Dr. Cal Newport: How to Enhance Focus and Improve Productivity

25:02I'll go back and check that, maybe make a note and, okay, they did this, then they did that, and then like, and then it's crystallized. And when, as I say this, I realize, of course this should work. This is the way that the brain learns. But somehow that's not the way we are taught to learn. Yeah, well, I'm smiling because when I was 22, I wrote this book called How to Become a Straight A Student. Right? And the whole premise of the book was, I'm going to talk to actual college students who have straight A's, and who don't seem completely ground out, right? Like not burnt out. And I'm just going to interview them, right?

25:36And the protocol was, how did you study for the last test? Did you study for how did you take notes for the last? So I was just asking them to walk through their methodology. The core idea of that book was active recall. That was the core idea that replicating ideas, what you used to say is replicating the information from scratch as if teaching a class without looking at your notes. That is the only way to learn. And the thing about it was it's a trade -off. It doesn't take, it's efficient. It doesn't take much time. But it's incredibly mentally taxing, right? This is why students often avoid it.

26:07It is difficult to sit there and try to replicate and pull forth, okay, what did I read here? How did that work? It's mentally very taxing. But it's very time efficient, right? If you're willing to essentially put up with that with that pain, you learn very quickly. And not only do you learn very quickly, you don't forget. It's almost like you have a pseudo photographic memory. When you study this way, you sit down to do a test and you're replicating whole lines from what you studied. The ideas sort of come out fully formed. It's such a fantastic way to actually learn. It was my key. The whole premise that got me writing that book is I went through this period as a college student where I came in freshman year was like a fine student, not a great student, but a fine student.

26:51And I was rowing crew and I was sort of like excited to do that. And then I developed the heart condition and had to stop congenital wiring in the heart, atrial flutter thing. I mean, I couldn't row crew anymore. Pro laps. It was a circuitry issue that would lead to an extremely rapid heartbeat. It's like really rapid like Takardia, right? You get 250 beats a minute, and it could be exercise induced, which is not optimal. You could take beta blockers, which would moderate the electrical timing, but beta blockers reduce your max heart rate. And if you're an athlete, where the entire thing that matters is your max heart rate, so you're doing something like a 2 ,000 meter rows, your performance on beta blockers just goes down.

27:34It makes no sense. It's like being a basketball player that weighs weighted shoes is too frustrating. It also makes you super malo. I was pretty milo guy, but I was a worse rower. So I stopped that. I was like, okay, I want to get serious about my studies. I was thinking of serious about my studies and writing, right? That's when I actually made the decisions they didn't stuck with for the next 25 years after that. But one of the things I did to get serious about my studies is I said, I'm going to systematically experiment with how to study for tests and how to write papers. And I would try this, how did it go?

28:07Deconstruct experiment. Try this, how to go deconstruct experiment. And active recall is a thing to turn me all around. And so I went from a pretty good student to 4 -0, every single quarter, sophomore year, junior year, senior year, I got 1A minus between my sophomore year through my senior year. It was like this miraculous transformation. It was active recall. I rebuilt all of my studies. So if it was for a humanities class, I had a whole way of taking notes. It was all built around doing active recall. For math classes, my main study tool was a stack of white paper. All right, do this proof, white piece of paper.

28:40And just can I do it from scratch? If I could, I know that technique. If I don't, all right, I'm going to come back and try it again later, completely transformed. You know, I did so well academically. It's why I ended up writing that book. They basically spread that message to other people. So I'm a huge advocate for active recall. It's really hard, but it is the way to learn new things. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens now called AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.

29:10I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012. So I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets to be the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long -term health. And those probiotics and Athletic Greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, Athletic Greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met.

29:49And it tastes great. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to Athletic Greens .com slash Huberman. And they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up Athletic Greens while you're on the road and the car on the plane, etc. And they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's Athletic Greens .com slash Huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3K2. And as you point out, it is very time efficient. I mean, it was a problem. It was a social problem for me that I would have to pretend during finals period that I was going to the library to study because I would be done studying.

30:27This active recall is brutal, but it's incredibly efficient. You sit down there. I would have my cards. I would mark it. Okay, I struggled with this. I'd put it in this pile. I got it done. I'd put it in this pile. And so then you would just go back to the I struggled with it pile and work on that. And then make a new I struggled with a pile. And these would exponentially decay. And so in like a few hours, you could really master, you know, with a few other tricks that worked, you could really master the material pretty quickly. And then one of my supposed to do, I didn't do all nighters. They go on to make any sense.

30:55Like active recall is how you prepare. It's going to take four hours. And it's going to be tough. So do it in the morning when you have energy and then you're done. I love it. I learned essentially all of neuronatomy looking down the my griscoe at tissue samples. And then I would try and take photographs with my eyes. I do not have a photographic memory, but then I would get home in the evening, look through the neuronatomy textbook, lie down, and try and fly through the different circuits in my mind. And then if I arrived at a structure in the brain that I couldn't identify, I would then go check my notes and go back.

31:27So I basically, I learned neuronatomy, which I, you know, I'm poor at a great many things in life, but neuronatomy, solid at, and then some, if I may say so. And it's because there's a mental map. You can move through it, you know, fly through it dynamically. And that it's the same process. Not all things lend themselves to that approach. I'm guessing we could think of a few that don't. I guess if people were learning music, that might be tricky. Maybe they need the sheet music in front of them. I don't know. I'm not a musician. Yeah. I mean, I studied a professional guitar player at one point.

32:03You were a professional guitar player. No, I studied one. Oh, so for a book, everything's from some book. I've written a lot of books. I wrote a book 10 years ago, where I was trying to figure out as part of it, how do people get better at things. And so I spent time with a professional guitar player to say, I just wanted to see how he practiced. Like, what is this actually look like? And what I learned from them is like, what they do is, yeah, they have the music in front of them, but for them, it's all speed. So they take a piece. He was working on Lix for, he was a new acoustic style player.

32:29And they had these kind of blue grassy type Lix. And he probably had a memorize. And he knew how fast he could comfortably play it. For them, it's all about adding 20 % to what they're comfortably doing. And then that push passed for their comfortable. And the thing I remember writing about him was he was concentrating so hard to try to hit this lick 20 % faster than he was used to it. He'd forget the breath. So he'd be like, going, going, going, and then just gasp, you know, like his body would, you know, force him for some debris. So yeah, there it seemed to be all about deliberate practice.

33:01So like, how do you, they don't waste any time professional musicians waste no time doing things are comfortable doing. Every time they spend practicing, and this is also incredibly difficult. But every time they spend practicing is almost entirely in a state of, I'm not comfortable with this. But if I focus as hard as I can, maybe I'm going to pull this off. Like I'll pull off the sonata at this new speed I'm trying to do. Maybe I'll pull it off. It's like the maximal growth stimulating state. And so I wrote in the, in this chapter, why was he so much better at guitar than I was at the same age?

33:35Because I played a lot of guitar when I was younger and was in rock bands, right? And this kid was young, right? But really, really good. And I said, okay, now I realize it. I can recognize me when I look back at my time playing guitar at his age, I played stuff I knew had a play. Like that's what was fun. Like, yeah, I want to like jam along with the songs I knew or, you know, rip some pentatonic scales, you know, to like a Jimmy Hendrix album. It was fun. And he's spent almost no time, the pros, but no time having fun. Practicing was your brain had to be, you know, uncomfortable. So I learned a lot from that, you know?

34:07This actually led to a bit of a battle because of my readers, there was this, this battle that emerged where people were trying to combine Anders Erickson and deliberate practice with Mehali Chiksetmiha and Flow. And really they were trying to make flow apply everywhere. Like it's all about flow, deliberate practices, flow, everything is flow. The whole thing is again to a state of flow. And I remember Anders talking about this at some point and say, like, no, no, no, like this state of practice that makes you better. It's the opposite of flow, right? And flow, you lose track of time. When you're practicing like that professional guitar player, you know, every second it passes by because it's like incredibly difficult.

34:47Like what you're doing, your mind is rebelling. It's not natural. You know, it's not fun. It's not the skier going down the hill and it's all instinct. It's you, it's all you thinking about exactly what you're trying to do. And so, you know, I began to push this point out here. It's like, it's not all about flow. Like actually getting better at things is really painful sometimes. Deliberate practice is not the same as flow. And there's a lot of fights about this for a while. I think there was a lot of flow advocates that just wanted life to be flow all the time. But I think Anders was right because I watched these professionals practice.

35:18Like, that's what it is. It's not fun. Well, everything we know about neuroplasticity, which of course is the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience, says that there needs to be some neurochemical or electrical condition that changes in the nervous system in order to queue up plasticity. And to my knowledge, one of the most robust of those is the release of the so -called catacolomines dopamine epinephrine nor epinephrine dopamine because it's involved in so many things can be a little bit of a distractor. So let's just say epinephrine nor epinephrine adrenaline nor adrenaline.

35:54It create in the body and mind to some extent a state of alertness and often a state of agitation. But if you think about it, in the absence of some neuromodulators like those that change the conditions for wiring of neurons, you know, everyone loves fire together, wire together. A beautiful statement by Carla Schatz, not Donald Hebb, Dr. Carla Schatz said that, not Donald Hebb. But why would neurons need to change their patterns of connectivity if you can complete the operation? The nervous system needs to, it doesn't feel discomfort, it creates discomfort, but the nervous system needs a queue to say, okay, this is different.

36:33I'm failing. And it's the failures that actually trigger the plasticity is the discomfort that queues that conditions are different now. Otherwise, there's simply no reason to devote energetic resources to rewiring neurons. And I feel like we don't learn this one more kids. We, and I think as kids, we can learn so much without that feeling of agitation. We get into these modes of looking for flow. And I have respect for the research on flow and the people who are involved in it, but I'd like to talk about flow a little bit. The only thing I really know about flow for sure is that backwards it spells wolf.

37:05So one of the flow, it's such an attractive idea, right? It's like Star Wars. It's like you have the force and you're doing things without thinking. And awesome, but I can't flow myself through a paper and extract the critical data. I can't create a podcast in flow. But when it's done, it feels great, especially if you nailed the key metrics. So what do you think about flow? I'm not trying to beat up on it. I just want to understand how you place it in the framework of learning and deep work if it belongs there at all. It doesn't have a big place in it in the deep work framework. And this was what the controversy was for a while.

37:43And I knew Mahaley a little bit. We corresponded some and I knew Anders a little bit. We corresponded some. So I felt like I was and both of them actually tragically have died in the last three or four years, I think. That's very sad. Yeah, I think both recently. Flow doesn't play a big role in the deep work framework. So when I was trying to justify deep work, so why focusing without distraction was important. I was drawing a lot more for Anders work, right? Because why is focusing without distraction? Important. Well, you have to quiet the neural circuitries. You can isolate the circuit that's actually relevant to the thing that you're doing, right?

38:21You're not going to get better at something. If you have noisy circuitry, this is and that requires a really intense concentration. So it was one of the big advantages of deep work was if you're used to that cognitive state, you're going to learn things faster. And I think it was all Anders to understand why. So if you're not distracted, I'm really focusing hard on what I'm doing, trying to learn this new thing. You're giving the right mental conditions, but it's not a flow state. I always used to say, okay, when your deep work is not flow, because of this, like a lot of deep work is you're trying to do something that is beyond your comfort zone, and that's going to be difficult.

38:52That's a state of deliberate practice. And there's a famous paper about this where Anders actually explicitly says deliberate practice and flow are very different. And I wrote an essay years ago called the Father of Deliberate Practice Disowns Flow. And again, people are really flow partisans out there. It's interesting. I think people just like the idea because it feels good. But I mean, flow is the feeling of performance, is the way I think about it. It's really hard to train for certain sports. But then when you're actually performing, you're in the game, you can fall in the flow, because then everything is under it's really hard to train guitar.

39:28But when you're performing in front of a big crowd, you probably maybe fall in the flow. Maybe you don't, but you could. But it's a performance state, not the practicing getting better state. So to me, flow has like very little role in how I think about what I do as a cognitive professional. It's just not something that comes up that often. I agree that we learn through focused work and that flow does manifest itself during performance. And sometimes so much so that people exhibit virtuosity. The surprising themselves even at what's in there. And that's kind of, I always think of it, it's what is unskilled, skilled mastery of virtuosity.

40:08Virtuosity seems to incorporate some random elements of, maybe even the performer has not done that before and they surprise themselves or something like that. Who knows, these are words for for something that isn't easily quantified in the first place. But in terms of deep work and getting a little bit back to kind of practical steps towards deep work, I also have to ask you because I didn't earlier when you are on your laptop in your library with your fireplace in these books. It's a beautiful image actually that you've drawn for us in our minds. Is the Wi -Fi connection to your computer activated or are you offline?

40:44It's connected because it doesn't really matter to me. Because what is it what's drawing my attention? The most important decision I think I made technically speaking to be a cognitive worker is I didn't lack a social media. I think we underestimate the degree to which our problem with digital distraction is not the internet, it's not our phones, it is specific products and services that are engineered at great expense, the pull you back to them. When you take that away, the internet is not that interesting. I don't have a cycle of sites to go to. I can check my email, but I don't really know where else to go.

41:22I mean, I can go to the New York Times, I guess, but then you've seen the articles, right? They change it once a day. There's just not much, I've set things up so there's not much that's that interesting to me. We've all heard of FOMO, fear of missing out. I feel like there's the other thing which is fear of missing something bad, right? It's sort of like an anxiety, a more primitive anxiety within us, that if we are not engaged on social media or looking at our phone often or texting often, it's not that we'll miss the party, we'll miss the emergency. You don't seem to suffer from those kind of everyday ills.

41:58Yeah, I mean, it doesn't happen that much. I mean, I have a phone, you know, a standard, no, I mean, I have my phone. I guess if I'm working away from it, yeah, I guess it's true if there's an emergency, but this was the case for a very long time, right? We didn't have smartphones till really relatively recently. This is 15 years ago. So we were just used to this until yesterday, essentially, that there's just periods of time where you're out of touch. Like, you're at a restaurant with someone. You're out of touch until you get back to your office. Like, we were okay. You know, we weren't plagued by emergencies that led to disastrous results because we couldn't hear about it right then.

42:33Go to the movies, like, you're out of touch, right? And be a couple hours, so you're in touch again. And so I, you know, it's not something that's affected me as much. So maybe I'm working without my phone nearby. A lot of people have this response, they begin sort of catastrophizing. Like, what if this happens or this or that? And I'm thinking, I survived before that. My parents survived without that. My grandparents survived without that. I don't worry about it as much, you know. And some of this maybe is just, this isn't upset people as much as it used to. The fact I don't use a lot of these apps or have my phone.

43:02But it really does upset people, right? There's, well, what about this? What about that? What about this? And I don't know how much of this is just maybe I'm oblivious and how much of this is people back sliding explanation for why they do need their phone, why they do need to look at all the time. But I, I get a lot of it. Yeah, well, maybe they're upset and you don't know because you're not looking at your phone. That's right. I hate, I'll tell you what, that's a blessing. Not knowing how upset people are at you. Yeah, it's a blessing as a semi -public figure. I'll tell you that. Yeah, I can comment on that, but I won't.

43:31I am on social media. And I do enjoy it. I sort of got started posting on Instagram and then expanded to other platforms including the podcast. But there's a threshold beyond which it becomes counterproductive for sure. I think there's information there. Like questions that people ask are often informative. It's sort of like adding a class and asking are there any questions? Sometimes the comments that people bring back are truly informative towards both where they might have some misunderstanding, but also sometimes some really terrific ideas. So there's that. But I completely agree that there's a very precarious space.

