains era Leonardo DiCaprio than you do a grizzled pirate captain, you need to try Caldera Labs. Skincare doesn't have to be complicated, but it should be good. Upgrade your routine with Caldera Labs and see a difference for yourself. Go to calderalab.com/deep and use DEEP at checkout for 20% off your first order. So that's calderalab,

• 29:33Cal Newport?

  C-A-L-D-E-R-A-lab.com/deep and use that code DEEP. I also want to talk about a product that we just recently started using here at my media company and it's been a game changer. That is Miro, M-I-R-O. Miro provides your team what Miro calls an innovation workspace, which it's like a, like a shared bulletin board that you can zoom in and out of. So you can sort of build it out endlessly and zoom in and out of where you want to go. And on this board, you can put any sort of information. You can put sticky notes. You can put tables. You can put links and images and arrows pointing between different things and so much more. Here at my company, we use it to build our schedules of upcoming podcasts

• 30:14Cal Newport?

  and newsletters. So we have a table of ideas for these by date, but then off to the side, we have all sorts of like sticky notes and pictures and ideas and arrows connecting back and forth to them. You can even directly embed Google Docs into this. So my, my scripts of the newsletters will embed them straight in the Miro. So you can just jump in and read it right there. It's been incredibly useful for us and we're only using some of the features. Miro has been working more recently to directly integrate AI-powered tools into this product, which is making it even more useful. You can now, for example, and this is cool, take an idea from a sticky note on a Miro board and have AI turn it into a diagram.

• 30:55Cal Newport?

  Or use it to populate a table. You can auto generate headline ideas mixed with your text. Like, all this is built right into the Miro tool. You don't have to leave the workspace, no switching tabs to an AI tool. It's all integrated. Jesse, you probably remember that before we used Miro, our method for keeping track of podcast ideas was to chisel notes into giant stone slabs. Now, I'm not sure why I listened to you about that. You used to tell me, I remember, it's so durable. Like, these will last for centuries. But Miro, now we can put those chisels away. We got something that works much better. So help your teams get more done, or not just get more done, get great done with Miro.

• 31:35Cal Newport?

  Check out Miro.com to find out how. That's M-I-R-O dot com. All right, Jesse, let's move on to some questions.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  All right. First question's from Michaela. I have an administrative sales role involving routine tasks like emailing clients and reviewing campaigns. It's monotonous. How can I structure my mornings if I don't have two hours for deep work?

• 31:57Cal Newport?

  Well, I got a couple of questions here. Follow up. One, what are you doing deep work for? You know, concentrating for the sake of concentrating doesn't do anything. Deep work is useful if you have a particular professional task that will benefit from such focus, and then you want to make sure that you're giving it to it. So to me, your problem might not be one of scheduling, but one of evolving your job to find a way to take on some responsibilities from which deep work will help. Once you have, hey, here's a thing you want me to do. This is valuable for the company, but it requires deep work

• 32:36Cal Newport?

  to do it well. Now you have something to fight for. Now you can go back and say, hey, I don't have time, the uninterrupted time to do this. Well, like, so let's, uh, let's put aside two hours a day that's protected. Let's not start my day to this time. Let's in, I'll do communication in the morning and then the afternoon is deep work. However you want to work it out, once you have a particular thing that clearly benefits from concentration, you can then fight for that concentration. But if you're thinking about deep work abstractly, like, I should just be doing deep work. Concentration is good. My job is distracted. That's not going to help. So you've got to have a particular thing you're fighting for, but then, once you do, you'll be surprised by how much innovation is possible. All right, who do we got next?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Next question is from Michael. I'm an electrical engineer working in the aerospace industry. We are about to have a 20% mandatory overtime. I currently do my eight-hour job in about three hours. How should I handle this mandatory overtime? I have a quick update. He can do the 20% one day and he's also getting paid, or he can do it, spread it out over the hours each day.

• 33:42Cal Newport?

