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

26:03Because we're not in the old world of social media anymore, where you decide who you're going to follow and you see the people that you follow. And I know you talk about this a lot. But the algorithm says, all right, I'm going to show your followers the people that are posting. And since most people are consuming social media based on what's showing up for them, we stop getting served up. Our social media traffic sort of dwindles down. And that means a lot of the onboarding into the larger ecosystem begins to dwindle. Fewer people showing up on YouTube, fewer people signing on for Patreon. And we're taking a hit.

26:42and you feel nervous and you wonder, is this something that you can get away with, especially when you're in a space where so much of what you do seems to depend on views. So that was a problem, that was a challenge. And it definitely stirred a lot of conversations around, all right, we're keeping this commitment, but what does it look like when the commitment's over? So you're seeing dollars go down. Ultimately, you're seeing concrete. And then what are, just so we understand better how these businesses work. So what are the various funnels in which people, when you say coming into your ecosystem, just so we understand the business, like becoming a subscriber to the podcast, becoming a subscriber to the newsletter, what's ultimately, what's the destination?

27:29And then what were the funnels in which people get to those destinations? And then which of those funnels now are effectively turned off? yeah so the the the primary way we we make money is through patreon subscribers i i would say it's a pretty small percentage of of patreon subscribers who finance everything we don't really make any money off youtube of social media off ads or any of those things now now there is a change that we can come back to later where youtube turned on the ads for our videos they persisted in turning them on we can't get them to turn it off and so now we have ads on our videos as a qualifier but that's something that we can't control but everything leads to in terms of like financing things it comes through the patreon subscribers and so the social media channels the youtube channels the spotify all of that stuff it's designed to create interest so people like what they hear and they say, hey, we want more.

28:28And we try to deliver a high quality product for all the free viewers. But we do record, you know, two and a half hours of a maximal episode. And we invite people after anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes of an episode to to come check out the second half. And that's the primary way. And so when all of that other stuff dwindles down, then that's that's essentially the commercial, if you will. Josh might hate that language, but that's kind of the commercial for the Patreon. That's how they find out. No one's Googling Patreon channels that I can support. That's how they find out. So like I might see a couple Instagram videos and like, oh, I like this.

29:06I might move from there over to the podcast, either audio or video. I'm like, oh, this is great. And then when I'm there, they're like, oh, I want the maximal episode. And now I join Patreon. So you are lopping off the front of that pathway. That's exactly right. Yeah, it's almost like you've got a clothing store that's located right on the corner of a major intersection. And you get a lot of people who come in who didn't even know about your store or care about your store because they're on vacation. They're out with family. They're waiting on their table for the restaurant next door. And just a lot of people come in.

29:43And then you say, I'm going to shut this store down. And everything is online. That's how you get our clothes. that's a major change in your business. So was there adjustments made? I mean, was it, this is unsustainable, but we can make adjustments that'll make it sustainable? Or was it sustainable, but you're now just, it's a different level of growth. And you're like, you know what? That's not what it was before, but hey, this is still a business. We're all still doing okay. Like, how are you thinking about the future of the business? Or was it clearly, this is unsustainable. We're gonna have to turn this back on.

30:13What were the thoughts that were emerging about the long-term viability of the business during this period? yeah so this is interesting because this is where josh and i are i think are processing things a little bit differently i i think josh would say anything is sustainable if you're willing to make the trade-offs involved right and so you can make money and continue building an empire which we know he'd never call it that even if you're not on social media I think for him, social media is a positive space where you can do a lot of good things. There was nothing about his time away that made him feel like afraid of social media or afraid of his relationship to it.

31:01He learned a lot of things that helps him return to it in a more healthful manner. And so for him, it's, hey, look, if you don't want to do social media, there are things that you could do to make money. but I like social media. I think it's valuable. I think it's a good space. And so let's return to it, but let's not return to it out of fear. Like, oh no, the business is breaking down. Let's do all the things that we used to do, but let's return to it mindfully. We're not going to post highlights every day just for the sake of doing it. We're not going to do whatever the algorithm tells us to do.

31:33We're not going to speak in the language that the algorithm commands us to speak in. Or If we want to say words that the algorithm threatens us for saying, we're going to ignore that and we're going to still do our thing, but in a modified way. And so if you look at social media, minimalist social media today versus minimalist social media before that year, it's a more laid back vibe with less frequent posts, but things that are still kind of like consistent with the mission. That's what I think Josh would say. I think that's a fairly decent representation of his position. maybe there's some nuance he would have to fill in and that describes and that describes basically the what the the company as a whole is doing now right so the people who are working on social okay and then what was because i want to hear yours is interesting to me but just to close the loop on the effect of that so then what's the this more laid-back uh approach to social media where you basically as you're saying you eliminated the stuff that like you really didn't like the like the the drive of every day we have to produce something and that feeling of clutter is it did you find a that you know what this new style is just as effective so we just had some wrong assumptions or did you find like maybe it is less effective than the maximal style we're doing before but it's a good trade-off it's yielding enough growth that like things are sustainable again i i think a lot of those things as a team we're still learning about but but but i think the suspicion is less actually can be more that that you don't have to be posting multiple times every day in order to get those benefits that you want and and there's an increasing respect for just how um flighty the algorithm could be and and just how careful you should be if you're on those spaces of building your entire vocation or game plan around what the algorithm rewards because that might change next week.

33:27Next week, the algorithm might be like, hey, a cup of coffee needs to be visible on the screen in order for it to show up in the feed. As a matter of fact, I've got a funny story about that, a funny discovery we made. So there was this period where our Instagram views seemed to drop down like out of nowhere. And there was no major change in our posting schedule or the types of stuff we were putting out. And one of our guys looked into it and he was just sort of like Sherlock Holmes-ing this thing, right? Just really digging in. And he finds out that the problem is these mics that we're using are covering our mouths.

