Ep. 278: How to Think  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 278: How to Think - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/e4b65302-4965-455a-835a-974f482e5af4 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Information Consumption** - Improve information quality and reduce quantity. - Stop using social media algorithms for news. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. So the first practice that I want to to discuss is to improve the quality and decrease the quantity of information that you consume. So to illustrate this with an icon, I'm going to expertly draw here the Twitter T. I know they've switched to X, but I sort of am boycotting that. So I'm drawing a T and I'll put in a circle with a line through it. I'm going to indicate consuming better quality and less quantity of information. So what does this mean? I'm talking particularly here about news or other information you use to learn more things about the world. Stop using social media algorithms to curate your news flow. Social media algorithms are bad curators. Their interest is not making you as informed as possible. Their interest is making you as engaged and possible to make you as engaged and possible. They are going to push you to places that are not emotionally healthy. It's also not going to lead you to the most nuanced understanding of issues. I want you instead to focus on a multi-scale news and information consumption. So I want your news and information consumption to be divided over three scales, daily, monthly, and seasonal. And here's what I mean by that. Daily have a very small number, probably just one sources of quality, non-algorithmically curated news and information. ([Time 0:08:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e6b65f6e-2b9f-41a2-b43a-ad547437607b)) - **Multi-Scale News** - Adopt a multi-scale approach to news consumption: daily, monthly, and seasonally. - Use high-quality, non-algorithmically curated sources. Transcript: Cal Newport This could be one of the growing number of daily news roundup newsletters. I like, for example, if you're a subscriber to the New York Times, I think David Leonhart's daily news summary is a fantastic one. I'm saying this mainly because they featured my profile from the New York Times Magazine from last year. They re-featured it recently in that newsletter, so we know that's expertly curated. It could be a daily News Roundup podcast. It could be a physical newspaper that you pick up or have delivered. Okay, at the monthly scale, you spend the time to go through a collection of, let's say, two to six in-depth long-form magazine articles. So now this is still relatively current, but not day-to current. This is now information where enough time has passed for a professional journalist or writer to actually spend some time to really digest information about what's going on in the world And produce and have edited a long-form piece. Now we're at a lag of a month or so from what's actually going on. This is where, for example, you can pull out a few selected articles from my own journalistic home, which is The New Yorker. Maybe you pull out some long-form articles from The Atlantic or Foreign Affairs or The National Review or The Wall Street Journal's Sunday issue. Whatever it is that you particularly follow. It could be print, could be not print, tablet magazine. I'm just thinking of different things I've pulled from before. And you're like, here's my six articles I've gathered throughout the month, 3,000, 5,000 word beast. I'm going to go to a coffee shop somewhere. I've got these printed out. And let's just engage at this slower scale, deeper understanding, slower scale. Now we jump up to the seasonal scale, and this is books. There's something going on in the world you care about. You should get a book written by an expert, someone who has spent years working on this artifact based on many more years of actually engaging with this topic. And you get this beautiful artifact here that you can hold and consume in about a week or two that is going to give you as deep or nuanced as an understanding of a topic as you're ever likely To get outside of actually studying that topic professionally yourself. ([Time 0:09:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/61f843ae-2814-4080-a772-64bc9b09043b)) - **Boredom Comfort** - Increase comfort with boredom by having daily phone-free outings or chores. - A longer, phone-free outing on weekends is beneficial. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. Practice number two, increase your comfort with boredom. So let's draw a picture for this one as well. I'm going to draw here as a rock. All right, there we go. And sitting on this rock, we see someone contemplating. Jesse appreciates my artwork. Increased comfort with boredom. What is the idea here before we get even more specific about the practices? If your brain is used to this idea that it is never bored, that when it lacks novel stimuli, you will always feed it a shiny digital treat in the form typically of your phone or an iPad or A browser tab that's going to give you something emotionally salient in the moment. It can't tolerate serious thinking because serious thinking requires you to keep your attention sustained, this inner eye of your attention sustained on a single abstract topic. That's boring because there's not a lot of novel stimuli. Your brain has to be comfort with boredom. So by increasing your comfort with boredom, you're just teaching your brain. It's not that you're bored all the time. It's also not trying to put too much of a positive value on boredom. It's just teaching your brain sometimes we're bored and sometimes we're not, and I'm comfortable with that state of boredom. So how can you do this? Two things I'm going to suggest. One, actually have every day a particular outing or chore or task you do. It can be short, but a particular thing you do without your phone. Go to the drugstore, go put in your laundry. It doesn't have to be long. Taking out the garbage and do it with nothing in your ear. So you're like, okay, I'm just doing this activity. There's no novel stimuli here. I'm just kind of having