Ep. 376: The Lincoln Protocol

28:33But if you're working on something that you really deem to be useful, that long-term system says, I'm in charge here, it's going to suppress that and allow you to resist and keep moving on the bigger term thing. Once you've chosen one of those more ambitious accomplishments, the best way to succeed is going to be to reconfigure your brain in the way required to actually understand that problem and what the solutions work like and take the right efforts forward. And reading is a great way to reconfigure it. So Lincoln then making reading his primary purposive reading, purposeful reading as primary way of moving towards his goals was very smart because for these type of goals, if they're non-physical, reconfiguring your brain is what's going to give you a chance of succeeding.

29:12And then as he would succeed with one project, your long-term motivational system takes in that experience. It gets encoded in the hippocampus and therefore accessible again when it comes time to work on the next project. And now your motivation is stronger. Now your ability to suppress the sort of short-term proximate distractions is much more powerful. So it's this virtuous cycle that builds. That is how I believe Lincoln was able to escape the traps and then make his fastest sense. And I think the same holds for our current digital world as well. If you're engaged in the Lincoln protocol, maybe at first you'll be trying hard to resist the pull of like the distractions, the darkness and the danger that's online.

29:50But then as you have some successes and I can get something useful, a morally useful, ethically useful, pragmatically useful project and you know how to, you're used to how to reconfigure your mind and now I'm going to make progress on it. You've done this a few times. Man, that long-term motivation system will say, TikTok, what? Get out of here. We're on our way to doing stuff that matters. There's nothing that's more motivating or fulfilling for the human experience. The Lincoln Protocol, taken from the 1820s to 1850s, is a fantastic way, I think, in the 2020s to actually navigate away from the digital traps.

30:25and have some more sort of meaning and autonomy in your life. Now, there's three pitfalls you have to be careful about if you're implementing the Lincoln Protocol. Number one, don't make your projects too ambitious. It needs to be tractable, meaning it has to be something maybe you can't do it tomorrow, but that it's reasonable. You can see a reasonable path and a reasonable timeline for you to learn what you need to learn to make progress, right? Like it was reasonable for Lincoln in the 1820s to say, I can learn geometry. It's hard, but I can learn enough geometry to be the county surveyor. But it would not have been reasonable in the 1820s for him to say, I'm going to run for president next year.

31:06So that's be ambitious, but not too ambitious. If it's just, I want to be a millionaire in six months, like your mind is, you don't know how to do this. The second pitfall, your project needs to be useful. So it has to connect to things you really care about, which for Lincoln at first was really self-improvement in the sense of like he was on his own and came from a hard situation. So he was really motivated to, I need to get established politically, socially, and economically. So I don't feel like I have to go back to splitting rails and being rented out to other families to do manual labor.

31:37But then as that got more solidified, he began to redefine useful to mean useful to other people. At first, useful to his town, then useful to his county when he was in the state legislature. And then as he moved up in the state legislature, useful to the whole state of Illinois. He was a Whig, which means he was really big on internal improvement projects. We need to fund canals and toll roads so that everyone has more economic opportunity. And then as he moved to the national scale, of course, he turned to the national goods of trying to hold the union together and ending slavery. So it needs to be a useful project.

32:11If it's just something you think is like cool or fun or I want to crush it on TikTok, that is not going to necessarily generate enough positive feedback from your long-term motivational system for you to suppress the short-term system and to get out of those traps. The final pitfall is avoiding doing the actual hard work required. For most of the things that Lincoln went after, it was reading hard books that mattered. Those books were hard, and he would just do the work to learn them. if you don't do the equivalent hard work for the useful projects that you choose you're not going to make progress if you want to tell yourself the story that i have this ambitious useful project and what really matters is looking up these like easy to watch tutorials on youtube that have these like checklist productivity ideas about hey make your profile great and people will come to it or whatever you don't actually want to do the hard work of reconfiguring your mind to understand something new and then apply that knowledge to actually produce new things there out the world If you're there trying to configure, you know, maniacally and manically trying to configure AI to systematize and automate everything so you can avoid any sort of beyond minimal effort, that's not the Lincoln Protocol, and you're not going to succeed.

33:19And, you know, hard things require that hard effort, so that has to be part of it. So those are the pitfalls you have to avoid. All right, but if you do those, avoid those pitfalls, the Lincoln Protocol is a fantastic way to think about traversing our world just as it was back then. All right, let's do some takeaways.

33:49All right, so in the opening of his book, Lincoln's Virtues, William Lee Miller, in his esteemable conversational tone, writes the following. I'll put this up on the screen here. it's a curious truth is it not that an unschooled 19th century american politician named abraham lincoln from the raw frontier villages of illinois and indiana has turned out to be among the most revered of the human beings who have ever walked this earth curious and perhaps a little moving if you think about it lincoln's path to that status was not mysterious it didn't rely on generational gifts or some sort of grand inheritance.

34:27It was a result of a simple protocol applied repeatedly that helped him overcome the distraction, dangers, and darkness of his period to systematically build toward a more meaningful and useful life. Now, at the core of his rise, as we covered, was this idea of purposeful reading. He didn't sit in an ivory tower and study abstract theory or memorize facts that he could pull from at dinner parties, nor did he get lost in the most sort of diverting writing of his time. He was more pragmatic. He read to improve his brain in exactly the ways he needed to do things that he thought was useful. And it turns out if you do this deliberately enough for a long enough time, you can literally reshape not just the world that you perceive through your brain, but actually change the world around you for the better.

