Why Am I Working More and Getting Less Done?

23:58And it's all a conflict between the worker and the management. That's not the situation here. The pseudo productivity actually produces less profit. It's a bad way to run a business and it makes people miserable. Like both of those. So you fix one, you're fixing both types of things. It's actually everyone is suffering under this regime. And that's often confusing for people at first. It's like, I'm on everyone's side here. This is going to make your bottom line better and it's going to make your employers happier. Both of that's true. I've heard you say this theory that like there is not the we overvalue the pseudo work.

24:30You know, there's no value to it. But there is like a real cost to the other thing. There's a real cost to being a bottleneck. And everybody does not like a bottleneck. One of my fears when I'm off doing deep work and I like usually I put my phone far away from me. I'm like in my zone. I try to do it with pen and paper as much as possible. Like I don't turn on my laptop more than a couple times a week if I can avoid it. Then I'm like I do feel this like lurking like I'm not a people placer but I'm like oh I wonder who's going to hate me at the end of this like eight hours. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is why in my book, World Without Email, for example, nowhere in there you're going to see advice that says check your inbox less often.

25:08Yeah. Only check twice a day. Put up an autoresponder. You know, what matters is just, you know, your focus or this or that. All the solutions in that book, and I'm super clear about this, is you have to first replace the hyperactive hive mind with something that doesn't demand so much unscheduled communication. That's the ultimate solution. And I think that's why we've been stuck in solving this solution is because we often try to approach it as an individual. So the whole system of pseudo productivity hooked up to the hyperactive hive mind is running at our company. And then we say, okay, you as an individual, just stop checking your email so much.

25:43Like that's impossible. We've set up a whole system that's built around ad hoc back and forth communication that grinds to a halt if I bring myself out of it. So no one person can fix it. The mathematical term is this a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. We're stuck at this point where no one person can make a unilateral change to make their situation better. Because if you're the only person changing, you're going to be a bottleneck and your situation gets worse. So you actually, the only way to get out of one of these Nash equilibriums is to change the structure of the system itself. So this has been a big part of my argument.

26:12It's like, I don't care too much about advice for individuals about, hey, it's bad to be distracted. I want to say it's bad to be distracted. How do we change the underlying collaboration and business system so we don't have to be so distracting. Don't say check your inbox less often. You have to change it so that there's nothing there for you to see even if you do. That's the ultimate solution. I'm not much of an agency girl. I sometimes feel all the agency stuff elides are core, structural, global issues. And we're like, just fix yourself and the world will be great. And I'm like, no, this world is hard and does something to your mind.

26:44But you talk to these executives who presumably ask you to advise them on how to run less hyperactive, hive-minded work cultures, Correct? Are they like CEOs? Are they CTOs? Like, who are you talking to? I've done everything. Yeah. So C-suite stuff, you know, small people in a small group in a conference room, one-on-one, thousand people in a room. Yeah. So what is the number one thing executives get wrong about work culture? They think it's about norms. They think, oh, we just have bad norms. And if we can just promulgate new norms, everything will be better. Like the most common solution I heard, especially like around the time I was working on a world without email, was executives would just say, I just think we have this bad norm that expects people to respond quickly.

27:29So why don't we just promulgate a new norm that says, hey, don't expect a response, you know, right away. Like it might be a few hours before responses. And I'd be like, the reason why people are checking their inbox all the time, it's not because of some cultural norm that they don't want to violate. It's because decisions are being made with back and forth ad hoc conversations. And there's 10 messages that have to get back and forth before the end of the day. And it's only going to happen if I'm checking my inbox every two minutes so that I can see the next message right after it arrives. It's a consequence of your work process, not of some sort of norm.

27:59So I think it's often seen as like it's norms and individual behaviors are off. And if we could just change the norms, people would fix their individual behaviors. And it's a systems problem. And that is, by the way, why I think it's so hard to solve, is that this is why I haven't had a lot of success, quite frankly, is that changing the entire way that your work functions is incredibly messy, complicated, expensive, and annoying. And that's what stops it from happening. And we've seen this in other technological business revolution, the continuous motion assembly line, productivity miracle. Why didn't we use it earlier?

