Ep. 337: Hacking Remote Work  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 337: Hacking Remote Work - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/6e6ebb29-a08b-4479-bcf9-0314216a65c6 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Remote Work Essentials** - Successful remote work needs clear workload systems and structured communication. - Without these, remote work can be frustrating and less productive. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. So three foundational ideas, and I'm going to draw, spin off some concrete advice for each. All right. Foundational idea number one, successful remote work requires two things, clear workload systems and structured communication. Let me unpack both of those things. Clear workload system means there is some clarity about what you're working on and what it means for something that you're working on to be done. And the load of what you're actively working on now that you're tracking it is kept manageable. That is what's meant by clear workload systems. And by structured communication, this involves how information flows, questions are asked, and status is checked on the work that is happening. If communication is structured, these type of interactions are consolidated into a smaller number of predictable periods or moved asynchronous. But unscheduled communication is minimized. That means something that comes in you weren't expecting that you need to reply to, like an email or a chat. Calendar clutter is also minimized in a structured communication regime. So you don't have a calendar that fills ever fuller with meetings to talk about work. So if your work is structured around clear workloads and structured communication, remote work can work really well. If it's not, remote work can be frustrating for all involved. I'll give you two examples, one broad, one specific, about workplaces that have these properties and therefore have found successful transitions to remote work. The first is in software dev, right? Software developers had many examples of large teams or organizations that were fully remote, even pre-pandemic. It was one of the only sectors of knowledge work that sort of consistently had success with remote work. Why is it? It's because these firms were using agile methodologies to organize their developers' efforts. So some of the core features of agile methodologies is clear workload management. You have a shared board. Everything that needs to be added, the features that need to be added, the bugs that need to be checked for the particular software product in question, those are all specified on a shared Board. They don't exist on individuals' plates. And then what happens is individuals are assigned specific things to work on. So it's very clear who is working on what, and you have very clear workload limits, right? It might be you should be working on one thing at a time, and when you're done, we'll give you the new thing. Or you could be working on two things at a time, and when you're done with one of those, we'll bring you on a new thing. But it's very clear who's working on what. Workloads are managed. You don't work on too many things at the same time. And it is very clear when you're done. You say, okay, I have finished this feature. It's committed into the repository. We can move this card on the virtual board from me working on it to the done column. So it's very structured workload management. Agile methodologies also have very structured communication. They have a daily stand-up meeting. It's very quick. They call them standups because when these would be done in person, you would do them standing up, the discourage, loviation. And in these standup meetings, you go person, person, person. Here's the board. Here's the things you're working on. There's two. What's your progress? What have you done since yesterday? Why is this not done yet? What do you need from other people to get this done? Or, okay, you finished this yesterday. Let's decide as a group what you should work on next. Let us know right away what you need for it. So you're consolidating communication about how things are going and what you need to a 20-minute block in the same time every day, as opposed to allowing this to just unfold through Unstructured emails and text messages throughout the day. So software dev already had workload management and structured communication. It was easy to move remote. That works well remote. The board can be virtual. The status means can be virtual. Most of what you're doing then is just working solo anyway. So the fact that you are not in an office around other people or not didn't matter. It was easier to move that remote. Here's another example more specific of a workplace in which they had these properties and they've done well remote. I was talking to someone recently who had a position in the Veterans Affairs office, and he was saying the big team that he was working with, they actually measured productivity. They did a study, and it was clear that on all the metrics you might care about for their particular type of work, they all went up with remote work. So I said, well, what type of work is this team doing? And he told me, oh, it's claims processing, processing claims from veterans for largely for benefits or healthcare. I was like, that is an example of work in which you can have a very clearly defined workload. Here is our cues of claims to be processed. Here are the ones that have currently been assigned to you. We can check in a system without even really having to have unscheduled communication at all. What have you processed today? What have you processed this week, right? We can have a system to flag issues or you need help or to move it up to someone else. It's a very structured workload without the need. It doesn't really rely on ad hoc communication or meetings that clutter your calendar. So yeah, that could move remote very well. I want to be where I want to be. I'm working on my claims. It doesn't really matter if I'm in the office. Where remote work struggles is where you're missing one or both of those. It's like an average, modern, generic, Scott Adams, Dilbert-style office doesn't have either of these things. Work is assigned haphazardly, usually through emails and requests at meetings. Like, hey, can you work on this? What about this? Can you look into this? So everyone has this sort of haphazard workload. It's not clearly defined. I don't know who's working on what. There's no clear way for me to see what's done when something is finished or what the status of things are. The only way to check in is through more communication. So we have a ton of unstructured communication that just try to keep various plates moving. I'm constantly emailing people. People are emailing me. We're jumping in and off in Slack. We begin using meetings as a proxy for productivity, standing meetings to try to make progress on things. Calendars are cluttered. The overhead of workloads collapses in on its own weight. That type of workplace doesn't move remote as well because it's just dependent on all this ad hoc, back and forth interaction. And when you move remote, all that just gets harder. It's all just higher friction. I can't grab you in the hallway. I have to schedule Zoom meetings for everything. Calendars get even more cluttered. I have to send many more emails because I'm missing all the in-person quick grabs and quick conversations in the hallways. When you don't have workload structure or structured communication, remote work can actually just increase the frustration and friction work. A lot of people saw this in the pandemic where they got no benefit out of remote work from a subjective well-being perspective because their work became even more interruptive, more Zoom, more like talking about work or feeling interrupted from talking about work, and it made things worse. ([Time 0:06:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6026c31b-f215-42b7-b3ac-9ae194c52fd9)) - **Structuring Remote Work** - Track tasks centrally and make it clear who is working on what. - Use daily synchronization meetings to batch communication and reduce email overload. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, so once we have that idea, what's some concrete advice we can give to make your own situation better? Well, if you work in a team and you have some control over how your team operates, take a page out of Agile. Track those tasks centrally. It should be clear, what does our team need to accomplish? New tasks should show up on the team's list, not on an individual's plate. And then you should have a clear way of saying who's working on what. And it's fine for most stuff. The answer is no one is working on this yet. We don't want anyone working on more than two things at a time. So the 20 things we've identified that our team needs to do, maybe most of them are just in this waiting to do column that no one owns. It's not generating any overhead tax, no emails or no meetings for anyone because no one's working on it yet. Over here we see, okay, working on these two things. And now I actually have to do those things. Well, hey, you've had these on your thing for two days. What else are you doing? You should be making progress, right? But we are saving ourselves from being completely overloaded with work. Daily synchronization meetings of the same style they use in Agile can work really well for teams. 