35:13Now, the same protocol is available to you. If you feel stuck in a digital morass of distraction and energy-sucking terribleness, just think about Lincoln's perilous situation as a kid. You too can escape these type of traps and do something more interesting. You might not become president, but you can become more than just a group of ones and zeros in one of Mark Zuckerberg's user databases. So read with purpose, aim towards useful projects that you choose with care, and repeat. In an age where you can now literally download an app that will generate an AI video of yourself boxing with Queen Elizabeth or when over 1.5 billion people spend at least some time each month on TikTok, aimlessly scrolling through carefully curated nothingness, Lincoln's self-improvement lessons have perhaps never been more relevant.

36:07There you go, Jesse. That's an excuse for me to nerd out on Lincoln. You know what's interesting, though? so you know how i started the this whole deep dive with that post from 2008 yeah so when i went back to find that post i went back to the archive so at calnewport.com if you go to the essays link there's an archive link on the side uh and so i was going back to the archives like find exactly where that article was and it came from february of 2008 that was a crazy month for cal newport ideas i didn't realize like there's sort of a historic month from the perspective of like the stuff I'm known for.

36:45First of all, this is crazy. I wrote 18 articles that month because that's what it used to be like in the old days of blogging and email newsletters. Like you wrote, it was, I would write three, at least three articles a week. One of them would be a link roundup. One of them would be student advice. That'd be on Monday. I called it Monday masterclass. And then Wednesday would be like all like ideas, like the Lincoln article. I looked through those 18 articles. I had some of my like more classic ideas of student advice during that month, including the Morse code method for taking notes, which is more or less how I take notes today is where you mark the side of the pages with really efficient marks.

37:21I had the idea of the post-exam post-mortem, a huge student idea of mine of like after each test, you have to go back and say what worked and what didn't and how I studied. Also had this idea of pseudo-skimming in there. But outside of the student advice, I had three of my most important early non-student posts. So I had the Lincoln Post, which honestly was like one of the first times I dealt with digital distraction. obviously i'm known for that today that was a very early example of me talking about digital distraction as a problem it's also the same month where i first introduced the phrase be so good they can't ignore you so i that's when steve martin's memoir born standing up came out so i had the article it was called like steve martin's career advice so that's where that came from and fixed schedule productivity which is like one of my more well-known for a long time it's one of my more well-known productivity ideas.

38:08All that's in the same month. It was like the, the, my version of Einstein's Annis Mirabilis. I just checked to see when the financial crisis was in 2008. It was in September. I was like, imagine if it was the same month. I see, I was, we were all optimistic back. Yeah. You know what the other, the other 12 articles were, you got to buy more, more mortgages, no money down the market. I think the most popular article that month is this market's going nowhere but up. I think that was the post I had there. So anyways, I thought that was kind of cool. All right, speaking of presidents, so I geeked out on this article because I'm a big Lincoln fan and Nate, who helps me research these things, is a big Lincoln fan.

38:49So we kind of nerded out. I do have a, I don't know where else to put, I have a bone to pick, speaking of presidents, I have a bone to pick with the classic NBC show, The West Wing. And I don't know where or how to pick this bone, but because we talked about a presence, I'm going to do it now, and I think this is very important. I hope Aaron Sorkin is listening to this, and I know this is going to upset you, Jesse, but it's a mistake that I think needs to be dealt with. In the pilot episode of season one, there is a gag where Leo McGarry, the chief of staff, is on the phone with the editors of the New York Times Crossword and saying, oh, your answer for like number 17 across is wrong.

39:30That's not how you spell Gaddafi. I would know how to spell Gaddafi. I've met the man twice and once recommended an exocet missile strike against him. Right. So that's kind of, you know, it's like Aaron Sorkin pilot episode humor. Two episodes later, it might even be the next episode. Ergo Hawk, Proctor Hawk. The whole premise is there is a U.S. plane is shot down by Syrians and they're going to have to retaliate. And the whole point of this two-episode arc is that it's the first military retaliation that they've had to do in their administration. So they don't know how to do it. They've never done it before.

40:08They've never fired a missile or dropped a bomb on anyone yet. The show starts one year into it. So when did Leo McGarry recommend an exocet missile strike against Gaddafi if this was the first attack they've ever done and they've only been in office for one year? Yes, he was in the government before, but as the labor secretary. Why would he be recommending missile strikes? Look, I'm sure you're as outraged as I am. Aaron Sorkin, shame on you. All right. I don't know where else to put that. Quick housekeeping before we move on here. We need questions. We always want questions. We always want calls.

40:41Go to what's it? The deep life.com slash listen, slash listen. Jesse, what is your advice? If there's a listener who really wants to get a question or a call on the air, do you have any advice for what they should do? Because you're the one who goes through these. I think I have a couple of ideas, but what do you notice? because I want people to feel emboldened. People can always email me. Don't tell them that. You can get a lot of emails. Jesse at CalNewport.com. Some people do email me directly and then I have like a relationship with them. Here's my thing I would add. Make them short, right?

41:13So don't think of it as I have a very intricate scenario I'm in right now that I want like long-term counseling on. Yeah, it's what's the concept you want answers on. I would lean away from really detailed, like deep work, digital distraction, the workplace question. We need some of those, but we, you know, mainly we deal, we deal with technology, understanding how to respond to it, including technology in the office, but a lot of other technology as well. So you probably have a better chance if you're asking about technologies that are in the news that you're worried about or other sorts of technologies that are intersecting with your life that you're worried about.