to be alone with my own thoughts. A lot of people who take this advice will also typically add a longer outing on the weekends, hour plus no phone. ([Time 0:14:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0d67d9c0-3b0a-42c7-b004-96c59dde5a56)) - **Phone Foyer Method** - Use the phone foyer method: keep your phone plugged in in one place at home. - Go to it when needed, but it doesn't follow you around. Transcript: Cal Newport You can ramp that up over the weekend. The other really important thing you can do is the phone foyer method. The idea here is when you're at your home or your apartment or wherever you live, you keep your phone plugged in in one place. If you have a house with a foyer, it's in the foyer, or it's in the kitchen, if you have an apartment, whatever, but it stays plugged in when you're at home in one place. If you need to look something up, you go to where it's plugged in and you look it up there. If you need to receive or text with someone, you go where the phone is plugged in and you receive and do text there. Same with phone calls. You have to go to where the phone is. It is not where you are. Now, this is going to be annoying at first, but what you're doing here is severing this permanent accessibility of the distraction. So now when you're watching something or doing something in your own house or in your own apartment, you can't pull out the phone. It's somewhere else. You still have the benefits of, I need to look this thing up, but you have to walk 10 feet to go do it. You're going to get more mini moments of boredom during your evenings and mornings at home. ([Time 0:16:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d0eb65be-cf1f-4b92-8b7b-36673be5b200)) - **Attention Training** - Practice attention with interval training, starting with short durations and gradually increasing. - Use a timer and restart if you get distracted. Transcript: Cal Newport So I'll illustrate this here. You won't know at first what this means. So So provocatively, what I'm drawing here is a stopwatch. Is there something on the top, Jesse? I don't know. Let's do this. Perfect rendition of a stopwatch. Why am I drawing a stopwatch? Because one of the first things I'm going to recommend for cultivating your ability to pay attention is interval training. So actually increasing the timed intervals at which you're comfortable giving sustained attention to a single target. These intervals should be intense. You only increase the time of the intervals as you get comfortable with the current duration, right? So what we're trying to do here is get your mind comfortable with sustaining attention. So the previous practice, getting a comfort for boredom, we think of that as the table stakes, the foundation. Your mind has to be okay with not having a lot of stimuli. This practice is now about focusing and practicing the actual activity of focus, the actual activity of sustaining attention. So you have to be able to do it, and then you have to actually practice what this actually feels like. So with interval training, you can do this with multiple activities. It could be a difficult work or school activity. It can also be, and I think this is critical, a high-quality leisure activity, like watching a movie, which a lot of people, especially young people right now, have a very hard time doing For more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time without actually looking at their phone. It could be a high-quality leisure activity or a difficult work activity. It could be reading a book even, anything that requires focus. You start with an interval that you're comfortable with. Keep it small at first, maybe even just 10 minutes. You use a real timer. Set that timer. And might as well do it on your phone, by the way, because you want your phone right there in timer mode. So you know for a fact if you use your phone because you've left the timer mode on your phone. Set that timer for 10 minutes and work on that work task, watch that movie or read that book with as much concentration as you can muster, zero checks of anything screened outside of your Target until that timer goes off. If you break that concentration and say, I just have to check Twitter. I just have to see what's going on in my text messages. You have to start that timer and start it over. It doesn't count. Once you're able to consistently hit the current time duration, you increase it by 10 minutes. So this is just literally training the thing you want to be better at, sustaining attention on cognitive tasks, the absence of stimuli, sustaining the attention. ([Time 0:18:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/908ce287-8d57-4f6c-83ca-00843a7c3a42)) - **Ritual and Environment** - Cultivate attention through rituals and dedicated environments for focused activities. - Establish specific spaces for reading, deep work, or watching movies. Transcript: Cal Newport You got to train your brain what that feels like. Okay. Another thing you can do when it comes to cultivating your ability to pay attention is more passive, which is care about ritual, care about environment. Set up, this is where I go to read. And it's different than where I just sit and work or watch TV. I've set up like a very special chair and I have this light here and it's by like a warm radiator in the winter. This is where I go to work on deep work challenges versus just regular work or email. I have a separate part of my house. I went up to the attic and I've renovated an eve there and that's where I go to do deep work. And it's different than where I do my email and where the printer and all the filing cabinets are. I have a ritual I do before I watch a hard movie. I do a thing to get my mind into that mode. I listen to a movie podcast while walking for 20 minutes. Ritual and environment will help you fall into that deeper attention mode. Combine that with interval training. ([Time 0:20:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/af15da71-456e-4d05-b269-58ae18c3f017)) - **Productive Meditation** - Strengthen working memory with productive meditation: think through complex problems while walking. - Redirect your attention back to the