20 minutes, we all look at the things that need to be done and the things you're working on. Batch all of your email conversations into a real-time conversation right here. Okay, everyone, here's what I'm working on today. See, let's look at the board. These are two things that have been assigned to me. I'm really working on this first thing today. Let me save you all the emails that would otherwise trickle out as this day unfolded. And I'll just tell you all now, I need this from you and this from you. Okay. When can you get that to me by? By noon? Let me write this down. Okay. So you're getting that to me by noon. Let's type this up and you're getting, and you will talk to those clients. And when you actually don't even email me those responses, when you're done, you'll just put them in this shared folder. Great. We're typing up a summary of what everyone committed to in this meeting and boom, it'll be right there under the board in a saved document. We can all see our commitments. Great, everyone. We all agree. We have just saved ourselves ad hoc emails that might get ignored for days. We're all on the same page. Let's go do our work. So if you have some control over how your team functions, do that. If you're an individual, build a task board for your own task and make it transparent for the people you work with. I talk about this a lot in my book, Slow Productivity. Make a clear distinction between I'm working on this right now and I'm waiting to work on these things. And make sure that all the people who want you to do things can see this list. They see where their thing falls. And they're like, hey, let's have a meeting. Let's check in. You can say, here's the link to my list. You're in position three. You're marching steadily towards my actively working it on status, but you're not there yet. Once it's there, I'll let you know, and then we can get into it. So even if you do not have control over the activities or organization of your team, you can organize yourself in a similar way. Use office hours to deal with impromptu back and forth conversations. You email me something that I can't respond to with a single message, grab me at my daily office hours, call me, jump by my office, jump on an open Zoom thing I have. We'll figure it out in real time. Teams can have docket clearing meetings twice a week. If there's things the team needs to address, put it on a shared document called the docket twice a week. Everyone gets together. You go through that docket one by one, either dismiss the task, assign it to one individual, make a plan for it. Do all, again, this batching your communication in advance, this is another place to do that. Hey, what will I need from who by when to actually do this thing? While you're all here, let's all commit to that and write that down so we save ourselves emails. So there's a lot you can do to make your workload management clear and your communication structured. ([Time 0:13:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e00a4e60-5277-472f-8a30-2126f273f392)) - **Seasonality in Remote Work** - Small-scale seasonality, or variations in work intensity, makes remote work sustainable and enjoyable. - Offices often enforce pseudo-productivity, hindering this flexibility. Transcript: Cal Newport If you do, the fact that you're not in the same office doesn't matter nearly as much anymore. All right, foundational idea number two. Small-scale seasonality is the ingredient that makes remote work awesome. Kind of mixing metaphors there. Should I say delicious? It's the ingredient that makes remote work delicious. What do I mean by small scale seasonality? That's an idea for my book, Slow Productivity, where seasonality writ large is this idea of variations in your work intensity at different time scales. So at the big time scale, you it might be this season is slower than these other two seasons. At the smallest time scale, it might be I'm starting slow. I'm going to have a slow morning to kind of recharge, and then I have a busier afternoon. So it can go from the scale of the year down to the scale of the hours of a given day. Small-scale seasonality is looking at this sort of variation in intensity at these smaller scales, like of the day, hours within your day, or days of your week. And something that really makes remote work much more sustainable and cool is if you're able to embrace more of this variation in the intensity of your work. Why do you need remote work to more easily get this type of small-scale seasonality? It's because of what you face when you're in the office. Now, again, this is sort of canon from my slow productivity book, but in the first part of that book, I talk about how in the second half of the 20th century, office work became gripped By this idea of pseudo-productivity, the notion that visible effort is a useful proxy for valuable effort. The more stuff you're doing, the better. It became this rough heuristic we used to try to just manage knowledge workers because we didn't actually know what you were working on. And there was no pile of widgets or parking lot full of newly built model T's we could point to to say how productive you were. So we fell back as managers on this heuristic of you're doing stuff is good. If you want to prove to me that you're even more productive, do more stuff like be here earlier, go home later. Always seem to be frantic moving papers around when I walk by your office, right? The side effect of pseudo productivity is it meant that you had to sort of constantly always be on. Now in a pre-digital age, that was okay. We could sort of fake this, right? Like it really was a game of you're all talking football at the water cooler and the boss walks in and you immediately change, like you're in the middle of saying quarterback and you're Like, yeah, the quarterly results are going to be good this year because of our new reporting system, right? I mean, it was stuff like that. Or like you're kind of reading a magazine at your desk, but when the boss walked by, you know, I'm typing, you do like typing motions. That's how they know you're being busy. You do vampire typing motions. Digital screwed that all up because now you can demonstrate activity at a very small granularity. Each email or even more finer, each response to an instant message is a demonstration of your productivity in a pseudo-productivity regime. And you can do this at all times. In a meeting, in your office, at lunch, but also at home, while commuting, while at the dinner, while at a sporting event with your kid on the weekend. You can at any time be doing this really fine-grained demonstration of productivity. And what we got then was like, oh, I actually have to be doing stuff all the time now. It's not just I need to physically be moving when my boss walks by. I have to be responding to these emails, staying up on these instant messages, hopping in and off of calls or what have you. And you get no variation in your work. It is just like expected. You're on all day because if there's any time of the day where you're not responding to emails, then I'm going to worry that you're slacking off and this is going to be a problem. ([Time 0:17:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/99c9c51f-30c7-4ff3-a2d2-c212a8b4ba0c)) - **Implementing Seasonality** - Trade accountability for accessibility to gain freedom and inject seasonality. - Time block your days to enjoy relaxation and consider lighter workdays. Transcript: Cal Newport So pseudo-productivity made seasonality impossible. Remote work makes it possible again. No one is there directly observing you. And in particular, if you have followed the ideas from foundational idea number one, and it's more structured communication, not ad hoc communication, and it's more clearly managed Workloads, I'm working on like one thing right now, you gain back a lot more capability of I'm going hard today, but I'm going to take tomorrow slow. Friday is going to be an easier day because you're not being monitored. So fine grained, more structured work, maybe holds you more accountable, but it's not so fine grained how it unfolds. There's not with structured communication. There's not emails all day for people to answer. There's not meetings people are trying to schedule that they're judging you by how many you accept and how many you say no to. So remote work, if done right, allows for more small-scale seasonality. All right, so here's some advice built on this idea. One, to help try to inject more of the small-scale seasonality into your remote work setup, consider trading accountability for accessibility. It's a big move. You got to have your act together. But in a lot of positions, especially when you're remote, there's an option that can become available where you're saying, look, hold me accountable for what I'm doing. Like I will show you my proverbial widgets at the end of the week or the end of the month or the end of the quarter. Like this is what I did. And if it doesn't hold up, you know, fire me. But the flip side is I'm going to do this my own way. I'm not going to be in all your meetings. I'm not involved in these ad hoc projects that require, like, lots of back and forth ad hoc communication. I'm going to go, you know, do my work and produce these, finish these, these, uh, projects, whatever they are, the things you can count. And you're just going to have to let me do it my own way. It's dangerous. You actually have to deliver, but if you gain, uh, that type of freedom, you can now inject small scale seasonality into your job. And that's a lot of what makes remote work jobs