44:11And I'll just relay a quick anecdote years ago. I gave a quick lecture down at Santa Clara University, South of Stanford. And I was talking about this issue. I recommended your book and a student came up afterwards and he said, you don't get it. That's how I was in my early 40s. He said, you don't get it. You know, you grew up without social media and the phone. And so you've adopted it into your life. But we grew up with it. And when my phone, he's speaking for himself in the first person, when my phone loses power, I feel a physical drain within my body. And when it comes back on, I feel a lift within my body.

44:43So I'd love your thoughts on, they're not you think the phone and perhaps social media as well are in some ways an extension of our brain. It's almost like another cortical area that contains all this information. It's a version of us that gets into notions of AI that we can talk about as well. I know you're involved in AI and writing about AI. But to me, when the phone is used in that way, it really is almost like a piece of neural machinery of sorts. Yeah, I mean, there's two ways of looking at it. So there is the cyborg image, I suppose, right? You're extending your plug it into this neosphere.

45:22You have this digital networked extension of information and what's going on. There's also the much more pessimistic view, which is no, no, that feeling is the feeling of a moderate behavioral addiction. Right? So you'll hear the same thing from a gambler. I really, when I'm away from being able to the play, right, to make my bets or do whatever, like I feel really, I feel not myself. And then when I'm when I'm around it and I can play and make some bets, play some poker, whatever, dealing with the chips, I feel myself that chips, right? Like they would say so there, it could be both of these things could be true.

45:54I think the moderate behavioral addiction side is more true than than a lot of us want to admit, actually. Like it does feel bad because moderate behavioral addictions build these these feedback response loops. And then you get the dopamine system going when the anticipation because what's on there is things that have been engineered that you're going to get this sort of highly engaging stimuli. And then you see the deliverance of that stimuli, right? This really nice piece of glass on a piece of metal, I'm going to press this sort of carefully. This icon whose colors have been chosen because we know it's going to hit various parts of our neural alert systems to be as engaging as possible.

46:30And I'm going to see something in there that's going to generate some sort of emotional response. So of course, when you see that thing sitting there, you want to use it. And when you can't, it's a stymied dopamine response. You're like, this, this is not good. I'm uncomfortable. And I think that's a big part of it as well. Because I've had this, you know, I've had this argument with with some people. And I, by the way, I see both sides of this. Like there are great advantages to what people are doing with these tools. It's just that it's all mixed up with all these disadvantages. And it becomes very difficult.

46:59It's like the alcohol in the neighborhood bars to potent, you know? And people are going there to socialize and they're coming home at three in the morning, you know, passing out, you know? It's like the balances off. Not that there's not something good there, but the balances off. So it becomes pretty difficult to navigate. So I think some of that's what's going on, especially with the younger generation that was raised on it, which is why, by the way, I think the cultural norms are going to change around this. I think we're going to think about unrestricted internet usage. Not as something that we just sort of bequeath on youth as they become 10 years old, but something that we're actually much more careful about, probably something that's going to be post -pubestant is going to make a lot more sense once you've had more brain development.

47:38Once you've had more social entrenchment, you sort of understand your identity, et cetera. Because we recognize, you know, the flip side of plugging this thing into your brain is, yeah, you have access to more information, but it also pumps that into your brain. So I don't know. I lean a little bit heavy towards the pessimistic read because I know too many people, because of my books, who've really reduced the impact of these things in their lives. And they don't, on the far side of that transformation, they don't typically report a great impoverishment and experience. They don't report, um, I'm less mentally agile, the information that my fingertips is less.

48:13I'm, I'm in a log on the other side of it where they're like, oh, this is fine. So, you know, I'm a little bit suspicious about exactly what this mechanism is. I think you're right about the um, moderate behavioral addiction piece a years ago when I was starting my lab, I had grants to write, and I found the phone to be pretty intrusive for that process. So I used to give the phone to somebody in my lab and announced everyone in my lab that if I asked for it back prior to 5pm that day, we give everyone in the lab, I think it was a hundred dollar bill. My lab was pretty big at the time. I was a junior professor, they did not do not, sorry, academic institutions, not to be named.

48:50Um, pay us very much, despite what people might think. And um, and it was difficult several times throughout the day or more. I was like, I really want to look at that thing, but the end of the day, um, I'll tell you that no one got paid. I got my phone back, but it's wonderful. The amount of work that you can get done when that thing is out of the room. I mean, it's my, it's my superpower, right? I don't work that hard in the sense that I don't do long hours. I think I'm not constitutionally suited for long hours. This was never my thing. My brain tires, right? I mean, I'm good for four, four and a half good hours a day of actually producing good stuff with my brain, probably max.

49:28But you know, I don't use my phone that much. I don't use the internet that much and I prioritize it and a lot just gets done. It just sort of piles up over time, you know? And there's this sense of like you must be burning the midnight oil and you have all these things going on. Uh, but again, people, I think underestimate, and it's not the, the underestimate the impact of this. It's not just the, the accumulation of time you spend looking on your phone. It's also this network switching cost, right? Because like the phone is very good at inducing a network switch. And that's an expensive time consuming energy consuming neuronal operation tasks, which I'm going to switch my focus of attention from this to that.

50:04Like, we can't do that in two seconds, right? That's a hard process. It takes a while. It's why when you sit down to work on something really hard, you have that feeling of for the first 15 minutes, this is terrible. You know, and then after like 15 or 20 minutes, you sort of get into the groove. I always assumed part of what's going on is it takes a while for your brain to really start marshalling. Okay, so what semantic networks do we need to start activating here? Oh, we don't need this, inhibit this. We're not doing that anymore. It takes a while. So what happens then when you have a lot of these quick checks to social media, you're jumping in on email back and forth, is you have this disaster catastrophic pile up of aborted task switches happening, right?

50:44And so it's not just the total time you're looking at, let's say email or social media. It's the 15 minute window, you have to add around each of those checks in which you have this cognitive disorder. That really adds up. And then you realize, oh, there was no time during my day, in which I was more than 15 minutes away from looking at something that induced a network switch. The data I like to cite, which was looking at email and Slack checks and knowledge workers, this came from rescue time, the software company, the median average interval between checks was five minutes. It's the median and the mode was one minute in this data set.

51:19So it was like, we are, we are checking all the time. That means you were never in a state then in your day, where you don't have a confused cognitive space, where you don't have partially you're switching to this task. But then you switch back to this task before that finish, but before you could fully lock it in this task, you look back over here. And so you're spending your entire day in the state of cognitive disorder, which is going to be reduced cognitive output, right? So you get rid of that. I mean, I always say like one of my advantages is not that I'm doing anything smarter. I'm just avoiding sometimes the dumb thing to just hold in, slowing other people down.

51:51You get rid of that and you feel like you're on the world's best neurotropic or something like this. Like, oh, I'm just doing this thing. I'm doing it pretty well. Now I'm done. Why this didn't even take that long. So I mean, I think people underestimate what's going on here. Yeah, we'd like to drill into the concept of context and task switching a bit more. I do think that the brain has something akin to a transmission system where, for people that drive and have driven, the amount of energy that needs to be used in order to accelerate a vehicle to get up to a higher gear. It's very different than the equal amount of increase and speed at a given gear.

52:31So this is you hear this if you're not familiar with transmission. So it sounds like it sounds as if there's more facile at higher speeds. How could it be that you're burning less fuel at higher speed? It's not exactly that way. But I think the brain has these sort of transmission systems and what you're describing with people switching back and forth and checking email and phone, et cetera, and back to the work that should be at hand. It's sort of akin to going up and down the gear system constantly, trying to arrive at a given destination. And sure you might arrive, but you're going to burn far more fuel.

53:05It's the least efficient way to go about it. You want to get into that deep groove. And I think when we hear about flow, I feel like at least for me, that's the sort of notion of flow that I'm looking for, dropping into that deep groove, even if there's some friction within that groove of the challenge of the work that I'm doing. It's about not thinking about anything else. It's really about focus. And the word flow is just a wonderfully attractive word that I think gives us the false impression that we can just drop into things like a square wave function. Sit down, pen and paper, go. And there's no possible way that neural circuits could work that way.

53:40No, let's invent a term. You tell me it's a term makes sense. I'm a bit of an insolent fly, but neuro -semantic coherence. This is going to be my alternative term for flow when you're working on something hard. It's not that you're in an actual flow state where you lose track what you're doing. You're concentrating really hard, but why I'm saying neuro -semantic coherence is you get to this place where the sort of relevant semantic neural networks are all those that are activated are all relevant to what you're doing. And you've over time inhibited most of the unrelated networks that were fired up before.

54:13And so you get in this sense of it's hard, maybe I'm not losing track of time, but I'm all focused on this. You know, I'm grappling with the bear here, the math equation, the book chapter, whatever it is. And so it's something different than flow, but it's also different than Linda Stone had the term partial continuous attention, which is what you're that cognitive disaster of I'm constantly networks switching back and forth. So we'll call it neuro -semantic coherence. I'm going to coin that term because it's you have this coherence of the semantic neural networks on what you're doing. And that's the feeling of I'm getting after this hard problem.

54:48And it might be really hard to do. I mean, I know the feeling of trying to solve a math proof for me, for example, could be so difficult because I mean, what does it actually feel like in your head when you're solving a math proof? It's a lot of you hold this here and then you try to get to the next step by doing this. And it doesn't work. But you have to keep holding this here. It takes a lot of concentration. Okay, let me try this. That didn't work either, but this look promising. Okay, so now I need to go back and in my mind's eye, update this setup. And now let me try this. So it's a lot of holding things in your working memory and keeping them loaded while you try and extension and then evaluating how that worked without.

55:22And so it requires just internal concentration, which is unpleasant. But in neuro -semantic coherence, it's all this happening in your world, you know, is that in that proof. So maybe that's what we should be pitching what people should be looking for is, yeah, forget flow. But also remember, like this default where you're like the rescue time data set participants checking email once every five minutes, that's cognitive nonsense. That's crazy. That's like you're trying to, you know, play football and you're covering over one of your eyes and wearing like a 50 pound rucksack on. You're just like handicapping your abilities here for no reason, right?

55:56So what's in between is this idea and that requires focus, you know, requires deep work. You know, or playing football and then every three downs or so, running into the stands and having a conversation, trying to work out something, challenging with your spouse or whatever, and then going back and trying to totally different play set, right? Em, everything of throwing too many analogies and stories. I'll just briefly say I went and saw that the play in New York with my sister this year, I think it was Harry Potter and the cursed child or something like that. I didn't really enjoy the play that much, but the set stuff was amazing and they have this magic library.

56:29I think it's very, very relevant here, where essentially the book that you open has a certain topic. I don't know, it spells or something is Harry Potter. Again, fun show, but great set stuff didn't really resonate with me too much in any event. And then the books around it change their topic that, but are related to that central book. And then if you look at one particular thing, like maybe it's potions or something, I'm making this up. And then also the books around it change. They become either more specific. There might be a distant but related idea that could lend itself to creativity. So that's the way the brain works in cognition, is that we get into a frame of us or in discussion or a certain theme.

57:08And the books on the shelf change according to their relatedness based on memory of past, what's going on now in plans for the future. I think anytime we look at, we change context and we look at a raccoon video on Instagram or our calendar. And oh, there's that thing. The books become very scatters. So when we return to it, there's a lot more friction, a lot more work or neural, neural energy required to get back into that, um, this narrow states of cognition. Just not exactly explain sort of my experience in the way I think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're, it takes time to load up the, the sort of relevant, the secondary, interciary, semantic ideas.

57:45And now they're there. So like, you can pull from them. And then as you shift, you have to sort of shift this whole thing around. And that takes a lot of concentration. I mean, I wrote this, this article once that got me a little bit of trouble, not trouble, mild trouble. But it was, it was called for the Chronicle Higher Education. And the title they gave it was is email making professor stupid, which wasn't my title. You basically called everyone, every one of your colleagues stupid. I got all check email. The dean at the time did call me in for lunch. But actually he was, here's the thing. He was like, hey, this is real.

58:13I agree with this. Um, but what I was arguing actually in that article essentially was, what do we do at a university is, is, is, is, personally, what we're supposed to be doing is trying to teach what the life of the mind is and how that works. And we've kind of forgotten that. So we like, why we should maybe think about like at universities, we need to be explicitly not just teaching how to think. But also modeling the life of the mind at the, at the highest level. And so this idea that we just allow the, the professissariat to, to be drowned in emails and, and tasks and be as distracted. You know, it's the main war that every research professor has is how do I, how do I fight the admin overload until I become famous enough to get an assistant, right?

58:56Like this is the big problem. And I was making this proposal of university should be the citadel's a concentration. It's if you want to get the best academics in the world to university, just tell them, here's at the top of our contract, you will not be assigned an email address. Like you're going to get Nobel laureates coming from, you know, all over the country to come to this place. And so I was making this argument. We should think a lot more about thinking. We should talk more about it. We should model it exactly to type of things you're talking about. But we don't. It's much more content's focus.

59:23But really, this should be something more that we, we get into specifically like this is how you actually use the mind to produce innovative, interesting high value new cognitive artifacts. This is a very hard thing we're asking you to do. But you can apprentice here because this is what we do. And we've mastered. We're going to teach you how to do it. But we never have that sort of meta conversation, sort of meta cognition conversation. I've always thought that'd be important. I think you'd have much better outcomes if that's part of what you learned at the university was how to take the thing in your head and really put it to work, you know, really extract out of it as capabilities.

59:57Or even high school or even elementary school level. I agree. Yeah. You have kids. Yeah. And do they have smartphones? No. Yeah. How do they feel about that? Well, I mean, they're not, they're not old enough yet that it's a, it's a real problem. But they're, they're not going to be happy with me probably soon. Hate me now. Love me later as my mother used to say. Basically, because I, you know, I'm, I'm convinced having spent some time thinking about this, writing about this, doing some journalism on this, talking to a lot of the experts that like I think we're going to end up where all the, the arrows from the, the relevant social psych research, which I've been following this research since, you know, 2017, this is 2017 is roughly when you see the first warning signs going up that we need to worry about the potential mental health impacts of these tools, especially social meeting smartphones on young people.

1:00:48And I, you can track this, right? I have a talk I actually gave my kids school. Do I have to be about this? Where I track how this research evolved? And, you know, like any literature, it's contentious at first. And then you see, you begin to see a conciliance between different lines of evidence. And I think we're, we're everything now in the last couple of years is starting to come together. This idea of we don't really know if this is bad or not. I think that's just an old take. The research has moved past that. And I think where we're, we're, we're landing on is unrestricted internet use pre puberty is risky.

1:01:19And like the new standard is going to be post puberty is probably the right time to be given a device to give you unrestricted access. We're talking like 16 is probably the appropriate age. So this does not make me popular at the middle school, where my son's, my old son's about to go. I think in two or three years, that's just going to be common sense. This is the direction I see the research literature and the advocacy going. And I think there's a solid ground for this. Because you're a computer scientist, I can ask this question. What about video games? I'm not a big consumer of video games.

1:01:51It's been years since I've played one. In fact, but video games are so very different than smartphones and other technologies because they seem to put at least the kids I have observed playing them and adults into a very narrow trench of attention. Yeah. I mean, there are definitely issues with it. I mean, look, I'm not a social psychologist. I just sort of play one in my articles. But I've looked into this literature a lot. There's a bit of a gendered breakdown that has a lot of overlaps where when they're looking at potential harms of these technologies, young adolescents, pre -adolescent young adolescents, you tend to see social media that be more signal for cognitive distress for young women and girls and the video games to actually be the bigger culprit for young men and boys.