34:03And so when we're speaking, it's kind of like this. And because our lips are not visible, and it's one of the ways that Instagram detects that this is a video versus a picture, it was sort of showing up as a picture, which is being more suppressed because the thing to be promoted is the video this was his hypothesis which we kind of laughed at and thought was totally strange the experiment was let's move the mics and show our lips right and so everything went back up after that and so something like that is so it makes sense as to why it's the case, but there's something about it that just feels so arbitrary and so silly to build your life around, right?

34:53And that might not even be a thing in three months or in three years. The game might entirely change. And so a lot of the formulas we come up with, well, you have to post at this time or this many times. A lot of that is stuff we make up or stuff that we correctly guess, but is only true for a time. But it turns out that things are improving and doing better without as much work as what used to be the case. So that closes that loop on that. Now you want to get to my struggle. And just so we're oriented on a timeline perspective, when was it, when are we talking about now? When did the formal, the broad experiment end?

35:34What? Professor, you know that? of 2025? Beginning of 2025. Okay. And I was there in the spring of 2024. So this was like almost a year. Okay. All right. So that's the decision for the minimalist writ large is like we're going to be more, a little bit more laid back about the social media and just be more flexible and it'll do what it does. And okay. Now let's get into the mind of TK. It's 2025. We get towards the beginning of 2025. How are you feeling?

36:05I'm feeling very conflicted because I'm enjoying my time off social media but I'm also convinced that I need to be on it the sense of needing to be on it is very strong the sense of you would never make it without this tool is very strong and there's a rebellious part of me that hates what I believe to be true you know it's it's almost like someone telling you hey Cal, in order to be a somebody in this world, in order to be relevant, in order for anybody to watch your podcast, you have to wear Nike clothes and the logo has to be visible. I suppose you could live with that, but there might be a part of you that's self-respecting enough to say, I don't like that.

36:50I don't mind Nike. I don't really hate them, but I don't like believing that I have to do that in order to succeed. Something feels wrong about that. And so that's where I am emotionally at that time. And I guess I come on to social media in a very casual sense. I download the apps again and I log back on. But every time I try to post, it feels like I'm forcing it. It feels like I'm posting something for no other reason than that I can and that I probably should because I probably should keep things going. and you have a channel that's got, you know, your personal channel over 30 ,000 followers.

37:30And that's not a whole lot, comparatively speaking, but it's probably irresponsible to not take advantage of that in some kind of way. So I probably should be posting. And there was never any post where I'm thinking, this is something that I got to put out. This is something that I got to share. Every time I shared something, I just felt a little bit cheap. You know, I just felt a little bit cheap. and I'm thinking, hmm, I don't know. I don't like this. I'm not doing this very well. I'm back on here, but I have no consistency with my posts. My posts have no theme at all. I probably should be more consistent, but I don't want to do that.

38:10And I start to even think, and I'm not done with this thought process, I start to think maybe I should be an electrician like my brother. Really? His career doesn't require him to be online. He does very well. No one knows who he is outside of physical space.

38:37And I could focus in on that. I could learn on that. I think I have a pretty solid ability to, you know, enjoy things and manufacture meaning and passion out of mastery. Like you talk about, so good they can't ignore you. Maybe I should do that. And I go, where's that thought coming from? And it was an expression of my desire to be free of feeling like I have to be on here, you know. And so I started to think like that. And when I say that thought process is still ongoing, what I mean is I haven't closed the door on the possibility of choosing something other than this media space as the primary means by which I provide for my family.

39:25That's still an open topic for me. And that could take many different forms. And I'm still sort of wrestling with that. I think I love media space so much that in some shape, form or fashion, I'll always show up and do stuff. But that could just be TK showing up and doing stuff in a way that's entirely separated from money. And that's just TK doing a hobby. Now, it also could show up as TK next week, launching his new podcast, having sponsorships and doing his thing. I'm not dogmatic in either direction, but my wheels have been turning that way. And that's kind of a just gives you a sense of how deeply uncomfortable I felt with this stuff and how much I'm wrestling.

40:07Did you realize you were feeling that way before you actually took that time to pause? To what degree did the pause help clarify for you the fact that there is this conflict going on internally?

40:23well remember how i talked about the thoughts that i wasn't tweeting out and how i was spending more time thinking about those thoughts i i also had experiences where the impulse to take pictures of things went away when i couldn't share them on social media and that sort of got redirected to talking with my wife more about the day or about interesting observations. And I noticed in a way that wasn't quite like intentional, that I started to do more things like more volunteering at my church and my wife and I trying out new things more like, you know, going to go into the botanical garden more.

41:06And it was almost as if there was kind of like this, this natural desire for novelty, this natural desire to connect with humans to see things to even show off what i saw and it wasn't being fulfilled by social media and so i'm starting to experience this in space and those are things that i experienced before all this smartphone stuff but i was starting to wake up to them again and experience it at a later stage in life and so as i so so that kind of led to me being nervous about getting on? What is that going to take away from me? But once I get on, the things that I was doing just felt so empty and vacuous and kind of vain compared to what I was doing before.

41:51You know, I have these, I mentioned Steve Patterson, I have an hour long conversation with him every month. And it's just us arguing about philosophy. And we basically just take a topic. The assignment that we most recently talked about was Barclays Dialogues. And we both just committed to reading those. And then we just got on the phone for an hour, no cameras, we argued about it, we didn't record the conversation. Those are the kinds of things that started to happen more. And I feel like those things give me more meaning than the stuff that I was doing on social media. And that's not a, that's not a moral position.