potentially really cool. Time block your days. If you time block how you work, you get more enjoyment out of how you relax. Time blocking is needed to free yourself from the pseudo productivity mindset, because now you can actually look at your day and say, here's what I'm working and here's what I'm working On. And here's when I'm not working. And I can see the plan and it's not just me deciding on a whim I'm going to go relax now and you're going to be nervous the entire time like oh my god what am I missing should I be is there something I'm supposed to be doing am I falling behind when you time blocking gives you control over your time it's control not just over your work but over your non-work it allows you I'm going To fit this all in here so I can take this 90 minutes here and go for a long walk time blockers get better relaxation into their work day. So a great, great tool if you want more small scale seasonality inserted. Consider doing things where particular days are lighter than others. No meeting Mondays or no meeting Fridays are great. You know, you don't announce it, you just do it. Hey, when can you meet? What about blah, blah, blah, and blah? You say yes to the options not on Monday, no to the options on Monday. Now, like your Mondays are free of meetings. It allows you to come out of the weekend in a way that's maybe less stressful. I kind of roll in like what's going on. I get started back up on projects. I clear the plates. I just have time to get back up to speed again. People worry. Oh, my God, people will be upset I don't take meeting on Mondays. But no one's tracking you that way. Again, there's not a control center where people have bar charts of your average email response time. And they're plotting like your yes and no's to meeting request and seeing if there's any patterns in there. There's not like a supercomputer somewhere crunching looking for patterns of like, I think he has a rule about not taking meetings on Monday. We got them. We got them, guys. So just keep some days different than others. I like the idea of balancing hard days with light days. You produce better work in a way that's more interesting and sustainable. It one day and then like you recover the next day as opposed to taking the same number of hours and splitting them between the two days and kind of moving putting the work in between meetings And other types of things going on it's much more sustainable and you can produce cooler stuff if you just focus on something and produce it and then the next day you're just answering Emails doing some meetings like going for a long walk that's more sustainable and the work you do is going to be better. ([Time 0:21:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/74de4eda-b0cb-49d6-9573-34d760b1cbdd)) - **Importance of Workspace** - Workspaces significantly impact your mind. - Offices provide dedicated cognitive contexts, while home environments can increase distractions. Transcript: Cal Newport Also consider, again, if you have some control over how an organization runs, an idea I pitched in the Atlantic last spring, which was the hybrid attention model for hybrid work. And here the idea is I think many more offices should have a setup in which if you have some days that are remote and some days in office, so a hybrid schedule, synchronize the days where People are remote and make the rule, no meetings on those days and probably no email response expectations either. So the days you're at home, they like just work on the stuff that's most valuable and just do that work. And when you're in the office, you can have like meetings and communicate as well. And that's actually like a better place to do that because one meeting in person can maybe knock off, you know, 50 emails that might be generated if you had that same meeting on Zoom while You're at home. Because when you're in person, now you're all in the place and the meeting's kind of over. You're like, hold on a second. What about this? What about that? Like we, I've noticed this at Georgetown, like where I'm a professor. Our faculty meetings got moved virtual during COVID and now they're back entirely in person, which I like. Notice a major improvement in emails and Zoom because we're all just in this room and the meeting ends and everyone is like, I can take care of seven or eight hanging issues by just talking To people right here. Where before, if we're all in Zoom and just all logging out, that's seven or eight email threads I would have to initiate, each of which would now have any number of unscheduled messages That I have to see and reply to and all the clutter that comes with that. So I like the hybrid attention model. All right, third and last foundational idea. When working, spaces impact your mind. Spaces matter. Is something I think we underestimated when we were initially extolling the potential virtuals of remote work in the sort of pre-pandemic or early pandemic period. We underestimated the effect of which being at an office in an office building had a psychological benefit of our mind saying this is a place to work. I understand when I am at my building at the office, like I, I'm not thinking about signing up for day camps in the summer for my kids. I'm not thinking about, we need to re repaint the house or there might be a roof issue. I'm not thinking about, you know, my fitness routine because my weights are over there. Like, oh, I'm at the office. So I'm just thinking about office stuff that reduces cognitive drag. It takes these sort of metaphorical cognitive barnacles off of the boat hole here that are all adding up drag that slows down your progress through the waters. We underestimated that effect when we're working at home with the laundry basket right there and the home gym right there and the forms on the table that we need to fill out for the kids And all of those reminders of all this stuff that's unrelated to work, our mind has a little bit of attention moving between those. And that's taken away from our work and we feel more distracted and unease and uncomfortable and we run out of energy quicker. So spaces matter. We underestimated the value of commutes. We complained about them because it's a pain, especially if you live somewhere like in DC and there's a lot of traffic. But commutes had a psychological benefit in terms of moving through space transformed our mind from one mindset to the other. I need to leave this cognitive context of work and I need to shift to a cognitive context of my kids and home and my friends and life outside of work. A 20-minute drive is not a bad way to do that. You're moving through space, literally from one space where the first context is housed to another space where the next context is housed. And in that movement, you're able to start clearing out what's in your mind from work, loading up what's relevant to home, taking a breather in between to make that transition. And we lost that when it was just, I'm at my kitchen table working, and next thing you know, I'm also like making dinner at the same kitchen table. We underestimate the value of the commute. Okay, so if you're working from home, you can recognize that idea and make some changes that is going to build on it and make your work from home experience much better. ([Time 0:25:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9da8b838-7098-4eca-aba8-bf7fa775861f)) - **Optimizing Workspaces** - Work from near home, not directly at home, to create a dedicated work context. - Invest in creating a workspace you enjoy and separate deep work from logistical tasks. Transcript: Cal Newport One, I am a big believer in the phrase I coined in a New Yorker piece back in 2021, or maybe it was 2020, work from near home should be much more prevalent than it is right now. Work from near home means you have a remote work setup, but instead of doing your remote work in your home, you're doing it in a space near your home. You're not commuting to your office, but you're not working at your kitchen table either. The Deep Work HQ where I am right now, this is work from near home. I can almost see my house from here. It's a few blocks. It's like a four or five minute walk, but it's not my house. So I can come here even when I'm working from home to work on writing a problem set for my discrete mathematics course to work on an essay I'm writing for The New Yorker. I could do that at home if it's a day I happen to be at home, but coming here gives me a dedicated cognitive context that's different than the context that is my house. So working from near home matters. It is something you should consider investing in. Renting cheap office space, like the HQ is inexpensive office space. It the office space that's above commercial buildings on our small town main street like that a lot of a lot of uh small town main streets have like a lot of just sort of class b commercial Space on top of like the shops and the stores we're on top of a restaurant you know i don't work here as much at the evening because i can, it's rock and rolling downstairs, but it's like Fine in the morning. So, you know, it's not a fancy office building. There are shared workspaces that could work as well. My point is, if you can work from near home, it's a completely different experience than actually working from home. And I've converted some people, Jesse. I've gotten at least a couple neighbors in the general area to have offices in the various uh office spaces actually that you know the i don't know if they're doing this anymore