41:46If every question is like really detailed situations about the exact managerial email chain that's disrupting your deep work, I'm not going to call your boss. I don't know. So, all right, that'd be my advice. All right, enough of that. Let's move on to speaking of which, do some questions. All right, who do we got first? First question's from Paul. What is your schedule routine for reading long-form articles as opposed to your current monthly books? I typically default to my current book in order to meet my book reading goals, but this means that I never get around to reading the long-term articles that I have saved?

42:19Yeah, it's a good question. So I often, I'm often not reading a ton of long-form articles because, you know, a lot of my reading time is going towards books. I read a lot of books and the long-form articles I read tend to be those that are very narrowly relevant to something I really specifically care about. Like, oh, this is a topic I write about or I'm thinking about and then I'll read it, which is fine. I actually, books are great. Books are like a bunch of long-form articles that have been thought about for another couple of years and they have been polished at a higher level of sheen. So I think there's no issue with that as long as you're reading my New Yorker pieces, which is non-negotiable.

42:54However, what you can do – because long-form pieces are – you could have more of a diverse array of ideas because you don't have to stick with something for 60 ,000 words to 100 ,000 words, and it can be more contemporaneous. So one thing you can do and I recommend doing is having a virtual book. So like let's say your goal has been to read three books a month. You can say I count five long-form articles or six long-form articles as a book. So I'm going to read two books and six long-form articles. And then that same motivation that you're putting towards like getting through your book chapters, you can turn that towards like keeping up with your New Yorker issues or whatever Atlantic or whatever long-form articles you read.

43:38I mean, I think that's just as fine. And then so it just depends on like what mood you're in or what's going on. Like often if we're in a time of like political turmoil or geopolitical turmoil, I'll say, I don't want to be contemporaneous. And I'm going to let's read some books that are 100 years old. And other times I'll be like, you know what? I want to know what's going on in the world. Or if I'm deep in a book that I'm writing, I'm like, I don't really want to know what's going on in the world because I'm going to get ideas. I can't deal with ideas right now. I'm working on this thing. But if I'm in between books or in between big New Yorker pieces I'm writing, I'm like, oh, I want to be more exposed to ideas.

44:12So it's okay if you read long form or not. If you want to do more long form, just make a virtual book, you know, five to eight, depending on how long these articles are. Let that count as like one short book. All right. Who do we got next? Next up is Fred. I've been working on improving my focus by spending most of my time reading. I'm on my fifth day of a digital declutter, but I've hit a problem. I often have to reread the same sentence or paragraph several times before understanding it. I'm worried that I'm not improving. Is this normal when building focus? Well, good for you for doing a digital declutter.

44:44Good for you for trying a bunch of reading. This is one of the things you want to do with any digital clutter. As I always say, it's the reflection and experiments. You figure out what really makes you tick. So you want to try things that are new. You do this temporarily step away from your typical optional digital technologies. you want to be aggressively trying new things to feel out like what matters to me or not so you might be reading more now than it's going to be sustainable but it's a great way of sort of feeling that out like congratulations on that you're doing the right thing keep doing lots of experiments keep doing lots of reflection and thinking walks in terms of your specific issues with reading there's two things that you're going to have to keep an eye on that could be an issue here either your problem is coming because you're reading too much at a time like your focus is not ready to sit down for three hours and read a book.

45:31And so you're just losing focus. Or you're reading things that are too hard for your current state of preparation. So the solution to the, you're losing your focus. So if you find like, I understand things for a while, but in the same book, I begin to lose understanding as I go on, you need to make your sessions shorter. And then you stretch incrementally how long those sessions are over two, three weeks at one length before you sort of stretch them. You got to give your mind time to actually get stronger. If the problem is not how long you're reading, but just the material is too hard, well, then you need to work on sort of laddering up complexity.

46:06I've talked about this before on the show where I've kind of gone through in detail about how you ladder it up. Like roughly speaking, you start by just reading like whatever is the most interesting. So you just get into the habit of the mechanics of reading. Then you're going to move to like specific topics like Lincoln might be interested in, would have done on topics that are interesting to you about the world or issues that are of. So like useful reading, like I kind of want to understand these things. Maybe it's a political issue. Maybe it's like a spiritual issue. Maybe it's like an issue of health or physical fitness or a psychological or philosophical issue.

46:35It's stoicism, whatever it is. You're like, you know, now I'm reading for utility. I want to sort of understand this thing better. So that's sort of like the next level as you move up these ladders. But you start with very accessible text. You don't jump into like a textbook on stoicism. You start with like Ryan Holiday's much more accessible series. All right. Then what you want to move up, if there's a topic, you know, useful reading, now that you're locked in the useful reading, you can move your way up to what I think about is like more challenging secondary sources. So it's, you know, you're not reading like the original philosopher or the academic, but you're reading people talking about their ideas.

47:09And now they're talking about a little bit more sophisticated way. Now you're laddering up your understanding from there. You can then go to accessible primary sources if they exist. Like Again, they used a stoicism example. I think Marcus Aurelius, it's approachable, right? The text is approachable. It's not like in a good translation. It's not like reading Heidegger or something like that or like Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning. It's an accessible text, right? You don't need like a huge background and specialized terminology to understand. And then you finally move up to I want to read non-approachable primary sources.