problem when it wanders. Transcript: Cal Newport And this is going to be strengthen your working memory. So I'm going to draw here is a person very determinedly walking because he loves my art, and this person is thinking about all sorts of things. Why am I drawing a person walking? Because my number one tip for increasing your working memory is productive meditation. It's an idea that goes all the way back to my 2016 book, Deep Work. With productive meditation, you take a professional problem, or it could be a complicated personal problem, but a clear complicated problem. You go for a walk and you try to make progress on that problem only using your head. The walking helps you do this. If you're just sitting and thinking, it's much more difficult, but the walking actually quiet some noises in your cognitive circuit. So it's a little bit easier to focus. And every time you notice your attention wander away from the problem that you're trying to make progress on in your head, you notice that wandering and you move your attention back To the problem. This forces you to get very comfortable holding lots of information in your head and trying to manipulate it and generate new information based on it. You can make these walks longer and longer as you get more comfortable with this exercise. This is directly increasing your working memory strength. Your working memory strength is critical to being a serious thinker. Serious thinking requires you to pull multiple pieces of information and hold on to them in your mind's eye. This piece, but also this piece, and this piece is over here, and how do these things relate, and then how do I connect that to this other thing I thought before? Working memory is at the core of deep thoughts. Most people have a bad working memory, however, because we're not used to holding a lot of stuff in our head in a way that we can actually access them with our mind's eye. ([Time 0:21:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/db3363f2-4b35-47a4-a403-86232e80efac)) - **Intellectual Engagement** - Practice being intellectual by pairing primary and secondary sources. - Read *about* a book, movie, or artwork before engaging with it directly. Transcript: Cal Newport I'm going to draw one more picture. This final practice, I'm going to say it this way, practice being intellectual. And so let's see, let's draw our stick figure person here. So how do we know this person is intellectual? Um, it's not going to work. I'm going to draw him in a turtleneck, but he needs a neck, Jesse. That's the problem. Let me give him a neck, my stick figure person. There we go. Give him big neck. Your French accent. I probably will give him a beret as well. And a pipe. Yeah. So there you go. Turtleneck. Because he's an intellectual. All right. Beret. Because he's an intellectual. And a pipe. There you go. Practice being an intellectual. Now, I joke by drawing this picture of like sort of a pretentious Frenchman with a pipe because intellectual is often used in modern conversation as a pejorative term. But there's also a very specific and positive meaning here. It's a stance towards the world of information in which you are seeking out nuance and subtlety. You're also seeking out integration of information into complex understandings that you already have. So to be an intellectual is that you are engaging with the world of information, trying to master it and integrate it. Now, if you do this for a living, like I do, if you're a professor, they teach you how to do this. I mean, this is what you do for a living, but we don't talk enough about everyone else. How do you practice this intellectual stance, an intellectual approach to the world of information? I'm going to give you two very concrete ideas that I think almost anyone can do, and it's going to make you literally seem much smarter. The first is pairing primary and secondary sources. Pairing secondary and primary sources. Okay, here's what this means. It's most obvious with books. So you want to read a great book, let's say. I want to read The Odyssey. I want to read Joyce. I want to read Absalon, Absalon. The typical approach that I think professional intellectuals have, which is flawed because they forgot their own training, is they say just read it. Just expose yourself to the ideas and then pretend like it's really changed your life. But that's not actually the way you learn how to engage information and draw out nuance and complicate it. What you should do instead is say, okay, let me now get, before I read this hard book, a secondary source. A secondary source means it's a book about the book. So here is a book about why Faulkner is important or why Absalom Absalom is important. Here is a book about the heroic Greek world in which Homer wrote the Odyssey and why this is such an important book. I'm going to read about the book first and then go and read the actual primary source itself. You are now approaching this primary artifact with a framework for how to understand it, what you're looking for, what's important about it. And this gives your brain practice seeing things at a new level. You might not understand everything you saw in the secondary source, and you might not come away saying, I completely understand this book or it's changed my life, but you've practiced Reading multiple layers below the surface. See, when we just tell people, read the great books, go to the museums, and you'll just be inspired, we really are selling them short because that experience of inspiration requires You seeing multiple layers below the surface, and you got to practice that. ([Time 0:23:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2bb4b901-b368-48e3-91b2-eacfff5847d3)) - **Idea Documents** - Maintain idea documents, summarizing evolving thoughts on timeless or current topics. - Writing helps structure information and build conceptual frameworks. Transcript: Cal Newport Maintain idea documents. These are actual documents you maintain, like a Microsoft Word file just in your own personal files, or if you're a good handwriter, you could do this in journals. And you have particular topics that you are recording and updating a summary in your