Should I Press Pause? | Monday Advice

0:00I'm not recording this from my normal studio in Washington, D.C. I'm actually in Asheville, North Carolina. I'm staying here in a mountain lodge where F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly wrote part of The Great Gatsby. Now, for those who are interested, here's what it looks like. I'm here to finish edits on my next book and to visit with some writer friends to help figure out our future in the publishing industry. Now, there's a name for this strategy. I pressed pause on the busyness of my normal life to find space to think deeply about what comes next. I actually do this on a regular basis. It's something that has been immensely important in my life.

0:41So here's the key questions you might be asking. Is this something that you should be thinking about doing? And if so, how is it possible to press pause if you don't actually have the ability at the moment to just drop everything and escape to the mountains? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which makes this the perfect opportunity to go seek some answers. So here's the plan. I'll argue why pressing pause has become so necessary in our current moment of digital distraction. Then I'll explore some ideas for how to achieve the benefits of this general strategy, even if you're not able to go on an epic trip.

1:22So if you feel like you're stuck, always busy, always distracted, but not really making progress towards a deeper life, then this episode is for you. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.

1:48All right, so I'm recording this in the evening. Let me tell you what I did today. up in Asheville. I woke up early. The entire mountaintop at the lodge where I was staying was shrouded in fog. So I brewed some coffee and I went for a walk to do some thinking. There's a nice little footpath at my resort that winds up on a nearby hillside. I then did some work on my book in a, I don't know how else to explain this. It's like a rock-hued atrium overlooking the mountainside with an artificial waterfall falling. So it's an interesting place to get something done After that, I met up with some of my writer friends at a local gym where a trainer that some of us know, shout out to Zach of Strength Ratio, put us through a workout that, I'll be honest with you, still has left me sore.

2:34Don't even talk to me about pendulum squats. It's too soon for me to go there again. Then we relocated as a group to an office to brainstorm and chat about what's going on in our careers, the things that worry us about publishing, our plans for continuing to thrive in this industry. In some sense, let's step back. In some sense, this day was remarkably unproductive in the sense that I didn't actually finish a lot of work or answer a lot of messages or otherwise, as they say, get after it. But in another sense, today was remarkably productive. I've had a demanding semester, and it really wore me down.

3:10I was wearing a lot of hats. I was really busy. I felt stuck on a lot of the bigger things I cared about. This trip is helping me get unstuck. The three days I spend down here will yield benefits for many months to follow. These are the types of rewards you get from pressing pause. The big issue here, of course, is that most people don't have the ability, as we said, to simply drop everything and step away from their jobs and their responsibilities to regroup. So to figure out if it's possible, this is our challenge here, to figure out if it's possible for you to achieve most of the benefits of pressing pause without major disruptions in your life, we should start by trying to identify more precisely exactly what it is we're trying to achieve.

3:54And then we can step back and say, what are some alternative ways, some alternative strategies for getting these same benefits? All right. I got three benefits of pressing pause that I want to identify here. Number one, your brain struggles to think when it must be constantly context shifting, So when you are in a busy, normal day, you constantly have to shift your cognitive context from one target to another because we're busy, especially in the age of digital. There's text messages. There's emails. There's Slack messages. There's social media. There's news streams. There's podcasts. All of this is pulling out our attention all the time.

4:30We're jumping back and forth. A brain that is constantly switching its context has a hard time thinking well. There's terminology I use in my books where I say context shifting leads to reduced cognitive capacity. It's a way of saying when your mind is busy, it gets dumber. When you press pause and you get away from this busyness, you in a quite literal sense get smarter. Your IQ goes up because you are not reducing your cognitive capacity with all that context shifting. All right. The second specific benefit from pressing pause, new physical context can support new ideas and insights. When you're surrounded by the familiar, your brain is firing familiar circuits.