47:42And the best way to get at that is you sort of read it in conjunction with secondary sources that tell you about the book that you're reading so you're not coming in blind. So you're working up a ladder. You do this for a year, and on the other end, you're going to be tackling like pretty sophisticated books. And in the topic area that you're laddering, you're going to have accrued so much understanding and terminology and structural frameworks of knowledge that you're going to be like, oh, now I can tackle things that are way more complicated than I could a year ago and get meaningful value out of them.

48:09So it's something you can move yourself up to. and Lincoln did this. This is kind of like the Lincoln Protocol in action. It's very worth doing because as you get a more sophisticated understanding of a particular type of relevant, useful topic, your understanding of the world through that lens changes. Your world literally changes, including both how you understand it and the options you now have for taking action in it. It really like changes your world. You're putting on different glasses and opening up doors that were closed before. So it's worth doing. It's a good question. All right, who do we got next?

48:39Next up is Chelsea. What are the mechanics of finding and keeping a deep reading habit alive? I find that I always start and stop. Plus, I can't find good books on topics that I'm interested in. You know, you should have regular times. Again, good question. I love that you're thinking about having this regular reading habit. All these questions, of course, fit right in with the sort of Lincoln Protocol type of idea. Have regular times when you read always helps. I read over lunch. I read when I go to bed. If I have free time in the evening, I always do a half hour before TV shows or I alternate.

49:10Some days I do TV shows, but other days I sit and I read and have a place I go and a certain type of tea I make and certain type of music I put on. Start with books that you really find interesting. That's different than starting with topics you find interesting than finding books for them because sometimes that can be really narrow. So you want to be more broadly exposing yourself to different types of books. Like, oh, here's a genre fiction I really like and I can read through there. Here's a type of nonfiction book. I didn't realize there was like a lot of books on personal finance, but it's kind of inspiring because I want to get my money.

49:41I'm kind of in control and I like getting this information. Or I didn't realize like this type of nonfiction, like business idea books is really interesting or memoirs that are, you know. People moving to Provence and France and Italy and trying to there's a whole bunch of books like that or whatever. So it's not so much like I am very interested in nuclear waste disposal. That's what I need to find books on that. I can't find that many interesting books. Find books that are very interesting to you, but be really open to what those could be. And then you get some sort of goal, like there's a classic Lincoln Protocol that begins to push you to finish books and get more ambitious about it.

50:20But you're in the right place. Reading takes time to fill it out. Be more purposeful. Start really interesting. Have regular habits. And then start getting purposeful. Get those goals. I now want to learn about this so I can do that. finish, repeat, finish, repeat, and then it's going to become much more a part of your life. All right. So we have a few more questions to go as well as a case study. We have a call about Apple watches and then a segment where I'm actually going to go back and read comments from that original post in 2000. It's fascinating. I haven't looked at them. I think it's going to be a fascinating time machine into how we were thinking about distractions and Lincoln all those years ago.

50:57But first, we've got to take a really quick break to hear from another sponsor. So stick around. We will be right back.

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52:37I'll tell you who really needed Caldera Lab Tile products. Abraham Lincoln. That guy is pretty rough. He aged rough. That was a hard life back then. I didn't eat this week and I rode a horse through a hurricane skin's a little rough you look at these pictures of lincoln and you're like oh i would estimate that's like a 75 year old man he was like 24 which is like grizzled hollow dyes you need a caldera lab all right here's the thing skincare doesn't have to be complicated but it should be good upgrade your routine with caldera lab and see the difference for yourself go to caldera lab.com slash deep and use that code deep at checkout to get 20 off your first order we also want to talk about our friends at 1Password.

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55:08Learn more at 1Password.com slash deep. That's the number one, the word password.com slash deep. That's one password.com slash deep. Type that in all lowercase for it to work. One password.com slash deep, all lowercase. All right, Jesse, let's get back to some questions. Oh, it looks like we got a long one here. This is a long one. That's good. Let's settle in everyone. Luke has a lot to ask us here. It's from Luke. I've just completed my master's in mechanical engineering and have been hired by a large construction company to carry out a PhD. I spend basically the first 12 months defining my research topic.

55:46However, just six weeks in, I'm already finding the situation difficult to reconcile with the kind of deep life I hope to build. The project site is far, far away, but they put us in a hotel. The pay is good. When broken down hours work, some of the weeks it's comparable to what I could learn elsewhere. On top of this, I've recently started a business with a host friend. He's a marketing expert and I handle the technical side and that could potentially match my salary in about six months. I find myself torn between the two paths, continuing down the structured, stable, and intellectually demanding route of the PhD or committing to an entrepreneurship and the freedom to live more intentionally with my partner.

56:26This is like the Tolstoy of deep questions. All right, Luke. So I don't know if you're sensing this, Jesse. I'm getting like a little bit of push polling in here where like you're asking a question, but the question is trying to push you towards an answer. There's a little bit of like, Like, well, you know, it's far away and I really don't make any money at it. And like it's probably leading to the death of puppies. But like, you know, I could do it. Or like there's this wonderful, awesome thing. It's autonomous entrepreneurship with my friend that is going to make my life great. But I don't know what you think I should do.

56:58But I'm going to put the push pulling aside a little bit and try to take this, these two options here really straight. Right. Clearly, the thing you want to do here is classic lifestyle centric planning. and that requires you to look ahead a little bit farther into the future. And when you look ahead, you want to be describing what your ideal lifestyle is going to look like, let's say like a couple of years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, like you're looking into the future. The key for a good lifestyle vision is that it needs to be comprehensive. So you cannot just focus on one thing.