28:32Because it was a nightmare for Ford to try to get that running. Like it was really, really hard. How long did that take for Ford to set up an assembly line? And then how long would it take for Google to have a world with less email. Well, first of all, they had to, you know, and he pushed this through because he had control of that board, but huge capital expenditure. They had to build a lot of machinery that did not exist, right? So there was a lot of, we have to build these, you know, a drill press with 12 bits so that we can do this all at one time. They had to hire a lot more people, engineers to build these things, more supervisors to try to keep things working.

29:07And then I don't have exact timeline on it, but it was actually very difficult to try to get the timing right so that you could have continuous motion. Because if one station is too slow, the whole assembly line doesn't work. So it was a costly, annoying transition where things got worse before it got better. That's what we would need in knowledge work. And, you know, it's hard to find someone to step up to the plate to try that outside of like small teams, which there's all sorts of innovation going on. If you're like making me think that CTOs in the office should just like turn off email and then only turn it on like once an hour, like basically become like a postmaster.

29:40I mean, like email even says like at postmaster.georgetown.edu, whatever. Like get that person, that postmaster technical wizard to just like send it every hour. Yeah. I mean, I like that idea. Another idea is office hours, right? So you can have a simple rule then. If I get an email message that can be answered with a single message, right? Here's a question. I have the answer. Or can you send me the file? And I have the file. That's a great use of email, right? Asynchronous communication. I will respond to that when I get around to it by sending one message and a response. If I get a message, however, that's going to require more than one message in response, we have to interact.

30:14I say, come to my next office hours. My phone's on. My office door's open. We'll take three minutes. We'll work it out real time or I'll go to your office hours. People say, wait a second. I don't want to put aside an hour for office hours because if I count the literal minutes I'm spending writing these emails, it's only 20 minutes. But the 20 minutes that you're literally writing the emails is not the problem. The 200 inbox checks, that was the problem. There's so many ways that you help people get time back. Like the most clarifying to me was in one of your blog posts, you wrote something like a one hour meeting is not a one hour meeting.

30:47If there are six people at that meeting, it's a six hour meeting. And that to me was like mind blowing to think about every time I have a 15 minute meeting with four people, that's an hour of time. And I think better than the word busy, the word I've started using right now is oversubscribed. I'm not busy. I'm oversubscribed. And I've got to start like unsubscribing. Like you are a default no guy, right? Yeah. But you said yes to, but I don't believe you, Cal, because I wrote to you once and you said yes to do my podcast. Yeah, so that's quota-based, right? So no's are more complicated than simply just say no as default, right?

31:21Because the issue is there are certain activities, this is what gets people. There are certain activities where you say, I don't want to turn that off completely. Like, actually, these are an important part of my job. However, I get many more asked to do these activities than I can reasonably handle. So what do you do in that circumstance is you have quotas. That is, you have some sort of heuristic or rule that keeps a reasonable rhythm of those things in your life, but prevents it from getting out of control. So like if you're an academic, for example, you might say, I need to peer review papers.

31:50That's part of my job. But I get so many requests to peer review papers, I could spend all my time doing this, which doesn't make sense. So I'll do one paper per month. And if I've already hit my quota for that month, then I'll say, I'm sorry, I've already hit my quota for this month, so I can't say yes to additional ones. I'm this way with podcasts. It's important for me. I do a lot of podcast interviews. It's a big part of my outreach. I only typically record. My rule is typically one other person podcast per week. Okay. And so if I'm like, oh, like, you have a very good podcast, Georgetown alum.

32:20And I was like, great. This is a week I have a slot. Let's do it. Now, if someone else was like, hey, can I record this week? I'm like, no, this week's already full. It's like if Oprah came to you after what you had said yes to me, would you have said yes to Oprah? I might have said yes to Oprah. And then would you have canceled on me to meet your quota? No, probably not. I want to cancel on you. That wouldn't be good. You don't have to be so rigid about it. So dogmatic. A lot of people use stress as a governor, right? They say, when I get so overwhelmed that I'm palpably stressed out, I'm then going to slam the door and use that as psychological cover for the social capital costs to say no to everybody for a while.