  Okay, so, so here's the thing, you know,

• 33:47Cal Newport?

  if you're doing your work really efficiently, and they know that, but they're not giving you more work. And for whatever reason, they're like, we just were in this mindset of,

• 33:58Cal Newport?

  you're supposed to be here eight hours, and here's what I want you to do, and now we're doing overtime, so we need you to come for these extra hours, and we're going to pay you for these extra hours. And you were doing well at a high level, all the things they're asking for. And you're not pretending like you're overworked or can't handle, you're not saying no to new things. I think it is justified to use some of that time to work on other things. I don't think it's dishonest. As long as you're doing the work well, you're not lying about what you're doing, and you're not turning down the opportunity to do more if they offer it. It is okay if you have a, great, I am going to do some other things during these work daytimes. Maybe I'm going to slow down, slow down my work, and I'm going to do a other interest I'm looking into. I'm learning something new that's like, maybe vaguely professional

• 34:43Cal Newport?

  related, maybe not. I'm learning how to repair like, small outboard motors for ships, or maybe I have a stealth second job. I'm sort of like, working on an idea that could eventually be a new job, or whatever it is. That's probably where you are. Like, they are not making good use of their asset, which is your brain. So you've got to find something to fill that time. Now, if what you want is even more money, you could use this extra time to say like, hey, I want to take on huge new responsibilities and try to get promotion. You could do that. But if you're happy with the job and it's not completely filling your time, do something else with the time. I think it's completely honest as long as you're not, you know, breaking your contract, as long as you're not turning down new work, pretending like you're too busy. If they ask you, you could do some other stuff with that time.

• 35:26Cal Newport?

  This just happens in knowledge work because knowledge work is not like cranking a wrench on an assembly line where this is what you're doing. We can watch you do it and we want you to do it for this many hours. We're paying you for this hours. Knowledge work, as I talk about in my book, Slow Productivity, it's up and down. There's intense period and non-intense period. Some things happen faster than others. It's difficult to know who's working on what or how it's actually unfolding. So you have extra time? I say you can enjoy that. All right, who's next?

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Next up is Natasha. What should I do about my shutdown rituals taking too long? During my ritual, I process all the open loops I made during the day, generally notes and reminders to myself about work, my studies and my personal obligations. I accumulate so many open loops, I have trouble processing them all in a reasonable amount of my time. So I leave some left open and inevitably things pile up to the point where I get overwhelmed.

• 36:18Cal Newport?

  All right, this is a great question because it points out an important nuance about shutdown rituals. So the goal of a shutdown ritual is to close open loops so that your mind can have peace after work and not have to ruminate over things that you need to do or might need to do or might have forgotten. But what does it mean to close an open loop? This is where I think Natasha, the problem is emerging. You were thinking, based on this question, that closing an open loop means dealing with it. Like, what is this thing? What's the next step? Let me try to like move this forward or make sure we're on the same page or get this into fully like accounted for into my system. And that can take time, right?

• 37:02Cal Newport?

  It's like going through an email inbox is a classic example. To actually empty everything out of your inbox takes a long time. But all closing an open loop really means is that you no longer have to trust just on your brain to keep track of it. This is something that I don't have to just keep track of in my brain. So this could be way simpler. If you don't have to actually process it, you just have to make sure that you don't have to think about it. This could be way simpler. Like, for example, you could have a big text file called loops to process. And at the end of the day, you're looking in like your inbox, the notes you took during the day and things you're thinking of. Like, you're like, here's seven or eight, like, open, here's seven or eight open loops. Like, I don't know what to do with these, but there are things I need to make progress on. Instead of processing them,

• 37:44Cal Newport?

  imagine instead you just write them all down in that text file. You check to make sure that there's nothing urgent here. Like, oh, my God, if I don't deal with this tonight, it's a problem. So you reassure yourself, okay, I'm okay shutting down work right now. And you stretch out that text file really big on your laptop screen before you close it down. You say, it's the first thing I'm going to see in the morning when I open it. And then, you know, I could put aside a half hour and deal with that in the morning. That works, because you've accomplished a problem of assuring your brain, there's nothing you're missing, there's nothing you're forgetting, and there's nothing that is just being held in your brain. So there's a difference between getting something out of your head and processing and actually dealing with the thing. And some people's days just end fast, right? Like, I have to leave at 5:00, because I have to pick up my kids from daycare. And a lot

• 38:27Cal Newport?

  of stuff tends to happen at the end of my day. Like, things come in hot and heavy, like that last hour. I just don't have time to really sit down and handle things. It's fine. Like, I just have a, very quickly, I'm surveying my inbox, my calendar, I'm jotting down in my working texts on TNT, like, all these different things. I just want to make sure I'm not forgetting anything. There's nothing to do in the morning. There's nothing urgent. There's no emergencies. It's all written down. And if I wait till the morning to deal with this, nothing bad's going to happen. Great. Schedule shutdown complete. You can move on and go home. So you don't have to process things in your shutdown. You just have to reassure yourself that there's nothing that's just being kept track of in your head, that you have to remember or might remember later on. And if you have a busy end of day, I think dealing with stuff at the beginning of the day is fine, as long as you've written it down in a place you trust you'll see right when the next