57:31This is what really catches people up. They'll focus on one thing, like in your case, autonomy or something like that. I think this is definitely like a big Gen Z thing right now is like autonomy is a really big deal. Like I need to, I can't be in a situation. And look, I built my whole life around this instinct, but I can't be in a situation where like I have to keep doing work. I need the ability to like control my work and chill. I need to chill. Don't just have one. You need to have a lifestyle vision that covers a comprehensive description of your life. I suggest breaking it up into what we call buckets, but like different areas of your life.

58:04If it's constitution, which is like your health and community, which is like your connection to other people and craft, which can capture things like work and other sort of like useful things you build with your hands or mind. Contemplation, which can capture like the spiritual philosophical context, like what it's like physically where you are, like where you live and commutes and like the physical surroundings that you're in every day. You really want to have a vision that spans many of these buckets so it's comprehensive. And then the game is just how do I get closer to this broad vision? And that's how you should be comparing these two things.

58:39Don't fix it on one thing you don't like about the current training portion of this job. Don't fix it on just one thing you really like about the other thing. I'd have more autonomy in the short term. Which of these is going to give me the better route to covering more of this vision? And that's the way. And just do that analysis honestly, and that's the way to think about it. And if one of them, you know, like, hey, it gets me really far here, but I'm really doing bad on this other vision. And this one doesn't get me as far there, but it doesn't have these negatives. I'm doing okay in these other parts.

59:05Like, then that's the way I want to go. But you want to give it a good broad vision and give it a good sort of fair analysis. I'm thinking about this a lot because I'm writing a book on the deep life. And, you know, again, we mainly talk about things that relate back to technology here, problems caused by technology we're trying to solve. I can't think of the deep life without also thinking about technology because to me, like the most powerful thing, this is like the Lincoln Protocol. called. So I put this question in here. The most powerful thing you can do to resist just being falling into like numbness or nihilism or rage through online distraction machines is to construct a life on your own terms that's more compelling than what is offered in Sora or on TikTok or an Instagram scroll.

59:49So knowing the mechanics of like, how do I take control of my life? And given the circumstances I have, the opportunities I have and my obstacles, my idiosyncratic setup, how do I steer this towards a better, better life that's more intentional? As you do that, just like Lincoln discovered, the allure of these traps, these distraction, danger, darkness, producing traps, digital today is something different back then. They just, that allure dies down. It's just like the answer to distractions in the office was having a bigger, better offer, which was deep work. The answer to all these sort of like distractions and numbing and psychological manipulators that are on our phone is to have a bigger, better offer in your life, which is a deep life that you've constructed and it's just more interesting than watching the queen wrestle someone on Sora that's why I talk about this a lot it's why we talked about the Lincoln protocol on a podcast it's from a computer scientist and digital ethics ethicist that talks about like hey how do we respond and understand technology because this is how we respond to technology I think it's one of the big things we do so I wanted to work that in there so I could do my little pitch there all right do we have one more question yes we do all right it's from Ben as a father of a toddler I have plenty of time playing with him without much stimuli while a bit of boredom is appreciated these large spans of time is too much leading me to excessive phone usage what should i do well ben toddlers are boring men talk about this i don't think they're as boring to the women i guess my wife would point this out about me that when we had our first our first kid we just had one and he was young my wife would be very happy like we're just this is great we're like sitting in our living room and we like have our two-year-old and we're kind of here and i would be like this is boring like what are we doing here we're just he's on the blanket like this isn't this is boring i need to go hunt the mastodon or something like that so i want to what i want to do there is validate that that feeling um and tell you that uh if you can't find a mastodon and you instead try to spear neighborhood dogs as i did you're going to get the police are going to come over so don't follow don't follow that path so they are boring so what do you do as a dad?

1:01:48Well, you got to put on your dad hat. Moms have their own way to deal with toddlers. They're happy to gaze lovingly at them. Dads, you got to take that kid and go do stuff. You got to be active. We are going to go on adventures. I'll push you in the thing until you can walk and then I'll walk with you. And you invent the adventures. I mean, the old house I lived in, there's a park down the street and there's like a little bit of woods at the end of the park. Well, that became the wizard woods. We went to the woods. We had the different logs we would go to. We named the different things. We had to build traps for goblins.

1:02:20Like we had to go do things. We're going to go to the library. We're going to look at certain books. That's fine. Like go be active, put on your dad hat, have more things to do. But do have the rule when you are, it's just you and the kid, right? Don't use your phone. Don't have that be an option. If it's like a boring thing, like you're waiting and they're just like doing their, you know, boring toddler thing. Sorry, toddlers, but you are kind of boring. Read a book. That's fine. Let them see, oh, like dad's kind of reading a book. We're just sort of hanging out here in the yard on the first sunny day or whatever.

1:02:50I remember doing that. I have all these memories from our first kid. There'd be various times, like the way we shifted, the way we shifted our schedules, typically I would, my wife would go to work early. So I would have the early shift with the kids and then she could be back consistently in case I had to teach an evening class. But sometimes I would be the first one home and I would remember I liked, this was a habit from, we lived in Boston. and we like craved the sun, like, you know, um, pave people from like the Morlocks from the HG Wells, the time machine in Boston, like the sun, the sun.