5:14When you're in a novel situation, other parts of your brains turn on. And more importantly, networks that are associated, semantic networks that are associated with normal things in your everyday life don't fire up, which leaves you more capacity for original thought. I actually talked about this a little bit in my book, Slow Productivity, where I talked about the unusual locations that professional writers sometimes go to to help do their writing. Um, one of the examples was Maya Angelou would go to a motel, take the pictures off the wall and ride on the bed. Why would they do this? Well, in the book, I made the neuroscientific argument that when you're not seeing things that you're used to, that cue thoughts that you're used to, you have more clarity on the new, you have more clarity on the novel.

5:59If you're just at home going through your day, you could be trying to have big thoughts, but you're going to see the laundry pile and you're going to think about laundry. Um, and you are going to see your baseball hat and think about the baseball game you're coaching the next day, and you're going to see whatever, your dog walk by and you're going to be like, oh yeah, I got to take the dog to the vet. Suddenly, a lot of your brain is caught up with the familiar. So you go to the unfamiliar, you have more of your brain open for thinking in more original ways. All right, the third benefit from pressing pause, you need to distance yourself from your present to better see your future.

6:33All right? When you are in the normal things you do, it is hard to think about different futures because your brain says, we've got things we need to do. This is what we care about right now. So to try to squeeze out original thoughts about what do I want in my life? What could happen? Where am I trying to go? It's really hard when the things you need to do are all around you right now. Our brains do not like to do future forecasting when there's present challenges that we face. when you press pause, you're hoping to get some distance from this present so that you can look outwards towards more interesting futures that you would otherwise not have noticed.

7:12Now, I'm clearly enjoying all these benefits down on my current pause I'm taking in Asheville. If you go off on an epic trip, all three of those benefits will clearly be delivered, right? I've distilled what it was about my trip that's giving me the rewards that I was seeking. But now that we know that this is what we're going for, these three things, we can actually come up with alternative strategies to get these benefits that will be less disruptive. We can think of these almost as like mini pauses. So what I want to do here is I want to go through four different levels of pauses that you can implement, four different ideas.

7:49And I'm going to order these from least disruptive to most disruptive, okay? The least disruptive will barely change your day. The level four most disruptive pause type will be what I'm doing now. So I want to give you a spectrum of different ways of pressing pause that, as we'll see afterwards, all of which to some degree will give you the benefits of pausing, but with varied levels of disruption. We're going to take a real quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible. Get business done with the new American Express Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card with unlimited 2 % cash back on all eligible purchases.

8:27Unlimited 5 % cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel Online and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business. You'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of$1 ,500 cash back after you spend$50 ,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership. Terms apply. Learn more at go.amex.com. All right, let's get into this. Level one, make a morning coffee shop loop. All right, here's how this strategy works. First thing in the morning, you might even want to wake up 20 minutes earlier than you normally would to make this work.

9:05First thing in the morning, early in the morning, go to a coffee shop, okay? Once there, get whatever, coffee, tea, whatever it is you normally drink. Go for a walk. In that walk, back at the coffee shop, okay? So you go for a walk with your coffee, with your tea, and then take out your journal to write down whatever thoughts you had on that walk. So you're there early, and then you start your day. This is before you do anything else in your day. You get out of bed, throw on a hat, water, boom, right out to the coffee shop. That's level one from a disruption scale. Level two on the disruption scale for pressing pause, schedule a doctor's appointment.

9:43For those who are listening, instead of watching, I am doing furious air quotes as I say doctor's appointment. So what I'm talking about here is you just, you're going to leave work early. People say I can never leave work early. Well, you do leave work early. You leave work early when you have a doctor's appointment. So you're able to do it, most people at least. So you choose a day in the future and like I'm going to have to leave it to this day or whatever. Like people don't care. You're taking a few hours off. All right, this will be your doctor's appointment. Do a full shutdown before you go.