own words of your best understanding of that topic. Now, these can be just general sort of timeless topics, like I'm interested in Stoic philosophy, and I have this document I build out and add to about what Stoic philosophy is, who the Thinkers are, what their thoughts, major thoughts are, your current summary of how you're thinking about Stoicism being in your own life. You are, through writing, consolidating information, structuring information. Now, again, this is something that real intellectuals get good at doing naturally, but you have to practice it. So writing and updating these summaries is a good way of doing it. You can do the same thing with current event topics as well. There's something going on in the world that you care about. You're like, I don't know, this scares me or interests me, or it just feels important to me. Create and begin maintaining a document of how you feel about this and why. This is a fantastic way to free yourself from the emotional ping-pong game of just let me expose myself to social media or algorithmic content. Let me choose a tribe and make that tribe make me feel good or scared and help me get mad about the other tribe. It gets you out of that trap and allows you to begin building your own understanding of things. You're worried about AI? Start building out this document. Here's what's going on. Here's the main types of AI. Here's where things are. Here's a list of thinkers and where they stand. And this thinker is against this thinker. You organize your thoughts. You're really worried or upset or conflicted or uneasy about conflict in the Middle East. Build out a document. Shut down Twitter. Build out a document. Here's what's going on. I mean, this is why I'm trying to articulate my concerns here. I really worry about this, but this, I don't know how, this is making me feel bad as well. And there's this argument doesn't quite work. And here's why. You're talking about arguments and where it falls short for you, where it resonates. Build idea documents as a way of structuring. To write is to think. So the write about what matters is to help you think about what matters, and your brain gets used to organizing information in the conceptual structures. ([Time 0:30:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7039c16c-90c6-494b-9cd5-b17cd11d0a64)) - **Structured Thinking** - Consolidate scattered ideas by writing them down in idea documents. - Writing structures thoughts and helps with communication. Transcript: Cal Newport My presentation just seems haphazard and shallow. How should I fix this? Well, sorry, I like this question because we've already done the answer in the deep dive, which is idea documents. So you might have noticed this among people who are more sort of traditionally intellectual or professional intellectuals. They're very good at, I read this New Yorker piece or watch this documentary and can now with great confidence sort of talk on this topic. In fact, I can talk sort of, I'm speaking from experience here, sort of like 60% out of my butt on this. But like I picked up enough things that I can sort of talk about this really confidently. That's practice. That's practice with taking information and integrating them into a structure, a conceptual structure that you can then apply to generate new information. So in conversation, I can now use this conceptual structure when engaging on this topic and be able to pull from it and seem really smart. How do you practice doing that is idea documents. You create these documents around ideas you care about or think are interesting. You begin to fill them out and evolve them. The act of actually writing forces you to build conceptual structures because the writing is just a reflection of an internal abstract structure on the page. If you write something structured about a topic you care about, I've written something structured about the conflict in the Middle East, how I'm feeling about it, where my confusions Are, who I don't agree with, who I do agree with, that requires you to build a conceptual structure for the information you have. Now, for a lot of people who are not professional thinkers, it really changes your experience of the world. Because if you're not building conceptual structures in which you integrate information, what you're doing instead is just surfing vibes. You know, I don't know, like, I don't like this person. And that person seems to be on the other side of this thing. So like, boo. Or I don't know, I saw this thing someone tweeted, and it made me feel righteous at the time. No, I didn't try to actually integrate this into a conceptual structure. So I just sort of feel like this is a clear-cut issue, right? And like, we're just really right. And then you get into a conversation, and you try to repeat the thing you saw tweeted that in that form felt so righteous and it's like, this doesn't really feel so convincing anymore. And the other person just said three things I wasn't thinking about. I don't know what to do. And your head sort of explodes or you just, you know, you're on the other team. So we're not used to it. Most people are not used to this way of actually engaging with the world. This is how you practice. Idea documents. So do this with actual topics that you talk to people about. Do this also with topics that are completely timeless that you want to know more about. A piece of technology, a type of philosophy. I built out a pretty extensive document a few years ago when I was listening to one of the great courses on the great ideas of Western philosophy. And I sort of start building this thing out. Like, I don't know, let me just write this down. And this person thought this, it just really helped me sort of structure who is who and what they were thinking and how this is important. When you don't write it down, it all sort of just filters through. So SR, start doing those idea documents and you're going to get better and better at this. All right. ([Time 0:42:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a74abb28-db8f-49eb-90d3-962620c16b62)) - **Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning** - Prioritize lifestyle-centric career planning