32:55And then I recharge, and then I overload myself again. I don't think that type of yo-yo scheduling, as I call it sometimes, I don't think that's that healthy. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back. Who's actually able to keep on top of all of their work threads? This is the Sponsored Dumb Question, brought to you by Zoom. Studies suggest we spend something like a quarter to more than half of our work time on correspondence, meeting, calls, emails, chats. Do not forget the chats. But conversations that matter may happen in hallways or a quick call that you took on the way to the airport.

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34:17You do not have social media outside of YouTube, right? How many hours do you estimate that not having social media gives you back for deep work, deep life, whatever? Massive, Massive. Because like you have to keep in mind the minutes looking at social media, for example, that's not the right metric. The right metric is minutes spent in a state of redirected or muddled cognitive state because you've recently looked at social media, right? It's the context window buffer. Yeah, the context window buffer, right? So like I think there's a lot of people, you know, who might actually have almost every one of their working hours reduced.

34:56because of sort of looking at my phone on a regular basis throughout the day. And that's what I care about because, you know, I make a living not just in general working on projects, but typically incredibly competitive, cognitively demanding projects, right? Books, elite, you know, publication articles, academic theorems that I'm trying to prove or whatever. Right. And you have to be at the absolute highest level of your thinking ability just to play the game. And so reduced cognitive capacity to me is terrifying. But you don't have an estimate in numbers at all. Because I think the mathematical formula is probably like number of times you check times number of things you check plus the time it takes across checking those things to get your mind back to you.

35:38Yeah. There was an analysis I saw once. It wasn't on social media, but it was of email use by a company called RescueTime. But they did an analysis I thought was really smart. they bucketed the day into buckets and I forgot what the duration was like 10 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever and then they marked each bucket if there was any email check in that bucket so the idea was like look if you look at your inbox within the sort of 10 minute window that whole 10 minute window is like basically shot right or a reduced cognitive capacity so then they were like how much time in someone's average day do they have of non-contaminated bucket.

36:15So time in which they aren't really proximate to having done an email check. And it was like 45 minutes. Then there's a secondary cost here for things like social media, which really worries me, which is the cognitive fitness cost. So let's move beyond the direct distractions. Another way to think about social media is like cognitive junk food, like ultra processed food of the brain or something like this. So if you're constantly consuming that, and let's say like it's after work, like I'm not working, I'm just, I'm consuming it at home while I'm watching TV instead of reading a book. it weakens your mind.

36:46So like your ability, just like you get cognitive obesity in some sense, your ability to maintain your focus on things that aren't like a constant, a constant sequence of highly salient distractions, right? That capability diminishes. And then when you're like, I want to read a book, I want to think hard about a business strategy. Your brain has become out of shape. It's like, I can't tolerate that, right? So that you also have this long-term cognitive fitness cost. So you can also think about it as, even if you're assiduous during the workday, like don't look at social media in the workday, But then you veg out all evening.

37:15It's always like a background that you're always looking at. It's like saying, I'm really healthy during the day, but I eat, you know, six sleeves of Oreos every night. It's going to catch up to you, right? It's not healthy. We need cognitive ozempic. That's what's going to happen as a society. I mean, actually, it exists. It's called Adderall. Don't dread it. This is not the thing. But yes. I mean, is there any good data out there for what all of this is doing to our brain health? And we're not doctors, neither myself. yourself, though, you could put one on a flight, I guess, since you have a PhD.

37:46But is there anyone doing studies around, you know, there's this rise of everyone, I feel like, is diagnosed with ADHD. You know, there's memory issues. Like, is there any proof that all the social media is facilitating some of these things? Yeah. I mean, I think there's endless studies that'll look at more narrowly particular technology used and its impact on the brain. So you can measure all sorts of proximate negative cognitive impacts. It could be, okay, looking at short-form video, we can measure these various things. Like, oh, if you look at short-form video this much, then your ability to do X, Y, and Z, to focus to this, to that, all goes down measurably, right?

