Pod Insights Deep Questions with Cal Newport Ep. 326: Time to Unplug About this episode During the election season our devices take a particularly hard tole on our health and happiness. Now that the votes have been cast and counted, Cal proposes it’s time to take a temporary but radical break from the exhausting digital chatter. He then answers questions from his listeners and discusses Martha Stewart and the problems of “aesthetic productivity.”
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: Time to Unplug [2:49]
- How do I organize all the information in my life? [39:04]
- How can I do a side hustle if it’s against company policy? [42:23]
- What is “Humanist Productivity”? [48:46]
- Should I use a flip phone in college? [57:05]
- How can I work at a natural place in a software company? [1:01:27]
- CALL: Oliver Burkeman and imperfectionism [1:08:32]
CASE STUDY: Managing with slow productivity [1:13:16]
CAL REACTS: Martha Stewart’s Productivity Tips [1:21:36]
Links:
Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow
Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/
Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?
calnewport.com/after-you-vote-unplug/
today.com/shop/martha-stewart-shares-her-favorite-tips-staying-organized-t171345
Thanks to our Sponsors:
mybodytutor.com
cozyearth.com/deep
notion.com/cal
rhone.com/cal
Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 16,982 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:11 Cal Newport? I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.
0:24 Cal Newport? So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse. Jesse, I always want to give a quick update to the listeners who submitted their name to you, the potentially participate in the organizational challenge. By the time you're hearing this, we have reached out to the initial group of people that I'm going to work with. So if you have not heard back from us, you can assume that you were not selected for that initial group. However, people might drop out or we might decide to do another group or a larger group. So you still may hear from us in the future, but just to update you on that challenge right now, we have reached out to the initial group. I will be talking to them soon. And for all of the podcast listeners, we're hoping to produce good audio out of this project.
1:08 Cal Newport? So you'll be able to hear the real stories of real people who are struggling to organize a disordered life and then hear about what I recommend to them. And then hear the after effect of what worked, what didn't. This is all part of my effort to try to make some of the advice I give here for what we call humanist productivity. Make it more real and get away from the abstract. So stay tuned for that. I'm still deciding, Jesse, whether or not, once we produce that package, if it should be on the main show or if it should be an in-depth episode, because real people could fit in in-depth as well. So I'm still thinking about that.
1:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I guess the one thing I'd say is we got a lot of very qualified applicants and, you know, it was a talented pool with like a lot of people who showed a lot of interest, like over like 200.
1:52 Cal Newport? Yeah. So, so we had to make a lot of hard choices. And what we were selecting for in the end is just like the right mix, the right mix of people and circumstances that would work well for what we're doing. Maybe we'll do a bigger project. You know, we did this for digital minimalism where we ran a large group of people. It was 1,600 people. I ran through a digital declutter and got a lot of information back. So maybe down the line, we'll do a larger sort of experiment here. So stay tuned on that. But I do want to continue to make the advice we talked about here on the show more realistic. Well, we have a good show. We have a deep dive coming up that is very much tuned to our current moment, especially here in America. We got some good questions. We got a call about
2:33 Cal Newport? Oliver Berkman, and I'm going to talk about Martha Stewart in the final segment. So stay tuned for that. So first, let's get started, Jesse, with the deep dive. So I'm recording this episode a few days after the American presidential election. For those of us like me who study technology and its impact on our lives, elections can be particularly relevant and particularly worrisome. Now, why is that? It's because the dynamics of the lead up to elections, especially American presidential elections, have a way of heightening a lot
3:14 Cal Newport? of the specific dynamics that make modern technology problematic. Let me be very specific about this. First, the environment in the lead up to an election amplifies the interruptive nature of digital content. So what I mean by that is the interruptive nature of digital content is the idea that you feel compelled to check in on, say, a social media feed or an online news site or newsletter subscriptions. You feel a need to check in on it during the middle of other things. It thus interrupts whatever you're working on. During elections, this trend or this pull becomes much more heightened because there is this very strong
3:57 Cal Newport? sense that there could be at any moment highly salient breaking news. And it could be something that happened that could change the election, or it could be a particular hot take that you want to know about because it's going to make you happy, or a take that's going to make you really upset about what's going on. Poll numbers is a classic example of these. It's intermittent reinforcement. They could drop at any moment, and someone could be commenting on them. So during election seasons, this idea that I need to pull out that phone one more time, that becomes extra strong. Why is that a problem? Because context switching is an expensive neural operation. When you turn your attention from the conversation that you're having, from the book you're trying
4:38 Cal Newport? to read, the memo you're trying to write, the meeting you're trying to pay attention to, when you switch your attention from that to a phone and you see something that's highly salient and emotionally arousing, it triggers an expensive cognitive context shift within your own head. These operations can take 5, 10, up to 15 or 20 minutes for your mind to completely change its cognitive context, but you're not giving it time to do that. You're glancing, you're initiating, and then you're returning to what you're doing before. So you've triggered this expensive change of where your mind is focused, and you abort that change and try to bring it back to what you're doing before. And before your attention can fully settle on what you're actually trying to do, you check something else and initiate a new unrelated change. The result is an incoherent cognitive context.
5:23 Cal Newport? You feel mentally exhausted and drained. That feeling that people associate with the sort of pre-election period, a big part of that is actually an exhausted brain. They can't keep switching back cognitive context. The second issue that's amplified with technology during the pre-election season is that the emotional salience of the content you're looking at is amplified. That is, its ability to create a strong emotional reaction is much more heightened than a typical content cycle. You're much more likely to see something that is going to make you aroused in the sense
6:03 Cal Newport? of very happy, very upset, outraged, afraid, frustrated, panicky, dread, right? And why this happens is because there's always a competition going on to create the content that's going to move to the top of the curation wars. You have to remember, if you're running a platform like Twitter... There's hundreds of millions of tweets being generated a day. The average user is going to see a couple hundred. So there's this intense informational Darwinian battle for what actually makes it to your attention. It's somewhat algorithmic. A lot of it actually has to do with more cybernetic dynamics such as amplification through power law, expanding follower graphs.
6:47 Cal Newport? I actually wrote a whole New Yorker piece about this two years ago where I got into how Twitter works and selects content. It's not just digital. It's people plus digital. But the point is it's an incredibly complex competition. The things that are most arousing tend to win. You have a lot of competition to win. A lot of people are trying to gain and win the attention game during the election. So they're really pushing and trying all sorts of different angles to get to the top of this catch your attention tournament. And as a result, the stuff you see in election cycle just hits that nervous system. And it's very invigorating. And that itself is also very draining and exhausting. Right?
7:30 Cal Newport? So now that the election is over and our minds are hopelessly scrambled and our nervous systems are strung out, what should we, listeners of this podcast, conscious users of technologies and seeker of the deep life, what do we do? Well, I wrote an essay about this for my newsletter at calnewport.com. It has a big proposal. I think it's the right proposal and that's what I want to go through today in today's deep dive. So if you're watching this episode instead of just listening, you'll see I have loaded that essay up on my screen here. This was on, is on calnewport.com. It was also sent to people who subscribe to my email newsletter.
8:12 Cal Newport? The title of this piece is "After You Vote, Unplug." All right, so I want to start with the suggestion. So here's the meat of what I'm suggesting. I'm going to read here from the article. "Here I have a suggestion that I think could be healing for all points of the political spectrum. Use the stress of this election to be the final push needed to step away from the exhausting digital chatter that's been dominating your brain."
8:42 Cal Newport? So what I'm suggesting in this article is in the post-election period, you take a substantial break from these digital content sources that have been so exhausting and draining over the past few months. Use the election as an excuse to at least temporarily reform your relationship with the digital. So what does that mean, step away? Well, I have four specific suggestions I give in the article. Number one, I say, take a break from social media. I mean that, stop, stop looking at, stop posting. Just go right now, cold turkey.
9:24 Cal Newport? I mean, unless you are a political commentator who makes a living off of like Twitter commentary in your Substack, so basically unless you're like Matthew Iglesias, take a break from social media.
9:39 Cal Newport? Don't look at it, take the apps off your phone, right? So they're just not there. Log out on your computer. So it's not easy on Safari on your phone just to go to the sites and look in it. Certainly don't post anything on it. Don't seek out hot takes on it as we'll soon cover. There's better places to get information right now and you don't need information all the time. Social media, I think, is probably the, the worst of the offenders in terms of a negative physiological and psychological impact on you during the election season. Because of the dynamics we just discussed, social media is sort of the worst offender. So I have the strongest suggestion there. Take a break.
10:17 Cal Newport? All right, suggestion number two, and I'm reading from the article here. Stop listening to news podcasts. Jesse, we gotta be really clear. This is not a news podcast. The, this podcast is the anecdote, right? This will be the anecdote to, uh, antidote. An anecdote and we'll tell some anecdotes, but it's the antidote to the news podcast. I'm a fan of news podcasts, by the way. I, I think it's, it's fantastic. It's like harkening back to the days where you would listen to the radio news. But we gotta take a break from it now. There's so much, you've been so immersed in this information. And what you want to take a break from is just people having just these
11:01 Cal Newport? conversations about what's happening and how they feel about it. You don't need to be immersed.