over the passion mindset. - Align your work with broader life goals, not just momentary enjoyment. Transcript: Cal Newport Let's keep rolling, Jesse. What do we got next? Next question is from Maggie. I work in data analysis, and I am regularly bored of my day-to tasks. At the same time, my side hustle has gotten to the point where I can spend the whole day in deep work without distraction. What should I do in the interim to maintain my deep work muscle while also getting through the day? Jesse, if you've gotten used to this type of question, we get the – I call it the leading the witness question, right? Where it's like, well, my work is bad and it's really boring and it's stupid. But this other thing is really great and it's awesome and I could do it all day long and it gives me meaning in life. What should I do? It's leading the question. So I want you to be careful here. This is Maggie. I want you to be wary of grass is greener syndrome. So when you're just sort of going through your professional life with what in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, I call the passion mindset, which is what is this job offering me? You're very susceptible to the grass is greener syndrome, which is like, I don't love like what I'm doing day to day right now. Maybe there's something where I would love what I'm doing day to day more. And when you start messing around with side hustles, this gets even more dangerous because it is easy to create a quote unquote side hustle that just like lets you do the thing you think Is fun in the moment, right? Because when you don't have to depend on that side hustle for all of your income, when you don't have to depend on that side hustle to actually create an impact in the world or support people, You can just make it whatever you want. And then you tell yourself the story that like there's jobs like this out here where I could just be doing this really fun thing. But over here in this other world, in this non-data analysis, I have to fill out memos, and it's not always like that my boss is kind of annoying, and it's not always interesting what I'm Doing. But in my side hustle, I'm writing a novel, and it's like fun. I'm just writing all day. But the issue is that side hustle could just be you cosplaying some sort of imaginary ideal of what work could be. It's a dangerous thing to have pulling you. So how do we get out of this situation? It's not just we say, well, just grin and bear whatever your job is, because maybe your job isn't in its current state what it should be. The way you get out of this situation is lifestyle-centric career planning. I have an ideal vision of where I want my life to be, and here's my sort of target in the next few years, all the aspects of my life, where I live, what I do, what my days are like, my engagement With community and the rest of the world. All these things are really clear. And as part of this, you then look back and say, how does I use my working life to get me closer there? Then what you were doing in your working life is part of a intentional plan to get you closer to a more idealized version of your lifestyle. That is much more effective than just the passion mindset of, do I like what I'm doing? Is there another thing I could be doing that I would like more? Maybe I should just be a novelist because this is fun. Like i bought uh my a hipster keyboard and it clickety clacks and and i'm drinking coffee and clickety clacky brad stolberg by the way jesse called my new keyboard a hipster keyboard Oh really yeah he's like oh so you got one of those hipster keyboards does he see him a lot in coffee shops i don't know i don't know he lives in uh ashville there's probably a lot of hipsters There right that's what i But yeah, so he calls it a hipster keyboard, which it is. So you're like, this is fun. I clickety-clack and wear a beret and a pipe in Starbucks, which is exactly what I do. I'm just like, ha, ha, ha. Right, right, right. I think this is fun and data now. The other stuff is kind of, you know, it's annoying, right? You're just going to get drawn into that. But if you're like, no, no, this data analysis is part of the money it generates, what I'm doing now, but where I want to shift my position here. Eventually, as I get to this level, I'm going to shift this to a consultant because I've saved this much money. And then it's going to be six months on, six months off, which is going to allow us. You have this plan worked out that the work you're doing now and what you're working towards with your work is part of a plan that connects deeply with what resonates. That's where you want to be, not just analyzing this, your day-to activity, something you enjoy or not, and then inventing this ideal job cosplay. Like, well, I'm comparing it to that. Couldn't it be that? It's the equivalent of like you're looking at your romantic partner and then you're watching a Ryan Reynolds movie. And you're like, huh, Ryan Reynolds seems kind of better i mean he's funny he's like pretty good shape you know he's like the handyman in this small town in this christmas movie that like I didn't realize would teach me the meaning of christmas and then you know you look over at at your romantic partner like i don't know i mean maybe he's probably just ryan reynolds it's Kind of the same thing when you're know, cosplaying on your hipster keyboard. Like, well, this is more fun than, you know, my job that's sending my kids to private school. So I think working backwards, and I know I'm a broken record on this, but lifestyle-centered career planning gives you focus on what you're doing and why, which is what you need to keep Moving. Your motivational system needs an understanding of what you're doing and how it leads to something important so that your episodic future thinking can see something that really resonates. That's what it needs. It doesn't need to enjoy every minute of what you're doing. That's the wrong metric. The athlete who really wants to be the best in their field does not enjoy all the time they spend in the weight room, but they're motivated to do it because it's part of their vision of being Number one. So that would be my advice there. Be careful of grass is greener syndrome. All right. What's our next question, Jesse? All right. This is the moment of truth too. Is this slow productivity corner? ([Time 0:45:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9cc23133-9eb8-4486-bbbe-d9d25a061423)) - **Slow Thinker Strategy** - As a slow thinker, compensate by setting expectations and responding thoughtfully later. - Lean into your slowness as a positive trait. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. What is our slow productivity corner question of the day, Jesse? That came from Kieran. Thank you, Kieran. I'm a slow thinker, but at times my employee wants complicated answers quickly. I struggle at times to gather my thoughts into concise answers to appease management. How should I compensate? Well, I'm going to give you a couple ideas here. One of them will be concrete and one of them is going to be a little bit more psychological. Let me start with the concrete. Lean into your slowness here by cultivating, this could be like a quirky idiosyncratic trait of yours. You get that email, hey Dante, what about like whatever? You say, interesting question. Let me give this a thought. I'll get back to you after lunch. You have a specific time that then gives you enough time to sit down and say, okay, let me take a break. Let me take a beat and let me think through like, what do I really want to say here? And let me gather some points here and actually make this pretty thoughtful and then send it back by the time I said it was going to send it back. So then people think like, well, Dante, yeah, he's a very thoughtful guy. Like he never responds right off the cuff in the meetings. He says, let me get back to you. And then he does. And he gets back to us in the time he says. And it's always really thoughtful stuff. And now you're leaning into the slowness instead of losing opportunities. Like, ah, like Dante doesn't get back to us or it's incomplete. They're like this is just the way this guy operates that's actually kind of cool he's careful so we can kind of trust him on careful stuff and here's the bonus dante they will maybe start Leaving you out of this sort of knucklehead like back and forth hyperactive hive mind like let's just like go back and forth 70 emails right now and try to like get some answer you don't Really want to be a part of that anyways. Like I'm slower. So no, I can't do the less than 70 emails next 30 minutes, but I can really help think what's really going to be best for this client to do this. You really have to deliver though, really do think through and be deliberate. Here's my psychological answer. So that's like what you could do positively. There could be a negative aspect here as well. There could be some combination of perfectionism and imposter syndrome, self-confidence issues going on here. Right. So the other thing that might be happening is you're just worried about shooting off a response because you worry I'm insufficient. Like this might not be smart. This might not make sense. If I send off this response too quick and I really haven't thought about it, the boss is going to be like, aha, I knew it. You're not smart. You're an imposter. Pack up and get out of here. And so you're crippled by this idea of, you know, I just, do I really belong here? Can, you know, are people going to think I'm dumb? It's sort of like a perfectionism imposter syndrome. That's also very common in these sort of work scenarios. And there you have to just basically, this is psychological, you have to harness your sort of inner American white maleness of just, I will be very confident. Like, yeah, I know about this there, you know, and just be like, it'll work out. You got to have to kind of get that mindset a little bit it's going to feel artificial at first that's sort of like yeah of course do this of course you know then high five people because That's what american white males do i suppose we high five each other yeah they type on hipster keyboard we're just like let me just knock this out on my hipster keyboard give it up just Round of high fives. So everyone in the room is just high fiving. So you got some of that's just mindset. People, here's the thing. People are not scouring over your responses. They're not looking at them in detail. There's not a committee that's like, okay, here comes Dante. Let's put it up, project it, project it on the board for some reason they have it on a 1980s style plastic film on the overhead projector and they're all staring at it and thinking about It and then finally like someone in a tweed jacket shakes their head and says no this is not good this is not good at all and then the other guy is like so we're gonna murder him like yeah let's Do it and they all just run out of the room to come get you that's not what happens when you send a quick email it's mainly just people who are really busy and overwhelmed and just trying To throw things. I need an answer to this because I have so many things going on. I'm super stressed. They don't really care. If you read most people's emails in the hyperactive hive mind situation, they often sound like you have, you know, a caveman who's dealing with a brain injury responding. It's like, me, client meeting, bad, 4 p.m., question mark, emoji. People are just throwing junk around. So the psychological answer is you go a little easier on yourself. Just be like, yeah, it's fine. The conversation needs to move forward. So you have some combination of these two options. Don't be so worried about people scrutinizing your responses. Or, and this could be complimentary, lean into being a slow thinker. This is my thing. I take my time, but then I give you good responses. I like this, this second, this latter response, just because I think it might free you from a lot of the back and forth hyperactive nonsense. And in a way that's not costing you. We don't involve Dante and like a lot, some of the back and forth nonsense because not because he's not reliable, but because he's a slower, more careful thinker. So he probably won't respond on this right away. In fact, the fact that you are, you will respond this right away. It makes me