• 39:12Cal Newport?

  day begins. I often do this, Jesse, with my time block planner. I'm doing a shutdown ritual, especially like during the busy part of the school year. I will often there'll be some like open loops that are popping up towards the end of the day. I will write them on the page for the next day. Because now my brain trusts, well, the one thing I know I'm going to see is my time block planner page tomorrow when I build my time block plan. And in particular, if I've already done my shutdown ritual and I remember something during the evening, oh, what about this? I go and I write it on the next page of my time block planner. I've done no work on it. I've made no attempt to process it or act on it. I haven't gone to my systems. I haven't gone to Trello and found the right board and created a card and put the stuff

• 39:57Cal Newport?

  in there. I just jotted it down. I keep it on my dresser upstairs. But that is enough because I know the next day I will see that page when I build my time block plan. So that is enough for my brain to say, I don't have to worry about this tonight. So don't process, just get this stuff down to a place where you know you'll see it. Now, if you have a lot of time process, that's fine. Like I'm going to get stuff in the Trello. And if you have a slow end of the day, like that last caller that is working like 19 minutes and then the rest of his day is bored, he can shut everything down. But Natasha, if you, if you can't process it, that's fine. Just get it somewhere where you, you are not relying on your brain to remember it. You don't have to deal with it. You just have to make sure that it will be dealt with. All right, who do we got?

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Next up is Courtney. How can I organize and streamline email communications with my students? I teach at a university and over the years, the amount of student emails keeps increasing. How can I better organize communications and expectations with them?

• 40:53Cal Newport?

  Well, I'll tell you what I do with my students at Georgetown. I've devised a series of increasingly difficult and dangerous physical challenges that if they can make it through all of them, they will make it to a place where they can actually send me an email. So that's worked out pretty well. We've had a few hospitalizations, but I got to tell you, my inbox volume has been lower. So I think that's the way to do it. If you don't do that, there's another strategy, which is I would suggest if you have a lot of this coming in, like you're teaching a large class or multiple classes that are, some classes just have more student interaction than others, just based on the material. I would hold office hours three times a week. Right, so you're never that far from an office hours.

• 41:38Cal Newport?

  I would introduce a virtual off option to those office hours. And maybe you would say, this is just for the second half of or through the whole where they can message you. The kids these days, I don't know if you know this, Jesse. The kids these days are sometimes worried about in-person conversation and the friction involves and feel very comfortable if they can type things. That's why they want to send you an email. It's safer socially than having to go and actually talk to you in person. I have a messaging off option for your office hours. Here is a messaging app, a WhatsApp, Slack thing for my class where during those office hours, I will see things and interact with you on there as well. So no email.

• 42:23Cal Newport?

  Don't send me an email that's going to sit in my inbox. I eventually have to answer, but you can during office hours, come by my office or message me. It used to be you could see, you can call me, but no one wants to call. So you have to do messaging. All right. Anything that can't be answered with a single response. You say, look, if it can be answered with a single response, what time is the test going to be? Can you up sign this thing? Right? If it's not something you can answer with a single response, you say, this is for office hours. And once they email you anyway, with something that just can't be answered with a simple response, needs some back and forth or whatever, some extra work, you say, bring it to my next office hours, you can make it virtual in person. They adjust, students adjust, right? They just need to know, I have an issue I want to solve. How do I solve it?

• 43:08Cal Newport?

  Oh, this is how I solve it. I have to go to your office hours. There's one, you do three a week. I'm never far from one. Good, that's, I don't have to worry about what to do about that and what's next. And they move on. It's minimal extra overhead for them. For you, it makes a huge difference. And now all these things that are coming in emails and all these back and forth emails go away. The only emails you're getting are ones that like, actually, it's a good use of email. Like, oh, I have the answer and I can send it back when I have time. And now you're doing much more sort of in-person synchronous interaction during these office hours and boom, boom, boom, you get through a lot of things. And you're not having to like constantly be going back and forth in email. So I think that's the easiest thing to do. If you're a professor, you have some autonomy here. It's you're in charge. Historically, professors are in charge about how you talk to them. And you can tell your students, this is how you interact with me. That will work.

• 43:53Cal Newport?

