Sunday Pick: How to be productive without burning out with Cal Newport | ReThinking

0:11We'll be right back.

0:30we're sharing an episode of Rethinking featuring Cal Newport, the author of Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. You'll hear important takeaways on productivity, why doing less might help you do more in the long run, and how to create habits that help you succeed in a sustainable way. If you want more insights that will help you conquer the new year, you can find it each week on Rethinking, available wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.

1:04Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Cal Newport. His day job is as a computer science professor at Georgetown. But I'm more interested in his side hustle. He's one of the world's foremost thinkers on how to make work better. Cal Moonlights is a New Yorker writer, podcast host, and best-selling author of books like Deep Work, So Good They Can't Ignore You, and Digital Minimalism.

1:43He's joining me today to talk about his new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. What was happening in our current world of work around this nebulous idea that we informally refer to as productivity was clearly broken. People are tired of that idea. They don't know what it means. Whatever they're doing doesn't seem to be working for them. And so people are in a space right now where they want to start from a blank slate and rethink what does it mean to do my work well. We've been discussing and debating ideas for years, mostly by email, even though he hates email.

2:19Today, I'm excited to bring that conversation to life outside of our inboxes.

2:26I feel like this has been a long time coming. I know. I can't believe we haven't actually done like a formal thing before. So here we go. Well, this is going to be extremely formal. Yes. Dr. Grant, what is your next query? Well, Dr. Newport, it's thoughtful of you to ask. What's something you want me to rethink? The need to respond to every email. Our old battle, Adam. We've had some emails back and forth maybe about it, but we've mostly been arguing via op-ed. Yeah, like the pages of the New York Times. Yeah, we've been. All right, good. So we'll put a pin in that one. The first thing that piqued my interest was your title is an oxymoron.

3:03Slow productivity. By definition, productivity is a high rate of output per unit of time. So it's supposed to be fast. And I just, I love oxymorons. I thought that was a fascinating juxtaposition. I think you're spot on that there's been a turn in the zeitgeist. that productivity used to be something that we valued. Now we live in a culture where increasingly people are anti-productivity. And I worry that maybe we've been getting it wrong for a long time, but then some people are also over-correcting and missing out on the value of meaningful accomplishment. And I had a hunch that you've been thinking and working on this issue for a long time and that you could help to unconfuse us a little bit.

3:41Here's my business case study about what happened with productivity. It was for a long time an economic concept that was well-defined. Starts in agriculture. How many bushels of crop per acre under cultivation are you producing? If you switch to a different crop rotation method, you can measure this and say, hey, the number went up. Industrial manufacturing arises. This idea ports over easily. Then we get the mid-20th century. Knowledge work arises as a major economic sector. Suddenly, we can't directly port this definition anymore because the average knowledge worker does many different things.

4:18There's no one thing to measure. It's incomparable from person to person. My portfolio of things I'm doing right now is different than yours in subtle ways. And there's no clearly defined system to measure or improve because productivity became personal. How I organize myself, how I organize my work is up to me. That was a new idea in the history of economic activity. I think we fell back on a heuristic called pseudo productivity, which just says activity will be our proxy for doing useful stuff. That kind of lasted for a while. But then we invented networks and laptops and smartphones and Slack and email.

4:55And this idea of just more is better than less began to spin out of control until by the time we get to the pandemic, we're saying this is no longer sustainable. This fake definition of productivity doesn't work. We got to do something different. So that's my whole story that goes from the 17th century up to 2024. That's what I think is going on. I think the case is really compelling. And I don't think I disagree with any of it. There's a piece missing from that puzzle for me that I wonder how you think about, which is you go right from manufacturing economy to knowledge work. And I think in between and even now looming larger than knowledge work is a service economy, right?

5:32By my last count, something like 80 percent of Americans work in service jobs. And some of those jobs are also knowledge jobs, but the service economy here is bigger than the knowledge economy. And then the same is true in Western Europe and in most industrialized parts of the world. So how does service work fit into all this? Because it actually seems to me that it follows the same arc as your knowledge work argument that you can't really measure the quality of service just by the number of customers or clients or patients that you interact with. Yeah, they're having the exact same problem in that sector.