1:02:42There is a bit of a difference here because with the social media impact, the content of what's happening matters in this picture, right? So what I'm seeing, the engagement I'm having, how this impacts my social life, this is part of the mental distress. With video games, it seems to be more an impact of just disharmonious passion and obsession. It's the time it takes, right? Because the games can be incredibly addictive. So the problem that young men are having are just they're playing it all the time. I'm staying up late because I have an iPad in my room and I'm 14 and I'm going to play Fortnite until three in the morning because my brain cannot handle what you're giving me here, right?

1:03:18So it's less of a content concern than it is just a time concern, right? That seems more solvable to me. My solution with my own kids, I don't mind video games, I'm a computer scientist, but I said nothing that's online, right? Nothing that was free because if it was free, that means their business model involves getting you to play it all the time so you can upcharge or whatever. They have Nintendo switches, like I like Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, here's a $60 L the game that someone spent five years making or whatever. You can only play those games so long at a time before you know you're tired, you come back to it.

1:03:51They don't have an addictive response to it. If they get an iPad with a game on it, they'll just like play that till their eyes bleed because those are meant to be addictive. So I'm wary about video games, but there it's all just the usage game. So you stick away from the more addictive games. It's a much easier problem to solve, I think, than the social media, the social media issue. Earlier you talked about books. I still read hardcover and paperback books. What are your thoughts on audio books and learning by way of audio book versus paper in front of you flipping a physical device or Kindles?

1:04:27I don't know if there's any real research on this. I've seen a little bit, but I'm curious what you've encountered and what your thoughts are as well. You could speculate. Yeah, I'll tell you personally, I can only do fiction in audio books. Because when I'm in a nonfiction experience, I'm just very used to constantly looking for connections and ideas. And so I have to be able to slow down and then speed up and then go back to something I just read. So I really have a distressing experience trying to listen to nonfiction audio books. Fictions fine. That's great. I'll put a thriller on it, you know, Audible.

1:04:57Great. I'll listen through it. And I think some of this might be particular to my my engagement with books, which is I'm a writer and a thinker. So I'm constantly looking for ideas. And so I might have a different engagement with a nonfiction book than someone, you know, just listening to one of my books, but I can only do fiction on audio. That makes sense. Thinking about what works for me, what doesn't it? I agree. I love stories and fiction by audio book. You ideally consumed on a long drive or a hike. But nonfiction requires that I take notes and see things in their kind of respective spatial layout.

1:05:34And yeah, in your most recent book, you describe this concept of pseudo productivity. Is pseudo productivity a general term to refer to some of the things we've already talked about? This task -witching context switching, or pseudo productivity, something that includes other categories of limiting ourselves as well? I mean, I think it's more specific than that, right? So to me, sort of productivity was the answer that we came up with a knowledge work to a real dilemma, which is that's a sector, you know, using your brain primarily to create value. That's a sector that emerged as a major part of the economy in roughly the mid 20th century.

1:06:14When that emerged, all the definitions of productivity that we had were inspired from agriculture and industry. So in agriculture, we can have ratios. Bushels of corn, per whatever acres of land under cultivation and industrial manufacturing we have ratios, model teas per input labor hour. So you could just measure these things. We also had clearly defined systems of production. So you could then say, if I change this about the system of production, what happens to this number? And you could do gradient descent, right? Okay, I do this. That number goes down. Let's not do that. But I make this change.

1:06:47It goes up. That's a better way of building it. Like this was the dominant way of thinking about productivity since basically Adam Smith, the knowledge work arises. That doesn't work, right? Because I'm working on whatever, five different things. It's different than what you were working on. How I'm managing my work is entirely off -uscated, right? In knowledge work, organizational ideas is entirely left up to the individual. How you manage your work and your workload and collaboration, that's up to you. That's all off -uscated. There's no number to measure. There's no system to improve. So I think it was a real quandary.

1:07:17My argument is what essentially the management class came up with is shooter productivity, which is, okay, and the absence of being able to be quantitative about this, we will use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. So that's it. Like we see you doing things that's better than not. The more we see you doing the better, I call that shooter productivity. And I think that's implicitly how we've been organizing the management of knowledge work, labor, since the 1950s. And we say visibility at people doing things. This is the conflating of busyness with actual productivity. Yes. And so the problem came when we had this a general way of measuring, approximating productive effort, which wasn't very good, but whatever, right?

1:07:58I mean, I want to see you're at the office and you're doing things. The problem was the front office IT revolution, right? Because I'm essentially a technocratic. I see everything through the lens of technology and my writing. We got computers, we got networks, we got email. Souter productivity can't be sustainable in that context, because now with something like email, then later, tools like Slack, I can demonstrate effort at a very fine grain, right? Because I can send an email, respond to this, jump onto a Slack conversation. I can now do that at a very fine grain level and essentially everywhere and all throughout my day, I can be demonstrating labor at home.

1:08:34I can be demonstrating labor because we have mobile computing, we get the smartphone revolution. So there's now an ability to constantly be demonstrating effort at all points of our day. And that's where I think the wheels came off the bus. Right? And led to this point that got worse and worse starting the early 2000s and hit a head in the pandemic of knowledge worker burnout, knowledge worker exhaustion and nihilism of like, what's going on with my job? Like all I do is zoom all day, what's happening? I think that shooter productivity plus front office IT revolution, they did not play nice together.

1:09:06And you can see this by the way, if you look even at productivity books, you see this huge shift that happens early 90s versus early 2000s. It's like a completely shift in tone, right? Early 90s, it's Stephen Covey is very optimistic. It's like how are we going to self -actualize and like carefully choose the most meaningful activities to fulfill all of our dreams for all of our roles. Early 2000s, now we have email, you have David Allen, it's like, oh my god, we're so overwhelmed with task. All we can hope for is like these little moments of zen in the day. If we can just automate how we're just churning through these widgets, at least we can find some cognitive piece.

1:09:41What happened in those 10 years was the front office IT revolution. And now we just felt like we had to constantly be demonstrating that visible effort. So, you know, I think that's where we got into the problem. Suda productivity plus technology. Recently, my podcast team was in Australia and my producer and close friend here, Rob Moore, instructed all of us to get rid of social media on our phones, except one guy who would post our weekly episodes announcements. And it was pretty brutal at first. And then coming back to social media, it actually turned out to be more challenging. You really experienced the friction coming back the other way.

1:10:21And then one experiences the the lack of friction and that's where it gets scary. It's so interesting the way that the brain can adapt. The friction leaving something behind, the friction coming back to it. And I think for people listening to this, I raised this because I think, of course, many people listening are, you know, have work that they really need to focus on. They may be having issues with productivity and burnout, etc. I think a lot of people use the phone and social media because it fills their life. You know, it provides some enrichment and they aren't necessarily committed to specific projects.

1:10:57But I guess through the lens of the let's just call it the Cal New Portee and Lens, one might argue that those people almost certainly have untapped creativity, untapped resources within them that they don't yet know about because they're essentially using that energy elsewhere. I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's papering over the void. You have this void in your life because there's unmet potential, unmet interest, living in misalignment with the things you care about. I mean, a lot of people, this is the classic sort of catastrophe of life. Social media, and before this, it was other things.

1:11:35There was other intoxicants or other sorts of distractions. It's a way for some people of essentially putting a screen over that gaping void. And it's just makes it bearable enough that you can kind of go on with life. And so it is true. If you just rip it out, you see the void. And that's really difficult. I mean, I did this experiment for one of my books. I ran an experiment with 1600 people and they all turned off all their social media for 30 days. 30 days. 30 days, right? These are young people, old people. A whole mix. A whole mix, right? Not just university students. I recruited them from my newsletter readership so they weren't university students.

1:12:12And it wasn't formal research. It was, you know, I put out the call, right? So this is not randomly sampled, right? But I put out the call and I said, here, I'm going to walk you through this. And then I got a lot of information back. So people reported back how it went. And this was like the number one thing I heard was it's really hard at first, right? And so who were the people that succeeded for 30 days versus those who did it? The ones who didn't succeeded, tended to just try to white knuckle it. Just be like, I don't like how much I'm using social media. I'm just going to stop because it's bad.

1:12:40And I don't want to do a bad thing. I'm just going to like, you know, hold on to tables, white knuckles. They want it to make it 30 days. The people who did succeed followed my advice to incredibly aggressively pursue alternatives in those 30 days. So it's like go learn new hobbies, join things right away. Get like really structured about your day. Get into exercise again, learn how to knit again. A lot of people said, oh, I learned about, I forgot how fun libraries were. Like you can go into this building and like all the books are free. And there's there you could just grab whatever. And it's okay if you don't like the book because you didn't have to pay for it.

1:13:12I'm going out with friends again. I'm okay. Every week, I'm going to have, you know, we're going to have drinks with this person and every Thursday morning, I'm going to go running with this person. The people who aggressively tried to put in place a more positive alternative through self -reflection experimentation. They lasted to 30 days and beyond. Right. And so then I came to realize like, oh, I see what's happening here is you have these unmet needs. These tools can give you sort of a, a semi -lacrum of meeting them. I need, I'm a social bean. I need to be connected to people. Well, I'm texting and like doing comments on social media.

1:13:44It's sort of touches that a little bit just enough that you don't feel hopelessly lonely, but it's not really fulfilling that. I have a need to like see my intentions made manifest concretely in the world. Humans want to do this. Well, I'm, you know, posting these things and people are responding. It's sort of this semi -lacrum of real creation. So it's like kind of satisfying that just enough that it's not just intolerable, right? And so what happens is if you remove that, you have to actually fill those things the right way. So now I'm not socializing on social media, but I'm going out of my way to sacrifice time and attention on behalf of other people.

1:14:16I'm feeling the social void in the right way. Now I don't really feel like I need to go back. I'm actually making my intentions manifest. I'm learning skills and building things. Now the sort of pseudo construction and collective attention economy of social media post this and you'll like it. I'm like this. I don't need that anymore to fill that void. So it's like you have to fill the void first. So, so, you know, five years ago I wrote a book that was about reforming this part of your life. And a lot of the book was had nothing to do with technology, but about how to actually just rebuild parts of your life.

1:14:50And on my podcast, honestly, like one of the big topics we talk about, which is crazy that I'm a technologist and I write about trying to find focus and distracted world is this thing we call the deep life, which is just straight up building a meaningful life 101. And it's like crazy that my podcast is talking about it. But on the other hand, it's not because my it's the podcast people go to when they're fed up with the digital world. And it turns out if you don't get the analog world working right for you, you need something to avoid starting that void and the digital world will do that well enough.

1:15:21It's like just good enough to keep life tolerable. There's a lot of discussion nowadays about ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder sometimes minus the H minus the hyperactivity. A lot of kids have true clinically diagnosed ADHD. So we want to be sensitive to that. It's a real issue for a lot of people. A lot of adults have true ADHD. But nowadays people talk about ADHD the same way terms like depression, trauma, gas lighting, and etc. are discussing in nonclinical territory. OCD. OCD is technically as well. Right. Right. And I'm not disparaging that. It's just that we have sort of a dilution of deeper understanding of what these things really are and aren't.

1:16:07What are your thoughts? I realize you're not a psychiatrist. But what are your thoughts on the idea that many people that think they perhaps have true attention issues have either built those attention issues through neuroplasticity into their system, meaning their system probably worked, nervous system probably worked pretty well to focus, but they engaged in enough task switching that the search into the brain involved in cognition became optimized for this very distributed cognition as opposed to narrow focused attention. And what are your thoughts about the amount of stimulant use on college campuses and in adult populations to try and overcome this?

1:16:50I feel like there's a lot of attempts to use pharmacology to match the level of distraction to try and make that distraction not seem like distraction. But this is an area I hear a lot about given the nature of the things I cover on the podcast. I think a lot of these issues are phone -induced. And I think the problem is not solvable as much. You don't need pills. You need a different phone relationship. My optimistic hypothesis is again this nonclinical difficulty with maintaining attention like in your work or if you're a college student or whatever. It's not necessarily representing knock on wood like a wholesale neural rewiring.

1:17:30I basically rewired my circuits on my brain to be a sort of distributed switching processor. I think most of this is persisting in that much more malleable area that gets affected by moderate behavioral addictions. We have parts of the brain that are part of these feedback reward loops that's meant to be malleable. It's supposed to be, so we can have really rapid learning about what's happening in our environment and how we're supposed to respond to it. And this is what gets hijacked when you build up these behavioral addictions. So it's very quick to change. But that malleability means you can change it back.

1:18:04So I think this drive, do I have to keep checking my email or my phone, is again you build up a moderate behavioral addiction because of standard reward cues. And that's a part of the brain that you can't, it's difficult, but it's not your whole brain is now a social media brain. And that's just the brain you have because you're exposed to this. It's a matter of getting this stimuli out of your life, doing the same type of training you would do, explore them exposure, like it used to the idea of feeling that drive and not actually doing it. You can work with blocking apps like there's stuff you can do.

1:18:36This is sort of like standard, it's painful, it takes two months, and then you're doing better on it. So I do think we have a large stratum of subclinical attention issues that are not representing wholesale neural rewiring, but are like absolutely sort of expected outcomes of working with malleable reward cue circuits in the brain. We can fix those just like we can if you know, you're you're gambling too much or compulsively eating the junk food or something. We don't say your whole brain got weriered for junk food. It's like no, you have this this particular cue cycle that we have to work on.

1:19:11So maybe I'm being optimistic there. And you know the brain better, but like it would be extraordinary if in like a 10 year period, right, your entire brain somehow got rewired in a way that it couldn't sustain focus anymore. I totally agree with that statement, unless you're a young person and you grew up in a distracted world and your brain optimized as the young brain does for the conditions it's in. And then I think you have a real issue, which is not to say it can't be rescued through the use of discipline, tools, protocols, pharmacology, nutrition, great sleep, and if necessary prescription drugs, right, because there is a case for prescription drugs in certain instances for ADHD.

1:19:54And as I understand it, you know, anytime people say, wait, aren't those drugs just math, isn't it just speed? Yep, they are in fedamines in most cases. And the idea is to increase the deployment of certain certain neuromodulators, once I mentioned before, as it means to induce neuroplasticity so that the focus state becomes more of a default state. So I think that young people are in trouble. I think that we I do worry about young people. I think it's it's akin to putting them in a kind of a well, we know this in the visual system. If you take an animal or human and you put them into an altered visual environment, the visual system changes and your perception of the visual world is becomes inaccurate.

1:20:34And the way I think of this cognitively with respect to attention, the analogy would be, I think we've been for the last 10 years or so, 10, 15 years, we've been raising kids in a sort of house of fun house mirror things, which is anything but fun, where you look at yourself and your legs are shorter than in your torso's long. And so everywhere you turn, you're getting a distorted perception and trying to navigate the world through that distorted perception is very, very difficult. You can do it, but it's a lot of extra work. That's what I feel we've done to young people. I'm very concerned about that as well.

1:21:09Yeah. And I think I don't know what you're taking on this, but do you think at the undergraduate level that we have just been not explicitly, but just sort of implicitly professors in general, we have been just sort of slowly adapting the difficulty of what we're teaching, et cetera, because we maybe there's a reduced cognitive focus capacity, which is like the key skill for this sort of very artificial thing of learning, you know, complicated college level work. I think this would be an interesting experiment to find out is have we been implicitly having to sort of simplify things to keep roughly speaking grade distributions where normatively we feel comfortable.