  That method does make a big difference. Harder in companies, works in academia.

• 43:59Cal Newport?

  All right, who do we got?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Next up is Sarah. I'm starting my PhD at MIT in nuclear engineering. I was recently asked also to serve as committee chair for a student organization. I worry about my ability to manage my first year studies and research simultaneously with these tasks. Should I follow the principles from slow productivity and do less?

• 44:21Cal Newport?

  Yes. Yeah, your first year PhD student, MIT is tough. Tough program, no for experience. You don't know what to expect. Don't do the student committee chair. Say like, look, I'm starting my PhD program at MIT. I don't know what they're expecting to get my full time. I can't do it. They're like, oh, no, okay, great. Well, someone else. Like you're a solution to their problem. They're probably someone who's like reliable, like this person would be good. Maybe they'll do it. And then you're like, oh, I can't because I'm starting a PhD program like that makes sense. They move on to the next person. That was like a nothing in their life. You just save yourself potentially from a huge amount of pain. Super asymmetrical. So I think starting something new is a perfect time to do less, a perfect excuse to do less. You'll be okay, I think.

• 45:05Cal Newport?

  I don't know the nuclear engineering program, but I've talked about like the doctoral program in computer science. The coursework is really not that bad. If you're, I mean, I'm sure those courses are hard, but if you're in the program, you're not going to find them that hard, but just might as well give yourself some breathing room. I want to get used to being a doctoral student, the classes and MIT is this cool campus. It's very intimidating with these like old school classrooms with the chalkboards going up and down. And, and, you know, there's scientists on jetpack shooting freeze rays at each other. As at least people assume happens at MIT. And there's like all sorts of craziness going on. So do less. This isn't urgent, say no. There was something, I can't remember what it was. There was something like this early in my time at MIT.

• 45:49Cal Newport?

  I saw a program and I don't remember what it was. So I apologize for that, but it was some sort of extracurricular, whatever. And they were looking for students, grad students to be a part of some sort of pilot program or whatever. And I had this moment of inspiration where I was like, oh, this sounds cool. This matches some interest. I was like, hey, here, I want to volunteer like, hey, yes, you've been selected. This would be great. You should do it. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. I wasn't thinking straight.

• 46:16Cal Newport?

  I got ahead of myself. I really need to be focusing on what I'm doing here. I probably shouldn't bring on something else. And I sort of backed out of it and that was the right decision. You don't need a lot of extracurriculars. Now here is a warning. I want to give to you and any sort of graduate student, there is something I call graduate student overload syndrome that you have to be very wary of, but particularly if you're a doctoral student, because here's what's happens if you're a doctoral student in a lot of programs, your friends of that age have normal jobs and they're probably smart if you're going to like MIT or something, so they have hard jobs. They're all like lawyers and bankers and they're talking about like how much they're working and how hard it is. And let's be honest, being a graduate student is kind of a fake job. It's hard in certain ways,

• 46:57Cal Newport?

  but it's also you're you're rolling in at 11 and you have all this sort of flexibility. Some new graduate students get uncomfortable, like I'm not doing enough stuff. I feel like I'm not somehow using my potential. And so they overload with a bunch of extra are going to be on the graduate student committee for this and the student government. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that because they find comfort in busyness. It's pseudo productivity writ large. I want to be doing a lot of stuff. So I feel like what I'm doing is worthwhile. This is hard and I'm busy, but that's not how graduate school works because it's an academic intellectual pursuit and academic intellectual pursuits need space and they need time. And sometimes you need to just spend hours and hours trying to figure out a problem set problem or trying

• 47:40Cal Newport?

  to make sense about an experiment. You are not supposed to be busy when you're training your mind to do things at high levels. So you have to make peace with this idea of I am not busy in a traditional sense, and yet what I'm doing is still hard and important. So be worried about graduate student overload syndrome as well. But short answer, don't do the committee chair. At least that'd be my advice. All right. Do we have a call this week, Jesse? We do. All right, let's see if we can make this work.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Hi, Cal. Clement's here. Longtime listener. Love all your books and read your newsletter, listen to every podcast episode. Quite some time ago, you introduced the general household chores task list as like a separate piece from your general trellis boards. You mentioned you were experimenting with that. So I am curious how that experiment has been going, if you had any additional tweaks and insights to it, or if you have discarded it all together for something new. Household chores are a constant source of interfering with my attempts at a deep life.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  So I'd really be grateful for additional insights and tips there.

• 48:55Cal Newport?