6:03I mean, if I'm dealing with individuals all day, even let's say to keep it like simple and like a retail setting, right? How do we exactly measure how good I'm doing? It's you can't. So again, if you bring over the like, well, more is better than less. Longer hours is better than fewer hours. You end up in sort of a similar problem. So it's like we can think of the problem of the 20th century as how do we do things productively when we don't have Model Ts to count? That's the central problem, I think, of labor strife and personal satisfaction in the 20th and 21st century economy. How would you define slow productivity?

6:40So it was my answer to the question of can we come up with at least one concrete definition of productivity that's not just more is better than less that will satisfy two things? I don't want to burn out or have work stamp on all other parts of my life. One of my personal motivations for this book was my three kids reached a certain age where they needed basically every minute I had to offer in a way that they didn't when they were younger. They need a lot of my time at the same time that I'm at the peak of my professional power. So that's A, I needed my definition to avoid burnout and work just taking over my whole life.

7:17But B, I'm ambitious. I like to do things. How do I do both those things? Slow productivity was the answer I came up with. And it had three principles. Do fewer things at the same time. Work at a more natural pace. So not just full intensity, eight hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year. But couple that with principle three, obsessing over the quality of what you do. And my argument is if those three things all come together, you get a vision of knowledge work that can be high impact and effective, but also is very sustainable and meaningful. So it's a attempt to try to have some sort of alternative to pseudo productivity that might actually satisfy the preconditions I had.

8:01Fewer things is tricky for a lot of people who don't get to determine how much they do if their schedules and their task lists are set by a boss. If I'm somebody who doesn't have freedom, how do you think about that? Well, I mean, first, let's just think about the case for doing fewer things, because I I think this will get to the answer of how do we actually make this happen. The misconception I think people have about doing fewer things is that this is just about a zero-sum trade-off. Yes, this is going to be worse for my employer or my company, but it's going to make my life better, right? I think it's actually the opposite.

8:34What happens in knowledge work, because we have typically no systematic way to manage or even make transparent workloads. I have no idea what you're working on or how much you're working on. It's all informal and ad hoc. When we put more and more stuff on our plate, each of these things that we agree to brings with it a non-trivial amount of persistent overhead. It's the administrative overhead. The emails about the thing I agreed to do, the standing meetings about the thing I agreed to do, even the cognitive real estate. I have to just remember in the back of my mind, I agreed to do this. my claim is as you pile up work on your list of things you said yes to too large the fraction of your day that is now going to servicing overhead becomes larger and larger until now you're spending most of your time servicing these tasks removing the time required to actually accomplish them which then creates an even bigger backlog because nothing ever clears out and i make this claim in the book that for a lot of knowledge workers in the first few months of the pandemic this happened, this sudden new influx of tasks pushed them to the place where a lot of people were finding themselves doing eight hours of Zoom all day.

9:42It was like an absurd, almost Kafka play of all I'm doing is meetings about work. I mean, I had listeners and readers who would say, here's my big problem, Cal. When do I go to the bathroom? So actually having fewer things on your plate at any given time actually increases the rate at which you accomplish things and increases the quality of the things that you accomplish. So if you zoom out to, let's say the three month scale, you're actually probably producing a lot more, right? Overload makes it hard to actually do work. Then we get to the question of, okay, so how do you actually negotiate this in your own working life?

10:17I have a lot of different ideas in the book about if you work for someone else, how do we move towards this? And a lot of these ideas are not just about saying no, but they're more about surfacing your workload, surfacing your available time, surfacing the amount of time what you're being asked to do is and making that all transparent so that you can have like a much more reasonable negotiation about what you should be doing at any one time. And so there's a lot of ways you can do this from poll-based systems to keeping a list of pending projects where they can add it onto the back and see how many things are ahead of it, doing pre-planning of time for projects so you can actually come back and say, Sure.

10:56But the next time I have the 15 hours available to do this, it's going to be a month and a half from now. Transparency and surfacing of the reality of workloads can go a long way, I think, of becoming more reasonable about how much should we have on our plate at the same time. I love that idea. And of course, it depends on having a reasonable boss, but so does everything else in a hierarchy. The idea of doing fewer things at once is interesting, and I'm kind of torn on it. I think on the one hand, it makes a lot of sense because the more tasks you have, the more pressure you face to multitask, which we know leads to rapid task switching and usually detracts from the quality of both tasks that are being focused on sort of sequentially in rapid fire.