1:21:47I mean, do we see this signal yet? That's my interest. Do we see this signal yet if we look back a generation 20 years ago versus now? I don't know for courses of the sort that I teach or taught until very recently, I still teach, but I was directing the Neuronatomy course and there's a laboratory module. So the students dissect brains, they're holding actual human brains. That's a real physical contact that cannot be recapitulated digitally. You just can't do it. You can try, use VR, but it ain't the same. I mean, how would you like it if your neurosurgeon learned on a virtual brain? And then it does surgery on a brain?

1:22:24No, not no such thing should happen. I think that my experience with this is perhaps most relevant with respect to social media where I teach neuroscience. And I use a variety of duration of clips. The 92nd real, the seven minute thing, the two and a half hour podcast, we have podcast solo podcast, like a four and a half hours. I don't know how many people listen, start to finish, but I think having a variety of different durations really helps. And I'm told by my team, I have a TikTok account, although I've never logged on there. I think TikTok represents the extreme of bubble gum level information slash entertainment.

1:23:11And they really nailed some circuit that can handle information of about 30 to 60 seconds in a format that tickles the brain just right to keep swiping, liking, commenting and sharing. And I don't think that's anything like a real understanding or education. Yeah, I mean, it's is nothing like a real understanding or education. Yeah, I mean, TikTok in particular, I think something people what people get wrong about TikTok is they think that there was a real algorithmic innovation, which is actually not the case. As far as I understand, the machine learning algorithm underneath TikTok is probably like a relatively standard sort of multi -arm bandant, you know, intermittent feedback reinforcement algorithm.

1:23:53All they do is they clear out all the other noise. So, you know, if you're Facebook or something like this, you're trying to use algorithms to curate things, but you have all these other legacy structures you also have to try to satisfy. There's friends and, you know, you want to show stuff that your friends like more than other people and there's groups you're joining. TikTok just got rid of all the noise. And so we're just going to all we're doing is optimizing watch time. We think we don't know, but we think watch time is the main thing that they're optimizing. So we want to optimize it. Watch time and everything.

1:24:24All these videos all just exist as multi -dimensional points in this sort of semantic cloud. And all we're doing is just showing you things and then you swipe another thing, swipe another thing. So when you get rid of all the noise from machine learning algorithm, it doesn't also have to satisfy that I follow this person on Instagram or this is my friend. All I have to do is optimize this one number. How long did they walk before they swipe? It just turns out like, oh, it's really easy. Like you do that for a couple hours. You're going to hone in on these subregions in this massive multi -dimensional space of stuff that just tickles this particular person's brain.

1:24:54And it's very cybernetic because now I'm the user of TikTok, I'm the content creator, I'm getting immediate feedback what's working what's not. I really quickly find these particularly rich regions in this sort of cybernetic space. And so it's like TikTok just purified something that was simple, basic machine learning, but just like purify what we're doing here. And that turned out to be enough to create what's like probably the most addictive force we've seen in the digital world in a long time. So TikTok is optimized for dwell time. Yeah, that's the thought, right? Because it's not public. So like we don't exactly know how the algorithm works, but people have been studying it like a Skinnerbox, you know, 100 phones and we're looking at all these accounts, look at the variables.

1:25:32It seems like that's largely what it's optimizing for is how long did you watch before you swiped? And that's it. So I mean, it's not, this was both what was smart about TikTok and also why I've been arguing it's destabilized a whole traditional social media narrative is because the traditional massive social media players of the last decade had this first mover advantage on these giant actual social networks, right? It's like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram had these massive networks of people's preferences of following this person and this person I'm following and they could leverage these actual social graphs as a huge source of producing interesting content, right?

1:26:16And this was a huge first mover advantage because you can't, it's hard to get 100 million people to use something now, right? TikTok got rid of all that. We don't want a social graph. USA user don't have to declare anything. You don't have to follow people or say who your friends are. We'll just start showing you things and that was more compelling than what you could generate with a social graph. But now there's no first mover advantage. So as the big social media players follow the TikTok model, which is much more algorithmic, let's just try to curate based on algorithms, not who you follow, who your friends are, they're now much more vulnerable because TikTok could come along and do this without having to spend five years getting people to clear their friends.

1:26:52And now if someone else could come along and do this. So I think the major players are giving away their competitive advantage, which is this the social graph IP that no one will ever replicate again. They're giving away that advantage. And now it's a free -for -all playing field of all sources of attention engagement. So I don't know. I think TikTok accidentally destabilized the social media decade that had been defining until I think just recently. What I find so interesting about social media platforms like TikTok is that sure it makes sense that kids and teens would use it. They were raised with it, Snapchat, etc.

1:27:26But when I see my peers who we call ourselves adults, people in their mid to late 40s, 50s, essentially playing kids games or engaging through these platforms that are, they're not childlike necessarily, but they just prove that the or rather that their adherence slash addiction to them just proves that this is tapping into some core neural circuit that exists in everyone. So while it might be shaping the young grain a lot, this is adults basically eating junk food all day, which raises a question, I think while there are many different ways to eat and it's not a topic we want to get into now, Lord knows that's a great way to create a lot of social media content, debating which diet omnivore, common of warvegan, etc.

1:28:14The notion of intermittent fasting, limiting ones, a portion of the day where they eat to whatever, six hours, four hours, 12 hours, is an interesting one that maybe has some applicability here. What are your thoughts about simply not turning on the phone, maybe even not turning Wi -Fi on if people are not as disciplined as you are with the laptop or tablet for the first two hours of the day or four hours of the day, or for a portion of the day, sort of like taking a social media fast that isn't 30 days, which I think for a lot of people is going to evoke high court as all release, just the idea of it.

1:28:55Yeah, this is an idea I've written about before. In Deepork, I had this chapter called Embrace Bordom. That was the entire idea. So the idea was boredom by itself is not, I think, laudable. There's a reason why it feels distressing. When things feel distressing, that's usually an evolutionary signal that there's something going on here. But what I was arguing in that chapter was exactly what you're talking about. You should have some moments every day where you're free from distraction even though you could be accessing distraction and you want to. And like a little bit each day, 20 minutes each day, and then maybe a longer session once a week, like a couple hours.

1:29:31My argument for that was it's about breaking a Pavlovian connection in this sense, right? So if it's every time I feel bored, I'm lack of novel stimuli, I get this release of the phone. Your mind is really going to make that association of like, this is what we always do. If sometimes you don't, it's a different cognitive landscape, right? Your mind is sometimes we get the distraction, sometimes we don't. That's a much better place to be because now when it comes time to actually focus on something, your mind's like, I've been here before. We don't always get the distraction. So it isn't going back early 20th century psychology.

1:30:05There's probably a more neuroscientific way to think about this, but it's like breaking Pavlovian loops. If like sometimes we at the end of the day, I'm exhausted. It's an Instagram time and it like scratches an itch. But other times, I'm bored. I'm in line with the pharmacy and I don't look at the phone. My brain learns like, yeah, we don't always do it. And so the idea is that, you know, if you make boredom more tolerable, then you're much more likely to succeed with doing things that are boring but hard. And I think deep work, for example, is boring. It's just in the clinical sense of there's lack of novel stimuli.

1:30:33You're just doing the same thing for a long time. So I've always advocated for that is like, you don't go seeking it. I'm not a big believer of boredom is where all creative insight comes from. I think it's a strong evolutionary cue. Like, leave this state. But you do have to have some tolerance for it. I wonder if we need a different word than boredom. Are you familiar with this notion of gap effects in learning? These gap effects are similar to the effects of neural processing during sleep, focused attention with some agitation triggers neuroplasticity and learning, but it's during sleep in particular deep sleep, rapid eye movement, sleep states of deep rest, maybe in some forms of meditation, that the actual rewiring takes place.

1:31:16And then there's this literature about gap effects, which have been demonstrated for music, for math, for many things in which if people say are practicing new scales on the piano, for instance, but to be any scale. And then they intermittently are queued by a buzzer to just stop and do nothing. The hippocampus, which is at a rate of maybe 20 or 30 times faster at the neural level, we're not talking about boredom. What we're talking about is pauses during which perhaps we are obtaining accelerated neural plasticity. The gap effects certainly accelerate learning. I've talked about these in other podcasts.

1:31:57But I wonder whether or not this thing that you're calling boredom. So being in line to get some groceries and not taking one's phone out while the checker is scanning the groceries through and not really doing much of anything, it's entirely possible that the thing that we were working on earlier that day or the previous day is being processed in the hippocampus at an unconscious level at a much more rapid rate where we to look at our phone, we would inhibit those gap effects, which are truly beneficial. Yeah. Well, I mean, professors feel this all the time, at least a lot of ones I've talked to with peer reviews.

1:32:26So I don't know if you've had this experience, but you're like reviewing a paper. I often have this experience where when I'm first engaging with the paper, I feel incredibly frustrated. I don't quite understand what they're doing here. Like this mathematics isn't quite making sense to me. And it'll often be the fact I come back later. Like, well, let me just like write up what I have so far. And your understanding is like much, much better, right? So there's this sense of maybe something's been processing. I took that so seriously when I was, especially a postdoc, like when I was at the height of just all I do in my life is produce value with my brain.

1:32:57Every day I would do what I call thorough walks because I discovered thorough, well, a grad student, I read it down by the Charles, like the full sort of, you know, just minus the beret, like pretentious grad student thing. But I was really in the the the Walden real influential book for me. So every day when I would walk back, I was living on Beacon Hill walking from MIT. So people who know Boston, it's going across the Longfellow Bridge. I would say nothing but nature observation. Like that's what I'm doing. I'm just, oh, the ISIS thinner on the Charles today. Like look at this tree or the leaves coming back.

1:33:28Partially, I think what was going on is like, this was right after I'd been whiteboarding it, right? I think it was letting stuff process, right? So I had this explicitly in my routine. A lot of time where I was, okay, I can't think about work at all. I can't do anything else, but you know, I'm thinking about the tree I'm thinking about the water, like really sort of minimal cognitive lifts. And I wonder if that's what was going on there. Like to me, that, I mean, that was a very productive period of my life. Yeah, I feel like in the in the last five, 10 years, thanks largely in part to Matt Walker's book, Why We Sleep and the advocacy around sleep from others, we've come to understand that sleep is essential for mental health, physical health, and learning, cognitive performance, physical performance, so much so that now people devote immense amounts of attention and resources to try to get the best possible night sleep, whereas it was the all sleep one, I'm dead mentality prior to that.

1:34:21And I would love to see a world where people embrace not the notion of boredom per se, but the notion of gaps, lack of external stimuli coming into our eyes and our cognitive system as it means to get smarter, to get more creative, to get better. We just need a language for this. Yeah. And I think it's the, you know, so often language is a separator when it comes to health and performance tools. Something I really strive for is to try and create language that's not linked to any one person that illustrates what something is for. So maybe no small task, Alba, maybe we'll just have you rename boredom as a neural rewiring box or something like that.

1:35:03I'll go with the term. Yeah. My whole writing curve, by the way, is based on taking things people already intuitively know in their gut and giving it a two word name, just having the language around that really matters like deep work. Oh, okay. That's like this activity. I kind of knew that was important. I didn't have a name or digital minimalism. Like, oh, yeah, I kind of know what that means. Like it's a different philosophy towards it. But there's all, so I do have a name related to the gaps we're talking about, but for one of the other negative effects, right? So we have the positive effects you talked about, which is consolidation of learning and acceleration of learning.

1:35:36We had one negative effect, which was the pevlovian connection to distraction. The other one I've written about before is solitude deprivation. So I'm using a different definition of solitude than the colloquial one. Most people think of it as a physical thing. I'm just isolated, but there's a cognitive psychological definition of solitude, which means absence of stimuli created by other human minds. So I'm not taking in information that's coming directly from another human mind. Having no period with this solitude, so having no period in your day where you're free from stimuli created from other minds is solitude deprivation and it's a real issue.

1:36:17And partially it's a real issue because when we're processing input from another human brain, it's all hands on deck, right? And we're very social beings. A huge portion of our brain is dedicated to this, right? So it's a very cognitively expensive activity when I'm trying to understand another human's what they're saying. I'm simulating their mental state. I'm trying to understand like where do they fall in this sort of social hierarchy? And one of my arguments was when you spend your entire day in that state, it's exhausting and anxiety producing. And like until we had smartphones and ubiquitous wireless internet, the idea that you could banish all solitude from your day is laughable.

1:36:54It's impossible, right? So of course we had a lot of portions of our day where our brain was not like ramped up in gear for the sort of social processing mode. But smartphones makes it possible that you can be in that mode all day long. And so like one of the things I hypothesize is some of the anxiety rises that goes with the age of smartphones is brain exhaustion, right? So that's like that's another negative effect of the constant. We have two negative effects now for the constant stimuli and one positive effect for the absence of the constant stimuli. So I think we're making a case here for not always being on your device.

1:37:26Yeah, I agree. One of my favorite literature is from neurosciences. I think most people have heard of the so -called critical period stages of development when the brain is essentially hyperplastic to any input for better or worse. This is a stage of life called childhood. And then of course people throughout the number 25 after age 25, plasticity is possible. And requires more effort, tension, etc. And then sleep, so forth. But we know based on really beautiful studies that if you deprive someone of sensory input for even a few hours, and we're not talking about sitting in a completely black and room with no input, but you essentially limit the amount of sensory input.

1:38:06In the period that follows, you get an opportunity for a hyperplastic response to any stimuli. And this just makes sense if you understand basics about signal the noise and the visual system and the brain. It just means when there's a lot of background chatter of stuff, it's harder to see the stuff that matters and the stuff that the brain's required to. Very computer science -y neuroengineering type perspective. But yes, I would love for you to come up with a two -word description of this. It's not boredom induced plasticity. It's this quiet induced hyperplasticity or something. I don't know, maybe we can riff on this together.

1:38:40Sometimes I'm not trying to move into your space. But I have a very practical question. I'd love to get a little more insight into the structure of your days. But are you a list maker? Do you wake up in the morning and make lists and cross things off and then decide what are the key items on that list? No, I'm a time blocker. Time blocker. Yeah, so I'm not a big believer in to -do list. I like to grapple with the actual available time. Like, okay, I have a meeting here. I have to pick my kids up from school here. Here's the actual hours of the day that are free and where they fall. All right, what do I want to do with that time?

1:39:13Well, okay, now that I see that there's a lot of gaps in the middle of the day here, they're short. Maybe there I'm going to do a lot of small non -convary demanding thing. Oh, this first 90 minutes in the morning is like the main time I have uninterrupted. Okay, so this I'm going to work on writing. So I've been a big believer of this since I was an undergrad. Like, you give your time a job as opposed to having a list, which is somewhat orthogonal to what's actually happening your day. And then just as you go through your day, seeing what do I want to try to do next? Because I think it's I try to instruction my days as much as I can, but it just never quite works.

1:39:47Do you work late into the night? Are you no? No, I'm a 530 man. Okay, yeah, so 530 PM, that's it. Yeah, more or less, that's my cutoff. Now, the one exception is if I'm writing on deadline, I'll sometimes like, if I need to get more writing done, I can do an evening writing session, which I got used to through long experience. I've used to write my blog post at night after like my kids went to bed. Now they're older, and they don't go to bed as early. So it's like the one thing I have left that I'll do after 530s, like every once in a while, I'll do like a 90 minute evening writing block. But I call this by the way, this whole philosophy, I call fixed schedule productivity.