but during The pandemic and i know some people who did this yeah there's a church down the street from where i live an old church building they had just like some extra office offices you know like Church offices or whatever and they were like leasing those out cheap just like yeah you can have like a go to the church and there's like some offices in the back and people were doing Their their remote jobs from there there's a lot of options like that so anyways i think that type of that matters you know um i think at first we're like hey this is cool i'm at my house but Your house isn't great necessarily when it comes to actually getting things done if you are working at your house spend money on spaces to the extent possible. Prioritize investing in your spaces to make them better for work. That is not a triviality. It shouldn't be an afterthought. It should be as important as making sure that you have the right laptop to work at home or the right lighting camera to do the zoom you have to do all day. We should spend more money to the extent possible on making our workspaces better for working. If you have a shed, consider transforming that into a workspace in your backyard. It will transform your experience of work. If you have a home office, consider transforming it to be a space you really like to be in. These type of things matter. Inside, if you're working at home, separate deep workspace from logistical space. Have a cool space you use just for depth. You don't do email there. You don't have a printer there. You don't fill out forms there. You go there to think, to do the hard stuff, to code, to write that memo, to figure out the strategy. And then you have a separate space where you do the logistical stuff. So maybe like wherever like the home offices in your house where you pay your taxes and bills and you have your printer and your filing cabinet use that for your logistical space but build A deep workspace somewhere else it could be you know a nice chair by your bookshelf somewhere at my house i have a library where i write and i read and then upstairs in an alcove we have the Sort of home office where the filing cabinets and the printers and the scanners and i do my taxes and and if i'm doing email or something i'll do it up there. And if I'm writing at home, I'll do it in the other space. That can make a difference. Consider adventure work. This is an idea I first introduced when I was giving advice for students. We called it adventure studying. It is going to cool places to do work. You're working from home. You might say, okay, I have to read this complicated report, summarize it, or figure out our recommendations. I'm going to go somewhere interesting to do that. Why don't I go to downtown DC? I used to do this. Go to a museum, and I'm going to read it in an interesting part in one of the museums. I'm going to go downstairs at the National Gallery near the waterfall where there's no cell phone reception at the cafeteria. I'm going to get a cup of coffee and read it there. And then I'm going to walk through this gallery to see whatever it is. I want to look at Renaissance art to sort of get inspired and take a break. And then I'm going to move over to the cafe in the other wing. And there I'm going to sit down and make my recommendations. Like go to a cool place to do this type of work. It's more fun. It's less drag and you get more creativity. I'm a big fan of adventure working. And finally, simulate a commute even if you're at home. And typically this will be a long walk. I am going to do a 20-minute walk to shut down my workday. So I'll do my shutdown routine and have a 20-minute walk to sort of get my headspace out of work, to start reflecting on other things, to clear my head, get some blood flowing. And then when I get back from that walk, like my commute is over and now I'm ready for home life. I'm a big believer in doing a workout as your simulated commute. Maybe go around the block and do like a workout. Then it's a hard physical effort that can just reset your body and your mind. And then when you're done with that, you're like, oh, now I'm done with work. Don't just be like type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, turn. I'm now at home. Simulate the commute. It makes a big difference. All right. So those are my three ideas. One, workload management and structure communication. You need that for remote work to be successful. Two was about seasonality. Variations in intensity is what makes remote work's full potential unfold. So really fight to get that into your remote work setup and three spaces matter. Where you work, your commute. You need to care about that if you want remote work to be like something you really like about your job and not something that you're indifferent towards or maybe even makes it worse. ([Time 0:29:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8d9bf6e6-b111-4f94-9d66-5d7ee90264be)) - **Beyond Time Management** - Focus and attention management are crucial, not just time management. - Energy, focus, and attention determine what's reasonably achievable in a time-managed plan. Transcript: Jesse Right. First question is from Alex and we have a video. Alex says, what are your views on focus and attention management compared to time management? Cal Newport All right. So I'm glad we have a video for this one because I'm not exactly sure what, how he's using these terms. So for those who are watching, instead of just listening, we're going to bring this video up here on the screen now, but everyone will be able to hear it. Is that of focus and attention management instead of time management? Now, a lot of people are drawn to time management because they recognize a problem that they find it difficult to get stuff done throughout the day. They feel a lack of time to do things. But it's important to realize that that's not actually what it is. You see, we as humans don't have a great sense of time to begin with. So how is it that we can notice a lack of time? The thing is that what we're noticing isn't a lack of time. What we're noticing is a lack of result or a lack of the ability to do certain activities or get certain tasks done. So the question is, if I could extend out time infinitely, would that solve the problem? Naturally, the answer seems to be yes, but actually no, because during that time, we would end up just scheduling and to do more things. So take this for example, let's say that a day was only one hour long. Would we even try to do as much as we want to do in a normal day or a normal week? The answer is naturally no. So what we're noticing actually is a failure of our own behavior or action at fulfilling a certain set of tasks or activities that we wanted to. All right. I think I get what he's saying. I was a little distracted. I don't know if you noticed this, Jesse. This is a new YouTube format I haven't seen before. Do you notice while he's talking, he's sort of drawing pictures. Jesse Actually, the video is four years old. So I noticed it too. Yeah. I must be doing it. Yeah. But he's not doing it live. Cal Newport So he must be going back afterwards and he's just as bad of an artist as I am. So that's interesting. But man, that's an interesting format. So imagine if you just had my bad drawings next to me this whole time. I think I get what he's saying. All right, tell me if this seems like a fair summary, Jesse, because you listen to it as well. The point I'm trying to pull out of this from him is that he's saying it's not just about how much time you have to do things, which is what time management cares about. Your ability to focus or pay attention matter as well because like if that runs out who cares if you have 10 more hours free right you're not gonna do anything it's like what you really You need to care about your focus and attention management as much or maybe even more than time management does that seem fair yeah there's a book back this was god back in the early days Of my writing tony schwartz wrote a book called The Power of Full Engagement. And it was about energy management. And this was a big deal in the business space. This probably would have been an early 2000s era style book. I actually met him once. We spoke at the same conference. I'm trying to remember. Anyways, back in the day when I did more of this stuff. So this would have been like the 2000s. And his argument, I'll add it to the list, was like your energy is what matters. If your energy runs out, you can't do any work. So if you're a business person, his argument was you should care a lot about how much energy can I maintain throughout the day, and that has to do with diet and sleep and variability, etc. So I'll throw that into this same sort of focus and attention management category. Here's how I think about these things. Time management is about making a reasonable plan for the time you have available. Typically, like on the scale of a day, I want to make a good plan for the time I have available today. I'm managing my time, as opposed to just sort of reactively trying to execute tasks as I feel like I have time to do it. So like time block planning is a classic time management move. You're saying, I want to manage the time I have available today to accomplish, like I want a reasonable plan, whatever that is, like to get a lot done or to like to get certain key things Done or to relax. But like you're managing your time towards a goal to accomplish a reasonable plan. I think of energy management, focus management, attention