10:10Do not leave any open loops like, oh my God, there's emails I have to answer. People are waiting for things. Go through, have a plan for the next day. Shut down any open loops. Check out your inbox. Look at your calendar. You want to make sure that you've got that off your mind. Then during your quote-unquote doctor's appointment, go somewhere nearby but that you've never been before. A little museum people have been talking about that you never got around to visiting. There's a lake 20 minutes out of town with like a walking path around that you've heard about but never been there. Go somewhere you've never been before.

10:39If possible, leave your phone in your car once you're there. And then go wherever this place is, walking around the lake, going through this museum. Go to this novel place, spend an hour or two, bring your journal, write down your thoughts. All right, let's ratchet up the disruption level to be a little higher. Level three of disruption, book a 24-hour escape. Now, what I mean by this is I actually want you to book an Airbnb or hotel room someplace that's nearish by within a few hours, okay? You're going to leave after work. You're going to drive out to wherever this place is. You'll stay in that Airbnb or hotel room that night.

11:19You will then spend the whole next day into the afternoon just being in this place. It's a new city or maybe you got an Airbnb that's in the countryside somewhere, on the shore, whatever. Spend time in that place. You can keep coming back to the Airbnb throughout the day to do some journaling and then come home like you would at the end of a workday. So you have to take one full personal day to make this particular strategy happen. and you have like a night where you're staying somewhere. All right. Level four disruption, fly to Asheville. You don't have to literally come to Asheville, but you do something like that.

11:52You fly somewhere that is notably novel or beautiful or aesthetic or interesting, and you spend a few days there, and you really get into what's going on. What do I want to do with my life? All right. Four levels of disruption. These are all different options for pressing pause. Now, if we go back and address the three benefits that we identified before, you'll see that all of these pausing strategies touch on these benefits one way or the other, just to different degrees. Like our first benefit was the idea that a less distracted brain thinks better. Well, all of these pause strategies are going to help you reduce context shifting, right?

12:35In the morning coffee shop loop, you haven't done anything yet in the day. The day has it begun, so you don't have any thoughts on your mind yet to distract you. You haven't encountered anything. You have a clear mind, so you're taking advantage of that. When you book a doctor's appointment, you do a shutdown of your work so you don't have open loops, and you leave the phone in the car. And your brain has less to context shift for, so you're going to get more of the benefits of not having to do that. And then obviously if you're driving to a new place and you're staying in a new hotel or Airbnb, you're really wiping the brain.

13:03I'm in a completely new place. You're in a place where you don't have your normal responsibilities. The second benefit we talked about was the idea that new physical environments invite new insights. All three of these has you do something novel. The least obvious novelty here is the coffee shop loop. But what's novel here is not the coffee shop. You may have been there before. In fact, you're going there maybe like every day for a week. Maybe you've done the walk route around the coffee shop before. What's novel is being there so early. What's novel is before like my kids are even up, I'm in the coffee shop with like the old person crowd early in the morning writing a journal.

13:38I've never done that before. That's where the novelty comes from that one. The final benefit was distance from the present helps you reveal the future. All of these knock you out of your normal routine. Whether you're in the early morning sun walking with your coffee, which is what you don't normally do, or you've taken the afternoon off, or you're in the novel city, or you're in Asheville, you've stepped out of things you normally do, which gives you a better chance of actually seeing the future. All right, so depending on how much time you have available, there is some variation of pressing pause that you can actually do.

14:13Now, there's a final question here that we have to address. Every one of those scenarios I just said pretty cursory, like, yeah, write in your journal. What are you actually doing during these various pauses? What questions are you answering? What are you actually writing in your journal? Well, let me tell you my suggestions. This is what I'm doing here in Asheville. Number one, you ask yourself, what parts of my life are going well? Write those down. why you want gratitude. It's a great foundation for all of this. You know, that really is going well. I have some time to reflect away from the busyness, and I can just sit with a little bit of gratitude about parts of my life that I actually like.