11:08 Cal Newport? Further in the trauma or celebration, depending on what side of the political spectrum you are right now with strangers. So we're gonna take a temporary break from news podcasts. That's both news roundup style podcasts like the Daily, or you know, if you're center right, like the Dispatch, but also like the news analysis podcasts or the independent media podcasts. So you know, Barry Weiss's Honestly Podcast, or whatever she calls it now, where people are talking about the news. We're taking a temporary break from these. Not forever, we're taking temporary break. All right, third suggestion. Unsubscribe, at least for a while, from the political newsletters clogging your inbox with their hot takes and tired infighting. This might be more of a DC thing. I don't know, Jesse, this might be something that like, normal people don't do. But here in DC, people subscribe
11:51 Cal Newport? to email newsletters that have all these insider hot takes on political stuff. You know what I mean? I mean, there's so many of them around here. Because there's so many political experts here, and this is a good business or job for them, or whatever. If you subscribe to these, you get like, the Silver Bulletin, or you know, Jonah Goldberg, or whatever it is. This is a good time to temporarily take a break. We're trying to, again, get away from this content and subject matter that we're associating with being burnt out, with being drained. Again, we're not, we're coming back to this. We're not putting these people out of business. We're taking a break. Right, finally, this is the
12:33 Cal Newport? most either confusing or most controversial. So I'm gonna read here specifically. "I suggest you switch to a slower pace of media consumption with the formats that remain. Don't laugh at this suggestion, because I'm actually serious. Consider picking up the occasional old fashioned printed newspaper, free from algorithmic optimization and clickbait curation, at your local coffee shop or library to check in, all at once on anything major going on in the world. I think I might set up a Sunday only paper subscription as my main source of news for the rest of the fall."
13:07 Cal Newport? So it's a, you want to get some news still, I think that's fine. It's also a, would be stressful to be cut off completely from the world during a time, especially in our country of the turmoil of a post-election period, especially like a highly fraught election like we just went through. But I'm saying, we are slowing down that consumption is what I'm suggesting. We're not on social media, we're not getting newsletters, not getting in podcasts. I'm saying, pick up a newspaper. I say coffee shop because I don't know if you've seen this, Jesse, Starbucks sells newspapers. Interesting, they're there, right? Your library has the newspaper every day. So like any day, you could walk by the library and sit down and read the front page of the newspaper.
13:48 Cal Newport? I am, I don't get any paper newspaper, but I am considering signing up for a Sunday only paper subscription for the near future. And for me, just saying, I will read section A of that paper on Sundays.
14:03 Cal Newport? This gives you the news, you will be up to date. In fact, you will be more up to date on the news of the country and the world doing that than someone who's on their phone all the time. Because the newspaper is not algorithmic. A newspaper has no way of customizing what you see on the front page to your particular interests and therefore keeping out of your sight, stuff that you don't have a pre-existing interest in. They just show you the articles. You are going to see what's happening in Turkey, for example, and Kurdistan and the missile barrage is, you might not have ever heard about that because it's not big on social media, you're going to hear about it, right? You're going to hear more digested takes, okay?
14:45 Cal Newport? It's like this is covering, I don't need to be Tik Tok up to the beat on all the back and forth between, you know, the, the new administration and the old administration in America. Why don't I just read an article about like, what was the most important thing that happened? Oh, they had an argument about this, I see it, I hear their quotes, now I'm done. You're taking in news, you're not less informed, but the footprint of this news on your day to day attentional landscape is now greatly reduced.
15:13 Cal Newport? Alright, that's my suggestion about what to take out of your life.
15:17 Cal Newport? What should you then do with the newfound free attention? I even, I don't even say free time so much as free attention. What you're freeing up here is attention autonomy when you're not constantly looking at the phone. What you do with this, well, in the article I talk about, I'll read it here.
15:35 Cal Newport? Equally important is how you redirect your newly liberated attention. Consider aiming it toward real community with real people who actually live near you to retrain your brain to stop thinking of the world as hopelessly fractured into vicious tribes.
15:55 Cal Newport? And I say in the article, and I guess I should say this right now on the podcast, but if right now you're scouring this post to seek evidence as to whether I'm friend or foe, then you're already severely suffering from this malady.
16:09 Cal Newport? When you're online, it's all about the bad and the good. And not just the bad and the good, but making sure that you're sufficiently signaling to your team that you're on their team. This becomes the most important thing. And to make your team's boundaries stronger, you have to make the other team be defined increasingly dire and irredeemable.
16:31 Cal Newport? That becomes your reality. When you're on that digital world, that becomes your reality. You have a hate in your heart for people you've never met. You see people, when you're on social media so much, you see people suspicious, like I'm, what team are they on? And I'm looking for signs to try to signify it. You'd be surprised, or maybe not, by how much sort of upset, I would say, communication I get about, why aren't you specifically signaling your allegiance to like this particular issue I care about? You not signaling like publicly allegiance to a thing I care about to me, to the people writing in is like very difficult for them. That is a weird mindset.
17:14 Cal Newport? Until like 10 years ago, it is a weird way to go through the world. Right? You wouldn't walk into the supermarket in 1985 and be like, "You better tell me whether or not you voted for Reagan. And if you didn't vote for Reagan, why aren't you going around talking about how much of a supporter of Jimmy Carter you are, whatever?" It's a weird thing that digital media created, and we don't realize it's overcoming our world. So go spend time with real people, people you can see, people that you live with, doing things with them that's unrelated to like whatever fights are going on online. It rewires your perception of the world. People who spend time with real people in real situations have a lot harder time seeing the world through a lens of hatred. And that's because that's how
17:59 Cal Newport? we're wired to live, we're wired to cooperate. We talked about the Morris book Tribal when I did my roundup of books I read last month, and he argues that the human tribal instinct is one of actual cooperation. That's what allowed Homo sapiens to succeed, is that we can cooperate and empathize with people that we don't know, you know, they're not in our close family or kin, and that's what allowed Homo sapiens to succeed at a global level where other closely related hominid species did not, because they basically just treated everyone. They had no way of cooperating with people that wasn't direct kin, you know, they would just kill them. And so like the Neanderthals could never actually grow large trade networks or cities, or the types of things Homo sapiens do. Lean into that human
18:42 Cal Newport? instinct, be around real people, it will really retrain. You'll just feel happier, you'll feel less upset. All right, another suggestion. Consider reading books again. There's a pleasure in the conquest of deep ideas that's been lost as we thrashed in a digital sea of churning distraction. Books slow down your mind. Books give you a deeper understanding of issue than you'll get online. Books challenge your perceptions or sharpen and sophisticate your understandings and beliefs in ways they couldn't before. Books change the way you understand the world. So go back to reading more books, books about whatever, just as a principle. But also, if you're having a strong reaction to the election...
19:28 Cal Newport? The right way, in my opinion, to try to make sense, you feel like you don't understand the world, you don't understand our country. The right way to make sense of things is not trying to sift through 50,000 hot takes, or 500 different podcast interviews with people pontificating, and hope that sort of out of that morass of like highly engaging, random, attention-seeking content, better understanding will come. It's the, I think, the slow encounter with relevant ideas. And books are the way to do it. Read books you think are going to help you better understand what's going on in your country. And it's a, it's a slower,
20:13 Cal Newport? it feels meaningful. I went through this in 2016. I remember doing this very clearly. That simpler time, 2016, Jesse. So remember, we're coming out of eight years of Obama, you know, hope, red, blue. And if you were, you know, living in a coastal city and you're like an academic like I was, like, everything's great, everyone's happy. Obama's awesome, there's like some weird Tea Party people, but I think they just like tricorn hats. And like, that was just our world. And then, so the 2016 Trump victory, much more so, I think, than the 2024 one, was super surprising. And I remember having this feeling, it's
20:54 Cal Newport? just, you know, I'm an East Coast intellectual my whole life, of bafflement. I remember that, like, I don't understand. I'm a Obama supporter, read the New York Times, I don't understand how anyone could vote for Donald Trump. I remember having this bafflement, right? Because I just had never been exposed to, you know, whatever, that part, what was going on. I had no empathy with the mindset.
21:19 Cal Newport? And so what I did, because I'm a nerd this way, is I got a bunch of books. I got a bunch of books. And I was like, I'm gonna read. And I read on the left and the right, all like center-left, center-right stuff, right? Because I like reactionary far-right stuff's not interesting to me. And I wasn't that interested in like far-left type stuff or whatever. But I was reading, and I don't remember, I remember some of the books, but not of them. Like, I remember reading, like, Thomas Franks had this book called Listen Liberal, that was talking about the evolution of the Democratic Party from its working-class coalition, and then in the post-Nixon era, how it moved and realigned around more like
22:00 Cal Newport? salaried economic elites, like lawyers and had, you know, financiers, and how this happened during the Clinton era. And this movement happened in part because the Democratic Party was upset with their working-class base because of support for Vietnam and lack of support for civil rights. And it was like, interesting. I was, I read some, Yuval Levin had a book coming from the center-right. I remember reading that book. I was reading these books to try to understand, like, how did the modern right feel? What had happened? What's going on with the modern left? And I remember it was very calming, because reading is slow. And it's, it calms the nervous system. And you feel like the structures of knowledge
22:40 Cal Newport? are complicating themselves. And it feels productive, but it's sort of a-emotional. And in some sense, for me, it was very helpful. I remember it was like something to do. And what I, it also changed, like, it changed my perception of the world in ways that I think was useful for me. Going, the world became a more complicated place in a way that I think was useful. So, it's books. Read. Don't scroll. Read, don't scroll. That's the right way. Same if you're on the right as well. Let's say, like, you're super celebratory
23:16 Cal Newport? or this or that. It's gratuitous to just say, I'm gonna just bathe in, you know, people dunking online, right? Understand, like, what's going on with my party? What is the potential positive future? What are the traps to avoid? Like, what's happening? Like, get, read and get, get into the complexity.
23:42 Cal Newport? Of what's going on, right? So anyways, reading slows things down. It makes the world richer, makes you gets rid of the the pot nerves, right? Like you, people in a library are not stressed. Being around books is not stressful. So I suggest reading. Final suggestion from the book, spend more time in nature. To discover that despite the apocalyptic tenor of the online world, its analog counterpart persists and is beautiful. We feel good when we're in nature. Sunshine, walking a nature trail. It just resets, it resets our nervous systems, which have been artificially put out of whack because of the digital. Go outside, go outside this fall.