management, all of these sort of things. They all control what reasonable means. Like what are you capable of accomplishing with your time-managed plan? So let me make this a little bit more concrete. Let's say you have bad energy management, right? You're sleeping poorly, you're out of shape, you're eating poorly, your morning is like donuts and energy drinks, and you just crash, right? Like you really crash by mid-morning, and then you have like a terrible lunch, and you have like an hour-long carb high and then you crash again. It's hard for you to focus. What is reasonably possible for you to do when you're making your plan for the day is really limited by that because you only have like a certain number of windows where you can really Be doing good work. So the number of your space of reasonable plans when you're doing your time management is somewhat constrained here. You don't have a version, you don't have a reasonable plan available, for example, where you get after something hard all afternoon because your energy is not there. Here's another concrete example. Let's say your attention management is very poor. You're like a typical young person. You are on your phone a lot. Even when you're working, you're constantly context-shifting and quick-checking your phone and seeing what's going on in TikTok or seeing what's going on with like text messages With your friends or etc. This also reduces the possibility of reasonable plans you can succeed with when you're managing your time for the day because your attention is so divided that it's very high friction To focus on anything. You're probably better suited. The plans that are reasonable are going to be those that are built around like lots of small tasks that already have you divide your attention or assume a division of your attention. You can't really have like long, deep sessions. So energy management, focus management, attention management, that type of stuff gives you your set of options for like what is possible for a given day. And then time management is how you shoot once you've chosen one of those options, how you actually like plan your time to execute it. The time management part of your brain is like, hey, let me know what's on the plate. You give me something we can actually do and I'll arrange the time to make sure it happens. But if you're really distracted or your energy is really low or what have you, like all I do is move the time around. I can't control what you're actually able to do with it. So you can tell me to schedule a day where we're going to like focus deeply on a book chapter for six hours, but that's not going to happen because of these other things. So you need both of these. Time management, you need some notion of how you control your time in the day so that you're in control and your time doesn't control you. Otherwise, you're just going to get pushed around by the incoming and reactive. ([Time 0:40:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f4c1d27a-597d-4f89-bd2d-4f84a3905984)) - **Self-Studying Technical Concepts** - To learn technical concepts, simulate tests for yourself on the material. - Active recall and producing information from scratch are key for effective learning. Transcript: Jesse Anyways, what do we got next? Next question is from Max. I work as a technical journalist for F1 website. How can I self-study technical concepts to improve my articles so that they can be so good they can't be ignored? I think when it comes to technical knowledge, you basically have to take yourself back to school, which means you need to be in some way simulated or otherwise tested on the new things Cal Newport You're trying to learn. All right, I'm trying to understand like this complicated topic. I need some way of being tested on my understanding of that that I'm studying for. And in studying for that test, I learn it. What you can't do is just read a bunch of stuff and hope it sticks. Like some stuff will stick, but this is a very inefficient way of doing it so you need to test now there might not be an actual test you have to sort of find some way of simulating that like I am going to um write a full explanatory summary of this particular game theory topic that the f1 teams are now using and i'm going to give it to one of our like game theoreticians who works On the team. And they're like, yeah, I'll take a look at it, mate. And you're like, okay, they're going to look at this and see if I really understand this or not. So now I have a test that I'm working towards that's forcing me to actually integrate the information and study it like I would study material if I was still a student. So when it comes to that type of technical stuff, it's just like I say for college kids. Active recall, producing information from scratch, being tested on your knowledge, that's how you learn it. ([Time 0:50:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f69769bc-b074-492c-b560-a2f8ca483b57)) - **Evidence-Based Career Planning** - Use evidence-based career planning, not just grand goals. - Talk to people in the field to validate your plan and identify milestones for progress. Transcript: Jesse Much do I spend? Cal Newport Have you seen the show on netflix i saw some of it you see those sinners yeah like one race car will have like what looks to be essentially the headquarters for stark industries like one Race car and like whole team i do not understand how that sponsor must be so much money in that because they spend so much money just billion i don't know if it's billions like hundreds Of millions of dollars yeah it must be worth it because it's such an international sport yeah they can it's marketing yeah i guess right i mean marketing and brand recognition but man They spend and like i'm not afraid to say it they spend more than we spend on our show here at deep questions. Jesse I don't want to shock people. They spend more. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Jacob. I'm a PhD student in aerospace engineering at UCLA, and I'm considering dropping out after three and a half years. My goal was to be an astronaut. My PhD topic is okay. I'm overwhelmed and I have financial troubles. It'll probably take me another three years to finish it if I stick with the program. Should I enter the space industry now, which is a master's? Cal Newport Look, Jacob, I think this is a situation where evidence-based career planning is probably lacking and is now needed to be pretty aggressively inserted. So evidence-based career planning is, think of it as the complement to my concept of lifestyle-centric planning, which also I don't know that you're doing. I think, you know, I want to be an astronaut is often the epitome of grand goal planning, right? I just, this one goal is going to make my life better as opposed to lifestyle-centric planning. But I'll put my lifestyle-centric planning tirade to the side here and focus on, again, its complement is evidence-based career planning. Because once you're actually going towards a plan, be it a lifestyle-centric plan or a grand goal plan, you need to figure out the right way to make progress. And here, you have to ground your decisions and evidence from real people who understand how that part of the world works, who are telling you clearly what you're doing makes sense and It's the right way to get there. People skip this. It sounds obvious. Of course you would do that, but people don't. They write themselves stories where the moral of the story is whatever move that is sort of available or feels emotionally interesting is like the right thing to do. You go off to get your doctorate, not because you sat down and we're like talking to people from the NASA program and like, this is how this works. And if you go here and get this degree, plus this type of training, you've got this pretty good chance of actually making to the program. And here's how you can part of evidence career planning, by the way, is learning what the milestones are along the way you can use to assess that you're making progress. Like, look, if you're here by your third year, then you are still on track. But if you're not, then this is probably not going to be for you. That's evidence based career planning. But what people do instead is like, I don't know, I want to be an astronaut. I also kind of grad school, this seems I can apply to this now. There's something kind of romantic about being at UCLA. Let's just do that. Like I know astronauts have these degrees often and you kind of go off and after a while, you're like, I don't know. I don't have any money and I don't know if this really matters and maybe I should stop it. Those answers, if you did evidence-based career planning, should be crystal clear. So what you need to do now is once you identify what you're looking for, and I do think you need the lifestyle plan here, right? You got to talk to people who are going to Sandy check your plan and you got to hear things you don't want to hear necessarily. They might say, this doesn't matter. I don't care about that degree. Or this degree does matter. This other thing doesn't, right? But you want, especially if you're making a move, like getting various types of graduate degrees, you need crystal clear evidence from people who know this degree will get you this Opportunity. Without this degree, you can't. It has to be crystal clear. This is exactly why I'm doing this. You cannot get job X at space industry company Y without master's degree Z. So go get that degree from this place. This is a