38:21Or we'll do paid controlled experiments where we'll, you know, pay you to not use social media or randomly assigning people to use or not use groups so that it's unbiased and look at what are the actual effects that has over this sort of window of time. We have endless studies that show, yeah, there's these direct negative cognitive correlations to allow these behaviors that it's a reasonable extrapolation like oh okay so then if I do all these things all the time it can't possibly be good for me but I think the biggest you know studies are subjective right that sometimes it's just the obvious things that everyone realizes when you hear hoofbeats as horses not zebras and it's things such as people saying I can't read as much as I used to be able to I can't keep my focus on a television show I used to love going to the movies and now I find it like intolerable to try to keep my attention focused on it.

39:09I'm having a harder time with like more sophisticated like arguments. I sort of like fall out of it. We ignore that sometimes because we're such a data-driven culture. But like to me, that's the first place to start, right? If people are subjectively saying my cognitive life is impoverished and I can just directly see it's connected to this, we don't necessarily need a good error bar on a line plot before we say, I think that's a problem. You recently had a podcast episode a few weeks ago that was around this idea of cognitive KPIs, like cognitive exercise you could do. So what are three things people can do if they feel that, that could help them get their, you know, neurological gardening, their mind up to fitness?

39:48Oh, yeah. I mean, you can completely train your mind. I talked about timed reading challenges. You sort of pick up an article that's somewhat sophisticated and see how long can I read it. Maybe I'll do it 10 or 15 minutes at first without feeling like unbearable distraction and then try to increase that over time. Productive meditation is another thing I've talked about where you go for a walk and try to make progress on a problem just in your mind and you keep bringing your attention back to it when it wanders and you try to increase the duration of time. You can do that. You try to set challenges for writing.

40:16Writing is calisthenics for the brain. It's the pull-ups of the brain. It's incredibly difficult and incredibly enriching to your ability to produce original thought, to put your knowledge into action. So saying, forget Gen AI. I'm writing this email. I'm writing this report. Yeah, it's hard. I want it to be hard, just like pull-ups are hard, but that's what makes me stronger. But cognitive fitness is my big thing, right? I mean, I think this will be the new revolution of this decade that's coming up right now is going to be, oh, I see, just like we learned about physical health mattered in the mid-20th century.

40:47As we head towards the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, we're like, oh, cognitive health matters as well. We have to take it seriously. I want to be cognitively jacked without cognitive asembeck. And I think that one of the interesting hacks about like wellness culture has been the corporatization of it where all of a sudden somebody did some reports or made some charts that made CEOs realize that like, oh, if I have a more healthy fit workforce, that's going to bring down my health insurance costs or whatever it was that mattered to their bottom line. And all of a sudden, like, offices were giving you gym memberships, et cetera.

41:21And so I hope that your work actually translates into a cognitive fitness imperative for executives to help workers. Because so much of it's hyperactive hive mind. It would be great if, like, our employers were to help people get that back. I'm with you on that. And I think it's coming. Sometimes I'll work till, like, 3 in the morning. And I – it's so funny because I don't have an office job, but something that you wrote resonated with me. I think it was in your book, Deep Work. People's work is squeezed and you're really doing the hard work. You're spending your whole day in the hyperactive hive mind during work hours.

41:57And then it's in your early morning and your late evening that you can really do work. Yeah. Well, we know that from Microsoft data, right? Because Microsoft collects this data annually from their Microsoft 365 productivity apps, which millions of people use. And they put out this work index report every year. And one of the things in the most recent report is like, first of all, the average worker is now checking a communication tool or a meeting tool once every two minutes on average, right? So it's constant. But they said there are some times in which we see people like logged into the productivity, they call it apps, like working in Word, without also looking at Teams or Outlook or, you know, other types of meeting software.