11:38So I'm with you so far. But then I start to think about some of the evidence that if you want to get something done, you should give it to a busy person. There's a Keith Wilcox et al. paper, for example, showing that people, when they have more on their plate, they actually get things done faster. It's related to Parkinson's law. The amount that you do will expand to fill the time you have for it. Yeah. So if you buy the premise that work expands to fill the time you have for it and it also can contract as you have less time for it, that suggests that we might benefit from doing more things as opposed to fewer things.

12:12So can you reconcile these two competing arguments for me? Well, let's look deeper at Parkinson's law. So at some point I read the original citation and it comes from a critique of the British civil service. And it was as much a critique of the arbitrary and pointlessness of a lot of these jobs in the civil service as it was about a general observation about time. So they were saying in these jobs, you just fill whatever time you have because it's advantageous. It just looks good for you to be busy, right? So here's an alternative is principle three, obsess over quality. You do have to have a target.

12:51And that's why I call obsessing over quality, the glue that holds everything else together in the book. If you're not focused on doing something really well that you care about, then I'm with you. Like who cares? We might as well just be sending a lot of emails, right? I mean, we might as well have a lot going on. I had this question just a couple of weeks ago on my podcast. It was interesting. It was a developer wrote to me, a computer developer, and said, my company is doing all the Cal Newport stuff to get rid of unnecessary administrative work and overhead. There's no email. There's no Slack.

13:23There's no meetings. Like, we just have this, like, really structured, asynchronous project management system. And he was having a really hard time with it because he said, look, I can program for four hours a day. What do I do for the rest of the day? And, you know, my answer to him was like, I think you have to care about what you're doing. You have to have some other motivation for finishing things, doing them well, being eager to move on to the next. Or then I agree. Yeah. Then having less things on your plate, you're just going to either be bored or you're going to busy work it out anyways to fill the time.

13:55It seems to me that it's easy to confuse doing fewer things with just doing less work. if you're not focusing on quality, a lot of it also just engenders an antagonistic relationship to your work. But when you add in that third ingredient, I am obsessed with doing really good stuff. It completely changes the valence of everything else. And that's why I think it's so important for any of these other thoughts. And this is, by the way, what the anti-productivity movement often is missing. When you take out the part about wanting to do something really well, the anti-productivity thinking begins to stumble.

14:29And it either stumbles in the sort of just like standard critiques of capitalism or these sort of generic calls for just doing less, just do nothing. It ends up in places that don't, in the end, resonate with people in a sustainable way. You have to have that other piece of also humans like to make their intentions manifest concretely in the world in a way they're proud. You need that in there if you want to understand how to deal with the hard stuff. So you're pro-meaningful contribution to the world and anti-burnout. I think that's the only logical combination. If you think burnout is just part of work, your contributions long term almost certainly are going to be diminished.

15:06Like ultimately something's going to give if you really are just completely overloading yourself. I think the way you framed slow productivity, this is something that we could all do better as individuals. But this is also, I think, a real message to leaders to say these are principles for organizational cultures and structures. That we should have a larger conversation about how many things are we doing collectively? What kind of frenetic pace are we creating systemically? Are we placing the quality bar high enough on the things that really matter? What does that conversation look like for you?

15:39It's such a hard conversation. This was my experience with my last book, right? So in 2021, I had this book kind of cheekily titled A World Without Email. But it was really a book about the corporate managerial structure and modern knowledge work needs to seriously reexamine how do we organize work? How do we collaborate? We can't just let this continue to be up to everyone's individual decisions. The way we're working today is not working. So I was making an argument aimed at organizations that you have to get into the game here. You're not thinking about how we work nearly as much as we do in other industrial sectors.

16:16That was an impossible sell, it turned out. It's really hard. It's really big ships. And so I got more interested in that recently. Why could I not change more minds with that? part of my new theory about what's happening here is that this is a side effect of managerial capitalism. So if we go back to the theory of managerial capitalism that emerges in the mid mid-century, looking back the early 20th century, the theorizing around managerial capitalism says in organizations that are large, what the managers are optimizing for in terms of how things are run no longer have to be directly congruent to market forces.