42:31That's not a, that's not a judgment about other people that are on there and the content they're creating, but that was sort of the dominant feeling. Does that make sense? So it's, I mean, it's kind of ironic. The, the, the part that makes sense is you are exposed to things, more of things that were important to you when you were taking the break. And then that helped you understand their importance. And then when you returned, you saw the vacuousness, but there's this ironic piece as well to this, which I think is social media has this self-defense mechanism where it puts enough rubble around your brain that you don't actually have the practice or cognitive space to actually work through the thoughts about, hey, how is this thing affecting me or what are my possibilities?

43:07It distracts you too much from being able to think about the cost of the distraction, because that's a complicated, uncomfortable thought that requires you're on a long walk and you're coming back to it again. And you're seeing a feeling and you're noticing a feeling and you're sticking with the feeling and then you're evolving the feeling and then it comes back and you're updating the frameworks of structure within your own psyche. And so it's like maybe the strongest defense that social media has to its own propagation is make it difficult for people to actually think clearly about, hey, what's going on here?

43:43But you would say – so people have – what's interesting about this is Josh had a different response. So like the value here is clarity, right? Like this, it's not really like, this is not a PSA for this is bad. This is good. And you don't, you won't realize this is bad until you do X, Y, or Z, right? It's a PSA for clarity of, you know, you get clarity about your life, what matters, what doesn't, how things fit in, visions for how your life might go forward. And you can't develop those visions without clarity. and that's what came out of, not that you're still struggling with it, but you're struggling with the right things now.

44:23You didn't even know to struggle about that before the podcast. That's right. When you talk about the struggle and the self-defense mechanism of social media, I think of two categories of that. The first is the social category. Whenever you talk out loud about these things, no matter how many qualifications you make, no matter how many prefacing remarks you make, you can spend 10 minutes issuing out disclaimers about how nonjudgmental you are about all this and how all the people you love are on social media and you realize they're getting a lot of good out of it. And you're going to have to suffer through with great patience, a number of people responding to that by being like, well, maybe it's just the way you're using it, man.

45:04Like social media is still good. It's positive. Hey, I wouldn't even know you. We wouldn't even have this conversation if it wasn't for social media. I love your conversation with Cal Newport, but you know what? If it wasn't for social media, you wouldn't have it. And there's something about that that's not just possibly irritating. It kind of tempts you to think, you know, I am kind of being over serious about this. And yeah, they're right. What the heck am I doing by even rethinking any of this? So that's a powerful social component. The second component is this sense of it being pragmatically necessary in a way that you just can't possibly shake.

45:45So the example that I use is imagine that you're a gambling addict and you're an alcoholic and you want to live a normal life like anybody else. And the only grocery store where you can buy your food is in the casino. Your barber is in the casino and all of your friends are in the casino. Now, you know your own weaknesses. And when you walk to the front doors of that casino, you can feel it. You can feel yourself like, you know, on the cusp of something that's going to move you in a direction you don't want to go in. But at the same time, all your friends are there and you don't want to be antisocial.

46:24You definitely don't want to be irrelevant. And you want to get your hair cut, right? And you need the groceries. Just go in there. Stay focused. Don't drink. Don't gamble. through your thing. And somehow every time you do this, it's five hours later, you've knocked back several drinks, you spent several hours at the roulette table. You're a lot poorer because you've spent so much money and in the heat of the moment, you just kind of like, even though you intended, even though you told yourself, you know what, I'm just going to sit down for and play$50 on roulette. And the only reason I'm sitting down is because my buddy's here at the table and he called me over and he says, just hang out with me for a few minutes and I'm here, I'll put a limit on it and then like$500 later, I'm just, I'm miserable and I leave the casino and I didn't get my hair cut because I used my time on the roulette table.

47:15I got some groceries, but not as much as I needed and all of the people who gave me those great arguments about how it's necessary and gave me all of those awesome pointers about how to manage it effectively, I think they're right, But there's something about it that's inconsistent with my lived experience. And at some point, I got to start being true to that, even if it makes me uncomfortable. Well, I'll say this about my appreciation for your work. I think the things you're talking about, and I've been listening to you your entire career, but a heck of a lot more lately as you talk about AI, you talk about the smartphone, You talk about habit formation.

48:00I think we're at a time where the world is just getting so noisy, but in a way that's good. Entertainment is more addicting than it's ever been. Even the cheapest forms of entertainment are so well produced that it's difficult to not watch them. Even the commercials that we use to skip past are starting to get so good that they make us want to watch them. It's so easy to just get into that hypnagogic state and then wake up later and say, where did my time go? Where did myself go? And I think about the lyrics to this Kurt Elling song called Finding Neverland, where he says, my friends, every day we go to our everyday work.

48:47We return to our everyday homes. We sit in the everyday chair and drink from the everyday cup. but we never allow ourselves to go into the extraordinary places in our hearts and our minds. I ask you, my friend, how do you think a book is written? How do you think a song is born? How do you think a picture is painted? How do you think a race is won? How do you think a world gets started? If a little daydreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time. When I think about that lyric, I think about how the greatest adventure is to journey deep into the interior self, not for the sake of withdrawing from the world, but for the sake of cultivating this ability to look out upon the world from the vantage point of being in those deep spaces in yourself.

49:39It's as radical of a change in perspective as it is to look at the world from the mountaintop, to go to the Grand Canyon and then look at things, or to experience a neighborhood by riding on a bicycle rather than by walking or by driving in a car. How you experience things is so different based on your vantage point. And when your vantage point is being connected to your deep self, it's the most amazing vantage point to have in life. And what you're really showing people is not just tips on how to handle technology, not just perspectives on the smartphone or social media, but really how to find those spaces within themselves where when they look out on the world again, when they have conversations, when they read a book or do things, they're looking at it from the most exciting vantage point possible.

50:27And that's what's become most exciting to me. And in this stage of life where I've got the gray on my beard, I'm more excited about life than I ever have been because I just can't wait to know who I get to become by minimizing my time on these apps, my time on these devices, my face being in the screen. And I'll be showing up in some manner, but my priority will be engaging life from the deep self. And you've really done a lot to help me and others minimize the sense of loss that comes with that. Well, TK, I can't think of a better, more elegant, inspiring way to bring this conversation to a close.