42:36They're like, when is those times? They're like, it's the weekends, early morning, late night. And so like what they've observed in the data is when do we actually see people sitting down and just working without distraction. It's outside of work hours. But then that way, like a four-day work week or like Eric Yvonne from Zoom has famously said, you know, he's looking forward to a three-day work week. Those would be good because it would give us more, quote-unquote, weekends to do deep work. Yeah. Well, this is why I think we should just codify this into the actual day, right? Like I wrote this Atlantic piece a couple years ago where I said, look, we should consider hybrid attention models where it's hybrid work, you know, days a week you're at home three days are at the office but we say the two days at home no meetings no email and like those are the days where you just know all day long you just locked in trying to make progress and then the other days you're like yeah i'm coordinating with people i'm talking to people i'm having meetings like you can integrate this into the workday itself this is what i would measure is like look if you can't get you know three or four hours of uninterrupted time during the day that's an indictment about how we're running our company we have to fix that as opposed to let's just have people do work late at night or on the weekends and then you get these weird inequities because of that because not everyone can do that.

43:45You know, maybe people have families or taking care of someone. So then you begin to sort of like reverse selection where it's like, well, the people who are able to do that are the only ones you can really get enough work done to actually move up. I spoke at a law firm once about Deep Work and it was a major law firm here in D.C. It's a reading group internally of just women lawyers. And they were talking about these accidental inequities. But they said, for example, there's a group of men that just they don't care about being jerks. Right. So they're like more likely to be like, no, forget you.

44:14I'm working on something. I'm just not going to answer. And they said because of that, they do more deep work. If they can do more deep work, they move ahead. And then we end up with a partner core that is like accidentally biased towards people that are actually sort of actively antisocial. And then that's a problem for the firm because you actually have the mythanthropes or the people that had moved up. And that's not who you want representing the firm. Okay. I want to end with a few lightning rounds. We talked a lot about meetings, like reverse meetings where people come in and do office hours with you.

44:42We talked about meeting quotas. So like having quotas in your life, we didn't talk about meeting tariffs, but I do think it would be good to like ask your annoying colleague who keeps asking for a meeting to put money in a jar, like a curse jar when you're young. We talked a little bit about emails. I want to know if this is insane or genius. Marking 4 ,000 unread emails, read, and then moving on with your life, like declaring email bankruptcy? No, that's completely reasonable. Reasonable? Well, what else are you going to do? Are you going to go through and cognitively context shift 4 ,000 times?

45:13That's not reasonable. If something's critical, someone will get back to you again. Yeah, I'm completely on board with that. Okay. I work late at night. Is it fine for me to send emails at 1 in the morning to my team, or should I be scheduling those? I think it's fine as long as you're clear, like, hey, I'm just saying, you know, no obligation of immediate response. I think it's implied if it's one in the morning that you're not expecting immediate response. What about team email? Like why shouldn't it just be like team at smartgirldomequestions.com and then whoever gets it first can handle it like a LIFO, like last in first out kind of factory approach to work?

45:48Well, it's arbitrary that we ended up with an email convention where it's a person's name at the company.com just as followed because early emails were on time shared computer systems where it was your you were actually leaving text files and other people's user accounts and people's users accounts were tied to their name but I actually think there's a problem with email addresses being associated with a name because you imagine another person on the other side getting the message when you imagine a specific other person getting that message your expectations really increase like why is this this person has my message why are they ignoring me this is a slight this is an issue right so one of the big solutions is no no no we should have more email addresses not associated with people.

46:27You know, clients at company.com, and that's where clients send email messages. You know, a team name at company.com, people's expectations for like responses, et cetera, completely moderates when they no longer imagine that they're communicating to a specific other human on the other side. Okay. I love that. I think then people would just start texting. I mean, I actually have a theory of email, which is that email is no longer email. Email has become snail mail. It is like a junk mail inbox with some useful information in it, like your tax records, whatever is coming through. Text is now email.

47:02If you are sending me a voice note, you're like my boyfriend or my boss and I don't have a boss, calling has become the new text. But I think actually we've just shifted over to like more and more like immediate, urgent workflows. Is that fair? It's a combination of the two things we've talked about, right? You've got the hyperactive hive mind plus no workload management, right? So I have many things that all require coordination. Therefore, the faster I can make progress on whatever specific thing is in front of me, the more I'll feel like I can juggle these sort of things. So I want the fastest possible medium that has the fastest possible response times expectations.