24:27 Cal Newport? Go outside this winter, you know? Um, that makes a big difference. All right, so there are my advice, right? So, okay, quick summary. The suggestions of what to temporarily walk away from. Social media, political podcasts, political newspapers, and to move to slower media consumption. Things to do to fill this newly liberated attention. Read books, meet real people, and spend more time outside. Now, how long should we do this? Because again, I said, I'm not talking about a permanent disconnect from like political news sources. Here is the, the good news about the American election schedule. We do these elections in November, but nothing changes till January.
25:12 Cal Newport? Right? So there's no, like they do in other countries. We have this election in November, next week. You know, the new person takes over. So like we, and whether we're like worried or celebrating this new person, we really want to be up to date on like what's happening and what they're doing. It really matters. We have in the American system, this break. Nothing can really happen between November and January, except for pontification. Nothing can really happen, except for the search for clicks, except for the challenge online to win the attention curation tournament.
25:47 Cal Newport? So take a break till the new year. I think that's the right timing. You're not missing much. You got holidays that are centered on family. We got Thanksgiving, we got Christmica. I'm not sure if you know this, but Hanukkah is starting on the same, on Christmas Day or some, or Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.
26:04 Speaker 01 Oh, really?
26:05 Cal Newport? Yeah. Yeah. It's a rare, a rare confluence of those two things. We got that going on. We got more importantly than all three of those, baseball hot stove season. Juan Soto is meeting with Steve Cohen, everyone. This is something you could be paying attention to right now. I think that's good to pay attention to. Someone actually wrote me back, Jesse, when I posted this newsletter, and they wrote me back of like, yeah, I've been doing this. And a lot of people actually, by the way, they wrote me back and said, they started this like a few weeks before the election. They were just done, right? And they're kind of in a happier place than any of us right now, probably. But someone wrote back and there's like, I've been doing it for two weeks. But one of the things I've been struggling with is sports news. And I was like, oh, no, no, that's, that's good. Actually, you want
26:50 Cal Newport? to spend time with sports news. That's the solution to healing because I need my baseball trade rumors. Alright, so do it for the, do it for the fall. And then the new year, you can reevaluate. If you want to reevaluate smartly, maybe reread my book, Digital Minimalism, and it'll talk about how to, how to re-enter technology into your life after a break. But the main thing I want to suggest is just take this political break and then do this act of alternative activities. Do this pretty hardcore for the rest of November, for all December. Let your body reset, let your mind reset. You can revisit the world of politics in a more serious way in the new year. So let me end this day by, by reading the paragraph that ended this article. "The republic will still stand without our constant digital vigilance,
27:35 Cal Newport? but it's unclear if our mental health can survive the status quo." And I really believe that? So let's all unplug. Time to take a break.
27:45 Speaker 01 I have a couple of follow up questions.
27:47 Cal Newport? Yeah. What I think about the Mets' chance of signing Juan Soto? It's a good question.
27:52 Speaker 01 Pretty strong, actually, I think.
27:54 Cal Newport? I think he'll spend whatever.
27:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree.
27:57 Cal Newport? It'll be fun for us to see him, though, in the N L East. It's like we get to see Harper a lot still, so I guess that'd be fun.
28:02 Speaker 01 The thing that Bad Dog always says is how the free agency takes so long in baseball. It's just so drawn out and it's like horrible.
28:10 Cal Newport? Yeah.
28:11 Speaker 01 But anyway, did you use Chat G P T to make that image?
28:16 Cal Newport? Yeah, I could tell. I was just messing around with that. Isn't it creepy?
28:20 Speaker 01 They all look the same, but I could tell you probably put like, I want a voting sticker and then like.
28:24 Cal Newport? I was just curious. Yeah, I was just curious. I don't think I'll be using Chat G P T for most images in the world because here, let me load this on the screen. If people are watching, I'll make it big. It's so creepy.
28:34 Speaker 01 They all look the same. You can tell.
28:36 Cal Newport? But let me show you like the things that are creepy. Like, yeah, there's an I voted sticker, but the the font is weird, right? Like, it's kind of weird and Gothic. And there's someone reading, but her face looks weird. Like, when I look at this picture, so if you're just listening, there's a young woman reading a book by a creek with an I voted sticker on. Conceptually, this is like a good image for this article, like you've because the thing, the title was after you vote on plugs. So it's like, I went from voting to I'm reading a book by a creek. But everything about this picture screams that if that that young woman turns slowly to look at the camera, she would like her mouth would be sewed shut and her eyes would be red. You know what I mean? Like, you just, you feel like
29:21 Cal Newport? this is the setup of a creepy scene in like a Blumhouse movie.
29:28 Cal Newport? Or that she's just like that, like she's just reading there and it zooms out and it's just corpses everywhere. Like, don't you get that sense? Yeah, she's on a mountain of corpses. She she zooms out and like, there's some sort of like dinosaur in the water. I don't know. Man, A I makes creepy pictures.
29:50 Speaker 01 A couple other quick questions. I thought you did get the newspaper every day.
29:53 Cal Newport? I used to. We used to get the Post.
29:55 Speaker 01 Okay, you stopped that?
29:56 Cal Newport? We just, we weren't keeping up.
29:58 Speaker 01 Okay.
29:58 Cal Newport? It was too much news and then it was, I was feeling wasteful.
30:01 Speaker 01 Next up, when you do reconnect, what news podcast do you listen to? I feel like our audience would be curious.
30:08 Cal Newport? Well, I don't do news roundup podcasts because.
30:12 Cal Newport? We used to get the paper. I usually just read the paper online. But I do like some of like the different news commentary podcast.
30:21 Speaker 01 Like what?
30:22 Cal Newport? Well, so the thing I do typically is I'm often chasing guests. So I'm interested in particular guests. But I do like listening to center, right, center, left commentary podcast. Because I feel like those you read a balance of those, you get a really good, like kind of a non polemical understanding of what's going on. And it's sort of good to try to balance those two. It's like a good center, right? Podcast would be like listening to Andrew Sullivan. You know, he used to editor of the New Republic, used to write for New York Magazine, has a British accent, which makes him like 25% smarter, which is like, it's true. I was just, you know, we've joking about, but like Oliver
31:01 Cal Newport? Berkman on the show, that accent gave him 20 IQ points. He's like, oh, yes, profound, profound. So, you know, things like that are interesting. I think I think of Ezra Klein as center left. You know, very policy focused. So I'm brilliant guy, brilliant interviewer. So if you take like Sullivan and Klein and sort of like those are good. You're going to get kind of an interesting balance take sometimes like Sam Harris will have on interesting, especially when Sam Harris is doing like technology, I think is really interesting. He has that way of just slowly trying to break down and understand what's going on. And so I'll
31:41 Cal Newport? listen to his sometimes. Who else do I listen to? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't do a ton of political content.
31:48 Speaker 01 That's a good answer.
31:49 Cal Newport? But I'm missing some. There's definitely more. There's definitely more I listen to sometimes.
31:54 Speaker 01 Cool. And then lastly, with the newsletters, I remember when I was just started listening to your podcast when you started, I used to have a lot of newsletters, but now I trimmed like a lot of them. So I'm very selective about my newsletters that come into my box inbox.
32:08 Cal Newport? Yeah, I think that's probably good. I mean, you mainly need mine. Mine has been like very sporadic recently. I do. My plan is to go back. There should be a weekly. I want to write my newsletter weekly. So I'm working on some schedule template changes that's going to make that possible. I'm not quite there. I would like to be there for the New Year's. I think more than once a week is like too much. Yeah. That's what I'm going for. I might have some sort of more synergy, but like we did today, where I write a newsletter on something to really organize my thoughts and then I can use that as the foundation for a deep dive on the podcast. I'm thinking about doing something like that.
32:46 Cal Newport? But I'm not, I'm not quite there. Not quite there yet. I just have so much writing I do.
32:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:51 Cal Newport? You know, I just have a lot more writing. I use the newsletter. What I probably need to go back to is I used to write the newsletter in the evening, but it's because my, I had babies before. So like they would go to bed at, you know, 6:30 and then I could just choose one night a week. I'd sit in the big leather chair. Longtime listeners know about the big leather chair. I'd sit in the big leather chair, put on a record, write my newsletter. It was like nice and meditative. But now my kids are like staying up later than I am. And it's just, I'm just, that's not as much of an option anymore. So I got to figure this out. But yeah, be selective with newsletters. Definitely, like you subscribe the newsletter for the election cycle. It's unsubscribe left and right. Nate Silver was very clever. It's not super clever, but a smart move. You know, Nate Silver, the election forecaster.
33:33 Cal Newport? He turned off, as we got to the fall, he turned off monthly subscriptions. Oh, he's like, I only have annual subscriptions. Cause he knew, like a lot of people, like, all I really care about is your discussions of your model in the lead up to the election. So he's like, fine, but you still have to subscribe for a whole year, which is smart because then when you finally get around to, okay, now I can finally unsubscribe. He's like, there's like some other like midterm, like another election happening. So we'll see. All right. So that's it for the deep dive. We got some good questions coming up. We're covering a lot of topics in those questions, but first, here from one of our sponsors. I want to talk in particular about our friends at Notion. Notion combines your
34:14 Cal Newport? notes, docs, and projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed. And now we have the new Notion AI, which has the capabilities of multiple AI tools built in, which means you can search, generate, analyze, and chat all inside Notion. Now, here's the thing. If you don't know Notion, you're not a sufficiently intense productivity information flow geek like I am. It's this fantastic, super flexible tool for organizing your information, accessing your information, seeing your information in sort of different types of views. You can organize tasks, track your habits, write beautiful docs, collaborate with your team. We used to have this system with one of our ad agencies before where, and I've mentioned this on the show,
34:56 Cal Newport? they built this great interface for us for dealing with ad reads, where we could see the same data from many different forms. So I could say, for example, what are the ad reads we need to do on the show being recorded on this day? Or we could click on one of those particular advertisers and say, actually, I want to see all of the ad reads that we have scheduled for that particular advertiser. When we are on the view for a particular show, we could click on a particular read and enter in the information about, hey, what's the timestamp? And all this information gets stored in a cool place. You can build these sort of custom information systems that could be enterprise level or just you dealing with some complicated project you have. But this key new feature in Notion that I'm talking about here is how they've integrated AI with Notion AI.