1:40:23I've been doing it since I was a grad student, fixed a work hour schedule. That's my commitment. I work in these hours and then work downstream from that for everything else. So like this controls like even what you decide to bring into your life, because you know, I can't go past a schedule and it drives you to be more innovative in how you deal with your time and schedule. You have to be efficient because you only have these hours here. That's been, you know, a signal for my life since I was in my early 20s. Fixed a schedule and don't work outside of that schedule. Now, it's your move to figure out anything you want to do, you have to make that work.

1:40:56When we come to Professor figure out how to make that work. You want to write books while you're being a professor? Figure out how to make that work. You don't have the option of just throwing hours at it. And you innovate a lot, I think, when you have the constraints. Where do sleep and exercise fit into your schedule? What's your typical to bed time, wake up time, what's your typical exercise routine? And the reason I ask about this is because I think nowadays we hopefully people understand that exercising cognitive function are inextricably linked. And we're all going to live longer lives and be sharper mentally by doing exercise.

1:41:30Yeah. So, I mean, my main, like, actual working with weights, I do this pre -dinner. And this was the innovation in the last couple of years. It's a fantastic psychologically for me. This is a transition from work to like family time after work. So I'll do like 45, 50 minutes garage gym, you know, the way we built during COVID. After I'm done working before dinner. And once you get used to that, like, it also forces you, like, I got finished work because I got to get this in before dinner. But then I'll do also quite a bit of walking. If it's not a teaching day, so I'm not on campus. I do a lot of thinking on foot, you know, walking my kids through the bus stop, which isn't particularly close and back.

1:42:06So, I'll do a lot of walking. But that's when I, my serious exercise now is always, always pre -dinner. Then I want to be up, you know, in our room by 10. And then at that point, I don't track. So, I have insomnia issues, which actually has been like key driver of a lot of the things I think about, especially with slow productivity, is I'm very wary because I can, without any control on my own, just find myself unable to sleep sometimes. Fall asleep or stay asleep. Fall asleep. Yeah, I mean, I used to get it really bad. Not so bad now, but, you know, it comes and goes. That really affected the way I thought about productivity.

1:42:42Because it seemed like to me the definition of just, I get after it with a bunch of stuff, wasn't really on the table. Because if my notion of productivity depended on me like every day, being able to just like hammer on a bunch of stuff, I'm very busy. I have lots of commitments. What would happen if I couldn't sleep? I want to be able to do that. So, I drifted naturally towards a definition of productivity, which was, it doesn't really matter if you work tomorrow. But it is important that like this month you work, like riding a book. It doesn't matter if you work on your book chapter tomorrow in particular.

1:43:14But like this month, you have to spend a lot of time working on it. So, it was like an insomnia compatible definition of productivity was sort of morphed into this idea of slow productivity, taking your time with it. So, it's interesting. So, like, sleep issues really shaped away. I thought about work and put me on these much longer time scales of productivity. Try not to be dependent on any particular day being critical to what you do. I don't want the high stress situation. I don't want to like, I'm just going to 10 hours a day for the next 10 days. We're going to make this deal happen. Like, I can't operate in that space because I worry about it any time my brain could betray me.

1:43:47And I can like, lose sleep for a couple days. I think it's really important that you're sharing this because while people's challenges differ, I think oftentimes people hear the content of my podcast or other podcasts and think, gosh, I have to have everything dialed in just right. When in fact, most all of the tools and protocols that have been discussed on the Hubertman Lab podcast are in response or particular challenge that I've had or that others close to me have had. And I love I'm sorry that you suffer from insomnia. We have a series on sleep with Matt Walker in which he lays out some some great tools that we haven't yet discussed on the podcast.

1:44:24I'll just send you a text to I'll call you with a short list of those and hopefully they'll help. But we do cover insomnia in some depth. But I think it's important that people realize that they can be very productive with the hours that they have and the moments or hours of high focus clarity that they have. Even if they're not sleeping great, even if they're raising small children. Because that's the real world. And certainly that's the real world of deadlines and academia, but family and colds and flus and travel and jet lag and arguments and all the happy stuff too. Vacations. So sounds like you're very good at adapting your day to what's going on around it.

1:45:14But you have at least one period of say 60 to 90 minutes of real what you would call deep work. Let's say at least five days a week. I know that might be an underestimate, but it seems like that's what that's what I'm extracting from this. That's the goal. So to me, depending on the season is how extreme that can get. So the busiest season would be like a teaching semester. But even then, I'm going to make sure that five days a week I'm starting with deep work and the non -teaching days are more than the teaching days. Compare that to the summer, for example, where like all I do for the most part is deep work.

1:45:49No meetings on Mondays and Fridays. All admin stuff is mid -day to early afternoon, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Everything else is deep work. Just locked in hours at a time. But I want, if I'm not getting five days, five days of starting the day with deep work, I'm unhappy. Because I mean, I keep coming back to this is, okay, because I'm not going to be able to, I mean, fortunately, the insomnia does involve, it has about the mean years, but the the thread of it like completely shaped away, I think about things. And because I know I'm never going to be have like an Elon Musk style energy of like, I can just take on seven companies and make it happen, right?

1:46:25I just don't have that ability. I've always focused on the long game. And to me, the long game plays out with get your deep work time in, you know, just keep working on the stuff you do best and get better at it. You know, tomorrow doesn't matter. But if you, if you're doing this most days for the next four months, like that's going to matter, you know? And so I often think about productivity in my own life at the scale of decades. Like, what do I want to do in my 20s? You know, okay, what do I want to do in my 30s? You know, what do I want to do in my 40s? You know, and that helps. Like, in my 30s, I had a lot of young kids.

1:46:54Like, it's, yeah, I mean, the amount of time I could spend total working is like much less, right? But I could still think about what do I want to do in my 30s? How do I make that happen? Let me make sure I'm pushing like on those things. Then everything else I can adapt to, I can give here and there. You know, it allows you to be very adaptable when you're thinking about what do I want to do, you know, for the next 10 years. It also means you're not on a random Tuesday, chiding yourself because like, why didn't I get three more hours of work in? That becomes sort of a nonsensical question. And what you care about is like, what happens in the next decade?

1:47:25Which is, that's the long game. It's not about, you know, hustling today. It's about, I came back to deep work day after day after day when other people got distracted by TikTok, you know, like I got to, yeah, whatever. It's that coming back to what matters again and again. Years ago, I was in a scientific competition slash battle and one of my tools, it wasn't really the kindest tool was I would just suggest to the competitor, um, great television series. So the wire, yeah, that's how it's great. And we won a few, they won a few, but, um, you know, there's something very addictive about those, um, yeah, Netflix shows, I, you know, I mean, they're unbelievably addictive.

1:48:06Just even seeing that the, the, um, slider next episode, slider come up, you can skip the intro. It's just like, they've just dialed it in. So I suggest those to competitors all the time. Not no longer, but, um, then who knows what role they played, but I just noticed in myself, um, how distracting they could be, they could take me to, when I start watching Ozark, yeah, I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, perhaps to use the restroom or something and then starting another episode of it is wild. Yeah. And, um, I, I wonder whether or not a way to reverse engineer one's way to productivity, reverse hack, our way to productivity would be to think about all the ways that you would, um, benevolently deploy distraction for a competitor.

1:48:50And then, um, ask yourself what, which of those you're still engaging in and think of yourself as sort of in a competition with the highly distracted version of oneself. Yeah. And because I think that one task, um, I think for us today is to try and think about for the person listening to this who's non -academic, um, who's hearing about all this distraction that enjoys some social media, you know, how, how can they bring about the best version of themselves in terms of productivity, but also presence for family, um, presence with self, um, et cetera. And, and if one isn't in a competitive environment, um, then maybe it's about setting up different mental maps of the self and then trying to pit them against one another and be the best version.

1:49:33Yeah. Literally. I think that's interesting. Right. Like, think about what would be, yeah, what would I like to say, do you think about my competitor? What would really give me a leg up? Yeah. Am I doing this? I mean, but I would also add in here, this is like a slower productivity type idea. Um, you figure out the thing you really care about. You figure out what you would need to do to really show up for that thing. And then if you're doing that, like, give yourself a break on everything else too. You know what I mean? It's like, I'm this way with right. If I'm getting in my writing time, I have to write.

1:50:02I'm very uncomfortable. And I'm not writing. I just write all the time articles books. You know, I'm always writing. If I'm getting in my writing time, then it's like, okay, the rest of the day, maybe like this week was a kind of a loss. Like, the kids were home sick or there was a crisis at the university or whatever. And like, I'm just trying to keep that under control and like have good productivity habits and like, don't context switch too much and don't be too distracted, but still have your fixed scale of productivity like in the 530 every day in time block and try to be reasonable with that time limit the damage.

1:50:32But if I'm doing the thing that ultimately really matters, I'm going to be pretty happy with it. So it's like moving to the definition of, am I happy with what I'm producing away from a quantity metric and to this more, am I aggregating the quality reps? You know, and it like I think in weightlifting, this would make a lot more sense, right? It's like, yeah, there's a certain number of like a certain amount of time under load, each muscle group needs to be on. And like, if I'm doing that, I'm happy if I'm, you know, weightlifting, right? There's no notion of like, why can't I, why didn't I exercise five hours more or this or that?

1:51:03And so I sometimes try to think about my core intellectual work that way. Like, if I'm getting in the core deep reps and the thing I care most about, which for me is almost always writing, then like the rest I just want to, it's like damage control. Like, I want to like do the other stuff well and like not get too stressed out about it. And, you know, there's the productivity habits that are about doing the stuff that matters and protecting it. And then there's the habits that are all just about, let's not let the other stuff get out of control. Yeah, I find it a little bit easier. You go easier on myself when I think about it that way.

1:51:31Do you listen to music while you work? No. Well, the data certainly support not listening to music or if you do listen to music, listening to music without lyrics. Yeah, you have to train even to get used to it, right? I mean, even to get used to music without lyrics, you got to get used to it. I guess your brain's building the filters. Some people I have met have trained themselves to work with lyrical music, which I think it took them a long time, but I met a self -published novelist who does like a million words a year, which is crazy. And he blasts, because he has four kids, he blasts Metallica in Nascar earphones.

1:52:06And I think how do you possibly write like this? I think he just trained his mind has just like a pure auditory filter that it's that it's he adapted, I guess, or maybe his books are back to that. I don't know. But I like silence or like background noise to, but even background noise is hard. I have a hard time writing at cafes, for example, like I really do like lack of stimuli. Do you use visual blinders? You know, like some people actually do this, they'll, you know, it's like a hoodie and they'll be like really trying to tunnel their vision, which makes perfect sense from the perspective of neuroscience.

1:52:36I mean, your visual world strongly constrains the the narrowness or the broadness of your cognitive maps. Yeah, I mean, I just have my spaces engineered, right? So like, where I write in my library at home, all the interesting windows are behind me and over here, I'm staring across to windows that just goes right next to the neighbors and like just typically blinds down. But as you say this, it just makes me want to, you know, shout that, you know, so many people who think they have attention deficit issues have probably just put themselves in compromised environments, which include smartphone apps and things that, so I mean, like, like there's absolutely no way that they ought to be able to focus.

1:53:19In fact, perhaps the fact that they can focus at all is miraculous given the constraints like trying to run with shackles on. Yeah, I mean, look, we're used to this with physical stuff, right? If we analogize to physical fitness, we're so used to all these details, right? Like it matters like what you're eating, like how you're sleeping, the details of how you train and when you train and how much, like we're very used to this idea that that really matters. We have no intuitions for cognitive development or application. We like treat our brain, I guess because we associate it so much with a sense of self is just this sort of an effable connection to us as a person.

1:53:53We don't think of it as much of an organ as like a muscle or something like this, but we don't have a sophisticated vocabulary at all for thinking about how do you do stuff with your brain, which is the, if you're in knowledge work, that's the whole game. Like the whole game is this brain takes an information, adds value to it. It alchemizes value out of out of mind stuff. And people who who alchemize value out of, you know, muscles, I'm a relief pitcher in baseball, I know like my whole job is like to take a certain muscles on my kinetic chain and use them to move a ball very fast. And if I really, I'm very careful about this, I can have a multi -million dollar deal.

1:54:29Those of us who do this with our brain don't have any of these intuitions. It's just like, you know, you have to work hard, you know, and we're on our phone all day. I mean, this has to be the physical equivalent. If you had like an endurance athlete who's smoking all the time, like this is crazy, like this is directly contra -intercating or indicating what you need to do, what matters, like what the actual activity is that matters for your value production. But with cognitive stuff, we have no intuition like this. Yeah, when I was a junior professor, this was down in San Diego, not Stanford, my girlfriend at the time, she said to me, she said, you're like a professional athlete.

1:55:04That was before I got tenure. And she was like, you're trying to go from like minor leagues to major, to go from, you know, you're like second string to starter. So like you have to treat what you're doing like a professional athlete with their game, like prioritize sleep, prioritize food, prioritize time, prioritize, you know, it's, and we, as you point out, we don't do that with the mind. We tend for cognitive stuff, we tend to assume that we just flip a switch and like focus time. And I think that's in part because there are certain things such as social media, such as a great movie, such as certain social interactions that can immediately and completely harness our attention.

1:55:40Unlike a marathoner where sure I could probably finish the 26 miles or wherever it is, 26 .23, I forget what it is. If I had to do it right now to save my life, but it's not like I can just hit a switch. And I think that's the, that's the kind of caveat here is that the kid that loves video games can definitely focus. Yeah. Give him or her a video game they love and boom, they're focused. So it seems as if there's a problem when they can't, but they know they can. Right. It's stuff's obvious when one states it, but I think it's worth pointing out that this stuff needs attention. It needs, it needs work.

1:56:19Yeah. Which means, and it starts with vocabulary. It starts with intentions, starts with examples. You know, I mean, there should be a book like how to think that we just give to everyone gets to learn and learn. Yeah. Like how to use your brain, like the user manual, you know, like that would be a very useful user manual. And I think in like elite cognitive professions, this gets handed down as lore and people figure it out. Right. I mean, like this was like my experience training at MIT in the theory group is that, you know, everything was focused on getting the most out of your mind. And so it's being passed down from, you know, person to person.

1:56:48It was also in the culture. It was in the way that people acted, but most places that do cognitive work don't have these, don't have these cultures. Yeah. But here's the advantage, though. Here's the silver lining. Right. If you're one of the few cares about it, it's a huge advantage right now. Like it's a big part of like my success. I don't think I have the highest horsepower brain, but like it, I care a lot about trying to, you know, get the most out of it. Like to push it to like the edges of like the reps, I can, I can actually RPMs, I can actually get out of it, you know. So it's an advantage as, you know, someone is listening to this, you start caring about your brain, how it works, how you want to take care of it, what you want to get out of it, you start caring about this.

1:57:27You're going to get advantage just compared to the person right next to you. Like suddenly in your office or, you know, in your grad program, it's going to be like, well, it's going on here. Yeah. Yeah. Let's super power. And sometimes there's a bit of a social cost upfront. Yeah. When I made the shift from being a, let's just call it a not serious student to a serious student in college. And I was coming from behind. I had to put so many more hours in. And so partying was this, this only happened fairly seldom. I still did it. But and it was isolating. Yeah. Actually lived alone in a studio apartment.