think, why aren't you more like Dante? So it's like a positive way to actually get away from some knucklehead stuff. ([Time 0:50:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a13e5380-769c-4739-8f7b-c425a61d899d)) - **Deep Holidays** - Plan deep holidays by bringing intellectually engaging, offline activities. - Focus on deep thinking disconnected from obligations. Transcript: Cal Newport How do you take deep holiday? Thanks, Cal. Well, first of all, Andy makes me think we should have added a sixth practice to our deep dive about how to become a more serious thinker. And that practice is adopt an English accent. Yeah. I think people just give you what, 50% more intellectual seriousness. Yeah. I was hoping you'd use your French accent well that's not an intellect i think the english accent sounds smarter yeah yeah um i've got a fantastic english accent holiday you're right Chop um no this is russian english accents make everything sound smarter Deep holidays is a good question, especially if you do think for a living like I do. I had to figure this out. I used to think the goal for a vacation was to have nothing to do because you get overwhelmed by having too much to do as you approach the vacation. So you say, wouldn't this be great to have nothing to do? Just it's me and my family and some fun books. It would stress the hell out of me, right? It's like you're a serious drinker and you say for the next two weeks, you know, I'm not going to touch it. It's difficult for those two weeks because you've been doing it all the time. So I would have a huge difficulty on vacations, especially when we had young kids, just feeling uncomfortable and antsy and bored and weird because my brain was like, what are we doing Here? So what I learned to do was to bring things to think deeply about on vacation. This will not cause stress. Just make sure these things are fully disconnected from any sort of communication or back and forth. Make sure they can't generate new tasks that you have to deal with and schedule. That really what you want escape from is all of that cognitive context shifting, all of that dealing with ever-evolving collections of obligations and scheduling. That's what you need to escape from. But actually the thinking hard about something interesting piece, well, that's actually the fun part of work. And so to be able to just do some of that, you know, I go for, I used to do this when we'd go to the beach, go for a walk on the beach every day and just think about something and take note. Like that's, you don't need that much, but that's great. You know? Planning is a good thing to do on vacations. I want to just like think through like what do I want to do with like this new book. So many of my book ideas have come together. The final stage of coming together has happened on vacation. So having things to think through that are – allow slowness. You can just spend time with them. There's no time sensitivity. No one's waiting for you. That generates no new obligations, no back and forth communication. To me, that's a deep holiday. You don't want to escape work. You want to just keep the coolest, most fun intellectual parts of work. ([Time 0:56:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/887e790e-07c7-482d-ab3d-bfb5e802544d)) - **Fan Art** - Cal Newport received fan art of a mock *Name of the Wind* cover with Brandon Sanderson as the author. - It relates to a long-running joke on the show. Transcript: Cal Newport Actually, let me load this up over here. All right. So longtime fans of the show know that we have this sort of long running joke where I pretend that the Patrick Rufus book, Name of the Wind, was written by Brandon Sanderson. Jesse, I got a very concerned email recently from a listener that was like, look, I feel bad about this. I love the show, but it's really, really bothering me. I think you have the wrong author. Brandon Sanderson did not write Name of the Wind. So this bit has been going on long enough that we have a huge amount of our audience that just thinks I'm dumb, which I sort of appreciate. Anyways, what's on the screen here, if you're watching instead of listening, one of our listeners, do we have their name somewhere? Yeah, it's, I'll get it. Alaska or something like that. Mocked up a fake version of Name of the Wind. Elasdy. Elasdy. Elasdy. So on the screen here is a fake version of the Name of the the Wind with Brandon Sanderson as the author. There seems to be a wizard in some sort of medieval armor holding, I guess, a time block plan. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I'm going to have to print that out. We'll put that in the studio. So there we go. It's the little things to make me happy. Um, but I have an actual article here to react to, you know, load this up on the screen right now. ([Time 1:07:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a847fcd9-e73c-45eb-892e-eaf39b6556b4)) - **In-Person Collaboration** - In-person collaboration fosters breakthrough ideas better than remote work. - The “whiteboard effect” promotes focus and on-demand information exchange. Transcript: Cal Newport Uh, this appeared in nature on November 29th. So if you're, if you're watching, I have it up on the screen here. See here. Um, you know, I'm looking at this, Jesse, this is actually, this is the, not the full article. This is actually the description of the data tables that got pulled into here. Oh, okay. Um, but I can tell you what's in, I could tell you what's actually in this article. So the title of the article is Remote Collaboration Fuses Fewer Breakthrough Ideas. Now, this was a study that was published in Nature where they took tens of thousands of actual research articles and patent applications, and they did some sort of analysis to figure Out the nature of the work that was done to produce this intellectual artifact, in particular in person or over a long distance collaboration. And what they found was a strong connection between the original new ideas and working in person together. That these more long distancedistance collaborations were not as associated with as much as many new ideas. So I wanted to get into this a little bit because I