35:38 Cal Newport? It makes all of this even better. The new Notion AI is a single tool that does it all. You can search across Notion and other apps. You can generate text and docs in your own style. You can analyze PDFs and images. You can chat with the system about your own information or what you want to do. It just makes it so much simpler to use this tool and so much more flexible. A couple of things to emphasize. Notion AI is designed to protect your privacy. Notion's AI partners are contractually prohibited from using your data to train their models. All right. Notion AI also respects the permissions of your content, so it will only reference content that you have access to.
36:21 Cal Newport? Second, it uses multiple models to give you the best results. Notion AI will draw from both GPT-4 and Claude. It will chat with you about any topic. It can search across thousands of docs in seconds, answer questions about your own information. There's this new beta feature called AI connectors, which allows it to search across other apps that are relevant, like Slack discussions, Google Docs, et cetera. So try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/cal. Do that in all lowercase letters. Notion.com/cal. Now try the powerful, easy to use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. That's notion.com/cal. I also want to talk about our friends at Cozy Earth.
37:07 Cal Newport? Look, I'm telling you, it's gift season is coming up. Buy people you care about Cozy Earth products. In particular, my favorite, the Cozy Earth Sheets. I have told you this, my wife and I are obsessed with Cozy Earth. We have multiple pairs of Cozy Earth Sheets because they are the most comfortable sheets we've ever had. We used to mourn when those sheets were being washed and we had to put just regular sheets on our bed. We would mourn it. And so we bought enough pairs so that we would never have to have a week without Cozy Earth Sheets on our bed. Just the fabric is so comfortable, it's breathable, it's soft, it sleeps cool. We also have the Cozy Earth Comforter Duvet Cover. Very soft.
37:52 Cal Newport? I have Cozy Earth Sweatshirt, which has this like really comfortable, almost cooling sensation, which I love when I'm exercising it. We have the Cozy Earth Towels. My wife has the Cozy Earth PJs. We really are big Cozy Earth boosters because I don't know how they make this fabric. But it is just the most comfortable stuff we have. We've given Cozy Earth Sheets as gifts. So anyways, gift giving season. You've got Kris McCaw coming up. Order these sheets or any of the other products now. I am a big believer. And there's also nice stuff, too. They're responsibly produced, they have 10-year warranties, et cetera, et cetera. All right, so wrap the ones you love in luxury with Cozy Earth. We have a good deal here to offer. And trust me, you need the deal.
38:36 Cal Newport? You want to bring the price down if you can. Visit CozyEarth.com/deep and use my exclusive 40% off code DEEP to give the gift of luxury this holiday season. That's CozyEarth.com/deep. And if you get that post-purchase survey, take a second to say you heard about Cozy Earth from Deep Questions Podcast. That really helps me because they know you came from me. All right, Jesse, I think we're ready for some questions. What do we got first?
39:04 Speaker 01 First question comes from Rebecca. With several years' worth of emails, notes, and files spread across various formats and locations, how can I best approach consolidating this information without succumbing to overwhelm?
39:17 Cal Newport? I mean, you should use Notion. We said ad read for Notion. Move it all in there, but use my promo code. Okay, so here's what I, my typical thought for organizing information. You need a digital and physical filing cabinet. Physical filing cabinet is obvious. It's a literal thing. It's a filing cabinet. You have folders, manila folders within bigger hanging folders. And you put actual pieces of paper in there. Digital filing cabinets is like a particular directory tree within your computer, where you store information that you want to, that you want to keep. So like on my computer, the folder is called administrative. And then underneath that, I have all sorts of sub folders for various things. Like here is stuff related, like digital files related to tax filings.
40:02 Cal Newport? Here's stuff related to like important Georgetown, like contracts or whatever. Right? So digital, treat it like a physical filing cabinet. You have a particular digital filing cabinet. I believe in encrypted backup of digital filing cabinets. I use Dropbox. And so it's automatically synced and stored encrypted on the Dropbox server. So if my computer is destroyed or lost, I'm not losing those important files. I can access them online and I can resync those files to a new computer when I get it. All right.
40:32 Cal Newport? If something is important, it should go in one of those two things. It's like you say here, like, what do I do with years worth of emails? Well, nothing. Most emails, if you just have them stored in your inbox, they're just in your inbox. I don't treat that particularly special. If there's a particular piece of information that arrived in an email that's important, print it and put it in a proper folder in your physical filing cabinet, or export it as a PDF and put it in an appropriate file within your digital filing folders. And what I mean by export it, well, technically speaking, the way I take things like emails and I store them, you just go to print, like you're printing it. And then when you select the printer, at least the way it works on Mac, you can say, open in preview or print the PDF.
41:17 Cal Newport? And so it just takes like whatever would have printed and it puts in a PDF file and you can just save that and move it into the filing cabinet. All right. So just have one digital, one physical. Notice where you don't have to replicate between the two. Some stuff can be, that's fine. Right? Like maybe you, someone sends you as a PDF, a contract, and you throw it in your digital, but you printed it, decided and maybe you want to store the printed. But you don't have to duplicate between the two. But that's where important stuff goes. Nothing else is a trusted storage system. The use of terminology from David Allen. So if something arrived in your email that's important, it is not stored until it's in one of those cabinets, digital or physical. Someone gives you a paper, it comes through the mailbox, you get mailed a form, a tax form, a contract, or whatever.
41:58 Cal Newport? It is not stored until you have it in a folder in your physical mailing cabinet or in your digital file storage, either one of those two things. All right. So just simplify where things can be stored, physical and digital, and don't consider things stored until it's in one of those places. Everything else, you don't have to stress about. Like if you have a bunch of emails archived in Gmail, who cares? The key stuff has been put in one of those folders. All right. What do I got next?
42:23 Speaker 01 Next question is from anonymous. How can I go out on my own when my company has a strict conflicts of interest policy preventing you from performing my craft on the side? I'm a high performer and objectively good at my craft, but would eventually like to start my own indie business. This goes directly against your advice to prove that you can make money doing something before quitting, leaving your day job to pursue your own venture.
42:44 Cal Newport? So the specific advice that anonymous is talking about comes from my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I said, use money as a neutral indicator of value. And the specific advice was to know if what you want to do, let's say is like a new job, is valuable, see if you can get people to give you money for it. And the key idea here is that people are happy to give you verbal praise or affirmation. It costs them nothing and it seems like the pleasant sociable thing to do. Hey, that's a great idea. Your business idea is great. You should just go for it. I wish I could do that. You're definitely going to be successful. That means nothing, right? They might not know anything about it, or they're just trying to be nice. But people do not like to give you their money.
43:25 Cal Newport? So you're like, okay, can I sell enough of this thing to support myself and then I no longer do my job? Well, if you can't, people aren't willing to give you your money for the thing you're selling, then it's not good enough for you to make a living on it. Right? Can I get a big enough book, can I get a big book advance on this book idea? If not, then maybe it's not the great book idea I thought it was, etc. So that's what we mean by money as a neutral indicator of value. So the person asking the question here is saying, but I can't go and try my thing on the side because I signed a contract. Well, that's true. You can't. If you signed a contract that says, look, I am a writer for this magazine and I'm not allowed to write for any of these other magazines while I'm here, then yeah, you can't go write for other magazines while you're here, right?
44:10 Cal Newport? Contract is a contract. Can you still apply the advice, though? Yes. In a couple of very specific ways. And the main way is a job offer. You don't like your current job and you want to bring your skills somewhere else where the setup better fits your lifestyle centric planning vision. You're allowed to go solicit job offers. If someone says, we will pay you this much money for you to come work for us. That's a fantastic neutral indicator of value. Oh, my skills are valued by them. Now I can quit my job and go take that other job. So you can actually just go out to the marketplace and see if in the other type of work you want to do with your skills that's better going to fit your lifestyle. Can you get a job offer?
44:55 Cal Newport? That is sufficiently large. That's also using money as a, as a neutral indicator of value. All right. And that'd probably be the main thing you could do in a situation like that.
45:05 Cal Newport? All right. What do we got next? Did that make you sign a conflict of interest? I think I did. I said, you're not allowed to. What would you be doing on this side? You're not allowed to. We need an enemy podcast. I was gonna say, you're not allowed to produce podcast for. We don't have an enemy podcast. We need a nemesis. I don't know who the nemesis would be of our podcast. Maybe we should just choose someone famous.
45:26 Speaker 01 Joe Rogan?
45:27 Cal Newport? Joe Rogan.
45:28 Speaker 01 His podcast is so big.
45:30 Cal Newport? You are not allowed to go produce Joe Rogan's podcast. I'm sorry. I put it in a contract.
45:37 Speaker 01 Although I was listening to him and Elon the other day, and I guess Jamie does play a lot of golf.
45:43 Cal Newport? That's a pretty good job. And you already have a kind of similar name.
45:47 Cal Newport? I mean, if he just started saying Jesse instead of Jamie, how many people you think would really notice? Like casual listeners like, yeah, there's like, there's a.
45:54 Speaker 01 You never see his face. You don't know what he looks like.
45:56 Cal Newport? He's, he kind of looks like you. I mean, he's tall and I think he has blonde hair.
46:02 Speaker 01 And he plays golf?