1:57:55I mean, it's isolating. They're, you're, you're going to miss out on certain things. There's some deprivation there. But you eventually end up in a position to do far more with your life. Yeah. Of course. What you said a moment ago also reminds me David Goggins, the David Goggins, no, no introduction needed. Has been quoted as saying, you know, it's easy nowadays to be exceptional because so many people are just distracted and wasting their time. So you put in 20 % more effort to being more focused or toward your fitness program. And you're going to, you're going to surpass many, many people. Yeah.

1:58:29So it's not that hard to accelerate. It's just it, it takes some practices that are socially challenging to implement. It's, it's funny. I had that same experience as an undergrad that you had. Yeah. Because I cared. I was impatient to be done with college and like to do things with my brain. I want to be a writer. I want to be an academic. But you know, that takes a lot of work. And I really cared a lot about it. So I was, I was a fraternity brother for one day. And I went to the first meeting they're doing, you know, he just held a pledging or whatever. And I just, not for me. And I walked away.

1:59:04It's like I'm not going to, because this is going to be distracting like the hangovers and this and that. And, and you know, I want to focus on writing. I want to learn how to do this. It is pretty isolating. Yeah. And I know some people that were in the Greek system that also benefited tremendously from that. I wasn't one of them. But I definitely resonate with it. Yeah. So not everyone. Yeah. I mean, they don't all have to be as intense as you and I were. But, but caring about your brain, it gives you a lot of options. And if you're playing catch -up, there's almost always a social cost associated with it.

1:59:37But you eventually are joined by many other people. You find the other nerds. It's a lot of nerds. The other nerds, misfits, and people who were, you know, seeking something, they come around. You find, you find them. I'm interested in this concept of burnout. We hear about burnout. We associate with it too much adrenaline, lack of sleep, tired and wired, feeling disengaged. The poet David White has a beautiful poem. I forget the title about burnout where he says that I think the cure to burnout is wholeheartedness. And I always like that. It's a bit more abstract than the kinds of things we're talking about today.

2:00:19But I like that because there's something about wholeheartedness really leaning into something with the true desire to be there and to explore it no matter how hard that is the opposite extreme of burnout. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think burnout in, if we're thinking knowledge, we're talking people with office jobs. My diagnosis there, it's not exactly quantity of work that does play a role. It's the kind of work. Because I think what's happening, what's been deranging actually for people in these jobs is workloads are getting larger, right? In part, because communication is low friction and we always want to be demonstrating activity, because a pseudo productivity and people are always asking us to do things we say yes.

2:01:02Everything we say yes to brings with it administrative overhead, right? Which is talking about the thing but not actually doing it. So it's like emails about the commitment. It's meetings about the commitment. Because our workloads are larger, what happens then is more and more of our time has to service this administrative overhead because everything we say yes to brings with it its own overhead, it adds up at aggregates, right? So now more and more of our day is spent talking about work and not actually doing the work and then make it even worse. It's not like this overhead is all batched together.

2:01:31It's sort of spread out throughout your day. So it's also putting you in that state of constant distraction, which makes it hard to do work. What I think is burning people out, is they're now in this state where they're saying I'm spending most of my day talking about work, sending emails, attending meetings. Very little time is left to actually make progress on the work and then the workload gets larger and larger. This by itself is deranging, right? It feels like you're in some sort of nihilistic experiment. What is this? Why do I have six hours in meetings? I'm not actually, this can't be the right way to work.

2:02:02And then what happens of course is you have to recover time in the morning and the afternoon, maybe after your kids go to bed, they try to actually make progress. So now you also have just a straight work quantity issue. So you're working more hours, there's an energy drain, but I think that psychological piece of this can't possibly make sense. Like I'm checking email once every two minutes and spent six hours in Zoom, like doing very little actual high value work. Like this can't be the right way to work. That's what I think the burnout epidemic right now is coming from is that psychological component of we all know this is stupid, but no one is saying the emperor has no clothes on.

2:02:37We all know that the amount of email and meetings I'm doing is such a waste of my salary. Like this is a highly trained brain. Like I could be writing these reports or this code or creating these business strategies, but we're all just accepting this. I think the absurdity of the current situation is creating as much of the burnout as it is, just we also have to add these extra hours. There's just like a straight aggregation of work quantity. It's almost analogous to taking professional athletes or would be professional athletes and having them do a bunch of other physical labor so that they're showing up not fresh for the game and little micro injuries and distracted and no one's admitting that this doesn't make sense and everyone's just getting injured and no one's talking about it.

2:03:20So it's the absurdity of it with drive people crazy and it is driving people crazy. It's so difficult though because certain things like smartphones are very useful on the hospital ward. I mean doctors can communicate, nurses communicate so much faster now. Parents and kids can communicate who's going to pick up the kids and nope got stuck in traffic. You go this way, alternate route on Google maps and on and on. So it's all woven in with stuff that's also highly adaptive. It makes it tough. It's almost like the work of being a selective filter is half the work of trying to de -load the cognitive systems that would allow you to do deep work.

2:03:57Yeah. Well in the workplaces even harder than that because part of the issue is email and slack. Let's just say digital communication. I spent a lot of time studying that closely from like a technocratic standpoint, the introduction of digital communication to the workplace and the problem there is the reason why we're checking this all the time. It's not some like individual habit de -optimization. It's not, oh I should just check this less often. What happened is when we introduced low friction digital communication to the office, this emerging consensus came about that said great let's just use ad hoc messaging as our major way of collaborating.

2:04:36Like we can just figure things out on the fly. I can just be like, Andrew what's going on with the whatever and you can answer me and I can send it back. This was very convenient. The activation cost was low and so this is how we began actually collaborating on work. Now what happens is as workloads get higher we now have many things at the same time they're all generating these asynchronous back and forth conversations. Most of these have some sort of time sensitivity. So if I email you and say like what's going on with like the guest coming later today, we have to kind of resolve this before later today.

2:05:04So now it's not just that these messages are going back and forth with all these different threads but I have to keep checking my inbox to make sure the gap's not too big. This is not a failure of habits. It's not a moral failure. It's necessitated by the fact that all these back and forth conversations have to keep moving forward. So it is difficult then if you're in this system to step out by yourself because this is the way we're collaborating is these asynchronous back and forth messages and I can't disengage myself from that without slowing things down. Like from a mathematical game theory point of view, it's a suboptible Nash equilibrium.

2:05:39It's not the right place, not the right way to run this. The utility value that's configuration is low but no one individual can deploy a different strategy that's going to be higher value. We're stuck in it. Right. And so now it becomes really hard for an individual just to say I want to check my email as often. It's built in systemically into this hyperactive hive mind workflow and the only way to break free from the suboptimal configuration is to basically have the organization itself do like a really high cost change to the rules of the game. These are how we're collaborating now. We're not using email freely anymore.

2:06:10We're going to use this system instead here. It's a very expensive top down procedure to free ourselves from the suboptimality. It's like in the world of work that's partially why this is such an intractable problem. I tried to write a book about this recently and it was really hard to gain traction because it's not easy to solve this. Like no individual can move out of this and you have to put in a lot of energy as an organization to try to change this. So in some sense email is a more insidious problem than social media on the phone. Because at least over here this is my engagement with this.

2:06:44And I might have these moderate behavioral addictions but I could make differences here. In my company oh this is much worse. This is like a systemic problem. It's an emergent deterministic work impact on an economic social cultural system that was completely dynamical and went in a way we didn't really expect. So it's a really tough situation sometimes especially in the world of work. How do we get out of this constant distraction? It's why I wrote deep work and I was like well why don't people just do this? That's why they don't just do this because it's not so easy to reclaim this time. Well it's like when I was a graduate student in postdoc I was focused on eating pretty well, meaning just clean -ish food and people talked less about that at that time.

2:07:30It was also really committed to exercise. So I was 16. People were less committed to that in the academic sector at that time. Now I think it's commonplace for people. I'm going to my yoga class. I'm doing my zone two cardio. I go to the gym. Men and women do this. I remember having like this sneak off to the gym. And you felt like a bit of an oddball if you were the one bringing your lunch to the pizza lunch and not there's any wrong pizza. Love pizza. But I was trying to eat well. I have for a long time I feel better when I do and I'm grateful that I did. But you get some weird looks like Audi have a eating disorder or something like that.

2:08:05That's what people would say then. Now people will probably look and know that looks better than the pizza. People start to understand so I think there needs to be a cultural shift. And I think there has been a cultural shift around food and exercise. Certainly food, meditation, sleep. I think people are far more accepting and actually encouraging of their workers and co -workers. Taking really good care in order to function better for longer. Yeah, I think it's going to be the next revolution and it's going to be a revolution. It's going to unlock talking on the scale of like a trillion dollar GVP.

2:08:37When we go through knowledge work and have this revolution, I call it like the cognitive revolution. Let's take really seriously how the brains of our workers work. Like these are our number one assets, like not to be too mechanistic about it. But what is our main capital asset if we're a knowledge work organization? We have some buildings, but really these brains that we have like employment contracts with. These brains create value. Let's take seriously how the brains actually operate. And as soon as we do, we'll say, oh my god, these brains are checking email once every two minutes. What a disaster.

2:09:05It's like if we had a car factory and we spent $20 million on one of these German robots that can put cars on the doors or whatever. And we just weren't taking care of it. And it was like Rusty and it was dropping the doors and the production pipeline was going down. We said, this is crazy. We got to take care of this equipment, right? When we have the cognitive revolution, the sort of cognitive capital revolution in knowledge work, I think it's going to unlock a trillion dollar GDP. I think that's how unproductive we've been. If we just think in the pure raw terms of brains producing stuff that's worth money, like it's like super deterministic and kind of inhumane about it.

2:09:42So much is being lost because we're in the suboptimal mass equilibrium. Everyone just email everyone all the time. Everyone's just on slack all the time. That when we finally have the revolution to get over that, it's going to be a massive economic hit. And AI might play a role in this, right? Because maybe AI wants to get planning capabilities. It's going to be able to take the burden of some of this back and forth planning. I think it's easier to get there with cultural shifts. I don't think we have to wait to build an email capable chat GPT to do this. Like you could solve this tomorrow. This is cultural as much as it's tool based.

2:10:13But I think it's going to be a huge revolution when we get there akin to like the assembly line in manufacturing, which was like a 10X improvement in productivity metrics. When we figured out the continuous motion assembly line with interchangeable parts was a massive. It created this productivity engine. I'm using the economics and so productivity now, you know, dollars per worker. The economic miracle that came from this process -based industrial innovations in the late 19th, early 20th century, the money generated by that, the wealth generated by that was the foundation of the modern west. Like the whole world as we know it was built.

2:10:49There's these huge latent potentials. And right now, I don't think we're there with the brain. And I think it's going to be a huge revolution. It's just difficult, right? It's not an easy revolution to start. But I think it's going to change whole industries in ways that we're not, it's going to be hard to even imagine. Yeah. And I think as long as there are individuals who either by virtue of lack of family or other constraints or by virtue of just having more energy and requiring less sleep because these individuals do exist out there. There will always be these individuals that can kind of apply themselves more than others in the sense that they can get in earlier and stay in later.

2:11:25And that trying to be them is not a good idea that we all need to optimize for our best balance of productivity, deep work, and work -life balance for lack of a better term. When I was a graduate student, I was really committed to my craft. And I remember hearing about a student, he's now a professor, a very accomplished and a chronologist. I'll just give him a name because he did this thing. He doesn't know me. But I heard about this guy that had been in the department, Randy Nelson. And everyone was like, he used to work a hundred hours a week. So I was like, all right, great. I'm going to start logging my work hours silently.

2:12:00I'm going to do 102 hours. And I ended up with a flu and an autoimmune condition. I literally had an autoimmune condition. I've never had one since I then I stopped working that much. Started working, quote, unquote smarter, along the lines of many of the things you're saying here, although I didn't implement or know about all these tools that time. And of course, the autoimmune thing went away. It was a fairly minor thing. Never had it again. But you can destroy yourself simply by working more, even if it's deep work. So the solution is not necessarily more. It's just like with exercise. I guess that stands it's obvious.

2:12:33But I thought I shared that anecdote because Randy Nelson taught me what I'm capable of and what I'm not capable of. Yeah. Well, the other thing that happens, by the way, too, it's not just who's capable of working more, get these advantages. There's these other unpredictable inequities. I talked to a law firm once years ago about deep work. And I was invited by a group, was actually a group of women lawyers who had a reading group. And they said part of what was happening at this law firm is that people who were disagreeable, just sort of gruff and jerks would get asked to do less of what they would call non -promotable activities, or can you organize this or whatever, which meant they had more time to do deep work, which meant they would do better and they would rise faster.

2:13:15And then what was happening then was you had accidentally built a system that said, let's make sure we have a fast track for our most disagreeable employees to the partnership level where actually you need to be pretty agreeable because your client acquisition is really on the partners. And so they accidentally had pushed towards this inequity. And these inequities happen all the time when we leave it like haphazard. And okay, so who's doing less work? Well, I just sort of like, I'm gruff and people don't like me or I have something going on at my house. It means I don't have the same time to do this.

2:13:46And you end up pushing people up these paths that might not be who you really want to select because you're selecting for things that are sort of unrelated to their actual underlying talent or like how much they can actually produce. And so I'm with you on that. Yeah, it's a complex problem, but attractable one nonetheless. I'm interested in your thoughts on remote work versus in -person work and the hybrid model. I've heard about a hybrid model recently, if anyone's a big record company, here in Los Angeles, said that they require one in -person day per week unless on sick leave. They require one at home day per week.

2:14:27And then the other day is it's at your discretion. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting model. For you in a five -day week model. Yeah, I mean, my proposals have thought about this a lot is, okay, if you're going to do hybrid work, and I proposed this in a Atlantic article recently, which created some positive, some negative ways, as like here's the way you should do it. Synchronize the schedule. Here's at home days, here's an office days, but for everybody, or have a few of these schedules, but like groups of people who work together have the same schedule, but then make the rule at home days, no meetings, no email.

2:15:00Like that's the way to really get the full benefit out of hybrid work. When we're in the office, we have meetings and we can talk about work and we're at home, we're just doing work and we can do it without distraction and we can just stay deep and really turn through things. I think it would really make a big difference on the overload issue, I think it would be much more sustainable. Remote work, so I did a lot of coverage or remote work as this was first emerging in the early pandemic. There I became convinced, I was doing this twice a month column for the New Yorker back then that was just looking at the pandemic transforming work.

2:15:27And I came away with the idea that remote work can be fantastic, but it's difficult. And it can't just be, do the job you were doing in person, but just do it at home, and we have Zoom and we'll figure it out. Like if you're going to be fully remote, we have to rethink what work means for that. And there's a lot of differences it needs to have. It needs to be way more structured. It probably needs to be, you're working on less things. It's very clear what you're working on. The collaboration is much more defined and much less frequent. You probably need to be freed from the sort of hyperactive hive, my dance, if we're just emailing each other all day and in Zoom meetings all day.

2:16:03You have to sort of reconstitute what a remote job is. I think before it works. And we know this in part because software developers, pre -pandemic, were one of the only knowledge sectors to have a really successful track record with remote work. That is the only sector within knowledge work where we had large companies fully remote. They did that because their jobs, they had really structured them around these agile workload management systems where, okay, here's when we talk about work, here's how long it takes, here's how we assign you new work. You work on one thing at a time, you sprint until it's done.