16:54It's no longer the case that, hey, if we don't use email this way, if we're smarter about distractions, we're more competitive, we'll get a direct market signal, and we're going to do better. And other companies that don't do this are going to go out of business. If I'm a manager in a large company, I'm not necessarily optimizing for what in the end is going to five years from now make our company more productive and extracting value from the minds of our employees. I might also be biased towards stability, stability of my position, stability of the company, this like hyperactive hive mind. We all just email everyone whenever we need to.

17:29And changing this would be very disruptive and disruption is bad. Disruption is scary. I'm increasingly convinced it is difficult to come in and change very large cultures because there's not the incentive structure there. And so it's almost like why this book, I said, okay, forget it. Let's go back to people. At least like, what can you do even if you work for one of these companies to make your life more manageable? Knowledge work is such a weird puzzle. We don't do it well, but we also don't attempt to do it better. Well, one solution that seems to be gaining a little traction in organizations and that I think at minimum is an interesting experiment is the four-day workweek.

18:07And you're on the record saying it's definitely not a panacea, which I agree with, but you also don't think it's going to be an effective antidote to burnout, if I understand correctly. Yes. I think burnout, among most things, is being caused by having too much on your plate. If you have too much on your plate, you telling me you don't have to work on Friday doesn't solve the problem that I have too much on my plate. And if anything, it's going to make the stress of that worse because now in the four days that remain, more of that time is going to be dedicated to the admin overhead. I would rather see a fifth day, like Friday is a day in which you can't service any overhead, no meeting, no meeting Fridays, but this failed.

18:47Intel tried this years back famously with no email Fridays, for example, this failed because the bigger problem is how we actually collaborate. So if in your company, the way decisions are made and progress proceeds on projects is we just slack or email back and forth on demand. You can't just say Friday's email free Friday because then work stops. So like I've been arguing, you can't do these blunt fixes for knowledge work. You have to do the fine-tuned fixes, which is coming in and saying, here is an alternative way that we're going to collaborate. That's not just rock and roll with asynchronous and synchronous communication on demand as needed.

19:25Then we need to fix workload management. Let's think about this as an organization. You should really only be working on three projects at a time. Let's write them down. Here they are. You fix those problems, you're fixing the burnout problem. If you instead just say, let's not work on Friday, Let's be hybrid. Let's be remote. None of these are bad, but none of these actually get to the direct problem either. I think we're in alignment on a bunch of those points and maybe tension on a couple of them. Having too much to do is, as far as I know, the most reliable predictor of emotional exhaustion.

19:55That being said, I think the evidence is a little bit more encouraging than you do. Let's start with the no meeting Friday idea. So Ben Laker and colleagues tested this out with, what, 76 companies? They ran meeting-free days. And self-reports of productivity went up. Satisfaction spiked. Stress went down. And you also get better reports on just quality of communication and collaboration. And I think what they're doing is they're committing to block out time to focus. They're allowing for deep work. He wrote a whole book on deep work. And this seems to be an effective mechanism for it. And interestingly, at least in this quasi-experiment, companies that had three no-meeting days a week got the greatest dividends.

20:40Now, there may be a selection bias there that the companies that are best at managing deep work and kind of carving out in the Paul Graham sense manager days as separate from maker days are more likely to adopt multiple meeting-free days a week. But this seems to be good news. And it also tracks with what Leslie Perlow showed in her quiet time experiment where, you know, just blocking out some mornings to not interact and not interrupt each other was good for productivity. So why are you so skeptical? So where my real skepticism was is on the no email days. So that failed because in most businesses, if you can't communicate during the day, things fell apart.

21:21No meetings is interesting. And what I think is happening with the no meeting days is it's not about workload. It's not making it better or worse. But what it's allowing people to do when I'm assuming, I'm guessing, I'm hypothesizing. But what's happening in these experiments is if we all agree that Friday is a no meeting day, it's not just the meetings that we're taking off the plate. We sort of mentally treat this as a deep workday. So we're probably sending less email. We're probably jumping off and on Slack less. And so what you're escaping on those days, you're not fixing the workload problem, but you're fixing the problem I talked about in my last book, which is the distraction of having to constantly keep up with digital back and forth and fragmentation of schedules.