51:08I think that captures beautifully, like what's at stake here. Going deep into yourself is a journey that we've forgotten about, but it is the best journey. but you have set yourself up now that if you release a long series of tick tock dance videos, we're just going to be disappointed now. See, that's the problem. You've, you've, you've, you've put yourself into a box or those videos where you snap and like different items of clothing change on you or whatever. When we start seeing hours of TK close switching tick tock videos, we're going to know we're going to be disappointed. That's it, man.

51:43You're, yourself in. Believe me, if you ever see that, I'll be disappointed. There's something else. Yeah. If you see that, call the authorities. Sean has a gun right off screen. We need more subscribers, TK. More TikToks. All right, TK. Always a pleasure. Thank you for coming on the show. We had a great conversation. Likewise, man. It's an honor. Always. All right. So there we go, Jesse. That was my conversation with TK Coleman. I'll tell you, probably the most poignant part of our discussion for me is when TK started to get sort of self-reflective about the role social media was playing in his life and him being uncomfortable about it being back in his life.

52:26The most poignant point for me is when he said, and I'm kind of paraphrasing, sometimes I feel like I should just become an electrician like my brother. And he went on to elaborate, if you're an electrician, there's no audience. that has to like follow what you're doing. There's no one to get mad at you or to applaud you for your take on things. There's no one that's waiting for your next missive. You just go into the world and do a skilled thing that people appreciate. So you could really tell he was struggling. Two of my best buddies are electricians. It's actually a pretty tough job. It's a really good job.

53:01It's also tough because they have to deal with like a lot of like the whys. They're very difficult and like - Are they residential electricians? So I have a buddy who's a builder, like a commercial real estate family and he said the best job is commercial electrician so you're not dealing with like the homeowners who are terrible let's be honest and it's like really complicated big jobs are way more interesting because i think the residential jobs are pretty straightforward uh who writes about this matt crawford writes about this the shop class is soul craft he was an electrician apprentice and he talks about in that book is a very poignant scene about the art and simple satisfactions of bending wire conduit.

53:44So if you're doing commercial electricity, you might have, you know, 30 major wires coming into a giant junction box, and they all have to have metal pipe that they come in. And how do you bend them all so all of those pipes can come out and fit together? And he was like, that was so much more satisfying than all of my work as a think tank knowledge worker. But it was, I think that it was a good discussion. And I loved how TK got personal. I loved how his takeaways were different than Joshua's. and that gets to the core of the social media pause, which is learning. And I really want to emphasize that because I think, again, I mentioned this in the intro to the show, but there's often an emphasis in a social media discourse about detoxing.

54:19I just want to sort of clear out these toxins for my system before I return to the activity, which I don't think is particularly useful or a sort of more reactionary, I don't like Elon Musk, it's a political statement, which is fine. I think anything that gets you off social media is probably good. But what most people really need, They have a complicated relationship with social media. It's a love-hate, practical, impractical relationship. They need self-knowledge about what was I missing? What is this doing to my life? What was actually useful? If that's what's useful and this other stuff was garbage, can I reintroduce just this into my life and not these other things?

54:54Or you get that feeling like TK had. He described the feeling of rubble in his brain. He didn't realize what's happening until he took a social media pause. I wasn't thinking clearly. And I didn't realize I wasn't thinking clearly until I stopped. So I love this idea as an experiment. All right. I'm going to give you advice about this. I got four points for successfully deploying a social media pause in your own work or life. All right. Point number one, define the pause with specificity. So you need to be clear about what you're going to stop doing during the pause and what you're going to continue doing and the things that you're going to continue to do, what rules you're going to put around it.

55:33A lot of people have some sort of background activity. It might be related to their job or connected to something else they do, like a running club that they're a part of, where they need some social media engagement. So just be clear about it. I'm doing A and B with these rules and nothing else, right? So be very clear about the parameters of your pause. If it's just, I want to try to use this stuff less, but I still have to use some, it'll fall apart. Piece of advice number two, define its duration. Specifically, how long are you going to go during the pause? I think 30 days is a good amount for most people.

56:03That was the minimalist original idea. It's also the amount I suggest in my 2019 book, Digital Minimalism. And so there's a lot of success. 30 days is enough time to gain some real insight, but it's not overly onerous. Advice number three, you need to experiment and reflect during the pause. So you need to try out other things to try to rediscover other modes of living and activities that are important to you that have been diluted through the use of social media and do self reflection. What's going on? What am I feeling? Why am I feeling it? I mean, we saw TK doing this type of self-reflection in real time in our conversation.

56:38He was trying to grapple with, why do I feel this antipathy towards this technology? What is it doing to my life? What am I going to lose? He was being really clear about it. There's huge cost for someone in his job to not be aggressively engaging in these tools. And you've got to do this self-reflection during the pause. And then finally, when it's over, you have to debrief and decide, what did I learn? what concrete changes in my life going forward does that point towards. If you miss that last stage, you're going to miss all the value of actually doing the social media pause. So there you go, Jesse, the social media pause.

57:14My social media pause experiment is just coming up on its 20th year. So it's a pretty long pause. It's been a long one, but we'll see what happens. I'm going to end it one day. Like I've decided I need to spend, I missed a lot. I need to be on TikTok a lot more. A lot of TikToks. Makes sense. A lot of inappropriate TikToks are coming your way once I'm done with my social media pause. So be ready for that. All right, we're going to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

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59:46And you know what my secret weapon is in this process? Wayfair. Wayfair makes it easy to find exactly what fits your styles and needs, what you need to upgrade your space with quality pieces that work, that will stay within your budget, plus also give you fast shipping and easy assembly options. Wayfair can match your aesthetic, like whatever aesthetic you like. You can do it. Like here at the Deep Work HQ, Jesse and I are leaning into 19th Century Circus. We thought that would be kind of like the appropriate vibe that we're going for. And it's not just indoor furniture. They have outdoor furniture.