2:16:36They had all this structure around work, which didn't really matter if you're in the office or not. So the less structured work is, the more free for all, the more you need we have to be in the office. So I'm a huge fan of full -time remote work, but I think those jobs have to look very different than a standard 2019 job. Yeah, I've always done a hybrid of remote work. They stick Wednesday mornings at home from the lab. But nowadays it's wild because it's especially during the pandemic, but still now I mean, you can do the whole day in pajamas and get it worked on. I love this idea of no email and limiting text and social media while at home doing work to really extract the most out of it.

2:17:17Are there any data maybe from the pandemic era or prior or beyond about Zoom and things like it in terms of how they enhance or diminish or perhaps have no effect on productivity like Zoom specifically and meetings. I mean, we just found ourselves in Zoom all the time for a while. That was the bigger problem. I mean, so there is data that says, for example, a hybrid meeting, some people are online, some people aren't. These are less effective meetings. They don't work as well. But the bigger problem with Zoom, I think, was the quantity. And part of it was just the technology involved, right? So if we're in the office together, and I have a relatively quick thing to talk to you about, I can just grab you and we can talk about this.

2:18:00And the footprint is going to be five minutes. But it's not just that it's five minutes, it's five well allocated minutes. Because I'm probably going to use the social cues of your doors open or you're going to get coffee anyways, right? In the Zoom era, instead we would say, well, we should set up a meeting, right? Because we have to talk about this. But if you think about a standard online calendar, it's difficult to have a meeting this less than 30 minutes long. You just have to drag it, you know? I mean, 30 minutes is like the default smallest length meeting. So we're taking a lot of informal back and forth and inflating the time.

2:18:29I think that was part of it. So we just had too much Zoom going on, right? If it was just I do one meeting a week, now it's on Zoom, it used to be in person. We were all on Zoom, we used to all be in person. That's not that big of a deal. It's maybe like a slightly less effective meeting, but it's fine. It's good enough. But if it's I have four X more meetings than I used to, because of the inherent inefficiencies of having to go to pre -scheduled virtual for basically all collaboration, that could be a huge problem. The data I saw from Microsoft, the last data I saw was a 252 % increase in these meetings from 2020 to now.

2:19:03And it's not a number. It's not like it peaked and then it started coming back down again once we went to hybrid. We just it's just high and it's still creeping up, right? That's a lot of time that just vanished. And we sort of pretend like it didn't. But that's a lot of time that is not actively working on things and just talking about work or talking about other stuff. We get around the talking about work. I think it's a real issue. Is there a top three list of things that if you had a magic wand, you would see everyone do each day. If you had if you had three he wishes. Yes, you mean what they be.

2:19:40If these are the college workers, if these are the enhancing work creativity, focused work, I mean, I think you and I both clearly agree that there's not just great value in terms of productivity, but a great degree of life enrichment. Like a deep level of enrichment in terms of happiness, feelings of well -being, time for connectivity with others, lessons about deep work that can be exported to time with others where we are really present, et cetera. Just so much to be gained from these from engaging in deep work and things like it that you've written about in your various books and talk about on your podcast.

2:20:19Is there a top three? Yeah. Yeah, so if I do three, I would say, okay, first of all with your workload, simulate something like a pull system instead of a push system. And what I mean by that is when you keep track of what you're working on, have the top part of that list, which is actively working on these things, and keep that top part of your list to like two or three things. Everything else is in the bottom part of the list. It's to work on next and it's in an ordered queue. And so when you finish something that you're working on, you pull something new to take it slot from the list below.

2:20:53So what I'm trying to do with that advice is reduce all this administrative overhead because now even if like, you can't get away, you have to say yes to these things because it's the way like your organization works. The stuff that's in the waiting to work on queue, you say, I don't have meetings about that, I don't do emails about that. I wait till I'm actively working on it and I only actively work on three things at a time. Now, I'm going to finish those things really quickly because I don't have 15 items worth of meetings I'm going to every day. So things are going to pull up there pretty quickly.

2:21:21And so the rate at which I'm accomplishing things will probably be higher than it was before. But I only work on three things actively. You could even make this visible. It's in a shared document if you want to. When someone asks you to do something new, tell them to put it on the end of your queue. You're like, oh, okay. So like, Andrew is not working on this right now. He's working on these three things. And there's seven things here. And I'm adding something number eight. So I know not to expect something for a while. In fact, I can keep checking this list until I see Andrew's working on it.

2:21:49So I can see it's making progress. And then once I know he's working on it, I can start email him about it. We can do just a normal type of overhead you would have with with projects, right? That alone is going to have a huge difference. Like now the amount of distraction your day is going to plummet because that's generated from overhead of things you've agreed to do. And that's going to plummet that out. All right. So that'd be number one. Could I just thank you? Could I just ask a few questions about that just to clarify? So for a user myself as an example selfishly, but then of course, I don't know what everyone else out there is pursuing.

2:22:19But so substitute the specifics I'm about to insert here for whatever it is that you care about in your life. So researching podcasts. Yeah. So low podcasts in particular for me is my major task in life these days with respect to work. So that would be top of the list. And then there could be two other items on this top of Q. Would daily activities like like exercise, social time with loved ones, etc. Would that be included there? Or were talking specifically about work? Yeah, let's just keep just work. Okay. So it would be podcast prep. So you might have the podcast prep. You might have the particular topic though.

2:22:58Right. Right. Okay. So I'm working on an episode right now about about skin health. Yeah. You could have two different episodes topics. You're probably those could both be up there. Yep. So skin health allergies episode. These are two that I'm spending a lot of time on months. Yeah. In fact, yeah. And then you heard might be something that involves the media company, something around the business side of it. Like, okay, we're trying to figure out a plan for whatever. Right. Content for for new content. Brand association. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Got it. Great. So those three would be top of the list.

2:23:29And every day until those are done, they could sit top of the list. And then there are a number of items underneath those that fall under whatever. Yeah. And critically, when these other items come up, right? Like, oh, this is like a topic, for example, I want to do a show on. You have a place to put it. Mm -hmm. It's not being forgotten. Or here's a business idea. Really? We need to figure out like whatever. We want to do something with our camera configure. Okay. Put on the list. So it's not being forgotten. Like, it's on there. And you can see where it is. Not only is it on there, but like this could be shared among your team.

2:23:58So as people had extra information or things to add to one of these projects, they can add it to it on the list, right? So the information is aggregating. So if you use a tool like Trello for this Trello spelled TREL. Okay. It's an app. It's a web -based service that the metaphor is just index cards in piles. Got it. Right? But they're virtual. Okay. But you can flip over the index card digitally, attach files, write notes. And so I use Trello for my own organization, what I'm working on. So now you have a place where you can gather, like, oh, we just, I just heard about something that's relevant to this thing I need to work on.

2:24:34You have a place to put it. Like, it goes on to the Trello card. Or you could do this with shared documents. Doesn't matter. You're just like literally typing things into a Google Doc. Or a whiteboard. Or a whiteboard. Right. Yeah. You could be, we're keeping track of these things, right? I'm going to do this, by the way. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm a big believer in this. And then everyone can see what you're working on. And then the key thing is if it's not in your active list, you don't have meetings about it. And you don't have emails about it, right? Like, if people have ideas or things, they just add it to the card.

2:25:00So when that gets up to the active list, we can work on all the information there. We haven't forgotten anything. And what two word language do you use to describe this first point, this method? I love this. I called it a pull -based pull -based. Right. What gets me pulled up? You pull into the, so you're fixing it in advance. Here's how much concentration I have to give on work. And you pull stuff into that. The alternative is push -based, which is how most organizations run, which is when I want you to do something, I just push it onto you. And now you have to deal with it. Got it. Once heard, email described as a public post to do list.

2:25:32Yeah. That made me scared of email in a way that nothing else had. Yeah. It's new ports, pull -based system. I called it that, by the way. This is what in a lot of the advice in the first, one of the chapters of the new book is basically how do you get away with implementing this when you have a boss? And there's all sorts of different. So you're your own boss. You can just say this is what we're doing. Here's the board. But there's a lot of subtle ways you can do this. Yeah. Right. So that's number one. Yeah. That's number one. The Cal Nuke words pull -based system. I'm going to do this. And I'm actually going to report back on this at some point.

2:26:05You won't see the post on social media because you're not there, but others will. All right. That's one. All right. Number two would be multi -scale planning. Okay. So now this is planning. You're planning on three different scales daily, weekly, seasonally or quarterly, however you want to think about it. Right. So you have a plan for like the semester, the season, or the quarter. Like this is what I'm working on. These are the big objectives I want to hit. Here's to remind us to myself about like what matters. Like remember, like I'm overhauling my my workout routine. We're trying to like do this with the podcast.

2:26:38You look at that scale planning every week when you build your weekly plan. And the weekly plan, it gets free form text. You don't need anything, you know, any special tools. Your weekly plan, you're looking at the actual calendar. All right. What from my bigger scale plan, my seasonal quarterly plan? What am I trying to make sure I can make progress on this week? And you confront the reality of your week, you see where's the empty space where there's the busy space. You also change what's on your plate right here. You know, if I cancel this thing, that frees up that whole morning, which means like I could really make progress on this, which I really want to make progress on.

2:27:11So great. I'm going to cancel that thing on Friday. So you're looking at the whole week as one unit. Then every day, you look at your weekly plan. Like, okay. So, so I'm going to use this when I make my plan for the day. And when you do your daily plan, you do time blocking. Now I'm every I'm giving a job every minute on my work day, not my day after work, but every minute of my work day. I'm time blocking. So I call it time blocking is you're literally drawing blocks around the free time. Okay. This I'm working on this, this I'm working on this. So you're making a plan for your day. That is informed by the weekly plan.

2:27:41So in multi -scale planning, you have like the big picture things you care about trickle their way all the way down to, okay, I'm what am I going to do during this hour, during the day. But you don't have to grapple every this what most people do. Every time I'm figuring out what to do next, I'm not grappling with all these scales at the same time. What are my objectives? What's my big plan? What's going on this week? You're you're dealing with each of these scales when the time is right. And so when it finally gets down to it's now three o 'clock, you're just doing what that block is. And you figured out that block earlier today when you looked at your weekly plan, that weekly plan reflected what was in your semester plan, which you figured out, you spent a whole afternoon working on at the beginning of the semester.

2:28:20So multi -scale planning, it keeps you focused on what matters. It prevents you from wandering through your day and how you disperse your energy. And it gives you control over your time on different scales from like canceling major ongoing obligations that just being more efficient about what you do during a given day. So I swear by multi -scale planning to try to keep this whole lumbering ship that is sort of like Kell Newport aiming in the towards the right shores, you know, like keep correcting and keeping it aimed back. I love this. This is more less what I do with my physical workouts. Every week I know I'm going to get three resistance training sessions, two or three cardiovascular training sessions.

2:29:00I know I'm going to train my legs once it's either going to be on depending on travel Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. I'll train torso muscles in the middle of the week. I'll train sort of limb accessory muscles on a Saturday. Yeah. Long run on Sunday or hike on Sunday or some other day, there'll be some sort of hit workout in the middle of the week. Yeah. Ideally there's a jog in there too. And you can adjust it a little bit based on the reality of the week. Yeah, I might double up for two days and take a day off. I have my ideal schedule, but sometimes it gets compromised. And then I do that for 16 week cycles where I vary the kind of intensity load, etc.

2:29:34And I've done this for years and it just kind of works for me. Yeah. Now with cognitive work, I don't tend to do this. It tends to be more deadline based. Yeah. But I think that the pull -based system is really going to help. If I dovetail it with this multi -scale planning, I love this. And you can see the deadlines now. You see them coming. So that's part of what's nice about multi -scale planning is you know the deadlines coming up. And so when you're doing your semester planning, you start thinking like, okay, for the big deadlines, like when I get to December, I need to be really starting getting after this thing is going to be due.

2:30:06Yeah, I've got a book to. Yeah. So then you know, and so this really helps in book writing. Because now when I'm planning, it's like, you know, a year in advance, I know this month, I need to get like roughly the rough draft of chapter two done. You know, and then that trickles down to my week where I'm going to make sure I have enough time clear to like, be on track for finishing it. And then that trickles into my day. Now I know to like block those mornings to work on it. So it all, it all works together. An added bonus of the daily scale is I would say, communications should get its own block.

2:30:36Email, social media, whatever that's like you communicating with the outside world, goes into your time block plan. So if your block doesn't include that, you don't do it. So it's like, this block is writing. It's not email, it's not social media. So the rule is really simple. I'm not going to use email or social media. But I still need to do email at some point. So I have to put a block in for it. And when I'm in my email blocks, I'm doing the email. If I need to go on social media to see what's going on with like the latest episode or something, I got to give that time. And then you can monofocus.

2:31:05Because then it's like psychological hack. But basically, when you particularly, when you schedule communication and distraction, now the only thing you have the muster willpower to do is obey the single rule of I'm following my blocks. If you don't do that, if you're like, I just sometimes do email and social media, sometimes I don't. Now what you have to do is just constantly be having this debate is now the right time to do this. And I'm going to do at some point today. Why not now? Well, what about now? What about now? Like you're just constantly asking yourself, right? That's impossible, right?

2:31:35That's going to drain you. But if all you have to do instead is say, my commitment today is to follow my blocks. And I get, I really feel good when I do it. And like, I check off a box if I do give yourself some feedback here. It's a much easier cognitive battle. But when then just trying to be reasonable about, well, let me wait a little longer to check my email. Like you're going to lose that battle, you know, eight times out of 10, which is like enough to really overcome it. So that's like a hidden bonus of time blocking is now you can really get your arms around separating different cognitively distinct activities.

2:32:06This is where the analogy of time restricted eating comes to mind. Again, not that that's the best way to lose weight or maintain weight or it's it's rolling longevity is still debated, et cetera. But I think for many people, not all, but for many people, the decision that they do not eat during certain time blocks and they do eat another time blocks is just far more tractable in the real world for them. Then trying to limit portion size decide whether or not they're going to eat or they're going to pass the cookie and have a little bit. Nope, they're they're interfasting window. It's just it simplifies the issue.

2:32:38And as a consequence, I think it improves behavior overall. Although the clinical trials point to some mixed results with that last statement. Again, I don't want the nutrition East does after me. The point is the time blocking and the thick black line didness of the yes, no, the binary yes, no, as eat don't eat or a single comment. Email, communicate, don't communicate in a given time block. I think that's that really is what it's about it. It honors the the power of those sorts of neural computations. And there's another hidden bonus of time blocking too is visually distinct blocks. So what I do, for example, is I put double thick line around deep work blocks focusing on some not just deep work, but deep work on things I really care about.

2:33:23Just this gives you a visual record. How much deep work am I doing? It's this diagnosis. I use a paper -based time block planner. So you flip through those pages. And you're just looking for dark blocks. So you see, if I see, I don't have a lot of dark blocks. I say, this is my whole job. My whole life, I've been trained in a lab to think really hard about things and write things. Why do I not have very many dark blocks? You get this feedback mechanism. So there's all these bonuses when you start doing this type of, doing this type of planning. Before you tell us about number three, I often have fantasized about a web -based program that seems to run countercurrent to much of what you're talking about, but goes back to this the whiteboard MIT observer stuff that you talked about at the beginning, which is often long for, okay, I need to write today.

2:34:09I need to write a book or I'm going to do some podcast prep. I'm going to pop up a few windows of other people that are also doing deep work. And we're not going to communicate. In fact, if we do, or if music comes through on the microphone or somebody costs, that's going to be considered a distraction. But does anyone want to join me for some deep work? Yes. Where we don't communicate. And I often thought I would just pay someone to be there to just sit there. But I haven't done that. There are multiple companies that do this. Okay. Yeah. It's interesting. You're online with, or in person, with just other people doing deep work.