22:00So I do like that idea. In fact, my new claim is this is how we should think about hybrid work in this new era where that seems to be the standard for post-pandemic knowledge work. Why don't we treat the days, the hybrid days, the days you're at home very differently than the days you're in work? So it's a completely different cognitive context, too. Oh, when I'm at home, I'm just working as deeper. And when I'm in the office, we have like more meetings and emails. I think we're actually in alignment. No meeting days is solving another problem that's good. But it's neither help me nor hurting the workload problem.

22:31We're in sync there. Okay, so the four-day week, I'd like to see better random assignment in the trials that have been done so far. But when I look at Juliette Shore's work, for example, and a bunch of the companies that are experimenting with it, burnout does seem to be going down. And I wonder if part of what's going on is that when you commit to fewer days, you're more conscious of boundaries and protecting them. You're implicitly starting to create a culture that cares a little bit more about reducing workload. But I would rather explicitly tackle that. I would rather get in and say, why do I have so much stuff on my plate in the first place that maybe the four-day workweek is or is not sort of helping with?

23:12Why don't we get to the heart of the problem? I think that's very well articulated. I'm on board.

23:22All right, let's go to a lightning round. What is the worst productivity advice that you hear regularly? This idea that you choose one thing, get that done, and then you've had a successful day. You think that's a bad idea? Yeah. There's more to being a productive day than getting one good thing done. I think if that's where you are, your day is a disaster. I think you need a good plan for the day you have that includes a couple of important things and also handles the small things in a smart way and is reasonable. What is something about productivity that you've rethought lately? Seasonality.

23:54The degree to which we're not wired to basically work at the same level of intensity all the time. I didn't realize this was a problem until the last couple of years, and now I'm obsessed with it. I think the most productive I've ever been is during Michigan winter. You literally couldn't do anything else. Yeah, you're stuck in a cabin. You can't get out. Yeah. Yeah. And then spring would come around, and I played a lot of Ultimate Frisbee. You turned out okay. Eh, jury's still out. I'm allergic to productivity hacks. I think you are too. That being said, what's your favorite one? Well, that shifts all the time.

24:30Do you want the one I'm excited about right now or the one just that stood the test of time most? Well, now I want both. Okay, so let me give you the one that stood the test of time. And that is fixed schedule of productivity. Fix the hours you want to work and then do everything you can to make that work. That's now my goal. This is when I work. And I may have to actually drastically change things about my career if necessary. but these are my limits. That's when I work. It's a meta productivity idea because it forces you to develop dozens of custom fit practical productivity ideas to try to actually satisfy this big goal.

25:02So that's timeless. The flavor of the month I really like, the one for you, one for me, meeting scheduling strategy. If I schedule a meeting, I have to then find during that same week, a block of time of same length, the block off for me to do just my own work. It keeps your schedule 50-50, but in a flexible way. You're allowing a lot more meetings into your life than I am with that one-to-one. I think my philosophy is more like five-to-one. Five meetings. Wait, five for you and one for the meeting? Sorry, one to five, I guess it would be. Well, it depends on the season, but you know how it gets sometimes.

25:34You're on a committee. Don't serve on committees. Maybe that should be the timeless advice, right? It's the Richard Feynman advice. Pretend to be really irresponsible so people will stop putting you on academic committees. Though I talked about in the book, 10 years later after that, he admitted because he got sucked into running the Challenger Commission. Yeah, the Presidential Commission. Yeah, and then he reflected on that in an LA Times interview. I didn't follow my own advice. I always said, avoid committees, but you know what? This was important, and I'm glad I did it. So there's this interesting sort of philanthropic, later-in-life, humanist-type twist of Feynman.

26:09It's also a good reminder that almost every personal productivity rule has exceptions, which is why they should be guidelines, not rules. I agree. Where do you stand on focus apps that lock down your computer or your phone so you can't get distracted? From my experience, focus apps are a temporary measure for most people. So if you want to break the initial pull of digital addiction, it can be useful to use a focus app for a while. What almost always happens though, is if people consistently do this, the cravings diminish and they don't need to use the apps anymore. You'll lose your taste for browser tabbing over to Instagram.

26:47And then once you do, you don't need the focus app anymore. What's a question you have for me? Oh, okay. Interesting.