  All right. Good question. Yes, I still find it useful to maybe have a simpler place where household chores or family-related tasks are kept. Now, part of this is if you're in a family like I am, you have to share this with other people and other people might not want to be brought into your trowel madness. But there's two other things I find in general are helpful when it comes to the never-ending crush of there's just stuff that needs to be done around the house for the family or this or that. In addition to just having, here's my list of household chores, two things also help. One, I think, is having a general heuristic that's like, I do one thing a day. I have to do one thing a day. It could be in the morning or in the evening, but just like I have to get 10,000

• 49:38Cal Newport?

  steps, I have to take something off that list. And if it's a really busy day, it might be a small thing. If I have more time, I might do the taxes. But you just get in this habit of like, I do something every day. That really adds up. And it puts you into a mindset of like, yeah, like, one of the things I do is I work on my house. But that like, simple heuristic allows you get through these sort of personal chores, like, what's my one I'm going to do today? That alone makes a really big difference. The other thing that's helpful is integrating the sort of personal household chore list into your weekly planning. Because a lot of these things require time that's put aside and protected in advance. And if you don't do that, you'll never get to them. If you need to take the car into the shop because it's oil change time, you have to find when you're going

• 50:22Cal Newport?

  to do that. And you have to look at the whole week as a whole and be like, okay, when does this make sense? Okay, it's going to make sense Friday. You know what? I could do it Friday midday. I kind of have like a 90-minute circle there. And then you can start thinking, okay, if I'm going to do that, if I'm taking the car to the shop, what's around there that I could get done as long as I'm, there's some store, let me take care of this, this, and this. And you make a plan in advance to get some of these like, bigger things done. Weekly planning is the right time to do that. So in addition to having like a good list, a low friction list, a shared list that just like has the stuff for your house and it seems easier and less overhead than your complicated system for all your like professional things. In addition to that, integrate a weekly plan, have a do one thing a day heuristic. That I think for most people gets you to, I don't

• 51:06Cal Newport?

  know, 90%. Like right now, I would, I would say on, when I weekly plan household stuff and I'm not on vacation, if I'm being conservative, I'm probably like blocking off 18 to 20 hours a week thinking about skeleton placement for my Halloween decorations. And without weekly planning, I'm just not going to have that 18 to 22 hours free each week. And so it really makes a difference when you add those two things to it. I'm very interested. I might do a longer episode on sort of household management. There's a couple of systems out there, people swear by, I think it's a key thing. As you get older, it gets more complicated. So maybe, maybe we'll revisit that. All right. We got a case study this week. This is where

• 51:47Cal Newport?

  people write in to talk about how they've used the type of advice we talked about on this show in their life. Today's case study comes from Mike. Mike says, as a creative being on social media, as a creative being, oh, not a creative being, as a creative comma, being on social media felt like a necessity, but it was often a chore. So I finally did a 30 day digital declutter. I don't know why I waited so long. Here are my takeaways. Just as other people have described, the first day or two, I felt very antsy, like I should be checking something, but it quickly subsided over the next few days. I got used to the slower anxious life. I felt like I had more time in my day because I did. I

• 52:29Cal Newport?

  realized how little value I actually got from being on social media. I started to enjoy physical conversations with people as I knew I didn't have social media to check on their lives. And just as you said, no one even noticed I wasn't on social media that month. As an unexpected benefit, I started making decisions faster and with more certainty. I stopped letting folks on Instagram tell me what to do. Now that the 30 days have ended, I'm going back to establish rules for future social media use. Well, I, I love this, Mike. Great digital declutter where you step away for 30 days aggressively focused through reflection and experimentation on what's more meaningful. And then when you're done, say, what do I really need in my life? What did I really miss? And what are my new rules going forward? So I'm glad you had some success with that.

• 53:09Cal Newport?