sufficiently good place that if you get the degree here it will open up this pool of jobs you'll probably get one of those jobs and here's what this job is really like you need that Type of information otherwise you're sort of just wandering through the landscape of possibilities accruing credentials you think are interesting and hoping it leads to interesting Things so this is a time to do serious evidence-based planning now you could stick with your grand goal of being an astronaut Sure, get a sanity check. Is this possible for me? If so, exactly what would I need to do from here? And what would be my milestones along the way I would have to hit on this path? So I know if I'm failing on one of these milestones, I can eject off that path before I go too much farther. Or you could do lifestyle-centric planning. I'm probably not going to be an astronaut. But what do I want to do? Like, what do I want my life to be like? What where do I want to live in the country? What do I want my daily work to be like? Do I want to I mean, do I what's resonating is seeing early videos of Mark Rober when he still worked at the jet propulsion laboratory on the Mars rover? Like, is that like hey this lifestyle looks cool like he's working with cool people in a clean suit and you're building things and it's complicated engineering and you get to see your Work actually up there and it's challenging but the hours are usually reasonable and you can live in this cool place and mountain bike all the time and actually if i work at jet propulsion Laboratory i can live in alameda and i you start like doing and you build this whole picture out of like this would be a great lifestyle that's the other way to do this here you build out This like vision of a lifestyle that takes advantage of capital you have and say, okay, how do I get there as closely as possible? And then you're getting your evidence from if I want this job at this place, what degree do I need? What milestones can I look at to see if my degree or grades or program is sufficient to get it? Like what else are they looking for? So you got to choose what you're looking for and then you got to get the evidence. Pretend like you're writing a book about whatever you decide you're trying to do. Like you're writing a short book called how to do X. Like I'm doing research to write a how-to book about how to succeed in this thing. Gather that evidence. Gird your loins because you might not like what you hear. And in fact, you might hear for your plan, no, you're off the path. That's just not possible. You got to change. Like, okay, great. Let me change now before it's too late. So clarity about what you're looking for, whether that's grand goal or lifestyle centric, and then you got to do evidence-based planning. You got to talk to real people and get real evidence about these specific steps I'm doing specifically will help me and get those milestones figured out. ([Time 0:53:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a8cb8a02-fd7e-427a-841c-8fef59947390)) - **Slow Productivity for Students** - Treat your studies like a job and use autopilot scheduling for regular tasks. - Employ specific study strategies and evaluate their effectiveness; time block your days. Transcript: Jesse Get your computer science degree at mit all right we got to speed this up jesse what do we got next next question is from ahmed i'm a college student in tunisia can i use the principles of Slope productivity for my coursework sorry that was so productivity corner too so we have to play the music let's hear some music yeah Slow productivity corner questions related to Cal Newport My book, Slow Productivity, which you should buy. All right. So Ahmed's question. Slow productivity, does it relate to learning things? That's a good question. Yes, but I wouldn't say it the way you said it, Ahmed. Right. So you're saying, should I apply the principles of slow productivity? I would say this another way. If you treat your studies as a college student like a job, like you use best practices, like do it well, it will match the principles of slow productivity. It's not that hard of a job. And if you're doing it right, it should match the principles of slow productivity without you having to start with the principles and figure out how to apply them to your student job. Because I mean, I think there's just some best practices for being a student which are congruent with the principles of slow productivity, right? So like, here's the things I always talk about. You know, you treat your, your studies like a job, right? Don't just like study in some sort of ambiguous way. Like, how do I actually do this? This is my job. You should autopilot schedule the stuff that happens regularly. If you know you have a problem set due every week, pick the same time on the same days and the same place to work on that problem set. If you're going to have a lab report due every other week, have on your calendar exactly when and where you work on that lab report. Same place, same time, same days every week. So you automate all the stuff you know you have to do so you don't have to make those decisions on the fly. You need to use specific study strategies. How are you studying for this exam? How are you working on your problem set? How are you writing a paper? You need specific strategies that you think are going to be very effective. And then you need to evaluate those strategies. How did this go? Did I do well in the test? Did I do well, but there was a lot of wasted time? Like you go back and you evolve your study. What's the better way to study? What's a better way to write papers? You've got to evolve it towards what works best. Because a tested study strategy that you've worked on can be threex more time efficient than just quote-unquote studying at the library really makes a difference so you want to be very Specific about how you study and you want to evolve or improve those based on evidence there's a lot of key principles for you know how to build these things the most relevant book here Would really be my book how to become a straight-a student where i talk about how actual straight-a college students who are not grinds would study and you'll see principles in there Like active recall rules. Don't just read things quietly. Always generate things from scratch without looking at your notes to see if you can do it. That's how you learn things. I talk about math classes. It's all about sample problems, finding sample problems everywhere, from your book, from the lectures, from the problem sets. You're just like a sponge for sample problems to see if you can actually solve them. I have methods in there, best practices for writing papers. I have a sort of three-phase method for writing papers. I have a very specific method that's pretty analog for how you manage your research for working on a college paper. So you have to have specificity. So use something like my book to jumpstart those strategies, but then evolve them based on your own experience. And then finally, you just want to be careful about your time in general outside of autopilot scheduling. Time block to some degree your days. You don't need a time block every minute of your days as a student, but figure out in advance, hey, what studying do I need to do today? When am I going to do it? So you don't have to time block all eight hours of like a workday, but you do need a time block the stuff you have to do that day or is on your plan. You want to time block when that actually happens instead of just like waiting until you feel like you have a bunch of time. The only other hack I would throw your way is at the beginning of the semester, take the big things, exams and big papers, put them on your calendar and then work backwards, right? Work backwards a certain number of weeks and put on your calendar, make plan for upcoming exam or paper. So typically like three weeks or four, three to four weeks is a good scale here, but you know you have a paper due at the end of December. You should have at the beginning of December, make plan for paper due at the end of December. And then when you get there your calendar, you say, great, now I'm going to put aside time for the next month for when and how I'm going to work on this paper. And in that way, you never have deadlines creep up. Anyways, do these type of things. Your life as a student should more or less correspond with slow productivity. Let's check it out. Do fewer things. I mean, okay, your workload is your workload in college. You just want to make sure that you're not too overload on any one given day. Work at a natural pace. This really gives you control over your time. So it's not panic before deadline and then sloth. It allows you to have sort of a more smooth out variability and you can plan. I don't want to work on Friday, but I got started on my paper a month early. So I'm not stuck having to work on this thing all out for three days right before it's due. That will help. And then obsess over quality. Well, that's what you're doing when you care about your study, actual study tactics. I care about doing well in terms of the grade I get. So in some sense, this book I published in 2006, how to become a straight A student is like a handbook for a slow, productive lifestyle as a student. So, so maybe check that book out, uh, to help prime you and you will see the principles of slow productivity will, will show up ([Time 1:08:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/06b3dc31-b058-45bb-a90e-c7f133fb95c3)) - **Organizing a Writing Sabbatical** - Establish a daily writing habit, join a writer's group for feedback, and make writing fun. - For book projects, focus on the idea first, then write sequentially, adapting as needed. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, that put me back in a good mood. Do we have a call this week, Jesse? We do. All right, let's hear it. Hi, Cal. Jesse My name is Meg, and I'm an academic librarian currently recovering from my stint as department chair, but blissfully embarking on a 10-month sabbatical. Cal Newport During this time, I'm committed to pursuing a creative project that I've long wished to complete, a murder mystery set on a college campus. I've been a longtime fan of your work, especially your insights on deep work and time management that I've tried to use at work. But with 10 months of unstructured time laying ahead of me, I need some new process. I'm curious to know how you use your own time management practices to organize your writing sabbaticals in the past. As I navigate this creative process, I found myself grappling with how to break down such an expansive project across such an expansive period of time. I'm curious, when you're reading a book, do you rely on specific systems of projects and project lists, sub-projects, or some other structured framework to keep your writing momentum Up? How do you balance staying flexible with ensuring consistent progress on your writing? And do you find that a weekly review is necessary when you're able to tackle just a single large project at a time? Thanks for your insights, Cal. And I promise to put your advice to good use solving fictional murders. All right, so I'm going to give two answers here. My first answer is going to be like what I think you should do during your 10-month writing sabbatical, and then I'll answer your second question about how I tackle and structure book Projects. These aren't necessarily going to be the same answer. All right, in terms of what you should do, I would suggest in your 10-month sabbatical having a five-day writing habit, should be the first thing you do probably every day then be relatively Uncommitted after that you want to take advantage of the fact there's a sabbatical you might want to do like I do in the summers is if there's still going to be some like meetings and calls And work stuff in your life make those Tuesday through Thursday in the afternoon so that monday and fridays like after you're done writing you're just done so i'd write quick email only Middle of the week do i have like things that are scheduled and like really just lean into the rest of the time doing non-work related stuff so write five days a week you need a community For this you haven't written one of these mysteries before i'm assuming so you need to join a writer's group a mystery writer's group. You can find these online. There's probably a convention you can go to as well. There'll probably be one that is held at some point, hopefully not too late into your sabbatical, but don't wait for that convention to get going. You need to join a writer's group and right away get committed to get feedback on the plot, start writing chapters. We're going to read chapters. You got to just get going. Is it your first book and it's your first novel potentially? So it might be what you're really going to end up with at the end of 10 months is a draft of a novel that's not there, but now you've broken the seal and you've learned a lot of things. You've picked up a lot of skills by talking to the other writers and now you're, you're well suited to sort of more systematically transform this thing even once you're back to work. So join a group, commit to producing things, work every day, two to four hours, and let that just start to add up. That's what I would do. The other thing I would add, find a way to make the writing fun. It doesn't have to be every day, like go to cool places to write do adventure writing go don't just i'm just always going to sit down dreary like like punish myself in my basement like next To the dripping pipe and that's just where i'm going to write like make the writing actually fun if you're trying to crack a plot point this is great i'm going to go like an early morning Hike through this trail i like i'm going to bring a notebook and what am i doing this morning i'm cracking this this plot point right or i'm going to go to this museum and I'm going to work There. I'm going to have like a whole morning, a whole half day where I'm going to go and I'm going to have like a breakfast here and lunch here. And I'm going to bring a mystery book to read during lunch. And I'm going to work at this public library. And then I'm going to go for this walk and then go to the cafe at this museum. Like make the writing fun. Not every day. Some days it can be just sitting there, you have a sabbatical. You want to associate with your mind. This is fun. I like working on this. This is better than being department chair, right? I mean, this is different. There is a tendency a lot of people have when they're writing. They feel bad about it, that this doesn't feel bad enough. So they try to make their experience be harder. Somehow that justifies it to themselves or the rest of the world. You earned a sabbatical. Make the writing fun. Make it restorative. Like you earned it. This is not you being lazy. It's six years worth of semesters I'm sure you had to do to earn this 10 months off. In terms of my own writing projects, I tend to, I have a long period of working on the idea and working on the annotated outline for the idea when I'm leading up to selling it. Since I write nonfiction, you sell it first. Once I'm happy with it, I sell it. Then I go through a long period where I sort of change what I want it to be. I often do a lot of this work on foot. I'm working in single purpose notebooks, trying to crack what I think the book should be. Then I just start writing chapter by chapter. I typically write books sequentially, starting with the first chapter the introduction I come back and do at the end and that's how I start to get a feel for the book usually at some point Three or four chapters in it might lead to some relatively significant changes to the structure after I really feel like what do I have access to how is this unfolding how are the ideas Unfolding and I'll go back and radically change the structure again. But it really is just like, once I have thought a long time about what I want to write, I just start writing and just doing the work. I want to write this many days a week. I want to make progress on this chapter. And some days that's a lot of typing. Some days that's just a lot of like tracking down sources. Some days it's completely reworking things, but I want to just keep going. And I stop and I rework as needed to integrate the lessons I'm obtaining as I actually try to make progress. And it's just in my life is like one of the things I do. But I'm a professor, so it's what I do. If it's not working on a book, it's working on academic articles. It would be working on trade publication articles. Like my job is built around this idea that you are spending regular time writing. So it just sort of fits. This is like what I have done my entire life. I started writing regularly my senior year of college. That's when I was writing How to Win a College. And ever since then, I'm always just writing. As a grad student, it's academic papers and it was books. And as a professor, it's the same idea. So that's how I go about it. I think a lot about the idea and then i just get going and i update as i needed anyways i'm jealous about your sabbatical i think your plan is awesome have fun with it have fun with it for sure But you need a community don't just do this on your own two quick follow-up ([Time 1:16:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/58507b05-5583-4803-9cf0-cd2d054aba94)) - **Joining the Attention Resistance** - A software engineer reduced social media use with attention resistance strategies. - By making platforms less interesting, he gained time for career, health, and fulfillment. Transcript: Cal Newport But you've proven yourself already. You've given them a book that's done well already all right we got a case study here this is where people send in their accounts of using the type of advice we talk about on this show today's Case study comes from sean i'm a 33 year old software engineer i've worked to remove social platforms for my life i left all the big social media platforms since 2016. That's helped me reduce digital clutter to the minimum. YouTube was more challenging, but I disabled the history collection setting. The benefit is there are no recommendation algorithms on the landing page. I've reduced my YouTube subscriptions. I also created a new account that only has tech content. For Reddit, an ad block plugin has helped doom scrolling. For LinkedIn, I only follow folks in my field since I have made the lucrative platforms boring. I have more time for myself. I have times in the evening, which I can invest back into my career and learn new things. I have also found more time to exercise every other day since saving time. I have retrained my brain to not rely on a lot of platforms and I'm hitting the gym for a couple hours every alternate day. In a nutshell, win-win in career, win-win in health, and win-win in fulfillment. I like this case study. There is a particular thing I want to point out from it. So in my book, Digital Minimalism, I