26:56All of my questions for you tend to be very insider baseball because we're both professors who also write books, which is like an impossible thing. So here's my question. What did you change post-full professor? I mean, I know you were like 19. No, I actually think it's a universal question because everybody at some point will have the experience of realizing I achieved one of the major goals I was working toward or I decided it wasn't a major goal anymore. And now what do I change? There's an irony here, which is you're talking about doing less and you wear a lot of hats. You publish research.

27:34You teach. you podcast, you write books, you write articles in the New Yorker. And I think I might be guilty of the same. I guess one of the things I've been rethinking lately is how much do I need to do in each of those categories? So, you know, should I reconsider the number of classes I teach? That's actually something that Wharton did for us during COVID. They dropped our teaching load from three to two courses a year, which has been pretty meaningful in terms of the amount of time I have to do not only the projects that I care about, but also the time I have to spend with students. I think that's been a big deal.

28:10How are you thinking about that balance, especially now that you've written this book saying do fewer things? Are you doing less? Well, yeah. So I wrote the book in part because I wanted to improve my own setup. Some things I have done towards that, I have brought together my academic and writing worlds much closer. What I'm doing more as an academic is I'm thinking out loud about the different ways that technology affects society. I write books. I do a bunch of New Yorker stuff on it. And I don't write a bunch of computer science papers. So this, this consilience, like these two things coming together, that is freeing up a huge amount of time, right?

28:46So that really helped. The podcast, when I started the podcast, I had a rule, half day a week, you can never have more. And so if I want to do more, I want to add video, whatever I want to do in the podcast, as long as it fits in that half day a week, go for it. If it doesn't, then I have to automate something or hire someone, but it's never allowed to have a bigger footprint than that. And that made a big difference as well. But I'll tell you, Adam, even with all of those things, I'm still thinking, is there even more drastic reductions I should consider? I wrote this book less about I am the exemplar of this and more this is my aspiration.

29:19So let me clarify it so I know what I'm going for. Okay, let's talk about our digital debate here. So you want me to rethink my compulsive habit of responding to every email. I'm willing to do that. If you are willing to rethink your excessive digital minimalism, I will ignore more emails if you start one social media account? I'd rather you send more emails than we have to use social media. Get to use social media. Get to use it. Okay. Yeah, fair enough. My whole digital minimalism philosophy doesn't have hard edges, so it doesn't identify bad and good tech. It says you start with your values and then move backwards to say what's going to be most useful for advancing these values.

30:03Any social media application, if I see a really strong use case where the positive is going to bring me really outweighs the negative, it's on the table. Like for example, we put my podcast on YouTube now and you know, YouTube is a distracting thing and I don't use a lot of YouTube, but that's a decision to be made. But I felt like there was a very large audience that doesn't listen to podcasts traditionally and we could find them through YouTube. And so that's worth doing and I have to put some care around it. So I'm willing to consider a social media platform if I think the benefits are going to outweigh the negatives, but I'm terrified of most of them.

30:38I mean, if you put me on Twitter, I'm going to be on there all the time. You know what I'm saying? Like you put me on Instagram, I'm going to be on there all the time. We might have emailed at one point about the Michael Hausman finding, which suggested that people with a couple of social media accounts were more productive than those who didn't have any, and also more productive with those who had five or more. And we don't know whether this is cause or signal, but there is a part of me that thinks refusing to engage with social media altogether, the same way that it leaves kids out of their social circles in high school, it does close you off to opportunities to engage with people, to test ideas, to share some of your knowledge in bite-sized formats.

31:22And I think you're depriving other people of your ideas who would discover you on social. And you're also maybe missing out on some of the feedback that you would get. Like there are times when I decide to write an article because, you know, an Instagram post took off. And it was just an afterthought. I just kind of put it out there. I was like, wait a minute, there's more to say about this. People care about this. And also, you know, a bunch of people got mad at what I said, and I need to clarify what my point was. In other cases, I'll test an idea that I think is really promising and it doesn't take off.

31:51I'm like, maybe this is not a great use of my time. And I find that feedback mechanism really valuable. And, you know, you're not to suggest that you need it, But I've benefited a lot from it, and I want you to benefit from it too. So why don't you want to benefit from it, especially? And let me just throw in one other piece of this, which is I think you're really good at setting boundaries. The way you articulate, all right, I've got an amount of time that I've blocked out for podcasting, and I'm going to fit podcasting in that time. Why can't you do the same thing with social? Well, let me throw a counter argument back.