1:00:19They have decorations. They have organizational solutions. They have kids stuff, desk, chairs, and more. They make it easy to order. The shipping is fast. The prices are good and the pieces are quality. It's everything you need to make your spaces your own. Find furniture, decor, and essentials to fit your unique style and budget. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Wayfair. Every style, every home. All right, Jesse. Let's get back to the show. All right. You've heard from me. Now we want to hear from you. So let's open up our inbox. A quick reminder, if you have a question for me or you want to share a case study or you want to try to trick me into doing a rant, we have a new email address for you.

1:01:04You can send that in straight to podcast at calnewport.com. We'll try to get the most interesting stuff on the air. All right. Let's get into it. We have some messages from the inbox to cover. Jesse, what message do we have here first? First message is from an Oxford professor named Nuno. Oh, I like this one. We're getting a high class of correspondence here, Jesse. I'm impressed. We got Oxford professors. All right, I'm going to read this message here from Nuno. I'm a historian of science at All Souls College, Oxford. I'm a big fan of your work, and I am always on the lookout for deep work stories in history.

1:01:40Here's one below, which I published in my newsletter. All right, so Nuno sent me a newsletter. he had written about a historical figure who basically discovered deep work and why this was important during that period so what i'm going to do here is i've captured a few excerpts from this newsletter i'm going to read to you now there's a lot of elision in here so just keep in mind i'm cutting things out but let me read you these excerpts from this newsletter because i think it's really interesting all right it starts as follows those who are into productivity know the New York Times bestselling Deep Work, bestseller Deep Work.

1:02:16A little aside, Jesse, Deep Work was never a New York Times bestseller. I've had many New York Times bestsellers, but Deep Work was not. It's never been on the list. Two million copies in, never been on the list. All right, anyways, what I'm trying to say here is, Nuno, I'm fact-checking you, and I'm gonna drum you out of academia. You can't make those type of mistakes. Not on my watch. All right, let's get back into it. In this book, Cal Newport argues that having uninterrupted blocks of time for work leads to a more productive life. But did these distractions exist in the early modern period?

1:02:47The short answer is they did, yet they took a different and more interesting form than current distractions. Later on, Nuno elaborates, books were a leading distraction in the early modern period and how envious we should be of those times. From the 1500s onward, with the development of the printing press and the humanist revival of ancient philosophies, knowledge became available at a much greater pace than ever before. As this great Harvard historian explains, scholars felt there were too much to know. In order to capture and control the avalanche of information that came their way, a question that we still have today, readers develop new note-taking techniques.

1:03:23In the 16th and 17th centuries, they copied excerpts of what they read into notebooks, which they were later recopied into a master notebook called a book of commonplaces. Yet, even then, there are problems. Nicholas Steno, the main character of my new book, The Traveling Anatomist, faced all these challenges during his university studies in the late 1650s. His way of tackling them shaped his work productivity in significant ways, making him one of the most significant scientists of his time. As an advanced university student, he learned to focus on specific themes. Rather than letting his mind read multiple things quickly, a, quote, harmful hastening should be avoided, end quote, as he put it.

1:04:03His solution was to, quote, stick to one topic, end quote. In practice, this meant blocking specific moments of time to go through the hardest tasks. As he wrote in his personal notebook, before noon, nothing must be done except medical things. I'll stop there, Jesse, because I think this is fascinating. We see early on, or in the 1600s, we see the sort of emergence of psychologically oriented productivity. This is the type of productivity I talk about where you acknowledge the reality of your brain and how it functions when thinking about the best way to approach your work. and they realized because knowledge work was becoming a thing that didn't exist before you had to have knowledge to even process and and and produce new knowledge for there to be knowledge work and the printing press actually made knowledge work something to still have small number of people but you had a whole class of scholars now so it became a job i think this is important because if you go back to the actually ancient period let's go back to like the greek philosophers there are like six dudes doing this right it was you know Socrates and a couple others it was Pythagoras or whatever because it was just really hard to get even the information you needed the process and think about right but by the the early modern period as talked about in this essay you had books so now more people more people could be a sort of professional scholar class and what did they invent right away time blocking deep work focus all right you got to be careful about what you want to work on you want to keep your mind on one thing at a time and you want to block the time because it requires time that you otherwise aren't going to spend concentrating unless you put it aside ahead of time.

1:05:33So a lot of the ideas I talked about seemed like they emerged at the very beginning of knowledge work. What don't you see in this study? How do I optimize the number of tasks I get through? How do I build a complex system to automatically prioritize what I'm working on? Let me build really elaborate productivity philosophies. No, it was the main thing as the main thing, which is focusing hard in a narrow area for time that I blocked off in advance. Those key ideas were there from the very beginning. So there we go. Interesting letter, Nuno. All right. What's the second message we have, Jesse? All right.

1:06:10Next message is from a programmer named William on a tool suggestion. All right. Let's see here. Let's get technical. William says, I'm going to keep it brief. Try Obsidian. You'll love the flexibility of the system and the utility. A simple Obsidian system has felt like a digital revelation to keep an eye on task and not let it become overwhelming. Make up at what you will. Backlinks is by far the best feature for me, capturing hardware engineering notes, media and daily notes. It's hard at first and it becomes easier every day. I strongly encourage you to go through it and understand it before you think of it like a normal task manager.