46:03 Cal Newport? Yeah. Yeah. If you've been wondering, it is true. Jesse is the same as Jamie from the Joe Rogan podcast.
46:09 Speaker 01 He probably makes a ton of money doing that because he makes like 30 million a year.
46:13 Cal Newport? I hope so. Yeah. I mean, and I really do.
46:16 Speaker 01 Probably more than that.
46:16 Cal Newport? That's their whole, like my main inspiration I derive from Joe Rogan. Other than like taking lots of human growth hormone is he kept his operation small. Like his biggest staffing, the biggest like staffing he has is actually security. I mean, it really is him and Jamie. Like I just knowing from, I know a lot of people who know him or have been on his show. It's like Jamie does the things and puts the files online and runs the runs it. And that's it. And then like Joe books, he kind of just texts guests specifically. Like, so how you get on the Joe Rogan podcast, from what I understand, never been on the show,
46:57 Cal Newport? but I know lots of people who have is typically someone you know in common will reach out and be like, can I give your phone number to Joe? And then he'll just like text you and be like, hey, man, can we chat? And then he'll talk to you on the phone and like, this could be cool. I think we should talk. And then that's that. I think they have someone who like does travel booking or something, but.
47:16 Speaker 01 When you go on the show, can you use a gym? Don't they have a sick gym at their studio?
47:20 Cal Newport? Yeah, but my worry be like you use it before.
47:23 Speaker 01 I'd probably do it both.
47:24 Cal Newport? And then you're just like.
47:25 Speaker 01 Spend the whole day there.
47:26 Cal Newport? Pouring sweat. You're just in there. Yeah. I come in there just vomiting into a bucket, just pouring sweat. Ripped my peck muscle. I have an arrow through my shoulder because I was trying to like, he does a lot of like El Cunti and I have like an arrow through my shoulder. Yes, I can go well. I can go well. But yes, Jesse is not allowed. I'm putting my foot down. He's not allowed to produce Joe Rogan's podcast and mine, right? You can't have two giants competing for the same attention. There's only room in American cultural life for one of these two shows. We're both B M I Ts.
48:07 Cal Newport? I think between us, we do something like five million views a week between us and Joe Rogan's podcast. It were very powerful. You know, between our episode on time block planning and Joe's episode where he interviewed Donald Trump. 200 million views combined. Alright, that's a lot of cultural power we have. We can't, you know, you put two, you put two alphas in them, in a rink, right? You put two bowls in the same paddock, it's not gonna work. Sorry, Jesse, we gotta, you gotta choose your allegiance. It's either me or Rogan. Alright, who do we got next?
48:46 Speaker 01 Next question is from Steven. I'm a new listener and just finished your episode about the eight productivity books that can change your life. What is humanist productivity?
48:55 Cal Newport? Well, I like that episode. I don't remember what, I remember maybe like half of what those books were. That episode was from what, last year?
49:03 Speaker 01 I'll pull it up while you answer.
49:04 Cal Newport? Yeah. Okay, so humanist productivity, I've been using that term or variations of that term for a while. I actually did a whole interview about that on Brad Stolberg and Steve Magnus's and Clay Skipper's show. We, I think it was titled like humanist productivity. Alright, so what's the deal here? Well, what do we mean by productivity? There's two big definitions that have both explicitly and implicitly dominated sort of economic life. And then there's humanist productivity, which is a, going to be a third option, which I think is better. So, the first definition of productivity is the oldest definition of productivity. This emerges as an economic concept in the 18th century, comes out of
49:45 Cal Newport? agricultural production and then moves on to industrial production, and it's a ratio. The ratio of output per unit input. So, bushels of corn per acres of land cultivated, number of Model Ts produced per paid worker hour, right? In classic economics, typically the goal for anything that produces things is to increase that ratio as much as possible. When you hear, for example, about a country's productivity or productivity growth, this is the style of productivity they're measuring. So typically, they'll, they'll measure the economic output of a sector and they'll divide it by the number of people who work in the sector. So there, it's like dollars generated per worker. When that number goes up, productivity
50:28 Cal Newport? is up. When that number goes down, productivity is down. Alright, so ratio-based productivity is the standard economic metric that's named productivity. It was at the core of most of the economic growth that funded what we think of as the Western world today. This is Peter Drucker's argument. This idea of we're measuring this carefully and we keep looking for innovations in technique or processes that makes this ratio bigger. And it just led to sort of like massive explosions in economic growth. But it's really something that discusses, it's relevant to production processes. All right. So then knowledge work comes along, becomes a major sector in the 20th century. And this ratio-based definition of productivity doesn't cleanly apply. Why?
51:13 Cal Newport? Because a knowledge worker, someone who's sitting and working at a desk, doesn't just produce wheat or doesn't just produce Model Ts. There's not a clean output to measure. They work on many different things, many different projects, some internal, some external. Often, these projects are collaborative, so their role within the project is actually hard to actually like separate or isolate. And so you don't have a ratio to measure anymore. I can't give you a number that for most knowledge work positions, it says, here's your productivity number, we want it to go up and down. So what did we do? We invented the second major notion of productivity. And this was implicit, no one really said this out loud until I came along with my book, Slow Productivity, where I make this big argument. But we came up in the knowledge workspace with what I call pseudo-productivity.
51:56 Cal Newport? And it says, okay, if we can't explicitly manage or measure productivity because you're working on too many things, we will just use instead visible effort as a proxy for useful effort. The more you're doing, the better. We can't kind of figure out what you're doing or if what you're doing, like how much it matters or its direct impact on the bottom line, but more visible activity is better than less. That's pseudo-productivity. That has implicitly been how we managed knowledge work since like the 1950s. In an age of offices you came to and typewriters. It worked okay. It's not a great measure, but it didn't cause a lot of problems.
52:40 Cal Newport? It just meant like you had to be at the office. And when you're at the office, you know, try to hide the fact that you're on your third martini of lunch, right? You know, just kind of be there, be doing stuff. Don't spend too much time with the water cooler. Sued productivity went off the rails. Once we had the front office IT revolution, once we had email and then mobile computing, the problem was there was now no escape from opportunities to demonstrate activity because you could always be checking in on things, answering emails, working on work, wherever you happen to be. And this is when knowledge work became exhausting. It's when knowledge work eventually became deranging because now you as the individual had to constantly fight this battle between work and other things are important to you in your life. The boundary was gone.
53:24 Cal Newport? Inequities became amplified. The 23 year old with nothing going on can very easily just demonstrate visible activity by doing nonsense, slack and email answering late into the night. Whereas the people with families or caring for sick relatives or just other things going on that are important to them in their life couldn't do this as much. And now they're suffering under this measure, even though the 23 year old doing slack in the middle of the night is not actually producing more value if you had a way to really measure that. So we had the ratio based productivity followed by pseudo productivity. Humanist productivity says, no, no, no. The thing we want to optimize is your flourishing as a person. It's the type of productivity I talk about here on the show. The reason why I want you to take control over what you have to do and control over your time and attention is so that you are in control of your life.
54:07 Cal Newport? And once you're in control of your life, aim it towards where you want it to go. Now, part of that is being on top of your work, being able to accomplish the stuff that not only helps you keep your job, but helps you shape your career in the directions that are compatible with your vision of an ideal lifestyle. So this is a very important part of flourishing, but allows you to do it on your own terms and to not have this take up all of your time and to have other time to do other things and to make sure these other things are important and become a part of your life, to make sure your kids get what they need, that your soul gets what you need, that your community gets from you what it needs from a leadership perspective. So I'm a big believer for the individual to deploy the tools of productivity we discuss towards human flourishing. And that is different than ratio based productivity, which is trying to optimize output.
54:52 Cal Newport? That's different than pseudo productivity, which is trying to optimize visible activity.
54:57 Cal Newport? And so that's what we talk about here. It is my response to the anti-productivity movement. I think the anti-productivity movement tends to argue that like any discussion of productivity is about trying to move humans back towards this industrial ratio-based version of productivity. And I say it doesn't have to be. The anti-productivity movement tries to make this sort of false binary choice. Either you become like the human equivalent of the Model T assembly line where like we're trying to squeeze out as much production as possible, or your only other choice is to step away from productivity discourses and I guess write substacks about late-stage capitalism. I said, no, there's a third choice.
55:39 Cal Newport? Use the tools of productivity to build a life of human flourishing. Because here's the thing, pseudo-productivity is extremely stressful. Stepping away from any type of organizational thinking is also very stressful. You're going to be working more, you're going to be more stressed, you're going to be more frazzled, more frustrated, more upset. So the solution here is to learn the tools you need to control your tasks and time and attention, but then you be in control of what you want to aim towards, and you should aim towards human flourishing. That's what humanism is about. So we call it humanist productivity.
56:11 Speaker 01 I have the books.
56:13 Cal Newport? All right, what were the eight?
56:15 Speaker 01 Eight were Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Getting Things Done, Four Hour Work Week, Essentialism, 4,000 Weeks, How to Do Nothing, Make Time, 168 Hours.
56:28 Cal Newport? And what was the episode number for that?
56:31 Speaker 01 265.
56:32 Cal Newport? Okay. So we're at what, like 326?
56:36 Speaker 01 Yep.
56:37 Cal Newport? Yeah. That was a while ago. I have one more book I would now add to that list, which I think will be no surprise to our listeners. Eruption by Michael Crichton and James Patterson.
56:51 Speaker 01 Oh, man, that's funny.
56:52 Cal Newport? Torah-esque in its wisdom for human living. No, I'm not happy about that book, folks. Michael Crichton is spinning in his grave. All right, what do we got next?
57:05 Speaker 01 Next question is from Joel. I'm a software student and very distracted by my phone. I have an iPhone, an Apple Watch Ultra and a flip phone. What's your view on Apple Watches? And should I just use a flip phone in college?