32:22What you and I do, we write books, we write articles. It's not new. We haven't noticed in the last 10 years or so, which is roughly the era when social media has become sort of dominant cultural force. It's not like we've seen a notable increase in the quality of what essayists and book writers are producing. If anything, we're worried that we're seeing the opposite. So there's a counter argument that was saying, if this feedback really is very useful in the sense that net your stuff becomes better, we would expect books and articles to be better because almost everyone is on these all the time, but we're not seeing necessarily a trend like that.

32:54So what might be happening is... Well, hold on, Cal. That just means people aren't using it well. Well, okay. But why aren't they using it well? Because all of the incentives in these tools is built to make sure you use it poorly. This is way too extreme of an example, but it's like, I just smoke what I drink. But then like, eventually you're going to smoke a lot because it's really addictive. The negative externality scare me and I don't like them. And so the negative externality is in terms of like what it does to my attention and to my mood. And like Twitter is an anxiety producing machine.

33:21I have enough anxiety, right? Do I need to throw I guess I've tried to do with social media what you do with almost everything you do, which is I've tried to build a system for maximizing the benefits and minimizing the costs. And I mean, some of the heuristics are really simple. I only log into post and then I only scroll if there's nothing else I could be doing. And I think you have the discipline to pull that off. Okay, here's my challenge to you. What if you ran an experiment where you asked your team to start making, like create a Cal Newport account. Start doing posts that synthesize some of your favorite ideas and just check the account once a week yourself to see what you think of the reactions and are you getting something useful out of it.

34:07I'd be curious to see how that experiment plays out and the look on your face tells me that you don't want to go from abstinence to moderation because it's a slippery slope. Yeah, yes. My abstinence is partially, this is an unfair comparison because I have a really large audience. I have a way of interacting with my audience. I have a large newsletter and blog. I have this email address that's dedicated to people sending me interesting articles and links. So I'm basically simulating a lot of the benefits you're talking about. I'm able to simulate that without actually being on these monopoly platforms, right?

34:40So I get a lot of interesting ideas and feedback from this longstanding audience, which other people might not have. I think discovery of new audiences is harder for you. is probably the missing piece. That might be. That might be the case. And two, I'm probably more introverted than you. So in my life, I'm trying to meet less people typically. I get exhausted. Oh, I'm with you there. Yeah. Completely with you there. I don't want to talk to more people. I'm also trying to interact with fewer people. Yeah. Always. Yeah. So I'm like, I'm not actually looking necessarily for more conversation. I'm already exhausted for how many people I have to talk to.

35:10But then three, okay, we'll throw this in here. As an internet nerd, there's also a philosophical objection that I was opposed to the centralization of the internet to a small number of platform monopolies. And so there's also a philosophical objection there. I don't think that's the ideal function of the internet, which is a mechanism, I think, is world-changing general purpose technology, the end-all general purpose technologies. I did not like the phase where we centralized it into a small number of privately owned companies and that we all then had to use a small number of privately owned companies.

35:40So there's also an element of protest. I like my intellectual solitude. I think it leads to interesting, like more like original thoughts. I think I'm less susceptible with the things I write about towards being subtly pushed into thought grooves that are being reinforced in the discourses that happen in centralized conversation platforms. That's a really good argument. I don't have a lot of pushback to it. I also think thought grooves is a fascinating phrase that captures something that's missing when we talk about echo chambers and filter bubbles, which are much more isolating and restrictive than the internet actually is.

36:19Yeah. And thought groups aren't necessarily negative. Like we think about filter bubbles, but you see it in reporting. Like I do a lot of tech journalism. It's really easy to see on new topics, how people fall into these thought groups. They're not polarized. They're not political. It's just, you see this coalescing around these common themes. Now everyone's talking about the new technology in the same way. Let's go now to your case that I'm too responsive on email. I want to hear more. Yeah. I think I use don't respond to every email as a stand-in for don't just have email be a general purpose incoming pipe that everything comes through and that you have to service.