  Really consider, now that you are trying to decide what are my rules for social media going forward, really give the null hypothesis, what if my rule is doing no social media still? Give that a good look. Like you said, it was fine. So why, why stumble back into that world where they're desperately trying, so desperately to hook you? If it didn't really matter that you were off from a professional standpoint, keep that option in mind. If you do add it back, make it on your desktop, make it boring, and be very specific about what you're doing on there. Stay tuned, here's my preview, stay tuned for the next segment because I have something, an article I read, I want to talk about from a creative, talking

• 53:50Cal Newport?

  about exactly this point. So stay tuned for that, I think you'll like it. I also want to point out from this case study, where Mike says, "I started to enjoy physical conversations with people as I knew I didn't have social media to check on their lives." That's just what we were talking about in the deep dive, that one of the nuances to trying to reduce messaging in your life was to compensate by adding more analog interaction in your life. That's what really matters. Mike did that and it did get better. At least I think he did. The other way, I think, Jesse, to interpret, "I started to enjoy physical conversations", is that he gets really physical people when he talks to them. He sort of like grabs and

• 54:32Cal Newport?

  bear hugs them and it's like really awkward, you know. And you might enjoy that too, Mike, but maybe I won't recommend that. Anyways, good case study, thanks for seeing that in. We've got a great third segment, two things I want to talk about that I've read, but first, another brief word from a sponsor. Now, I know from experience that there is nothing small about starting your own small business. It's something you pour your heart and soul into it. In running my own media company, for example, I would estimate, and Jesse, I think you can confirm this, that in an average year, I probably dedicate around 10 to 100,000 hours just thinking about skeleton acquisition. That's true. More or less, right? So if you run a small business that sells something, whether online, in person, or both,

• 55:18Cal Newport?

  The commerce platform you need is Shopify, a company that understands small business because they were once one, two. Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together both in-store and online operations in up to 1,000 locations. Imagine being able to guarantee that shopping is always convenient, endless aisles, ship to customer, buy online, pick up in-store. All of this is made simpler so customers can shop how they want and the staff have the tools they need to choose to close to sale every time. And let's face it, acquiring new customers is expensive. With Shopify POS, you can keep shoppers coming back with personalized experiences and first-party

• 56:02Cal Newport?

  data that give marketing teams a competitive edge. It's, in fact, this is proven based on a report from EY. Businesses on Shopify POS see real results like 22% better total cost of ownership benefits equivalent to an 8.9% uplift in sales on average relevant to the markets that surveyed. Those are good numbers. So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. You can sign up for a $1 per month trial and start selling today if you go to Shopify.com/deep. Go to Shopify.com/deep. Shopify.com/deep. I also want to talk about our longtime sponsors at Grammarly.

• 56:44Cal Newport?

  Look, I needed Grammarly there to correct my pronunciation of their name. From emails to reports and project proposals, it's more challenging than ever to meet the demands of today's competing priorities without some help. For example, I would estimate the course of the average day working on this podcast, and Jesse, you can back me up on this, I probably write somewhere between 60 to 100 pages just on skeleton acquisition strategies alone. Did you say it's about right, like 600 pages? Yeah. This is why you need Grammarly, the essential AI. The people who don't know about my skeletons are really weirded out right now, I think, Jesse, let's be honest. I probably should have used Grammarly to check the tone. It might have said...

• 57:28Cal Newport?

  Your references to skeletons are off putting. You might want to reduce them. This is why you need Grammarly. It's the essential AI communication assistant that boosts your productivity so you can get more of what you need done faster, no matter what or where you're writing. All right, I want to give you three examples of things Grammarly can do to help your communication beyond just its existing role class sort of grammar and spell checking functions we all know about. One, it can help you adjust and tailor your tone so you come across exactly how you want. Tell you, talk about skeletons less. It can do generative AI things like helping you brainstorm titles. It can help you clean up text you already wrote to make it conciser or clearer. Think about that.

• 58:10Cal Newport?

  You're working on like an email or a part of a report. You're like, ooh, this is like getting a little bit clunky. Hey, can you make this tighter? Can you make this more concise? It can help you do that as well. It makes you a more effective communicator. So let Grammarly take the busy work off your plate so you can focus on high impact work like skeleton acquisition. Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com/podcast. That's grammarly.com/podcast. Jesse, Halloween to me is close. I mean, it's, it's almost August. I gotta start thinking, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about this.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  You tell us in a prior episode about how you've been coding your lights.

• 58:49Cal Newport?

  I've been doing some, well, I recoded them for 4th of July. So I brought out, I threw up the lights, some, I have a light controller I made for some programmable LEDs and I hung them up like bunting and programmed virtual bunting, red, white and blue. So it's like red, white and blue, and then it all shifts over and all shifts over. So it was like I, for, for night, I wanted like virtual bunting. And because I took the time to, I built multiple microcontroller driven custom light controllers. It was the matter of, you know, 10 minutes of coding to get that thing running. So I'm thinking about it. I'm working on motion sensors too. Building some custom motion sensor controllers, more to come.

• 59:31Cal Newport?