1:03:22And we all like come out or whatever. And I had that instinct for a while. So on the first sunny days, I like to go in the yard. We put down a blanket and the, and, you know, Max could just sort of roll around on it. And I would read, uh, you can imagine Jesse thrillers because that was part of my thing. The first sunny days I want to read thrillers. So we do some of that. I'd rather him see me reading books than being on a phone. I just don't want that to be an option with young kids that they see me on a phone instead of them. I can be reading a book or whatever, but I want to go back to the bigger parenting point that it's okay for dads to acknowledge that toddlers are boring.

1:03:49So just go be super active. And it's okay if that's different than like what the moms do. Nothing gets us more male than when we talk about parenting. Moms love when I talk about like what moms do. We're going to get the emails. I always get the same email. Who's watching the kid when you're doing deep work? That's going to be fine for you. who's watching the kid when you're filling out your time block planner. So, I wish I had a full-time staff that did nothing but allowed me to fill out my time block planner. I get a lot of that. All right. Do we have a case study? We do. All right. Let's get some theme music and get into this.

1:04:36All right. These are where people send in their accounts of using the type of advice we talk about on this show in their own life if you have a case study send it to jesse at calnewport.com but our first case study or our only case study for today comes from lisa lisa says i was a high performing professional a young artist curator educator and a military spouse for the last 20 years i was married to a senior officer but i got stuck creatively in my own career and also motherhood this past year i did more block planning short and long-term planning. And though not perfect, I'm more aware of digital consumption and I am still working to get better at having less distractions.

1:05:14Either way, this year, I was able to, one, successfully finish my last year teaching at the high school level. I am opening my own online art education platform that I didn't see possible or even dream of a year ago. Two, I will graduate with a master's this December. Three, I will illustrate and publish a children's book that has been sitting stalled for over a year or two. Four, my artistic work is starting to flourish again. It's also giving me the confidence to determine deeper level work. And if I want to get a PhD and go on creatively to more art history or writing projects, either way, my talents are being used significantly better.

1:05:47I'm more aware digitally of where my rabbit holes are and life is much more fulfilling. All right, I love this case study. Let me go back to what the change was that Lisa made that made all this cool stuff possible. Pretty simple. This past year, I did more block planning, short and long term. And though not perfect, I am more aware of digital consumption and working on reducing distractions. We underestimate how much is possible that we're being held back by, by being haphazard with our time and distracted more than we think. And that when you time blocks, like I want to actually give a job to my time, even if that job is resting, even that job is relaxing.

1:06:25I'm just being intentional about what do I actually want to do about my time. Suddenly and much more things become possible. And when you do long-term planning, you begin to make progress on things slowly and allowing sort of results to aggregate and things that would have seemed impossibly ambitious suddenly become tractable and then when you're careful about how much attention is lost to digital distraction and you reduce that the amount of brain power you can now apply to other things that are meaningful really jumps up because remember it's not just the raw number of minutes that you look at your phone it's the raw number of times you do because every time i glance at my phone and even if it's just quickly doing a few tiktok scrolls of looking at my Instagram, I do a context shift to my brain and it's going to take me 10 to 15 minutes to get back.

1:07:08Right? So if I'm just, look, I only looked at this thing four times in the last hour. It was like four total minutes. That's 56 minutes. I was working. Not so fast because if those four quick checks were spread out over that hour, no, no, you lost an hour of being able to do actual good work. So it's the raw number of times you check is much more important than the raw number of times that you're doing these distractions. So, you know, if you're thinking about the Lincoln Protocol, this type of thing matters, but it's virtuous. And I think this is what Lisa is seeing. There's a virtuous circle here.

1:07:40At first, it's kind of hard. I'm blocking and I'm being very careful about my distractions so I can train for this project like she's doing. She's not literally just reading books. She's studying for a master's program, but she's going after these projects, reconfiguring her brain. And then when she succeeds with one, the next one becomes more tractable and it's easier to move past the distractions. And as she succeeds with another, it becomes even easier. That's the virtuous cycle that begins because your long-term motivation system says, oh, this works. And the rewards we get from this are so much better from the rewards of when I'm watching the TikTok video and someone falls to the floor or whatever.

1:08:14It's kind of funny in the moment, not the same rewards as this company of mine is working. Here's the master's degree I just earned. So that is an example of the Lincoln Protocol in progress. The digital world is loosing its grips. When you escape those traps, the ascendancy becomes possible. All right, do we have a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear this one. Hey, Cal, this is Josh. I would love to know your perspective on Apple Watches or other smartwatches and how this could be an alternative to using your phone a lot. The benefit of the Apple Watch is I get notifications for texts and calls, which are really the main reason why I need to stay connected to my phone.

1:08:58But it also doesn't have the capability of getting on certain apps that could be distracting. So I'd love to know what you think about that. Is that level of connectivity okay to still be on an Apple Watch? or do you suggest in your advice to also try to have times away from that to be fully disconnected thanks so much i'm not a fan of apple watches it's why i somewhat ironically i have my zen 105 here um without the utc complication this is an entirely mechanical watch it just harvets an automatic so it harvests the motion of my hand i put it on purposely an apple watch style black silicon strap but there's no electricity in this beast so like that is my sort of little subtle watch nerd commentary on the apple watches here's the problem what you know one of the big things you want to avoid from a sort of digital distraction perspective it's like we just talked about with lisa context shifts when i shift my attention from what i'm doing it can take me up to 20 minutes to get it back but now the watch that says we'll make sure there is no escaping context shifts because if that thing buzzes my brain says there's a person who needs us and it could be urgent you can't ignore that now you got to look at that uh then you read it you say like oh it's better than having a phone i watch people read and dictate the longest messages on these things you have just like strapped a context shifter onto your arm i understand people like uh some of the the health and fitness benefits though i think that people work backwards they just wanted the Apple watch because they felt compelled to buy an Apple product.