36:57To have more intentional, like, here's how you talk to me about this versus that. Be harder to reach in times. I think you're friendlier than me. So I'm basically trying to make you into like a meaner person, which doesn't put me in the best position. I'm actually not interested in being friendly by email. I'm interested in being helpful and respectful. And it bothers me when someone sends a reasonable email and just gets ghosted. If that person walked by you and talked to you or left a message on your voicemail, you wouldn't just ignore them. You would dignify them with a response. And the fact that digitally people have an excuse to just pretend it never happened or just say, I'm sorry, I was too busy to say hi to you when you waved at me.

37:43Like, not okay in my view. But I think, you know, I don't think you should answer every email. I've tried to be really explicit about that. If someone is disrespectful to you, if somebody is wasting your time, if you're overwhelmed, it's reasonable to set a boundary. But I think there's a little bit of an overcorrection here that people are drowning in emails. Most people are facing email overload. And sometimes they're throwing out that baby with the bathwater. There's a bunch of evidence suggesting that one of the signs of a bad manager is being slow to respond to emails. I just read some research showing that the clearest predictors of professors being helpful teachers and mentors to their students is being quick to respond to student questions.

38:23In a lot of jobs, email is a way that you actually do your job. we have a responsibility to respond to the people who engage with us thoughtfully. And by the way, a lot of us seek help by email. We don't just offer it. And so I guess I think there's a social contract that as you would reasonably try to help a person who, you know, who sat down with you or who called you, you ought to do the same thing electronically. Yeah. Well, okay. Let me ask you about a compromise then. And first I'll say the bigger picture here is there's the bigger problem of our work happens by email, right? Because there's also good research that shows as you raise the email volume of managers, time spent on leadership activities drops.

39:02So there's a trade-off. But let's just set the stage. Given that this is how work happens right now, we can't fix this overnight. What should we do? How do you feel about this compromise? Where when it comes to my public facing communication channels, there I have like a clear, I call it a cinder filter where I say, here's the different ways to contact different people about different things. And all of them are clear. There is no actual channel for you can just reach out to me out of nowhere and I'll respond. There's places you can send stuff to me, but it says I'm probably not going to be able to respond.

39:34So it's trying to reset the contract. And then that's different than internally, like people I know and colleagues, et cetera, students and academic colleagues. Of course, I'll answer those emails because I know these people. Do I get your stamp of approval for that? No, I think I'm 100 % fine with that. First of all, it's not my place to judge how you manage your inbox. Secondly, I think this is obviously a different problem for a public figure than it is for somebody who's only visible inside their own organization. Although if it's a big organization, you get a reputation for being responsive and pretty soon no good deed goes unpunished.

40:06And I do worry a lot about that problem. But I think this is an expectation management problem. I think if you're going to habitually ignore email, you should have an auto reply that says, I'm terrible on email, please, text me or please call me and you should have a mechanism to be reachable. What I'm objecting to more is the narrative of my inbox is just other people's priorities. Like, well, if you're a good person, you care about other people's priorities, not just your own, but also you use your inbox to manage your priorities too. And the whole system of being able to reach people that aren't physically co-located with you or that you're not lucky enough to have a phone number for would fall apart if we mass adopted this, well, I'm just going to only answer what I want to answer policy.

40:51Okay. I, I agree with that. I think our final agreement will be, I'll be better at answering emails if you don't make me use Instagram. And then we got, I think we got ourselves a, we got ourselves a deal. All right. You, you have yourself a deal on that Cal. I think that's entirely fair. Fair enough. Fair enough. I might just ignore an email from you out of spite. That's the problem. That's the problem. You're like, yeah, I'll give it to you on Twitter. You have to go there to find it. Create an account. This has been great fun. Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you.

41:26I think the most important message from Cal's work is for leaders and managers. In an always-on world, the root cause of exhaustion is having too much to do. It doesn't matter how many stress management courses you offer or how many perks you pile on. The best way to fight burnout is to stop overloading people with work. If you care about people or even about the quality of the work they do, give them permission to do less well. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Asia Simpson.

42:06Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Stu and Alison Leighton Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quint, Ban Ban Chang, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers. It seems to me that one of the solutions to this problem is to recognize that you were doing... Let me try that again. Do you ever podcast notes itself? Yes, apparently I know how to talk.

42:40Thank you.