47:39Okay. The last thing we're going to do is a paddle round. If you had the time to context switch, we would do this together, but I'm going to try to do this myself. So this is like a kind of, should it be a meeting? It's going to be green. Or should it be an email? It's going to be red. Okay. All right. This is going to be difficult because I'm also not a big fan of single purpose meetings. I think it's a giant time waste, but okay. I know. You don't like single purpose meetings. Yeah. You like reverse office hours. Reverse office hours or like docket clearing meetings for teams. Yeah. Like we're going to get together as a team and we're going to, we have a whole list of things that people have built up over the last few days of things we need to deal with.

48:17And we're going to go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like go through those all together synchronous one by one. So like syncs, like kind of like daily stand up, right? Yeah. Okay. This should be a meeting or an email. Your boss wants to give you positive feedback on a document. Email. Should be an email. Yeah. It's something that requires no response or a single message response. Email. Okay, great. Feedback on your personality. Oh, in person. In person. It's very difficult to convey nuance of emotions or intention through linguistic text. We're not very good at that anymore. So in person voice communication has way more nuance.

48:57So at the very least on the phone. You're on deadline and one decision needs to be made. Like a big decision, like the budget for a big event. In person, synchronous. Phone call or meeting or office stop by. Yeah. Okay. So that's going to be a meeting. What if it's like two small decisions? Do they, does the other person have the ability to just give you the answer? Yeah. It's like the notes used to send when you're a kid. Like, do you like me? Yes, no, maybe. Yeah. If it can be answered in one, a message that can be responded to in a single message, email is fantastic for that. Okay. What about scheduling?

49:28This is my least favorite kind of email. You and I had this exchange when we met, scheduling something over email. System. So not a meeting or an email. Probably not. I think scheduling can be really wasteful. I mean, I know we're supposed to be in a world in which, you know, AI is about to kill humanity and take all the jobs. Will there be a period before it? If it gets that powerful, can't there be a period that solves the scheduling issue? Can we just get to that period first for a while? Well, they have that, like, Zoom has a scheduler or all these things, right? I'm still waiting for my AI chief of staff can communicate with your AI chief of staff and find a meeting time that works that actually reflects our relevant constraints.

50:06I totally want that. In 2022, Casey Newton and Kara Swisher and I did something at Manny's and SF. And I said, like, I know everyone in my generation is going to be so anti-AI, but I'm going to be pro-AI because I am, like, rooting for the mortal combat between my Naima AI and, like, United AI. No offense to United, who's never going to be a sponsor of my podcast. Yeah, but they're going to build a really good AI. That's the problem. It's going to beat your AI. They're never going to KO my AI. I know. It's going to KO my AI. Okay. If you want to hire somebody, meeting or email? Meeting. Meeting.

50:38Okay. If you want to fire somebody. Meeting. Meeting. This podcast, meeting or email? Like what, our conversation now? Yeah. Meeting. Good. Okay, great. That would have been really bad if you said that. You talk a lot about protocols, like people having protocols for how they take emails, when they do meetings, quotas, et cetera. I once dated a guy who was like a CEO founder, and he had an SOPs for his office environment where he would send people like this memo. And he gave it to me of like how he communicated. I remember it was like, I never send positive emails. So like if you don't hear from me, it's good.

51:10But if you hear from me, it's like a problem. Do you think we should have these kinds of documents in the workplace and in our personal lives? Well, I think it's good to have internal and external protocols. I mean, partially protocols are how you replace a hyperactive hive mind. You're like, oh, we agree on this is the protocol we use for this type of work and this type of work. And that's how you eventually move away from a lot of emails. Internal protocols are fine. Don't tell people about them. That seems to be the key. Like, you can have these internal rules. You don't have to explain them.