1:06:43It's the ultimate system of systems designer. All right. Have you heard of Obsidian, Jesse? Yeah, from you. Yeah, it kind of is around, I mean, programmer and programmer adjacent people like this. So I kind of know it from computer science circles, but it's kind of spreading. It's a little bit technical. Here's the main idea. Okay, so let me give you the quick primer on why people like Obsidian. It is a system for organizing information that is based on plain text files. So there's not some proprietary database existing in the cloud somewhere where all of your data is stored. And then some sort of application on your phone is talking to that database to retrieve information, which it then shows and it's all locked in there.

1:07:24Instead, all of the information in your Obsidian system is just plain text files on your computer. And what you do is there's a special collection of formatting tags and I don't know what you would call it, formatting elements, plain text formatting elements that you can add to these plain text files. So like if you want something to be a header, you might put two asterisks on either side of the phrase, right? And that indicates this text is supposed to be like a header or if it's part of a to-do list, maybe you have two square brackets and a square next to something. And that indicates it's all plain text, like this is a to-do list element, right?

1:08:01So it's all plain text. This is called markdown where you have this particular plain text elements you add that try to put formatting cues. And then anyone can write an Obsidian viewer app that can load up these files from your system and then display them properly. So where it sees you have the asterisks that mean there should be a header, it'll display that text as a header. Or where it sees the square brackets next to an item that you're trying to say this is a task, it'll make it like a to-do list when it displays it. So you can have a whole competitive ecosystem of different people writing readers to display what's in these text files and for you to write and have them store in these text files.

1:08:37There's like no one program you need. It's like an agreement of here's how we're going to format information in text files. And anyone can write a reader for displaying those text files and an editor for editing them. Right. So that so it's all sort of simple and it's all local. Now, what makes this really exciting for people is it's easy to process text files. It's like, let's say you want to add a special feature, right? Like you're like, you know what I want is because this is like very relevant to my work is that certain types of phrases that I think are inspiring. I want when I see those, them to be next to like, you know, a picture of Cal Network flexing or something like that.

1:09:17Well, you could invent, you're like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to have a special little formatting code like two tildes next to each other. And to me, that means put a picture of Cal Network. and now I can just write you know an obsidian viewer tool that like when it reads these text files and sees that it shows a picture of cal network so you can these are called plugins you can add all sorts of extra different formatting things different ways of displaying the information that's all stored underneath it and just plain text files no fancy databases no fancy format so that's that's what obsidian is there's a lot of plugins that have extended common obsidian readers so that you can do a lot of task management stuff so like you can show task list.

1:09:55You can tag things and just show things that have a certain tag. You can move things in the calendar view or into a Kanban type of board view. And so you can build up in a sort of Lego brick style, complicated, bespoke productivity task management systems on top of the core of just obsidians and plugins for obsidians. You can write your own plugins because it's just text file processing. And if you vibe code it, it's like you can do whatever you want. So anyways, Programmers like this because it's highly customizable and they love the conceptual simplicity of you could write the most complicated viewers in the world, but the underlying data is just text in text files.

1:10:32All right, so now the question is, other than the customizability, are there advantages to building task management systems on top of Obsidian? I don't personally do that. So what I've done here is I've loaded up a Reddit thread. this is from a few years ago, but the technology is, you know, it's been around for a while. And it says, please share how you use Obsidian for task management. I thought we'd quickly read a few of these responses to get a sense of what do these Obsidian based task management systems actually look like in practice. All right. So here's one response. Honestly, after trying all the various plugins and getting as creative as possible, I decided not to use Obsidian for task management.

1:11:14It was never designed for this. And even though so much work has gone into various plugins and their abilities. It all just feels really clunky and not as flexible as what I need for task project management. All right, let's see if we can find another response here. Someone says, I use Obzi, which is an Obsidian task manager on mobile. Another one says, I'm using Proletarian Wizard for a couple days. I like it so far. Simple and exactly what I need. If I go back up here, someone else says, it's important to have an effective way to organize all your tasks in one place, especially with a heavy workload from uni.

1:11:50Have you tried using Obsidian's plugins? If not, it might be a good start. There's a plugin called Tasks in Obsidian you could check out. It allows you to create, manage, and filter tasks across all of your notes, which sounds exactly like the functionality you need. You can even add due dates to your task and filter them based on priority or deadline. There's also another plugin called Calendar. This might come in handy if you like to see your task and events visually laid out in calendar format. It integrates seamlessly with tasks and so on. All right, so I think we get a feel here, right? It's like you find these plugins, you build sort of customized setups that might be hard for the novice user, but if you're used to sort of messing around with text file-based systems and scripting, it does give you a big sense of control.

1:12:32This is not new. in the computer programmer world, this idea of like organizing your life in text files goes all the way back. We see in like the early 2000s when the term life hacker was coined. I mean, that's kind of a blast from the past, Jesse. People don't use that anymore. But life hacking actually came from a talk where a programmer talked about how people were, programmers were organizing their lives with text files, with codes and little scripts. And they're doing this in Vim or in Emacs or something like that. So this sort of obsidian task manager is in the long line of that. Now in a day of like terminal agents, like Cloud Code, where everything is about files and file systems, a lot of programmers are now really thinking about their life as files and file systems and building Cloud Code agents to help them organize it.

1:13:19So here's where I land on this. I think this is kind of programmer stuff. It's sort of like model trains a little bit for programmers. It's fun to fit these things together and feel like you have some customization. A little bit of coding might be involved, but easy coding. I don't know that the average person needs this for tracking tasks. I mean, keep in mind last week when we had Sarah Hart Unger on the podcast, she doesn't even list tasks in any system. She just writes them onto her calendar. She has a list somewhere, a big picture stuff she's working on. And then just each week she's writes tasks on her calendar on particular days or time that she needs to get done.