14:47Once you've laid that foundation, the second thing you're going to address in your journal, what parts of my life are not going well? Where do I feel stuck? Like professionally, do I feel trapped? Do I have these certain ambitions that I had as a young person that aren't coming true, like wherever it is, this is where some of the more serious work happens. Now, here's what I want you to do. Take each of these items where you feel stuck, and maybe you're just going to look at one in your pause. That's fine. Take one of these items. You're going to start with the most radical blue sky solutions to this possible, the real drastic, like, you know, going to quit and join the circus type of solutions, right?

15:26And then start systematically as you brainstorm solutions, reducing the level of radicalness or disruption of your ideas. And you're going to start kind of like marching from like very blue sky radical ideas to increasingly simple and practical ideas. Okay? Now, what you're looking for is where is it on this march, on this march from like the radical ideas down to the very simple and pragmatic, where along the way did I feel like my suggestions are no longer working? Like, ah, that's not really going to fix it. What you've identified then is like the exact level of radicalness or extremeness that you probably need to try to get unstuck.

16:10Now, you don't have to solve these problems completely, but this is just like an exercise you're going to do. So you've kind of discovered for places you feel stuck, how radical or extreme do I really need to get to try to find a solution? And sometimes it might be like, man, the only solution here is to quit and join the circus. And other times there'll be a, oh, man, this real little fix is going to make a huge difference. This is a great exercise, but it takes – you need time. You need a new context. You need to get your normal stuff off your mind. The final thing you want to write in your journal is for each of these – you've identified these solutions.

16:40Write down what's next. So if these are the things you think you might have to do for where you're stuck, what would be the things you have to do next? You have to talk to this person. You have to have a discussion with your spouse. You have to gather some more information. Are there something you want to sign up for? Write those all down. Put a big circle many times around those. That is the outcome of this pause, and it's what you're going to bring back with you into your normal life, put into whatever system you use for scheduling and tasks, and that then becomes an action that helps you move forward.

17:06That's what helps you take your insights from the pause and turn them into positive action. all right make sense so you need a pause doesn't have to be dramatic but it can be if possible you need to be a little bit systematic with what you do during the pause this is very important all right now you may have heard that dog barking in the background well i'm actually recording this more specifically i'm in ashville but not at my resort i'm actually in the the garage studio of my writer friend brad stolberg who's been on this show many times now a client gave Brad a bottle of wine that Brad claims cost$1 ,000.

17:44Now, I think he's exaggerating. We've been pushing him on this, but he claims it cost$1 ,000. So, what we're going to do is, right after I finish recording this here, so we have a pizza waiting. We're going to open up that bottle. We're going to try out this vintage, and we're going to think some big thoughts about our lives as the crisp nighttime mountain air rolls in. Now, I return home tomorrow from Asheville, and I will press play once again. But for now, I feel very lucky to be able to have this moment of introspective pause. You deserve that feeling too. We're gonna take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

18:19Get business done with the new American Express Graphite Business Cash Unlimited card with unlimited 2 % cash back on all eligible purchases, unlimited 5 % cash back on flights and prepaid hotels booked through American Express Travel Online, and a flexible spending capacity that can grow with your business, you'll have the confidence to keep building. Apply today and earn a welcome offer of$1 ,500 cash back after you spend$50 ,000 in qualifying purchases on your new card within the first six months of card membership. Terms apply. Learn more at go.amex.com. All right, well, that's enough about me talking to you.

18:53Let's hear what you have to say on Mondays. We like to open up our inbox and see what our listeners want to share. Remember, if you have a question, feedback, or an idea you want to share, send the podcast at calnewport.com and we will take a look. All right. Well, there's no Jesse here in Asheville, so I'll have to set up these questions myself. The first question is from Enrique. Let me read it here. You mentioned you'll be on sabbatical this upcoming year. What email protocols or rules do you plan to use? Will you set up an out-of-office auto response? And if so, what will it say? How often will you check your Georgetown account and from where?