1:10:32And now they're trying to figure out like, why do I have this? I don't think it's that compelling. Um, so I know some people like it for various things. Sure. Uh, you can sync music on it, but it's a pain. It doesn't really work. And I'm not a big Apple watch fan. It's just a distraction machine. Listen to some of my prior podcast episodes about how to reform your relationship and expectations with other people about communication and communication protocols in a way that you don't have to be on call all the time for text messages but the important stuff can still get through those are the right solutions so no i'm not a big apple watch fan just get like one of these ends and you don't have to worry about it all right i don't know people love their apple watches i wrote an article when they first came out the apple watches speaking of my blog where the premise was it's not our job to figure out your product apple because that is how they released the apple watch they said here it is tim cook is like good news everybody he had just been installed you know this is right after jobs died it's like good news everyone we figured out the like in assembly line logistics to be able to like package and and ship apple watches worldwide and people like yay and then someone in the back was like but what are they for and he's like you know i don't know figure it out it's apple and people did and i wrote this whole article about like why we shouldn't have to buy products that don't have a really clear and compelling use case It's the same issue we have with a lot of AI tools today where people are like, you better be using AI.

1:11:58You better be using AI right now or you are out of here so fast, right? You know, like this river dredging business cannot survive if you are not ready for the AI future. And they're like, but what do you want me to do with it? Like you AI things, AI it. It's not our job to figure out how AI is useful to our job. companies using AI have to have a very compelling pitch for this product, whether it uses AI or not, we'll do this for you that's very useful. So don't – it's never your job to figure out why technology products are useful. If you're an enthusiast, it's fine to experiment and have fun with them, but that's a small percentage of the population.

1:12:34If you're not, you should not be – I do not like models that say, like, I got to figure out how to make ChatGBT useful because everyone says it is. If it was really going to make a big difference for you, it would be self-evident. So wait until it's self-evident. I don't even know how I got on that rant. All right, let's move on to our final segment. I call this Cal reads the comments. This is always fun. What I've done here is I've gone back to that Lincoln article. Would Lincoln be president if he had email that I wrote in February 2008? One of the very first articles I wrote about the dangers of digital distraction, especially in a professional context.

1:13:08This laid the seeds that grew eventually into what became deep work. This topic was kind of new back then. It wasn't, you know, smartphones were new email. People were getting a little bit wary about their email inboxes, but it was still a little bit like, oh my God, my email. But you know, it wasn't so bad. AOL was still a thing. At the beginning of us really worried about digital distractions. But what I wanted to do, and I haven't looked at these, Jesse will attest, I'm going to go back. Let's read some of these comments from 2008 to see what did people care or think about distractions back then.

1:13:40I thought it would be interesting. We should have like a read the comments theme music. yeah could that be an excuse to get the bass fishing music back where it was like hell yeah we'll get that back one day all right let's let's what do we have here all right here's a comment from february 20th 2008 amy uh she said in the electronic age we're on such an instant schedule that someone like lincoln may not have been able to cut it i managed a luxury imagined the luxury of having an entire day between a newspaper printing and the next newspaper printing to accuse or respond to a comment. I think the concept of GTD would be completely lost in those days.

1:14:19What do you mean that you can have an inbox for everything that you need to do? All right. That's an interesting argument from Amy. I would have agreed with that back then. I think today, no, I wouldn't agree with it. For example, you know what figure who predates Lincoln in American history that was completely overwhelmed with correspondence and messages and everything he had to do? George Washington. him. This is why he had to do whatever he could to get Hamilton. Some might say get Hamilton on his side. Hamilton reference from the play. I just read a book about it. He was overwhelmed. He was constant correspondence.

1:14:56His inbox was overflowing and it was like the curse of his life. He talks about this. If you read enough, like Chernow's biography of Washington gets into this. so that was a problem back then having too many people needing you too much stuff going on yes the delivery wasn't as fast but the actual production of responses was much slower you have to keep it in mind you had to write these long letters in response and back then linguistic communications you know epistolary communication required these like very long preambles you try to set the emotional context it was very flourishing it took forever to write these things and you had a quill and you dip it in ink so i don't know amy i think they they figures, the equivalent of 18th and 19th century executives of today had their own overload problems.

1:15:42What did Martin have to say? Martin says, the picture in your post, the dinosaur in the bikini girl, I feel like it's following me around. I subscribe to those different blogs, so I can't wait to see who posted. Oh, yeah. I had a whole chain of attributions. That picture went everywhere. I had a chain of attributions with like seven. This went to here, to here, to here, to here with ellipses in the middle because that thing I was trying to track. Back then you could track actually. Man, I missed a pre-social media day. So you could track. This picture was posted here. They got it from there. They would attribute it.

1:16:13Then that person, that blog would say, oh, I got it from here. And you could follow the chain of a meme. You could trace it back. Today, a meme goes to like 100 million people through an exponential growth and cybernetic Twitter follower graph. It's such a different time. As for the age of focus, I agree that many of us tend to check things too frequently. It's not just email. It could be TV news, RSS feeds, text messages, web forums, instant messaging, the list goes on. Man, is that anachronistic a little bit? Remember when those were the things that were distracting us? Cable news. RSS feeds.