  But again, this is like two thirds of my time. And then like one third of my time is like my family and my jobs and my health and everything else. All right, let's move on now, Jesse, to our final segment.

• 59:45Cal Newport?

  I often like to talk about in our final segments, what I'm reading. I got two things to talk about today. The first is a book, a book that just came out, but that I blurbed and I liked the book and I also like what it represents. So I wanted to call it out. The book is called North to the Future, An Offline Adventure Through the Changing Wilds of Alaska. This is by Ben Wasenbach. And this is a book of the old school at Kirkus in their review, I think called Ben, like a worthy successor to John McPhee, who, you know, wrote Coming to the Country, Back to the Country. I don't know. I read it a few months ago. He wrote a big, famous book about Alaska. But Ben actually goes on these adventures in Alaska with scientists, these weird quirky scientists,

• 1:00:30Cal Newport?

  and he goes and he finds them. They explore and it's narrative, but there's bigger themes and the setting is fantastic. And he grapples with the fact that he's in the real world and not online. I love that style of like big idea adventure writing. We don't get enough of that anymore. You know, it's, it's, we don't have enough of these books anymore. I'm glad people are still writing them. I really like this one. I gave it a good blurb. So check it out. It just came out. North to the Future by Ben Wasenbach, Wasenbach, I should say. I also want to talk about an article that someone sent me that I think is interesting because it gets at a common belief that drives people to social media use in a way that makes them unhappy. Now, this article, I don't know if you can bring it up on the screen or not, Jesse.

• 1:01:15Cal Newport?

  It's called, I'm Done With Social Media. And it is from a writer named Carolyn Crampton, and it's on a blog. Oh, I love blogs. Isn't this great, Jesse? Blogs, you can have, it's clean. There's like lots of text. You can take your time to explain something and it doesn't have to be in an app. And there's very few dancing, very few people dancing on here. I love blogs. All right. So I'm just going to read a couple excerpts from this and then I want to give you my more general thoughts. All right. So here's the setup. Caroline says, I started last year with a clear goal. It was going to be the year that I finally did social media, regular posting and content calendar, a strategy, a plan for growth, all of that.

• 1:02:01Cal Newport?

  And yet I ended the year pretty certain that I never wanted to open those apps again, let alone post my photos and words on them. All right, that's the setup. Why was she making this year the year social media? She's a writer, she had a book coming out and she wanted to do everything she could. This is very typical for creatives. I want to do, she wanted to do everything she could to help this book sell. And she said, okay, I'm not a big social media person, but I will do all the things. I'll get all the advice, I'll do all the things because this, I'm told, helps. And I want to make sure that I'm doing everything that I can. So Caroline goes on in the article and talks about, you know, all the stuff she has to do. The, the videos, the updates, every accomplishment, posting it multiple times so people could see it.

• 1:02:46Cal Newport?

  And so she really was working on this and giving us a lot of time. Here's what she learned. It didn't matter. She says, look, on Twitter, where I had nearly 10,000 followers that had mostly been accumulated during my previous work, work as a political journalist, the figures were even worse. So let's see here, most of my TikToks barely made to views in three figures. On Twitter, those numbers could be even smaller. So basically, no one was, even, even her followers weren't reading the stuff she was doing.

• 1:03:19Cal Newport?

  So what she figured out was books weren't, mostly weren't gaining, I'm reading here, books mostly weren't gaining momentum on TikTok because their authors were making top-notch viral videos, but because readers and bookish influencers were recommending them to each other and posting about their experience. It was about the quality of the book.

• 1:03:42Cal Newport?

  So this, I think, is a key point about social media that I've tried to make before. It's not that it's not helpful for spreading the word about things. Certainly, there are books that their entire success is owed to a big push on social media. You've got book talk, you've got Instagram, lesser, to lesser extent, Twitter. But as Caroline learned, it's not because the author was good at social media. It's not because the author had a lot of followers. It's because people like the book. And if people really like your book, they want to talk about it. And people use social media, they'll talk about it on social media. So social media can be really helpful for your efforts as a creative. But the best thing you can do to gain those benefits is to write something that is of

• 1:04:27Cal Newport?