19:30Well, Enrique is right. I am on sabbatical for the upcoming academic year, 2026-2027. This starts, it's a little bit fuzzy, but basically like the academic year starts at some point in the summer. I'm still doing a bunch of stuff related to my administrative roles like now in the month of June, but this will eventually, I'll sort of enter sabbatical mode as I roll out of those administrative roles over the summer and new people come in and so on. So what am I going to do with email? Well, first of all, like the obvious thing is I wear many hats and only some of them are associated with Georgetown roles affected by the sabbatical.

20:04So I don't have service obligations or teaching obligations. And that is a lot of email. I have all my other hats. I have my books. I'm on my podcast. I've got my newsletter. You know, I've got the articles I write. So I'll be working very hard, but that part will be out of my life. All right. So I still have a lot of email. What will I do with Georgetown email? I'm not going to do an autoresponder. I'm not a big believer in them. I know they make sense in certain contexts where you're in a work environment where fast response is required. And so like you need to, I guess, communicate to people if you're not going to respond.

20:36But I find in a lot of contexts, autoresponders are more about the anxiety of the person who's away from their inbox. They imagine in their mind, this is very natural, but they imagine in their mind that there's basically a back room somewhere where their peers and their boss come in and they have a, They have a big bulletin board where there's all these statistics and observations and messages from you where they're trying to track. Like, hmm, how long were they? What's their average delay time and response? This has gone up. What is going on here? There's a big question mark. Where is she? What's going on?

21:07And everyone's tracking and caring. And if you don't get out in front of it, they're about to burst out of that back room with torches and come find you. The reality is people actually don't care. The biggest benefit they often get by sending the email is that something got off their plate. they don't often aren't going to recognize that it took a while for you to respond. So I'm not a big believer in autoresponders unless your office absolutely demands it. I'll get back to people when I get back to them. I also don't preemptively apologize, right? If they're like, hey, where were you? I'll be like, oh, I'm away.

21:35I'm on sabbatical. I mean, maybe if like it's been a week or two, I'll be like, hey, sorry for the delay. I'm on sabbatical. And then I'll answer. And no one cares. They're probably happy that it took a week or two because that's a week or two. They didn't have to deal with whatever the thing was they were emailing you about. I'll check my email once a week for sure. my Georgetown email, maybe twice. That's it. No autoresponder, but it will be nice to have a little bit of reduced message volume. All right. Second message is from Brom. Brom says, in some of your recent episodes, you talked about a pattern of read, think, write.

22:05I was wondering if you could elaborate on the think part. Well, read, think, write is a sort of a classic mode mode of, this is like a classic mode of information intake that scholars have been using since, you know, the codex was first invented. But we're not used to it today. In our current world of algorithmic digital information, we are consuming information more and more in a different mode that I call dopamine surfing. And the way I think about it is our brain has been trained to be getting this like really positive stimulus from whatever we're engaging with content wise. And as soon as that positive stimulus starts to go down a little bit, we have to make drastic changes to get it back up again.

22:50We skim, we swipe, we jump around to try to find something that gets us back up again. We've got to keep that level of that sort of like stimulation level high. And so reading becomes incredibly erratic and very little information is actually stored. And we've been trained to do that with our devices. And I think this carries over to almost any of the content consumption we do. It's why I'm trying to watch a documentary and you're going to see people having to jump on their phone because there's like a slightly boring part of the documentary. They have to keep that stimuli high. It's like a very distracted way of engaging with information and you don't actually pull nearly as much insight out of text or other types of media when you're dopamine surfing.

23:27But it's what we've been trained to do. Read, think, write is a different way of consuming an older way that's different than dopamine surfing. I think it's useful to point out exactly how it works so that people know what used to be just second nature. We can remember and practice a better way to consume it. So the read, think, write loop goes like this. You read something that's hard in a book, in an article, right? This is like you're consuming hard information to get smarter. You then stop and you think about what you just read. Like, what does this mean? You move it around in your head, right?