1:16:44RSS feeds, which the social media companies killed because it was a competitor to their closed gardens. Google killed it because they wanted to make their own social media platforms. Web forums. Man, it's a different time. So interesting. What did Johanka have to say? I think the answer is obvious. make the high-focus activities far more attractive than those that add to the continuous partial attention problem. I mean, I think that's right. I think that's right in the sense that this is like the Lincoln Protocol that we landed on more recently, right? Is that if what you're doing is really useful in a way that's meaningful to you, your mind will suppress the short-term attention motivational system.

1:17:23Chris is being a little snarky here. Didn't Lincoln also have a nervous breakdown of some sort after a family member died? If we had the internet back then, that would be all over the web, and I don't think anyone would have voted for him. I think you can argue that people lived much more privately back in those days. Not politicians. No, his – yes, he had a press episode after his fiancée died, but he had embarrassments, political embarrassments. In particular, look up the spot speech that he gave about the Mexican-American War. I think this was Zachary Taylor who was the president at the time.

1:17:57it was an embarrassment and it like really hurt it followed him everywhere people you don't understand people wrote newspapers were you know three editions a day people had nothing else to do people would write about all these things they're all text filled full of text or whatever everyone knew about the embarrassments that lincoln had it was like a huge issue for him like his his the the problems he had in the house of representatives in the 1840s really followed him for a long time and he had to sort of earn his way out of it by coming back into the the Stephen Douglas debates with something even better to do.

1:18:27So I don't think that was true back then. They had all of those problems if you were a public figure, just like we do today. Here's someone. Oh, wait a second. Corrine says, Si, if everyone learned to cite their sources like good little boys and girls, everyone would know that that awesome comic comes from Asher Sarlin at Elephantitis of the Mind. Corrine, I am going to scroll to the top of my article here. All right. Jesse, what do we see here? Hat tip, academic productivity via why that's delightful, via omnibrain, via dot, dot, dot, via elephantitis of the mind. I clearly attributed that this started at that particular blog.

1:19:05I know it's been almost 20 years, but I do expect an apology from Corrine. All right, let's just look at a couple more. This is kind of fun. What did people care about back then? All right, here we go. White bread, white beard, thinking about focus back in 2008. Focus and dedication to mastering hard ideas. I've been thinking about those lately as I try to understand the behavior of my teenage daughters, which seems to be far removed from the realm of reason. I'm learning that they do not have focus on ideas their mother and I offer or what is available in many of the fine books to which they have access.

1:19:38They have only to go to their bedrooms and text their friends for instant confirmation that what they want, do, think, believe is not only utterly rational but absolutely right or an internal truth. even email is too slow for the young if not texting then at least instant messaging on the computer i'm learning that is not information or wisdom they seek but instant confirmation from their peers confirmation by responsible adults is simply unwanted or important oh white beard man it is hard to parent teenagers i'm just getting there but man think about that he was like three years away from there's no social media yet so things are about to get way worse with these teenagers.

1:20:14He was like, we're at the peak of digital issues for our teenagers as AOL instant messenger. They're not doing sufficient research when they cite their news sources. Oh man, Whitebeard things got worse. They got dark.

1:20:29Oh, okay. Now I'm just looking at a few of my responses. I responded to Corrine and said, you're right. I have now added elephantitis of the mind to the end. So I added that due to her. Corrine, I take it back. You don't owe me. Apologize. I told Chris that mudsling was pretty dirty so I kind of knew these things back then here's me talking to Amy I like your vision of GTD in the early 19th century I could imagine the next action list under context field is the next action plow under context axe are the next actions chop wood kill chicken that's pretty funny a little GTD humor that's what we miss in our age of Sora you're missing GTD humor deep in the comments Let's do one more.

1:21:14See here. Stefan said, quick question. I've been thinking about this and was wondering if having a laptop makes it easier to, quote, get off the computer, end quote, when you're studying at your desk, et cetera. The reasoning is that a desktop computer is right in front of you and taking up most of the space on your desk, whereas a laptop you can put away in a case and temporarily forget about it while you do your own work. Those that do have laptops, have you ever done this, does this work? man can you think about a time when it was having a laptop would be rare like people don't really we have this i think like we're the last people around like we have lots of desktop computers that are hq here but that's like pretty rare i guess because we're doing video editing and like audio production or whatever like everyone just uses laptops now um i think stefan is right because you can make a space dual use deep work without a laptop and then you can bring a laptop when you do need to actually do the laptop work uh what i do as i've talked about on the show is I have two different, well, at my house, I mean, a lot of different workspaces.

1:22:09But my house, I have two different offices. There's a library study, which has no permanent electronics. And I have a desk, an oak desk made by a company in Maine that specializes in desks for collegiate libraries. And it's surrounded by books with library, brass library lighting. And like, that's where I go to read and think. And then we have a separate sort of like small home office upstairs where our printer is, where we have a permanent monitor. We can plug our laptop in where the filing cabinets are, where the tape and the office supplies are. So like today I was doing the budget, the taxes.

1:22:38You do that up there. If you want to like read a Lincoln biography and highlight things with a pencil, you do it in the study. So I think having different spaces works. If you only have one, a laptop can be used to sort of transition the same space into both. So there we go. Kind of interesting to get that little glimpse into like what the world was like in 2008. It felt simpler. So people had a hard time back then as well. All right. So that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for sticking with me through my Lincoln nerdiness, but I do love it. We'll be back next week with another episode.

1:23:09And until then, as always, stay deep.

1:23:15Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70 ,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, You got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.

1:24:21Thank you.