2:34:43So a deep work club. The challenge is synchronizing schedules because I might want to do this with somebody on the East Coast, and they might not be doing deep work at the same time. And a recording isn't the same, because then they're not really watching. But there's something really to this. I mean, especially for at -home workers or people like me that work often in isolation. The rest of students do this. Distortation boot camps. I don't know if you had this experience. But Georgetown does a lot of colleges do this. Okay. Everyone work on their dissertation. We're all going to get together.

2:35:09And we're going to work on it together. Because they would often have me come speak at these things earlier in my career. It would just be a bunch of grad students. They were just coming to the same space. And they would work for like, okay, 90 minutes. And then they would have like a speaker come in or launch. And so the group cohesion of everyone working deeply at the same time. Writers retreats are the same way. We all go to the same house in the middle of nowhere. So that we're all just going to encourage each other right because that's all what everyone's doing here. Yeah. So social pressure.

2:35:35I'm with you. I was thinking if I ever needed to, you know, put a big extension on my house, that's what I should do. Just like, okay, pay me money. Then I will sit there on Zoom and do deep work with you. This is my secret plan. I pay money. I pay money to do deep work in parallel with you by with a virtual window there. There's Kalan has office doing that. I think there's something nice about having some knowledge of who people are. You know, like, hey, logging in today. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's get down to it. Set the timer and go. And then, you know, Asda, I'm out. Working at the library, academic libraries.

2:36:09Why did people do that? Right. Yes. Everyone there is working. Right. Yeah. No, I'm big believer in that. There's really something sticky to that. Okay. Number three. All right. Have a shutdown ritual, which clearly demarcates the end of work in the start of the night after work. And the shutdown ritual, so it has to you have to close open loops, right? So you got to make sure this is like a review type period. Let me look back at my inbox and look at my plan. Let me look at my, you know, my time block and my calendar. Really make sure I, there's nothing urgent that needs to be dealt with that I did it.

2:36:46And there's nothing that's just in my head that I don't want to forget. It's not written down somewhere like take care of all of that, right? So you review all these things. You get what am I going to do tomorrow? You don't have to build your whole plan for tomorrow. You have a sense for it. And then you need some sort of demonstrative thing you do to indicate that you finished the routine. Right? So my, my long time newsletter readers know I used to actually have a phrase. I would say schedule shutdown complete, like a crazy phrase, right? It's not how normal people talk, right? Now I have a planner that has like a check box that says shutdown complete next to it.

2:37:21The reason why that is a demonstrative anchor is that you use this then for cognitive behavioral therapy because at first people have a hard time shutting down work. I mean, I invented this because I had a very hard time shutting down work on my dissertation. I just, what this proof doesn't work and blah blah. So what you do is when you're, you get a rumination post shutdown. Hey, what about what's going on with our work? Are we doing the right thing? Do we forget this or that? Instead of engaging in the rumination? Well, it's like, no, I think we're okay. Let me think about my schedule tomorrow.

2:37:49What's my plan? You instead can just say, I said that crazy phrase, right? Check that box. I wouldn't have said that phrase unless I had gone through everything and made sure that I had a good plan and nothing's been missed and it was okay to shut down work. Because of that, I'm not going to engage with the rumination. I said the weird thing. Let's get back to what we're doing. This is like cognitive behavioral therapy that after a month or so, you were really able to actually effortlessly disengage from work and do everything, you know, all the other stuff that matters, right? Without having the constant rumination about work, which gives your mind an actual break to, you know, do other things.

2:38:25So, I mean, this is more mental health and productivity, but for me, it was critical. I mean, I can really remember when I came up with this, you know, exactly where I was in my graduate career. And there's just too many, too many ideas and concerns that were just roiling. And like, once I did this, you know, it took a few weeks and then I could actually like, shut down and go on and do other things. Yeah, the paired associated nature of the brain can make it really problematic if you're thinking about work at the dinner table. You start to associate the dinner table with work. I mean, when Matt Walker came here to do this six part series that's soon to be released, and we were discussing insomnia, he said, you know, one of the major issues with insomnia is people who have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep will often stay in bed when they can't sleep.

2:39:10And then the bed becomes associated with challenges with sleep that, you know, hence the recommendation that virtually every sleep coach and sleep scientist recommends that people actually, if they can't sleep for 20 minutes or so of effort, then you get up and leave the bed and go someplace else until you feel sleepy enough to go back and try or fall asleep on the couch elsewhere. I put that in as a note to you. But this seems incredibly important. Also, for enrichment of relationships with spouses and children and people in your life, I mean, the problem is the first thing that we ask people when they walk in the door to be glue is, how does work today?

2:39:46Yeah, how does work? What do you do today? Tell me about your school day, tell me about your work, maybe we need to come up with better questions. Yeah, like, here's something interesting we could do, or here's like something I read about unrelated to work. Yeah, no, I think it makes a huge difference. And again, there's all these meta benefits for these things. So one of the meta benefits for all of these is also, these are all very structured. You'll begin to build a reputation as someone who is very careful about how they manage themselves in their time. Like, if you're doing multi -scale planning, and certainly if you're doing, you know, pull -based workload management, people are going to start thinking, this is someone who thinks a lot about like how they manage their work day and how things happen.

2:40:24This gives you massively way, right? Yeah, because we think what like our colleagues want from us is accessibility. But really, why they want accessibility is because they have no clarity about, you know, are we going to do this thing or are we going to remember to do this thing? Am I going to have to keep bothering you? You know what? If I don't really think you have your act together, I just wish you would just do this right away or respond to me right away, because I'm going to have to worry about this until I hear back from you that you did it. Like accessibility is born from lack of trust or lack of clarity, right?

2:40:54So if you have the reputation of someone who really has their act together, you can, for example, lean into a shutdown. I don't do email at all. And people, they don't think that you're being lazy or that you're not keeping up with the work. They're like, no, like Andrew has his act together with this stuff. I trust them. When you show them something like this workload management system, like this is where the queue is, like I can't get to this yet. It's like, okay, that's reasonable. Like you have your act together. So there's this meta benefit of starting to get a little bit more structured about your time and cognitive work, is that people will give you more flexibility to work with the better you get at actually working with, you know, the resources you have as your reputation grows, your autonomy grows.

2:41:34Yeah. And of course, as your reputation grows, more gets thrown at you and it probably takes a bit more discipline to enforce these things. But I always remind myself and other people that, you know, the reason people want to access you is because of presumably the consequences of the deep work you did. Yeah. Not. But people love meetings. Gosh, I won't do brainstorm meetings anymore unless it's with my close team. Yeah. It's like you can pitch me a contract and we can reverse engineer the idea, you know. But it just doesn't work to meet with people and kind of brainstorm stuff. But I don't know what this is.

2:42:08Like I think maybe people are taking their own lack of structure and projecting it on to other people as a way to fill the time. Yeah, pseudo productivity as well. Like this is what I have like visible activity. And so let's, we have meetings, let's talk, let's hop on calls. Like that all feels useful. When ultimately it's not like I'm with you on it. Like remember, the reason why everyone wants to talk to me is because not I'm so great at brainstorming meetings, you know, people like this is great. Like Andrew's great at brainstorming meetings. So that's why we want to bother them. No, it's because you were really good at the podcast and you were doing like the deep thing.

2:42:41And then that brings in the better you get at what you do best. The more the world conspires to take away your time to actually work on it. Like professors know this well. Like pre -tenure, they most big universities are pretty good at preaching the professors. All that's going to matter is going to be your research. But they throw a ton of other stuff at you. It depends on the school. Like I was like Georgetown is very good about this. They're like we don't from our perspective, it's a waste of resources to hire you and have you not get tenure. So like we want to try to protect you from they keep service requirements low, for example, and like just focus on, you know, just focus on your research because that's what's going to matter.

2:43:15And at least professors know this, right? Like there's a clear process. Like the tenure process, most people don't understand tenure. They think it's like getting promoted at a job. And there's like all these different ways you can sort of impress your boss. It's none of that, right? I mean, it's these confidential letters from leading scholars in your field that are doing nothing but brutally assessing your research. How good is Cal? Who are two people who are better than him on the market right now? Who are like two people he's slightly better than would you tenure him at your university? What university could he get tenureed at?

2:43:43I mean, it's all that matters is yeah, research quality. So you have to somehow rediscover what that is if you're not a professor. Like ultimately, like this is the thing I do best for my company. So let me do that. Let me do that really well. There's also an aspect by the way of if you do a deep thing really well, that does not attract as much work as if what you do is you're just really good at like responding to people's things and putting out fires. It's like you don't want to get too much trapped in that game unless that's the game you want to play. You know, if you get trapped in the game of how I distinguish myself as I reply right away, it doesn't matter when it is, I make your life easier.

2:44:19You're playing the game and making other people's lives easier and that's what they're going to ask you to do. But if instead you play the game of I'm competent with this like I'll respond to the emails and not be I won't be pathological about it. But the real thing you care about is like this code on producing or these reports on producing are just really second to none. Then you're not going to get a much of the small stuff. They're like, okay, we'll do that then. That's what we want, that's what we want you to work on. So what is your equivalent of research is probably a really key question for a lot of people.

2:44:49How do you treat social engagements through work like the company barbecue, I don't know if anyone does company barbecue anymore, but happy hour or I don't know if anyone does that either. And social engagements with family because obviously those things are important too. Are those on your schedule? Well, I treat work schedule different from non -work schedule. So my work schedule is this time block plan, part of a multi -scale plan, really dialed in. Like when I'm working, I'm working. But then when I'm not working, I'm way more lax. So I don't do time block planning of my weekends or my evenings.

2:45:29The work shutdown being clear, it gives you more flexibility there. So it's like, okay, what do we want to do? Let's go see these people, see these things with the family. I like to be flexible and not overly planned outside of the work day. But then during the work day itself, you know, it's much more machine -like. So you're fairly not lax, but you're a bit more relaxed around social engagements and engaging with the kids. But yeah, work when you're working at home or in the office, you're a beast. Yeah, I'm like a black box in the work days. Like when I'm working, I disappear. Nice. Yeah. And then when I'm done, I'm around.

2:46:07But my family and friends, and they've learned, if you text me during the work day, I'm not part of that game of like, I'll just respond back to it. People know, it may have been four hours since I saw my phone. It's like Lex Friedman. Yeah. People often ask to get in touch with Lex, and I've made that connect for a few people. But I always point out, Lex will go long periods of time where we don't connect, and then we're close, close friends. We spent a lot of time in person on the phone, texts. But I understand that if I text Lex, I might not hear from him for four or five days, and it's all good.

2:46:39Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, that tells me he's good. It's like that scene at the end of Goodwill hunting where he's like, I just want to show up at your house. You're not there. And you get, there are any smiles as friends, Ghani knows he went the direction of his heart. So you're saying if you start to get a lot of like memes texted to you from Lex? That's not going to happen. You're going to be like, what's going on, Lex? That's never going to happen. What's struggle? Let's struggle. You have it in your life right now. I'm a big believer in the phone. I'm old school. I pick up the phone, make a call.

2:47:04We'll get on a call. Sometimes FaceTime. We do texts one or two things back to us. Often really quick. Yeah. Really quick. And I have other friends in the podcast space for which it's the same. It's just, phone is a great tool. And you know, drop in and then get back to it. Yeah. Not a lot of cheater chatter on. I like that. I always like, text is like a great logistical tool. You know, like, wait, what restaurant are you at? Oh, you know, okay, I'll meet you there. Are you free to talk? Like I love text as a logistical tool. But you're right. As a conversational tool, yes, not for me either. And do you take vacations where you are on pure vacation?

2:47:38So just with family or maybe even solo or with your spouse, where it's like no digital, anything? Yeah, digital is not a problem for me on vacation, but my wife won't let me not bring something to work on on vacations because because I become a monster. Got it. Your brain needs that. It needs it. Yeah. When we had little kids, I tried this, right? It's like, okay, like this is it. I'm not going to think about anything like this is, and I would just become like an anxiety case. So what I've learned is bring one thing. It's like very deep and non -urgent. Like a book concept I'm trying to make work or an academic paper that was like trying to crack or like something new.

2:48:15And I need like that 90 minutes a day to like walk on the beach and think, and I have to have a notebook. I have it with me in here. I have to have a notebook with me so that like I can capture notes and get them out of my head on vacation. And now we have a happy medium. Like I work a little bit every day. No email. I don't get that email. Not no deep work thinking. I'm much happier. It's like an itch that you have to scratch. Yeah, if I'm not writing or thinking, it's I get cognitively antsy. I get anxious, you know, like I'm on. I've been now. I'm talking to you now, but I've been traveling doing some podcasts and stuff like this.

2:48:49And I'm way out of my cognitive comfort zone here because I'm not logging. Like early in this trip, I was on a New Yorker in Atlantic deadline, like writing all the time, you know, in California time up at 5 a .m. like, you know, and I'm done with that now and I'm really cognitively antsy. Like I just feel out of sorts right now, you know, like I'm not working. I'm not thinking. Love it. Cal, for me, this has been such an honor. I mean, I should have said this at the beginning of the episode, but I've been such a fan for such a long time. Long before we met or communicated at all, I started reading your books.

2:49:27And I would say you and Tim Ferriss of the people who are really in my academic career had such a profound influence on how I approach work. And it required that I do things kind of against the grain people around me. And very quickly, I saw that I was making progress much faster than I would have otherwise. Yeah. And I never looked as competitive endeavor with others. But and you just continue to turn out valuable information, actionable tools, you know, book and after book after book. And obviously they require some structure and some some restriction, but also some moving toward action items.

2:50:05And I love these top three that you provided us on the pull forward, the multi -scale planning and the shutdown ritual. And all all the others on the you put forth. And I guess that the major takeaway for me today is that yes, you've developed all these tools, but you also use them. And it's not lost on me that you also have a flourishing career as a computer scientist. So you're not just somebody who talks about and here I'm not dissing anyone else in the in the information sphere like just talks about habits or just talks about protocols. You do these things and you implement them in the context of your work life, your creative life, your family life, and your relationship to self and you exercise.

2:50:46And and I think that that all combines to to be an amazing example of what's possible if we introduce a bit of understanding about how we function as a as a being. And that we implement some of these tools in the user manual that you've come up with. And so I just want to say on behalf of myself and everyone who's listening and watching, you know, thank you so much. This is incredibly valuable information regardless of what one is doing in life. And I'm certainly going to implement this three -step system. And I do have the book. I always like to read books after guests are on. I'm going to read the book.

2:51:25And I'm going to do some posts about what I experience as a consequence. So thank you so much. I would pay a substantial amount of money to do deep work sessions with you in the screen there. But I won't put that on you. I'm just going to I'm going to just bite down and and do this stuff. So thank you so much for being a pioneer in this space and for such a clear communicator. We all owe you a debt of gratitude. No, thanks Andrew. Well, and for the rest of us professors who are also podcasting, we owe you a debt of gratitude because you're showing us what's actually what's actually possible. So this has been great.

2:51:59Meeting you as well has been fantastic. All right. Well, thank you. We won't we won't see each other on social media, but we'll we'll share a little bit of that at some point before long. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Cal Newport to find links to Cal's website, books and to his excellent podcast. Please see the links in the show note caption. If you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review.

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2:53:43Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Cal Newport. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.