have talked about various forces that could help explain what they were seeing here. You see, what's going on when we think about the world of creativity and production is we're really excited about ideas like network theory and recombinant growth models, where we Just imagine there's just pools of information out there and different people have different pools of information. And if we just connect people, their pools of information connect and we can have the information share with each other and we get these interesting new combinations and there comes Innovation. The networking itself is abstract of these models. It's just connect. So it's online, it's digital, whatever. It doesn't really matter. But this study here in nature is saying, well, actually, it does matter how you're actually bringing people together to work. And it's because we are missing from these abstract models something that's much more messy and concrete, which is actual human brain cognition. Real human brains, messy collections of neurons that are actually trying to concentrate and create new thoughts. New important thoughts do not form from the low friction recombination of abstract information. They're produced in brains. And it requires serious thinking by real people. It's a hard alchemical process that takes some information and produces new information that's valuable. It is not just a recombination of ideas. Being in person with other people supports that process much better than virtual collaboration. Now, why is that? Well, there's an effect I wrote about in deep work called the whiteboard effect. And what it said is if you gather groups of people together to work on the same proverbial whiteboard on a problem for an extended period of time, that can actually unlock higher levels Of cognition than people even just working on their own because two things happen here. One, there's the social pressure not to fall behind on the thread of thought. So we're at the whiteboard. We're trying to figure out an equation. People are going back and forth and sort of proposing their new additions. If you let your attention wander, if you switch your cognitive context, there's a social cost because now you're going to fall behind the thread of conversation. You're going to have to say at some point, hold on, guys, I'm sorry, can you back up again? So there's a social cost to letting your mind wander. So when multiple people are working on something hard concurrently, everyone is focusing longer and harder than they would than if it was just themselves. There's not much of a social cost if you let your mind wander by yourself. No one knows. And then you can kind of go back to it. So when you're working together, one thing that happens is you think harder, you focus longer, you do less context shifts. The second thing that happens is you get on-demand additions of new information. I'm trying to figure out this proof. I'm stuck right here. This person right next to me might immediately be able to say, use this technique. I know this technique. You didn't. I can get you unstuck. Then we get to another place where they're stuck, you have a technique that gets them unstuck. So you expand your available pool of conceptual tools to apply to the problem at hand. So people sitting together for hours, focusing on something hard, they can actually produce more than just like a single person thinking about it. Now, what happens when we have remote collaboration? Most of that does not unlock those same whiteboard effects. Remote collaboration, because I did a lot of this during COVID, it's emailing things back and forth and it's having Zoom conferences for relatively short periods of time because if It's Zoom, you've scheduled it on your calendar and it's an hour and you're kind of talking things through. And it's kind of useful. You're exchanging some information, but you do not get those boost the cognition. You do not get those like in the moment when I'm stuck and actually thinking you help me get unstuck. When you do remote collaboration, the actual acts of collaboration are typically disassociated from the serious thinking, the alchemy when you're trying to produce new thoughts. You lose those advantages. I see this. Let me give you like an actual example from my own life as a professional thinker. So last year with some collaborators, I published a computer science paper that won an award. It won a best paper award. Here's what's interesting about working on that paper. It took a long time. We started during Zoom, on Zoom, because it's during the pandemic, and my collaborators were all over the world. We usually would get together every year, but we weren't. And so we had these regular Zoom meetings for a long time. We knew this was a good problem. We weren't making progress. Some progress would get made, but just getting stuck, because on Zoom we would talk about it. And then maybe we'd think about it some on our own and not much was happening. What got that paper unstuck? At some point I said, virus or no virus, those of you who are in this area, come to the Deep Work HQ. And we had the whiteboard in here. We spent the day, unlocked a lot of things. Now, suddenly we had a real core to this paper. Around this time, Georgetown was back open again. Things were rock and rolling. So one of my collaborators who had been overseas as a Georgetown professor came back and we said, great, let's get together every, there's a day, it was Wednesday, like we both taught On Wednesdays, between our classes, let's always get together and go to this whiteboard and just work. And more things begin to unfold quicker now, quicker now. And the core results of this paper really fell out to the place where then we could go back on our own and each take a different thing and polish it on our own. Paper came together, won a best paper award. So we couldn't make progress on this until we could figure out how to get back together. Still took us two years because a lot of this was still done virtually. Now, I want to contrast that. I'm going to load up something on ([Time 1:09:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9427aa0f-4584-47fe-a5a9-d57f552e9554))