  the moment, that is really good, that you're the right person to write, and it touches a chord. If you do that, social media might be a big part of that book blowing up, but not because you posted properly about it, but because other people were spreading the word. But in the end, what's going to matter, and this is a key idea for my book, Slow Productivity, is the quality of what you do. So I like Caroline's experience. I often say social media has helped a lot of my books sell. It's just not for me posting on it. It's other people posting about it on those mediums as well. So it's a good nuance. I've mentioned it before, but it is worth emphasizing again. You don't have to play the game of these small number of people with these massive companies that want you to do to come and give your time and attention and data to them so they can monetize it so that

• 1:05:11Cal Newport?

  they can buy the other half of Hawaii. You don't have to play that game. The whole history of social media has been one argument after another about why you have to use their weird product. It was, you won't know what's going on with your friends. You'll be isolated. Then it was like, this is where clubs talk, and you're not going to be able to be a part of organizations. And now it's like, you can't have a career or be a successful creative. It's always one thing after another if you're not on these apps, which if you think about them objectively are really weird. It's all these weird rituals of how you put things on there and type about it, and you have to like do the vertical video and not the horizontal video, and you have to do this and that, and all these weird sort of cultish rituals.

• 1:05:55Cal Newport?

  It's essentially the sort of modern digital version of I'm making a burnt offering at the Near Eastern altar. It's kind of the same type of thing. If we do all these sort of things and shake the rain stick just right, then I'll be spared being attacked by the monster, right? It's weird and it's kind of arbitrary, and maybe it feels good in the moment, and it's very distracting. But good work sells because good work sells. And if people have new places to talk about good work, they'll talk about it on those new places. When magazines came around, they helped sell books. It was a new way to sell books. Why? Because it was a place where people could write about books and talk about books and to help books take off. Not because the authors like, I'm going to write a bunch of articles in magazines about my own books, but because there's a new place people could write.

• 1:06:38Cal Newport?

  Radio could help sell books when radio became a big thing. Not because authors were like, I will go on the radio and talk about my book, but because there's shows that talk about books and they'll talk about your books. Like, the idea is new communication mediums might help people talk about stuff that's good. Your job as a creator is still to produce things that are good.

• 1:06:57Cal Newport?

  How people are talking about it doesn't necessarily matter a huge amount to you. So anyways, I like that article. It's Caroline Crampton. Check it out. She has a whole long thing about the experience.

• 1:07:08Cal Newport?

  Every writer or creative should read it. But my bigger point here again is there's always some reason we're being told why we have to be looking at these weird shiny digital baubles. And it's okay at some point to be like, I'm done here. Until you come back and say, you're going to make, you know, you're living, you're going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars of this without too much work, or this is what's going to keep your pacemaker running. Until it's like that compelling, like, I'm kind of done hearing from yet again, why, like, I need to be using these things, right? Give me a good reason until I have it, I'm going to be moving on. So I appreciate that article. And I loved that it was on a blog, just a simple blog. Some technologies are the best. All right. Oh, look at this.

• 1:07:53Cal Newport?

  We have an update here. Uh oh, about Hanson.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  Oh, that's not, that was just for, yeah, you can read it.

• 1:08:00Cal Newport?

  I'm curious, though. Did I, did I imply that the band Hanson? And now I'm trying to remember because we got an update. Someone sent us an update to say, all the brothers of the band Hanson are alive and well. I don't remember what I said about Hanson, but I must have implied that they ended up.

• 1:08:17Cal Newport?

  Dead in some sort of like gruesome murder suicide pact.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  They were just brought up in a prior episode and a fan reached out. That was just kind of for your FYI.

• 1:08:26Cal Newport?

  I think I might have joked about Hanson getting like grisly, you know, dying in some sort of terrible like grisly weird way. So this is, this is my, I don't remember what I said. I'm glad to hear that Hanson is alive and well. Um, I will listen to MMBop later today. This may be, this could be, talk about social media. This is my plan. Okay. I've got it, Jesse. This is how I'm going to sell so many copies of my next book. Imagine this vertical frame Tik Tok. All right. Stay with me here. Vertical frame Tik Tok skeletons dancing to MMBop.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  With your book, but holding your book.

• 1:09:08Cal Newport?

  Holding my book.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  It's gonna have a good cover.

• 1:09:11Cal Newport?

  That's 300,000 copy sales. Easy. Easy. It could be even more. So I take it all back. Uh, it's all about social media. It makes a lot of sense and I should spend a lot of time making skeletons to MMBop. Actually that, that would be cool in some way. All right. Enough nonsense. Uh, it's good weather today. I want to go enjoy it. Thank you everyone for listening. I'll be back next week with, uh, another episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:09:38Cal Newport?

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