talk about these type of de-interestifications you're doing the social media platforms as joining the attention resistance. And it's strategies where you have some valuable thing you need to get out of a social platform, but you don't want the social platform to extract hours of your time in return. So you use tools like blocking plugins or turning off history collection settings, et cetera, that makes the platform less interesting. You can still get the thing out of it you want to get out of it, but you pay less of that ancillary price. So we call that joining the attention resistance. It's an alternative to just quitting these platforms, and it's what you deploy when there are some legitimate reasons you need to use them. What's useful or enlightening about this case study is look what happens. He's using a bunch of platforms, but he made them non-interesting. So he's just using them for the actual reasons people give when you say, hey, why are you still on YouTube? Why are you still on LinkedIn? You know, those reasons people give, he's only using his platforms for those reasons and turning off the other things, the things we don't really care about, but it captures our attention And their impact on him is minimal. His hours of time is free. He's going to the gym. Like they don't really have a big footprint in his life. So it just goes to belie this idea that you can leap immediately from, I need to be on Instagram, like to keep up with these artists who are in my field, that you have to jump from that to, I need to be on Instagram for hours every day. Or I use YouTube because I like listen to deep, watch the deep questions podcast. Therefore I need to be spending hours on YouTube every day. This belies that connection. It says, no, no, no. You can, if you actually use these platforms just for the specific reasons you have to use them, they don't play a big role in your life. This idea that you have to be on your phone all the time, like looking at these things all the time, that is new. That is invented by these platforms. That is a business model that you are just a line item in a big spreadsheet for, and that is completely optional. So you can engage with the internet without the internet capturing your full mind. So I think that's a great reminder of the power of joining the attention resistance. All right, so speaking of which, we've got a good final segment coming up where we'll talk about a tech corner on social media and legal standards for bands. ([Time 1:25:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/90239ae3-cad2-4841-8f2d-c8910e644f1e)) - **Social Media and Legal Standards** - Lawmakers debate whether social media for kids is like cigarettes (bannable) or junk food (manageable). - Legally, social media leans towards cigarettes due to addiction fears and parental struggles. Transcript: Cal Newport But first, hear from a sponsor. So I want to talk about our friends at Indeed. Let's say you just realized that your business needed to hire suppliers. Someone yesterday. How can you find an amazing candidate fast, easy, just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job seen on the other job sites. Indeed, sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidate so you can reach the people you want faster. This makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored job posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored request. I was just thinking about this the other day, Jesse, why I wish we would have been useful to have Indeed. I'm thinking about how did I find you? My memory was I had to charter a blimp and I dropped leaflets. And it said, you want podcast help? Podcast good time, good. And then it was a picture of me giving a thumbs up. That was a hard way to hire. If I had had Indeed, I could have just had a sponsor job listing and that would have gone much better plus with indeed sponsor jobs there are no monthly subscriptions no long-term contracts And you only pay for results how fast is indeed in the minute i've been talking to you 23 hires were made on indeed according to Indeed data. And those were all hires by me. I'm building out this team. Those were all 100 people here working at Deep Work HQ. Let's see. So there's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility if you go to indeed.com/deep. Just go to indeed.com/deep right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/deep. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Indeed is all you need. I also want to talk about our friends at the sponsor whose name we most like to pronounce, and that is ZocDoc. Let's say you wake up and you have some sort of symptom. It's catching your attention. You don't know what this is. What can you do? Your instinct might be to jump on TikTok and see, let's see what the influencers there say, but maybe TikTok is banned right now and you realize what I really need to do is get actual medical Help. What stops us is that it is a pain logistically to find a doctor who is in our area and takes the right insurance and is taking new patients and has an appointment available. How would you figure that all out? This is where ZocDoc enters the scene. ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in-network doctors and click to instantly book an appointment. We're talking about booking in-network appointments with more than 100,000 doctors across every specialty from mental health to dental health, primary care to urgent care, and More, but we don't recommend that you book the appointment with all 100,000 at once. You should, a little bit of ambiguous wording here, you could do that, but you can instead pull from that vast collection to find the ones you need. Filter for doctors who take your insurance, are located nearby, are a good fit for any medical needs you may have, and are highly rated by verified patients. I like the ratings. You get a sense of like, what's it actually like going to this doctor's office? Once you find the right doctor, you can see their actual appointment openings. Choose a time slot that works for you. Click and boom, you've booked your visit appointments made through zocdoc also happen fast typically within just 24 to 72 hours of booking you can even sometimes score same day appointments Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to zocdoc.com/deep to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O slash deep. ZocDoc.com/deep. All right, Jesse, move on to our final segment. So we're going to do another tech corner here. Because I have been writing a series of columns for The New Yorker this month, we have a lot of my own material to draw from. We have yet again another New Yorker column of mine that was just published. The title, and I'll have this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of listening, the title is, is social media more like cigarettes or junk food? The deck here is lawmakers attempting to regulate children's access to social media must decide whether bans or warning labels are the optimal route for keeping kids safe. And here there's a picture of a cop. This is so much more friendly than the article. Was it last week? Yeah. Man, where it was a picture of a phone melting someone's face. We've gone from that to like a fun cartoon kid. This is better. Makes you less stressed. Here's the premise. Here's the question in this article. We worry about social media. It has some harms how much we're debating. We want to take action. We all kind of agree we should do something. There's lots of laws, et cetera, but what should they be? The help makes sense of all this. I said, okay, let's look at two past examples historically where there have been a product that presented harm for kids and we had to react to. The first product was cigarette smoking. We worried about kids smoking and we reacted. How do we react? We passed laws that said you can't buy cigarettes if you're a kid. We passed a cigarette ban based on age. The other example was junk food. We worried about kids and junk food as junk food became more prevalent after the mid-century point. We were especially worried about all of the kid-targeted advertising that was happening during kids' programming, which really pushed kids to eat a huge amount of this food, and it Was bad for them. We worried about kids' junk food as well. What do we do in response to that? We didn't ban junk food from kids. We didn't even ban advertising to kids, but we took more of a let's give parents tools to help them manage this for their kids on their own. So here is nutritional labeling. Here's the food pyramid. We're going to give you information, but then you're going to manage this risk on your kids on your own. So the question of the article then is when it comes to social media, if we're thinking about this as a potentially harmful to kids product, is it more like cigarettes or is it more like Junk food? And then once we had that clear question, because the answer will give us some sense of how we should react, I looked at the historical context of both of those past reactions and the legal Standards for both of those past reactions. They were historically contingent. Cigarettes were actually banned from kids in the 19th century. It was more moralistic times. The context matters. Whereas junk food became a big deal in the 1970s. This is Vietnam. This is Watergate. We weren't really looking as Americans for a lot of government ([Time 1:29:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/920b5cc5-9e9e-470f-a09d-9f63f1d02d79))