1:13:53I keep track of tasks, you know, largely in things three and some Trello. I look for just low friction in the interface. I just need a place the storm where I can get to them quickly from multiple devices when I'm planning. So this is probably overkill for most people, but it's interesting to hear about. Obsidian, I mean, it's just one of these things that conceptually is so clean and cool, but it doesn't necessarily mean in practice you're getting something out of it that functionally is way different than you would get from other simpler systems. We're kind of in, I like this type of stuff, Jesse, but it's probably not for everyone.

1:14:24All right. Do we have one more episode or one more message rather? We do. we have a note from Russell about our film student episode yes film students who cannot make it through movies we'll talk about the end of the show just yeah I've watched three movies since the last episode I like this new addition to the show like what I'm watching yeah yeah three movies last week and two books got a lot to talk about all right well let's see what Russell said Russell said in my newsletter I wrote about my experiences doing an exercise I first encountered in Oliver Berkman's 4 ,000 weeks, staring at a painting for three hours.

1:14:56It's one of the best actions I've taken ever. I'm forwarding you a copy of the essay because it seemed relevant to your recent episode on film students who can no longer sit through films. Russell's newsletter is called, uh, Solvator Ambulando, S-O-L-V-I-T-U-R-A-M-B-U-L-A-N-D-O. And the essay I'm reading from here is called Solvator Ambulando translates to Solvator by walking. And the title of this essay is called Staring at a Painting for Three Hours. All right, I'm going to read a few excerpts. This is like from his essay describing notes from his journal from doing this exercise of staring at a painting for three hours.

1:15:38So he starts by saying he bought a painting the year before by a French Canadian artist named John Claude Roy, and he had it hung up in his house, in his office in downtown Louisville. And he said, this is the painting he was going to do, the three-hour exercise. All right, here's some notes from his first hour of staring at that painting. I brought my chair around the face to painting. I kept my pen and journal nearby as I wanted to record my impressions for use of my essay. My phone stayed on my desk. I started a three-hour timer besides glancing over to the phone for a time check four times i did nothing with my phone during those three hours i didn't touch it in that first hour i scrutinized the painting asking myself what is going on in it what have i missed before what patterns exist my pen hummed with new observations coming at me thick and fast it'd be funny jesse if it turned out it was a modernist painting it was just a black canvas still black all right notes from his second hour second straight hours staring at the painting.

1:16:38I kept asking my what question and it burred the growing set of why or what really questions. Again, let me share a sample to my notes. Much more pink in this painting than I initially saw. What a curious place to build that red building. Rocky, no trees, no shade. Why not build it on the brown ridge to the far right? Except that where it is, you can see the building clearly. The red building on the gray cliff, is that really a church or a schoolhouse? All right, here's notes from his third straight hour of staring at the painting. time sped by in the first and second hours no bathroom break needed now i steamrolled on i felt absorbed and wanted to continue my enriching engagement with the painting in the third hour again my questioning made a subtle shift the why questions from the second hour evolved into who questions who was in the painting was i in it and if so where who else was in it what exactly might those three fishermen be and how did i experience the painting this is where he discovered he was actually looking through a window and why are those people moving and why are they coming towards me all right here's a couple reflections that he had from this exercise it might be obvious at this point but just in case let me write it down i thoroughly enjoyed this exercise and it significantly enhanced my attachment to an appreciation of a piece of art i already admired and savored in a profound sense i cannot convey the feelings and wonder of this exercise like reading the bhagavad gita or the bible or even noble literature like jane eyre you have to do it yourself.

1:18:04Were we humans meant to scroll, taking snippets of a rapidly passing global experience or to stare with fixed attention, appreciating our corner of the world and our place in it? I can't answer for all humans, of course, but last week I found the answer for myself. All right, that's a cool essay. Staring at a painting for three hours. I'm a big believer. This is like this developing idea I have. I've been working on a few pieces about this, more on that later, kind of confidential for now, but more on that later. This idea that cognitive fitness is something we really need to care about in the 21st century, it'll be what physical fitness became in the 20th century, that we need to defend thinking as a tier one skill, not just economically, but at the core of the human experience.

1:18:43And we're going to get more used to in the 21st century talking about exercises like this, just like we got used to in the 1970s and 80s, talking about doing cardiovascular exercise, an idea that never would have occurred to us before the late 1960s. This would be, I think, the physical exercise equivalent of running a half marathon. Took a lot of training. It was hard. It was significant. You felt good about it. And it made your body a lot more healthy. Same thing with this. It's non-trivial. It's hard, but it could be a real life-changing experience. It makes your mind a lot more healthy. So I like these ideas of treating the mind and focus and concentration and thinking as tier one things at the core of both our economy and our human experience and practicing them and prioritizing them.

1:19:29All right. So Russell, I appreciate you sending in that case study. All right. Before we wrap up this episode, let's quickly check in with what's been going on here in the Deep Work HQ. you. All right, Jesse, we got a lot to cover here quickly. People like to know what's going on. So we'll give them a quick summary. Changes to the show. Changes to the show. I sent out a request for feedback about the idea of taking my AI content and separating that out into like a separate episode or a separate podcast and not in this main Monday episode. And the feedback was pretty clear. People like, yeah, I think that should be separate.

1:20:09Right. And so I kind of split the difference, my sort of AI reality check content. I'm bringing it out of these Monday episodes, but I'm keeping it in this feed for now. And for now, we're releasing these on Thursdays, not every Thursday, but Thursday will be the day going forward where we have a short episode called AI reality check, where I put on my computer science journalist and humanist hats, I put them all on together, and it looks really cool. And I look at big worrisome or attention catching news from AI from the week before and try to give you a measured response. So it's out of the Monday episodes, but still in the podcast feed.

1:20:42The first one aired last Thursday. We're doing one this Thursday as well. So check that out. For now, I think in the newsletter, I'll probably keep it as a separate section of our main newsletter to avoid newsletter bloat, but we'll see. Maybe at some point I'll separate that out. Again, always happy to hear comments or feedbacks on this. You can go to podcast.kelnewport.com. All right. What did I read since we last recorded? I read Tim Wu's book, The Age of Extraction, which is a real, I really like Tim Wu's writing. He's a law professor at Columbia, but writes a lot about technology and technology in the economy and technology in law.