57:17 Cal Newport? Look, here's what I'm going to suggest you in college. And this is a general thing I often suggest to people is when it comes to technology and its negative impact on certain things you're doing. The problem might be caused by technology, but you don't solve the problem solely with technology as well. We kind of have this implicit techno determinist narrative out there that the tools you own specify like what the rhythms of your life is like. So if you want to change something you dislike about the rhythms of your life, like I'm very distracted when I'm studying, you have to choose to change the tools you own. I argue, no, no, change your behaviors, change your processes, change how you approach
57:58 Cal Newport? things, then the tools themselves probably won't matter that much. Now, if it's helpful because of like a really strong addiction to a smartphone to replace it with a non, if that's the only way to replace with a non-smartphone is like the only way you think you can break that addiction, okay, go ahead. But keep in mind, I'm someone who is very non-distracted by the digital world and I own a perfectly normal smartphone. It's not the technology that matters, it's my rules and systems. So when it comes particularly to college, I've been arguing this now for almost two decades. It's hard to believe, it's been almost two decades since I published my first book. Focus is a superpower. If you are comfortable with and frequently deployed academic sessions with no context switching, so no quick checks of phone in any ways, text messages, social media, web,
58:43 Cal Newport? you just can focus without distraction, compared to your peers who are context shifting back and forth, it's like 50 IQ points. It really will be like a superpower. You'll finish your assignments like 2X faster and your performance will be like 2X better. So how you do that, it's not so much what technology owns, it's about what your rules are. So let me give you a few. When you do studying, whether it's reading, working on problem sets or writing, do it with zero connectivity.
59:14 Cal Newport? Do not bring your phone. You're in college, right? You're not the FEMA director. It'll be okay if you are unreachable for 90 minutes. All right, you gotta get over yourself a little bit. Don't bring your phone. Turn off the wifi on your computer. Don't give me the whole thing about, I need to use the internet to get the sources. And so therefore I have to look at TikTok on my phone while I study. If you need to use the internet, that's a separate session. Go gather everything you need on a separate session. Bring your computer, turn off your lap, turn off the wifi. If it's something you could do without a computer, even better. Don't bring your phone with you. Go to an out of the way library. Practice studying without connectivity. It'll be very hard at first. As you get used to it, it's like taking the limitless pill. You're like, wow, this is so much easier than it used to be. You need to regularly practice being disconnected even outside of these sessions so that you're more comfortable with it.
59:58 Cal Newport? Do something every day without your phone. Like go have a meal, go drop off a book at the library. It doesn't have to be long, like 10, 15 minutes. But just get used to this idea that sometimes you do things without highly salient, algorithmically curated distraction. It just gets your brain used to the idea of like, that's fine. And then you'll, you'll have more success with those study sessions. If you're really struggling in those study sessions, use timers. I can do 50 minutes. And then I can go to back to my dorm room and look at my computer or phone. And then I'll come back and set another timer. When you're aiming towards a, a time limited goal, like I just want to survive 50 minutes without looking at my phone. It's much easier to succeed than if you're just generally saying, I'm gonna study for hours. I don't want to look at my phone. Your mind will convince you like, well, we have to look at it at some point. Why not now? Why not now?
1:00:42 Cal Newport? Timing makes it much simpler. Like I can last 50 minutes. Come on, it'd be embarrassing if I couldn't.
1:00:50 Cal Newport? All right, so outside of those two things, okay, I only had two. Outside of those two things, the tech doesn't really matter. You just, you practice studying and writing and doing schoolwork without connectivity. And you practice that in other parts of your life. And that's just how you do it. Superpower. I don't care if back in your room, you have, you know, an iPhone 19 that's plugged into one of those like Apple Vision Pros and you're wearing a Nintendo Power Glove. Whatever you want to do with your technology outside of the studying, whatever. But get used to that. And you're really, really gonna do well. All right, what do we got next?
1:01:27 Speaker 01 We have our corner.
1:01:28 Cal Newport? All right, let's hear some theme music.
1:01:37 Cal Newport? So as regular listeners know, every week we like to have one question that deals with an issue from my latest book, Low Productivity, The Lost Start of Accomplishment Without Burnout. If you have not read that book, you need to. It is probably at the core of at least 50% of what we talk about on this show. And go find that book, Slow Productivity, wherever books are sold. All right, Jesse, what is our Slow Productivity Corner Question of the Week?
1:02:00 Speaker 01 It's from Angel. My workday, my workdays consist of coding a new feature or fixing a bug. Our company works in a three-week sprints and many of my coworkers crush it. How can I work at a natural pace when it's out of my hands?
1:02:13 Cal Newport? I actually think sprints can be quite compatible with working at a natural pace. Let's quickly define those two terms. Sprint is an idea that comes out of Agile software development methodologies, where you have a particular bug you're fixing or feature you're working on, and you just do that. Right? So it's like just sprint working on this one thing until it's done, and then we'll change its status, and then we can figure out what you should work on next. It's a methodology I really like, because it recognizes the reality of instead trying to work on multiple things concurrently, slows down the actual time per thing to get done. Right? So if I work on three features concurrently, and then once I finish all three features, you know, divide that time
1:02:57 Cal Newport? by three, like what was the average time it took me to finish each of these three features? That average time tends to be much longer than if you did a sprint on the first feature, stopped, did a sprint on the second feature, stopped, and then did a sprint on the third feature and stopped. And it's just because of the administrative overhead of working on something, and when you have to keep switching your context, it slows you down. So sprints are a great idea. I think they can be compatible with working at a natural pace. Now, that's the second principle from my book, Slow Productivity, which says humans are not meant to be working all out, all day, all week, all year. We need variations in our intensity on multiple different time scales. Otherwise, it's really artificial and stressful. Sprints can help you here in two ways. One, at the macro scale.
1:03:41 Cal Newport? It gives you a natural down cycle period. You finish a hard sprint. That sprint is over. You can now explicitly take a break until the next sprint begins. Or you have a natural place to down cycle. Some software companies do this explicitly. Basecamp does this explicitly. You can read about down cycles in their employee handbook online. Where after you finish a sprint on something big, they want you to take a sufficiently long down cycle where all you're doing is reflecting on what you just did, thinking about what you want to do next and closing up loose ends. They say you can't skip this. They said it might be natural. You feel more productive to jump into a next sprint right away, but don't because if you don't restore overall, you're going to burn out and your effectiveness will go down.
1:04:25 Cal Newport? So consider adding a similar methodology like this. Just ask for it. Just like, yeah, this sprint was really hard. I want to take two days to just close up the loose ends and recharge, and then we'll start the next sprint. If you're doing good work, you know, it's fine. It's like, whatever, just this sounds a good idea. It's like Cal Newport stuff, like go for it, right? Sprints can also be useful for varying up your intensity at the smaller scale as well. Because you're just working on one thing, you have a lot more autonomy moment to moment. If the main thing I'm doing is working on this feature, I can, for example, do like a three hour, like really intense working on it. And then maybe like take two hours where I'm like going for a walk and just like recharging and thinking or like exercising or something like that.
1:05:10 Cal Newport? You have more flexibility to do this because you just have one thing to work on. So there's not as much of a public trace of your efforts. Compare this to a typical pseudo productivity shop, where you're just working on lots of stuff at the same time. Now you have a lot more hard edges on which down cycling your intensity could hit. You have a lot of meetings everywhere that like it's hard to get away from. You have all these emails going back and forth about 10 or 15 different things where it's notable if you don't answer an email for two hours, right? When you have a lot of things going on simultaneously, it's hard to down cycle for a few hours or take a day lighter than others. When you're working on one thing, you can. Maybe like really get after it Monday and don't do much Tuesday,
1:05:54 Cal Newport? but then give it a big push on Wednesday. It all kind of adds up to the same. If you're working really hard when you work, we tend to do better with variations anyway. So it's not going to take you longer. And because you're sprinting, I think you have a lot more flexibility, at least in shops that don't have this maddeningly self-destructive habit of you should be slacking with people while you sprint, which makes no sense to me. I think that's like owning an NBA team and making your players smoke a bunch of cigarettes. It's counterproductive. To make your programmers have to be on slack all day makes them significantly dumber. In the moment, you can't do that context shift. You can't code that way. So as I think sprints can be on multiple scales compatible with
1:06:38 Cal Newport? working at a natural pace.
1:06:40 Speaker 01 I guess you made it when I was reading the question too. I was under the impression that the sprints were like right after the others, but you answered that by saying she should ask for it.
1:06:49 Cal Newport? Yeah, just ask for it. Yeah. It's interesting. When you're doing good work, and this is why the third principle of slow productivity is obsess over quality. When you're doing good work, the biggest fear of your employer is losing you. And it's a mindset shift you have to make as you get organized, using the type of stuff I talk about, and get good using the stuff I talk about. You have to leave the mindset which fits earlier in your career, which is my employer is looking for reasons not to keep me on. My employer is looking for reasons to fire me. My employment here is contingent. They're not sure about me. At some point, you change from that to we don't want to lose them. And if you're doing great work and they know you're super on the ball and that you listen to my podcast
1:07:34 Cal Newport? and that like you're you're super organized and you're really focused. And you say, here, I want to take these two day down cycles. Here's why. They don't want to lose you. I mean, worse thing, they might say no, but they're not going to get mad. Speaking of basketball, I saw the other night Steph Curry playing the Wizards.
1:07:51 Speaker 01 Oh, you went to the game?
1:07:52 Cal Newport? Yeah, but he had a luxury box.
1:07:54 Speaker 01 Nice.
1:07:55 Cal Newport? Yeah. He's a lawyer, so we just needed one of us to have like a legitimate reason.
1:08:04 Speaker 01 Small court claims.