51:39Yeah, I thought it was kind of weird. You don't explain too much. I told him it was a bit strange that he had sent it to me. And then I never heard from him. So our relationship is going great because he said, if you don't hear from me, it's going great. He sounds like every engineer I know from, like, computer science grad school. Cal Newport, this has been fascinating. I want to bring you back at some point to talk about all things. You have a new book coming out called Deep Life, which I imagine is going to be around this cognitive. Is it right? Is it going to have some features of it? It's interesting.

52:04It's called The Deep Life. It's going to march. No, it's actually going to – it's about the mechanics of how you make intentional changes to your life as opposed to the content of what should be in your life. I don't know. I can't tell you that. But how does one actually go about taking control of their life and making this something meaningful to them, whatever that means to them? I love that. So sort of like a computer scientist tackling the issue of building an interesting life. Okay. I love it. Well, I mean, you have a very productive life. I don't know. You've written eight books. You have an amazing newsletter.

52:34You have a podcast. Your podcast is called Deep Questions. The most famous book, I think, is called Deep Work. The next one is called Deep Life Out in March. And for everything else, there's Shallow Life, which is yet to be published, but I'm sure would also be a bestseller these days and times. I end every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions, Cal, asking my guests who are so smart about their topic area, everything, a dumb question that they have that they haven't asked their phone or out loud yet. Something they don't know the answer to. Oh, my God. There's so many things. there's so many things I don't know the answer to.

53:06Okay, the last dumb thing I just did a search on is, and it, I will tell you, it took me a long time to figure this out, even though I'm an MIT trained computer scientist. I was trying to figure out how to take a window on an iPad and resize it. That was it. I needed to take like the browser window on my iPad and kind of shrink it a little bit so that I could bring it up on my screen. It didn't matter. It took me a long time to figure out. I tried asking chat CPT. It did not have the right answer. I Googled and found the Apple dev community. So that's not a brilliant question for a computer scientist to be asking, but it was actually, you know, I finally figured it out.

53:47And in moments like those, I'm always grateful for the person who made like the 18-minute YouTube video. And then the fact that search can tell you it's at minute four. You don't need to watch the whole 17 minutes to like learn how to resize the iPad window. But I love that question. The library of Alexandria of our time. Exactly. I love that. The library of Alexander of our time is YouTube videos. That's so scary. When I asked Jeffrey Hinton this question, he said, it's how the brain works. So that's the question that he just like that keeps him up. And he he wonders if like, yeah, in his lifetime, we'll know much more than we know now.

54:18I know. And he's built some interesting, you know, you've talked to him, but like even large language models with backpropagation is like, it's not how the brain works. And he has all these other cool systems. The problem is there's often a difference between like what system better matches the brain and like what system actually gets results. Yeah. Yeah. And what systems people will pay for. There's that too. All right. These are all different things. Thank you so much, Cal Newport. I will see you soon. Thank you very much for coming on Smart Call Time Questions. My pleasure. Bye. I wasn't just gassing up Cal Newport.

54:50I really, really like the way he is thinking about these challenges structurally and in terms of our own individual agency when it comes to work and how we do it. I've interviewed a lot of CEOs, a lot of founders. As noted, I've also dated some. I think the best leaders of our time are gonna be people who understand that the value of the workplace is getting a little bit lost in this hyperactive hive mind. It's not that the communication isn't valuable. In fact, the communication is really valuable. But how do you capture it? How do you consolidate it? How do you do it in times that don't, you know, distress the ultimate like deep work output potential?

55:28And the truth is like when the world is frothy, when the stock market's booming, when companies are doing well, these questions seem like, oh, nice to haves. But at the end of the day, it is a really bottom line decision. And it's also like a health decision. I'm 100 % serious about this idea of like cognitive health. Anyways, that's it for episode two of the What Even Is Work series brought to you by Zoom. We're going to be back with two more What Even Is Work episodes in October. I need some time to think about it. This episode was produced with Shina Ozaki, Melissa Lee Gibson, Sanja Nygam. It was shot in the amazing Wonder Studios in Manhattan with Desta Wonderad.

56:00It was engineered by Jamie Van Korf, mixed by Fernando Arruda. I'm your host, Nene Marraza, and I'll see you next time for an all-new Smart Girl Dumb Questions.