1:21:19And it really talks about the economic model that was ushered in by the large platform monopolies like Meta, like what's going on with Twitter, like what's going on with TikTok, how it's economically unproductive and fundamentally extractive of value of the economy in a way that should be corrected in a regulatory sense. And I think it's a great argument that this is not normal. And it's an argument we need to practice as we look ahead to AI so we don't make the same mistakes that we made back with the extractive platforms. I really like that book and I really respect Tim Wu. Also finished up, Ian Leslie has a book out called John and Paul about John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

1:21:58So it's about their song, their history of songwriters. It's broken up into, it's a long book, it's like 400 pages. It's broken up by actual songs. So each chapter focuses on one song that they wrote and as it tells the story of that song you learn more about their relationship and the history of the beatles there you go i didn't know that much about the beatles i learned a lot the thing i did reading that book which i'm sure every single person who read this book did iphone apple music right there constantly playing the songs like you get to a chapter like oh i gotta hear the song first there's a lot of like hear the song read about the song hear the song read about the song yeah which is pretty cool um i've seen a three movie since the last time we talked as well.

1:22:38Um, I watched train dreams, Netflix movie is nominated for best picture, beautifully shot. So it's a director, um, did it almost entirely with natural light. So it's sort of similar to the Alejandro, um, uh, in your A2 movie, the Revenant, which I really like where they, they just use natural light and you can kind of, you could tell, I always think that's a real flex. It had a little bit of that annoying sort of new Netflix thing we talked about a couple weeks ago where they have to add every once in a while heavy-handed narration to explain to the viewer who's not fully paying attention what's going on and what it means and how that person felt you're not going to see that in like a terrence malick movie or something like this which was of a similar style so i thought that was interesting um i watched the hurt locker kathleen bigelow haven't seen that in a long time so you saw it twice i saw it when it came out yeah Yeah, but that was, you know, 2009.

1:23:32Yeah. Yeah. So I was just watching it on wherever it's on. Real, like, shaky cam, naturalistic, high-stress, vignette-based. It's a good movie. She got Best Director for that. And then in honor with my – I have a group of friends we watch. We do movie watching. In honor of Robert Redford's passing, we watched Three Days of the Condor, which I like. It was one of the first movies to have, which we're now so used to. So we don't recognize this was new looking at it now, but it was very new then. In a paranoid thriller, which was kind of new, this was two years after Watergate, you know, this, Parallax, Giuman, Sheerian, Candidate, all the presidents men.

1:24:09You have scenes where Robert Redford is doing inscrutable things with technology and wires, and you don't really know what he's doing, but it just feels like high tech and super competent. So he's like down with phone in the phone interchanges at like a hotel and taking out wires and plugging them into like the maintenance headset and touching things together. You don't really know what he's doing other than like, yeah, that's pretty high tech. That's standard now. But that was kind of new back then. They had a computer. Oh, OK. They had a computer in there in the opening scene. It was like kind of supposed to be like scanning books and taking in.

1:24:45It was like one of the first movies to do this like techno thriller stuff. I mean, I guess Adronima Strain had that, the Robert Wise version of the Michael Crichton book, which would have been earlier. So this was around, but it was still kind of new. Westworld was around this time. They had one kind of hilarious technology where they were tracing the phone call and they were in the headquarters. And so they had a machine and just had like these big like light up options, like phone trace an option, trace done. and on the screen to try to show like where the phone, it was trying to show like, okay, here's where the call is coming from.

1:25:21It was like a, almost like a microfiche viewer of maps. You like saw physical maps behind this like screen, like shifting around rapidly. Like it was actually moving physical maps to show you where the call was coming from, as opposed to just like whatever technology knew where the call was coming from. It was translating it into like physical commands to move a map around to show you physically where it is. Why not just display the location? so i thought it was funny uh good movie probably the most like 1975 thing of that is that he kidnaps daryl hannah by gunpoint because he's like you know we gotta i don't want to give away the plot but he's trying to escape from nefarious dark government forces that are trying to kill him kidnaps her gunpoint brings her back to her apartment uh you know keeps her at gunpoint ties her up and gags her because he has to go you know investigate something and doesn't want her to tell her comes back from that love scene she's like well you know you got to break an egg to make an omelet this guy is pretty attractive he's got a good haircut she's like yeah he's a good looking guy sorry 1970s kidnapped her tighter gunpoint like all the worst things like he's a good looking guy uh anyways uh that was in tribute of like the late robert redford um all right uh Finally, upcoming projects.

1:26:40Jesse, I'm finally going through. We're renovating. We're renovating the Maker Lab slash producer's office here in the Deep Work HQ. You can attest I have tape on the wall that's now marking up all different things we're going to hang up. There is tape on the walls. It's an impossibly complicated project. There's so many things involved, like this, the things to hang, and who's going to hang them, but the things to buy to put in the things you're going to hang, and the lights you need, the display on the things you're going to hang, but also the task light for here. And you need a rug that's going to fit here, but you got to replace the chairs.

1:27:09And it had been like really overwhelming, but I spend more time working here now. And I really want this space to be like bespoke and like a place like I love being in that is very conducive to being creative. And I have microelectronics maker stuff next to like books where I write and have all of that mindset like in the same room. And so I'm doing it. It's a good thing we're next to a hardware store. It does help. We're next to a hardware store and above a bar. So, like, we're set up. So I can get all the stuff I need, and then after I destroy things and fail to properly build it, I can get a drink.

1:27:44So I think we're doing well. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of The Main Podcast. And on Thursday, check out an AI Reality Check short episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.