1:08:05 Cal Newport? Connection to the law firm or something like that. Right. It wasn't me. Look, I want to go out on a limb here with a hot take. Steph Curry is good at basketball. He's very good at basketball.
1:08:16 Speaker 01 He's been doing it for a long time, too.
1:08:18 Cal Newport? He has. But not that much taller.
1:08:20 Speaker 01 He's really good at golf, too.
1:08:21 Cal Newport? I believe it. All right, so there's our question. Let's get some theme music to end the corner.
1:08:32 Cal Newport? All right, Jesse, we have a call this week?
1:08:34 Speaker 01 We do.
1:08:34 Cal Newport? All right, let's hear it.
1:08:37 Speaker 02 Hi, Cal. My name is Amy, and I'm a PhD candidate in nursing, living in Canada. My question for you focuses on imperfectionism versus doing really good work that gets noticed, or being so good they can't ignore you. How do you know when your work is good enough to ship? Does it matter whether the work is like the type of work you're doing?
1:09:01 Speaker 02 And I'm just thinking about your recent conversation with Oliver Berkman on imperfectionism. Thank you.
1:09:08 Cal Newport? You want tangible evidence about the value of your work. At least when it comes to your career and career shaping, you want to be working on things where the value is more unambiguous. This ship this many units, this sold this many units, this got this much praise from the client. I brought in this much work. We have this much demand. And why does this matter? Because it's the main trading chip you have for shaping your career.
1:09:37 Cal Newport? Demonstration of unambiguously valuable capability or skills, that is your leverage for shaping the reality of your professional life. And if you can shape the reality of your professional life, you can shape it into really cool configurations that resonate with what's important to you. This is my whole bit about lifestyle-centric planning. You figure out your vision of the ideal lifestyle, and then you try to work backwards from that. Your profession is a big piece of that. Getting good at what you do in an unambiguous way is how you take control of your profession. And you're going to be much more likely to be able to shape your ideal lifestyle that way. I mean, this is what Oliver did, right? Like, he has, his life right now is he's just like a full-time writer. He's not even a columnist anymore. He just writes books.
1:10:22 Cal Newport? And so like what he talks about this lifestyle of write, do deep work for like three hours a day, like write, do your best with the time that remains to kinda just have a to do list and like do some useful stuff and then, and then kinda be okay and then, you know, go enjoy yourself and just be okay. That is a particular vision, which resonates with me as well, by the way. A very particular vision of a lifestyle that Oliver was able to engineer in part because he was a successful writer. He, he, he became a journalist. His column was very successful. It gave him a name in this particular area. He began writing books. I think his first book then it hit his big, but 4,000 weeks really did. It was
1:11:05 Cal Newport? a culmination of this training and that really opened up this ability for him to then reduce the urgency and load of the things he has so that this particular lifestyle of write, do a little bit of admin and then enjoy is possible. So he's like a great example of lifestyle centered career planning. So this is why like in slow productivity, I say obsess over quality is this critical principle is because it enables everything else. But again, to get to the specifics of your question, don't shy away from unambiguous evaluation. That's where lifestyle centric planning really can play. It's scary because unambiguous evaluation can be unambiguous negative evaluation. I'm being attacked by a fly.
1:11:49 Speaker 01 Oh, I noticed that in here actually.
1:11:51 Cal Newport? I think I described it. Hold on. I did not. I did not. I thought I was like Mr. Miyagi. I did not. It's tempting to, to steer away from things that is going to be unambiguous about how valuable it is. Like this sold this many units. We will or will not give you the deal for this book. Like the clients bought this or not, because it makes failure clear. But the flip side of things that have a Unambiguous downside that you're afraid of is that the upside is going to be unambiguously useful. And so that's the territory you swim towards. Not everyone has to do this. Some people's vision of an ideal lifestyle doesn't require this.
1:12:34 Cal Newport? They're like, "Look, I have this particular job. It's not so hard to do it well. It pays well, allows me to live in the place I want to live. I like the people that are there. And building on top of this, I can make the rest of my life what I want it to be." That's fine. But if there's something more radical you want to do with your life, that's where you're gonna have to do something where you have a big chance of notable failure, because the flip side of that's what's going to give you the big leverage you need to make radical changes. So maybe that's the way I would put it, is care about stuff that is too good to be ignored if you have visions in your lifestyle that are too desirable to be easily obtained. And that's a good way to think about it.
1:13:15 Cal Newport? All right, I think we have a case study here. So I like to do these now and again, where we read tales of people talking about the specific ways in which they put the type of advice we talked about on the show, how they put into practice in their own life. So do we have a name? Susan. All right. Susan says, "I am a new manager with one direct report that is outsourced. I was very confused at first on what to include him in and when I should involve him in stuff. He's new to the business, so I just CC'd him on everything, inviting him to every meeting. Maybe some of the emails would be educational, like my notes from various meetings or client responses. Maybe he would learn the business at the various meetings.
1:13:59 Cal Newport? We met once a week, but I was very unclear on what he was working on. I would send one-off tasks his way, but it was unclear if he had enough work to do or too much. Well, thanks to slow productivity, my clarity is drastically better. When I was whittling down the non-suitoproductive work for him to do, I had to get very clear on what was important. Now we meet more often for short updates, and he's got max three projects in a shared list. Since I know exactly what he is working on, I can stop spamming him with vaguely relevant emails, and I can just update the list when I need to share details or additional work or projects for him to do." Further, I started sharing my project list as well. At first, it was uncomfortable to have him see what I was working on.
1:14:44 Cal Newport? I was holding myself accountable to his judgment. What would he think? But having another human see what my projects are and having to frequent update meetings to show my incremental work has been rewarding. I look forward to one day having a larger team where we can all cross collaborate in this way. All right, so Susan is demonstrating an important concept. This is from principle one of my books, Slow Productivity. Manage your workloads better. It's like the key thing. The key thing that we don't think about at all in knowledge work is workload management. And this is what causes so many problems. So what did Susan do? Following my advice, she said, let's be explicit. What are you working on and how many things should you work on?
1:15:27 Cal Newport? Oh, you probably shouldn't be working on more than three things at once. So let's be clear about what those are. We'll put them in a list. If other things come up, we could put them in a waiting queue right next to them. So we won't forget about them. But I'm not going to ask you to work on them concurrently. When you finish one of these three, we can figure out together what's the right thing to put into your active list to replace it. Two, you put in place a particular communication protocol for collaboration. Three day a week meetings is great when you have a one-on-one like this because this means you don't have to send a one-off email. You're never more than a day away from having a conversation. So now he can just keep track of, oh, what questions do I have? And when you next meet, you guys can efficiently go through them.
1:16:11 Cal Newport? You can keep track of the questions you have and go through them. You know you're going to get an update on exactly where he is within a day. Thirty minutes, three days a week could take the place of thirty emails a day, five days a week, which is going to cause a constant state of having to go back and forth and check inboxes and stress. So Susan, I love the way that you made workload explicit. And by doing that, everyone got more effective. You structure effort, effort gets more sustainable, effort gets easier.
1:16:43 Cal Newport? All right, so we got a final segment coming up where I promised I'm going to talk about Martha Stewart. But first, here from a sponsor.
1:16:52 Cal Newport? Again, Jesse, as I drink from this big white mug, we need a sponsor. Actually, it says MedStar Health on it. So they were sponsoring MedStar Health. I talked to, I gave a thing at a MedStar Health board meeting.
1:17:04 Speaker 01 And they gave you a mug?
1:17:05 Cal Newport? Gave me a mug.
1:17:07 Speaker 01 And a free MRI?
1:17:08 Cal Newport? It was interesting. Yeah, they gave me an MRI for free. It was great. And a blood transfusion, which felt a little excessive, but they, you know, they just wanted, it's what they had on hand, what they had on hand. I want to talk today about longtime sponsor of the show, My Body Tutor. I've known Adam Gilbert, My Body Tutor's founders for many years. He used to be the health advice columnist for my blog. His company, My Body Tutor, is a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is the lack of consistency. They do this by simplifying the process into practical, sustainable behaviors. And then, and this is the magic to My Body Tutor, they assign you to a coach.
1:17:54 Cal Newport? They assign you to a coach that you check in with daily using their custom app about how things went with your exercise behavior, nutrition behavior. This introduces accountability, and this is the thing that most fitness efforts lack. It's not hard to figure out what you should be doing. The hard part is to actually do it. With a dedicated coach, you're much more likely to actually do it. And the dedicated coach can help you adapt to your specific situations. Thanksgiving's coming up. How do I prepare myself for that? I'm traveling for a week for Christmas. What should I do? I won't have access to my gym and I worry about, you know, overeating, right? You can get custom strategies for specific things
1:18:38 Cal Newport? that are happening. So My Body Tutor has become very popular for the very simple reason that it works. When you have a coach who is dedicated to working with you, you actually get results. And because the coaches are online, it's not nearly as expensive as actually having to have a nutritionist or a personal trainer like come to your house or come to your kitchen. It's a fantastic, fantastic product. You can find out more at mybodytutor.com, T U T O R. If you mention deep questions when you sign up, Adam will give you $50 off your first month. So go to mybodytutor.com and mention deep questions when you sign up to get $50 off your first month.
1:19:18 Cal Newport? I also want to talk about a clothing option that I have been a big fan of for a long time, and that is the commuter collection from Roan. Look, we're in fall. Fall needs its own wardrobe, full of comfortable and coordinated pieces for a layered look with perspective, and you need that warmth while maintaining, I'm a big believer in this, breathe ability. This is where the Roan's commuter collection comes in. Your clothing will look professional, it'll perform like activewear, and it will feel totally comfortable. All right, Roan's commuter collection is the most comfortable, breathable, and versatile set of products known to man. Its premium pieces elevate every occasion.
1:20:02 Cal Newport? We're talking about pants, dress shirts, quarter zips, polos, blazers, all boosted to be more functional. How do they do that? Well, they have the Roan's signature technical fabrics that stretch in every direction, breathe, fight odor, and effortlessly work everywhere. I love the breathability of the Roan commuter collection because I'm often active, giving speeches, teaching classes, I'm running around from one place to the other on a campus, and I want something that looks good, that's lightweight and breathes. I don't want to feel hot in a starched shirt. And if you're traveling, the Roan commuter collection also has wrinkle release technology. The wrinkles leave as you go through the day, you don't have to worry about packing the
1:20:47 Cal Newport? things, them being wrinkled, and at home, they're machine washable, no dry cleaning needed. You've got that gold fusion anti-odor, if you have a big, long day, you're going to stay fresh. So anyways, the commuter collection can get you through any workday and straight into whatever comes next. Head to roan.com/cal and use promo code CAL to save 20% off your entire order. That's 20% off your entire order when you head to R-H-O-N-E.com/cal and use code CAL. It's time to embody your most confident self. All right, Jesse, let's get to our final segment.
1:21:28 Cal Newport? All right, so load on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. This is the trailer for the new Netflix documentary Martha about Martha Stewart. A good documentary. Have you seen it yet, Jesse?
1:21:47 Speaker 01 I have.
1:21:47 Cal Newport? Yeah, it was good, right? Let me tell you what caught my attention.
1:21:53 Cal Newport? Early on, especially when her career was taking off,
1:21:57 Cal Newport? I was remarking, she must be incredibly busy.
1:22:03 Cal Newport? She had this property, the Turkey Hill Farm, that she was sort of custom renovating as acres and acres of property into like all these like custom gardens. She had this catering company, this like really famous catering company with to do these major catering jobs that were like very famous. That's just a complicated logistical battle with with
1:22:23 Cal Newport? your clients, but also with the the people who are working with you and the chefs and the servers. And she was writing. She was writing these books which are on the screen right now and she's writing these books like once a year. I mean, of course, as her empire grew into a big media publicly traded company, she was super busy. But we're kind of used to the idea of like CEOs of big companies being really busy and having big staffs. I was interested in this like earlier part of her life, where she had so much different things going on. I mean, I still have skeletons in my yard, Jesse. And I'm not nearly, I'm not working on nearly as many stuff as she was. And she was landscaping by hand like 50 acres of a farm. So I started thinking, I was like, you know,
1:23:05 Cal Newport? the time management book I would be curious in is one written by Martha Stewart. Like, how does she manage her time? Like, how did that work? And it turns out she did. She did write a book. I didn't know this. And it was called like Martha Stewart's Organizing. I have a picture of it here on the screen. She did write a book about time management. So like, oh, I'm just fascinated. Like, how did she do all this? And then I look at this book and I look at the tips in it. And I said, this has nothing to do with how someone like Martha Stewart organizes her life. So here's the book. You could already see by the cover with like paper clips in a neat box and a well wrapped up USB cable that this is not about how Martha Stewart
1:23:49 Cal Newport? built her empire while writing books while also renovating all this land. Look at some of the tips that she highlighted from this book. Keep your kitchen drawers well organized, maybe using her expendable in drawer utensil tray.
1:24:02 Cal Newport? Have a ceramic tool crock on your kitchen countertop to keep those kitchen utensils neatly put away. Make sure in your home office that you have file folders with vine decals on them so that they're aesthetically pleasing.
1:24:21 Cal Newport? She has a planner, the Martha Stewart spiral update a weekly calendar. It's very pretty. It has like roughly enough space on it for like seven things to write down. And that's all the advice she gives.
1:24:37 Cal Newport? I bring this up because it points to an important divide when we talk about time management and productivity. That we don't always elucidate. And that's the difference between aesthetic productivity and real productivity. So these products and what Martha Stewart has talked about in that book is what I call aesthetic productivity. It's typically based on organizing physical things in a pretty way and it uses that metaphor for organizing your life. You should have like a beautiful little notebook and draw all these pictures in it and have stickers you put on it. And then there's real productivity, which is I have a huge amount of stuff in my life. My schedule is very crowded. My attention is being pulled in all sorts of directions.
1:25:19 Cal Newport? I need to take control of this shit, like what Martha Stewart did at the height of her early busyness to try to build this empire that she did. And none of that has to do with drawer organizers or pretty planners that have pictures of flowers on the cover. It's complicated, hard, super focused work. It is the equivalent to athletes for all the training they do in the gym. And like when it comes to athletes who are good at what they do, we don't downplay how hard that is and how important the training is. Well, I think for any sort of knowledge work, it is the continually adjusted fight to keep control of the chaos is this like
1:26:02 Cal Newport? very difficult thing we have to do to be able to succeed with our jobs. And aesthetic productivity, I think, downplays it, makes it seem more minor, makes it seem like, you know, it's a matter of taste or sort of owning the right tools. So I would be really interested in like an actual, an actual productivity book from Martha Stewart. I could tell you, I don't know what you think, Jesse, from that documentary, it'd be pretty brutal, I would assume. It would say like, only sleep four hours a night, which she did. Fire fools. She was firing people left and right. If you need something done, yell. Not the nicest, not the nicest person. I bet she was super time blocked. If I had to guess. Super time
1:26:45 Cal Newport? blocked, like exactly when I'm going to fit in these things to make it all work. I bet her information systems were locked in tight. Like every order of food and who we're hiring and where's the staff. I think she hired good people and fired anyone who wasn't great. Like, I mean, I think, man, that, that, the real Martha Stewart time management book would probably be like Sun Tzu's Art of War. It'd be a pretty brutal book, if I had to guess. They don't, you know, I'm not suggesting most people need to do that level of extreme organization because she's way too stressed. What she does is way too stressful. But it is interesting that we don't, as like another aside, we don't often see a lot of windows into how like the, like the hyper busy organize themselves. I'm very curious about it. It's
1:27:28 Cal Newport? like a curiosity. I only know of one such book, which I think is actually called Hyper Productivity. And it literally was just like a very busy executive who sat on a lot of boards and said, here's how I organize my stuff. And yeah, it's hard and a lot of systems. I'm really fascinated by that type of stuff. Again, not that people need to do that because most people's ideal lifestyle does not involve like what Martha Stewart's ideal lifestyle involved. It doesn't involve juggling five boards and like two public companies or whatever. But it's a curiosity to me how they do it. But the one thing I know about how they do it, it's not through drawer organizers or file folders with vines on them.
1:28:03 Speaker 01 The one thing that I looked at a lot in the documentary was just, you know, the stock price obviously went down a lot when she was in, had her legal troubles and stuff. So I just checked it. It's at 6.4 now. So she's probably still a billionaire, right?
1:28:17 Cal Newport? I don't know. That's a good question because when she was a billionaire, it was in the twenties, wasn't it?
1:28:24 Speaker 01 It was, the initial offering was at 18, which I guess in today's daughter, she's like 33.
1:28:30 Cal Newport? So not optimal. She sold it to like a brand management company or something.
1:28:35 Speaker 01 Oh, she did?
1:28:35 Cal Newport? Yeah, licensing company.
1:28:37 Speaker 01 Like, how long ago?
1:28:41 Cal Newport? After jail.
1:28:43 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:28:44 Cal Newport? Probably early 2010s. Yes, they just licensed the, the brand name. The, the thing that, okay, so here's, if we're going to talk about Martha, the other thing that caught my attention is the scoreboard aspect. Like the fact that she's like, I want to make, I want this to be a company that goes public.
1:29:04 Cal Newport? And I want to be like the richest self-made woman in the world at the time. There's no functional reason to do that, right? Because this is a, when you have a brand built around a person, like what we've learned in like today's economy is you can make a killing. When it's built around you and you have a real talent for it, you can make a killing and have all sorts of autonomy and flexibility. There's no reason to like build an omnimedia company that has like all these employees or this or that, right? There's no reason she could have been making a killing with like books and could have her magazine and a TV show and just be like, I'm really well-known. I'm really good at this and I get paid a lot of money to do this. There's no reason to have to start a major company.
1:29:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:29:42 Cal Newport? And then once you have that major company, they had to have like a 50 different magazines and like 20 different shows, just to try to like justify, whatever. So it's interesting. She scaled to that where today is like the podcast economy. If you have that level of talent, so like she was exceptional enough that you could build this whole company around her. You can get 150 million dollar podcast deal. Except for now, what are you doing for that 150 million dollars? You're podcasting once a week or whatever, which is so much different than being the CEO of a public company. So it really caught my attention that. She wanted to start a big company.
1:30:15 Speaker 01 I think she likes the limelight too. Obviously, I mean, she wanted to do the documentary. How old is she?
1:30:20 Cal Newport? We looked it up, eighty.
1:30:22 Speaker 01 She's eighty?
1:30:23 Cal Newport? Eighty-one or eighty-two.
1:30:24 Speaker 01 Good.
1:30:25 Cal Newport? Yeah, yeah, because she was sixty-three when she went to jail. Yeah, yeah, she's older than you think. Yeah, she looks great. Yeah, I guess that's just me. It's lifestyle centric planning. I'm like, oh, if my, if I had this big brand that could be built, and I kind of have a reasonable brand built around me. All of my instincts is not how do we build a huge media company? It's like, how do we build like a very autonomous, flexible, you know, business off of that that's doesn't require
1:30:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:30:54 Cal Newport? board meetings.
1:30:57 Cal Newport? Interesting topic. All right. Anyways, that's all the time we have this week. We'll be back next week with another episode. If you listen to my advice from the beginning, maybe you'll be one of the few podcasts you'll be listening to next week. Until then, as always, stay deep.
1:31:12 Cal 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 two thousand and seven, and over seventy thousand subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.
Next Ep. 327: Would Kant Use TikTok? Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated