Ep. 341: Drowning, Treading, or Swimming  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 341: Drowning, Treading, or Swimming - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/7e1d20ac-ba24-4dd9-a56c-18cbea023779 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Productivity Rain Dances** - Focus on outputs, not inputs, to avoid "productivity rain dances." - Identify your most valuable work and determine what helps you improve it. Transcript: Cal Newport Around that same time, I noticed that Tim Ferriss was working on a new book, and I think he's calling it the book of no, oh, the no book. And he had – and I have it on the screen here for people who are watching. He's still writing it, but he posted the introduction on his website. And when I was reading the introduction of his book, I said, oh, wait a second. What Tim is thinking and writing about in this book really overlaps this idea that I've been toying with. So what I really want to do here is I'm going to read you an excerpt from the introduction to the Tim Ferriss's pending next book, the no book. And then I am going to introduce my concept of a metaphor for it and we'll keep returning to Tim's story to try to help tease out what I mean by that metaphor and what the ideas are I'm dealing With. So we've got a little bit of a complex web here of ideas, but I think it'll make it interesting. All right, so I have Tim's introduction draft up here on the screen. I am going to just read an excerpt from it. All right, this is from Tim's introduction. I first realized I had a problem when everything was going right for me. The day was May 2nd, 2007, just after 5.30 p.m. In New York, when I received a phone call I'll never forget. My editor at Random House wanted to inform me that my debut book, The 4-Hour Workweek, had hit the New York Times bestseller list. As her words sunk in, I staggered backwards and collapsed against a wall in shock, gratitude, and relief. Overnight, I was transformed from a guy begging to answer his emails to someone on the other side. All kinds of requests and offers poured in. Speaking gigs, interviews, consulting, partnerships, brand deals. It was a tsunami. Flattered, unprepared, and afraid, this might be my only 15 minutes of fame. I said yes to nearly everything, especially anything 6, nine, or 12 months off in the distance. My calendar seemed like pristine water, clear as crystal for a brief lull. But then I had to pay the piper. All right. So I want to offer a metaphor for understanding sort of what's happening there, a common problem, and how we can get out of it. I will say, by the way, Jesse, though, Ferris is underselling how successful his book was i've had many books hit the new york times bestseller list that by itself doesn't create the Tsunami it's like the right book and the right book at the right time the list is not the impressive part i think it was like that book was really successful uh especially in silicon valley So i think people overvalue the new york times bestseller list but this book was very successful. All right. So to make sense of the deeper lessons in Ferris's story, I'm going to introduce a metaphor here that we're going to follow through. All right. So here's the metaphor. Imagine a traveler is on an ocean liner and the ocean liner sinks. So before he dives into the water, the traveler instinctively grabs from his cabin all the things that seem important. So like, hey, here's a tool I use for my work or like here's a gift that like a friend gave me or an instrument I play for like entertainment. It's something that's important to me. And here's this book of poetry I'm trying to learn and better myself with this. Like all this stuff that's important, he grabs it from his cabin before the ship sinks. The problem is he has so much stuff that when he hits the water, he starts to flail. He's taken in water. His thrashing is only making things worse. It's clear to him that he is drowning. So if we connect this back to the Ferris story, this basically describes how Ferris is talking about that first year after the four-hour work week took off. He had so many commitments that they were weighing him down. He couldn't keep his head above water. It was that sense of, I am drowning in things to do. Okay, so then where things get interesting to me is the possible responses to this situation. So if we return to the metaphor, Here's one possible response. Maybe our traveler is a high-achieving type A type. So before heading out on his ocean voyage, he was saying, look, I'm afraid about ships sinking. So I'm going to train to be comfortable in the water. And I'm going to train, like, how to tread water. Like, what's the right stroke to use? And I'm going to exercise and get my legs strong. I'm going to get my lungs strong and I'm going to master how not to panic and I can be in the water like a rescue swimmer would learn, like how to be comfortable in the water and staying afloat. So maybe our traveler does all that work. So now when the ship sinks, he jumps in the water with these things that are important to him. He's not flailing and drowning. He's sort of calmly and strongly doing like the efficient stroke, keeping his head above water. But here's the creeping realization. It's taking all of his energy just to stay in that spot. He's not drowning right away, but he's also not getting anywhere. He's just stuck right there where the ship sunk. And eventually, I mean much more slowly than if he was not prepared at all, but eventually his strength will begin to ebb and he knows eventually he can't stay here forever. He will slip back below the water. Ferris, and productivity. To me, preparing and learning the tread water to be good and comfortable in the water in our metaphor is like in Ferris's world, having good productivity and time management systems. You're prepared to deal with lots of things. You keep track of obligations like I talk about. You manage what you're going to do with your time. I sometimes talk about this as having a how and when system or what and when system rather. Like you have a system to keep track of what you need to do and some way of figuring out when you're going to do things. Right. This sort of happened. Now I'm extrapolating beyond Ferris's excerpt to ([Time 0:07:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6efe972d-6576-4ec5-91b3-9f91f011330e)) - **Focus on Outputs** - Implement work quotas to avoid overload and maintain quality. - Separate active from waiting projects to reduce administrative overhead. Transcript: Cal Newport Just things we know about him more generally. I would say this is probably more or less what happened to Ferris a little bit longer, you know, in the years immediately following the four-hour workweek coming out, is he is really Good at systems. And I know from that period that, and he's talked about in his books, his systems for helping to deal with all the things he had to do and manage his time got very sophisticated. And he had teams and people who would answer things and keep track of and had rules for like when we're going to do this or that and what's going on with this calendar. And I don't want to have to book travel. I'll have someone who do that for me. Ferris got really good at the treading water. A lot of people in our audience also gets very good at that as well. You have good systems in place so that you're not going to panic if you have a huge amount of stuff on your plate. You'll be able to look at where things are, make sure this is on a waiting to hear from list, I've time blocked this, I'm getting back at this. You're keeping your head above water and you're staying calm, but you're not getting anywhere. So if we return to our metaphor, what's the final thing our traveler could do? Well, ultimately, the only answer that remains is that if he lets go of some of these things he's holding, these important things he brought in from the ship before it sunk, he'll be able To start swimming. And now he can actually aim to where he wants to go, like the shore, and make progress towards there. So what he needs, like ultimately, to get out of the situation is going to have to let some of those things go. Now, if we go back to Ferris's world, this is where he eventually evolved to. Ferris eventually evolved to a place where he was much more comfortable having less proverbial important things on his body in the water. He got good at saying no to obligations or commitments, some that were important to him, some that were coming from friends, some that were very entertaining to him. He got really good at that, which is why he's writing this whole book about saying no. To give you one example, there's another excerpt from the book that's written by Neil Strauss, who I think is actually co-writing this book with Ferris. But Strauss has this memory of more recently trying to context him, who he knows, with a text message. And when he texted him, he got the following response. This is like an automated reply. I'm traveling overseas until November 7th. If your text is urgent, please reach out to someone on my team. Otherwise, please rescind your text after November 7th if it still applies. Since catching up would be impossible, ([Time 0:12:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/89ab5316-7f2c-41bd-9b42-853d7245f4c9)) - **Practical Productivity Tips** - Use time block planning for intentional time management. - Protect deep work time by avoiding context switching. Transcript: Cal Newport I'll be deleting all messages upon my return and starting from scratch. Thank you. As Straustin says, is a boss level no. So ultimately where Tim got was recognizing that the systems alone wouldn't save him. He had to just have less things going on in his life. So I like that metaphor because not only does it have the obvious message of, you know, eventually you have to say no to things if you're going to get where you're going to go, but there's A subtler message in there that Ferris' example emphasizes, my own life emphasizes and struggles with this as well. There's this subtle message in there, which I think is very important for us to understand overload in our current moment. The traveler still had to learn to be comfortable in the water and didn't let go of things as well. So if the traveler had skipped the getting comfortable in the water step, you know, he wasn't going to make it to the shore, even if he dropped all of his things. And I think this is what's often missed when we're trying to understand or make sense of a critique productivity or time management organization. It's not that these skills aren't important, but it's realizing, I think it's a frustration that a lot of type A people like myself have, is the skills by themselves cannot make every Situation tractable. You can be really good swimmer, but if you have a bunch of stuff in your arms, you're eventually going to sink. Same thing. You can be super organized, but if you're trying to do too much, that overhead to actual execution ratio is going to get so high enough that nothing's going to get done. It's going to be very frustrating. You can keep your head above water for a while. You can keep people from getting upset. The most important things get done or deferred, and you sort of figure out how to make the whole puzzle work, but you're not making your way to shore. What I think people miss is they go to – they want one without the other. So the common mistake, the mistake that most people are coming to realize is like, okay, you can't just be really well organized if you're doing too much. But the other mistake is made as well where people are saying, oh, the problem here is just the doing too much, right? And that you shouldn't learn, if we go back to the metaphor, don't learn to swim, because that might maybe encourage you to bring too many things with you. It's better not to even bother with that swimming culture, because we don't want people to think that they can swim their way out of overload. But the problem is if you don't bother with that swimming culture, you can be as zen as you want. I'm not bringing anything with me. It doesn't matter. I say no to everything. You're still going to drown. So it's that you need both. The traveler who survived was a traveler who both trained but also was willing to let go of things that were important. And so I think that's often missed in the anti-productivity discussion. It's the hardest part, I think, of the productivity discussion. No organization is bad. Only trusting organization is bad. You need some organization, but you need all this other stuff as well. And the other stuff is psychological. Or if we read like Oliver Berkman's stuff, philosophical. There's all of these other layers to it. But the layers have to add up on top of each other. They're not alternatives. Like I care about productivity or I care about like being present and not doing too much. You need both of these things have to work together. So that metaphor where the difference between drowning, treading and swimming, I think it's helpful for me. So anyways, I'm looking forward to Tim's book because he really, really is good at saying no. As anyone who's communicated with him knows, he's good at that. And I think that is probably the hardest lesson or the most underserved lesson in these discussions of productivity. I can teach you how to swim. I'm good at that. But even I need more help figuring out how to drop the, some of the stuff I'm carrying. So I'm looking for that book and hopefully that metaphor proves as useful to you as it's starting to prove useful for me as well. Maybe it's a little overwrought Jesse, but I like that idea. Jesse Yeah. Treading, swimming. There's a lot of pieces in there. I've listened to all his podcasts for like over 10 years. Cal Newport Do you think he has it all figured out? I think he's still trying to figure it out. I think he has the ([Time 0:15:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/35dacdb3-d5c0-405a-9d66-76e94212c482)) - **Meeting Management** - Use Trello or similar tools for meeting management if appropriate. - Always process meeting outcomes to close open loops. Transcript: Cal Newport Can see, even if you have like a bunch of podcasting equipment in the back of your car and you can't actually see out the window. Their PVPro infotainment system is excellent. Anyways, it's a cool car. It's a classic car, or I should say vehicle. It's not a car. It's a called suv maybe um iconic but also quite luxurious all right so jesse beware because when brad and i are going to travel the country podcasting you're gonna be sitting in the middle Seat moving the video switcher i was gonna say i won't be able to keep up with my truck the one that brad sent me a picture of had a nice uh because it was tricked out they had a nice roof rack On there. So you're gonna be on the roof. We'll strap you down, it'll be okay, but you'll be up on the roof doing the video switcher as we go down the highway recording our Defender podcast. You can design your Defender at LandRoverUSA.com. Go to LandRoverUSA.com to learn more about the Defender. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Jesse First questions from Antonio. You discussed that a major impact of AI is that non-experts will be able to use tools at expert level without the training, and this leads to productivity gains. Don't you think this can also lead to quality productivity loss? Cal Newport If a user is relying heavily on AI for analysis, the work can have fundamental flaws that the non-expert won't be able to fix i mean maybe but i think there's a bit of a a difference in the Model that we're thinking about about how one would interact with ai in this scenario i i think the last few years we've been attuned to this chatbot model where the AI is this sort of singular Self-contained intelligence that you're asking to do things on your behalf. So I think that's what you have in mind. Like I'm asking the AI, analyze this data and tell me what you see. And then you don't really know what results it's going to produce. Now, I see it actually much more instrumental than that. It's allowing you to do something in a piece of software that you know what it is. You just don't know what is the right way to like click on things or select things to actually make this happen. This is where I think the first impact is going to be. Have all these columns of data and ([Time 0:26:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cac2db00-ba59-46ae-97b5-1d79d104f038)) - **AI Adoption** - Don't obsess over testing every new AI tool. - Focus on your work, and valuable AI applications will become apparent. Transcript: Cal Newport In column c which is like dollar amounts is below a hundred dollars erase all those rows and then i want to sort all the the the rows that remain based on their like column f which is like The location and you're like i don't really know exactly how to or that's going to take me a second to do, or I don't know how to sort, but I know what I want it to do. I could just sort of say that and then some sort of co-pilot type plugin will do that work for me. Or, you know, you're in Word and you want to say something like, I don't really know how this feature works, but can we go through and get rid of the – turn off the initial paragraph indents? Like when you start a new paragraph and indents, I actually don't like that. Can you turn off those indents and then can we make the block quotes, right, where I have a quote? Can we make the vertical spacing? It's like double space. Can we make that single space? Again, you know what you want to do. It's just like I haven't learned, like where do I find these formatting things? Where do I go to change it? You know, it's going to be things like that. You sort of know what you want to do, but you don't know how to do it. You haven't had that training. And so it's like someone sitting with you, like the used to be your nephew would sit with you when you're using your computer and they would, okay, I know how to do that. Granddad, here's how it goes, right? That's what I'm imagining the initial productivity gains are going to be. Not as we, the paradigm we've been trained in the last couple of years to get used to, which is more, hey, you singular intelligent entity, I'm going to give you something and you're going To go off and think and come back and bring me something. I actually used AI semi-successfully, Jesse, on the deep dive. I had written it, the metaphor in the deep dive using the second person, you. And I was like, I think this would be better as like a traveler, like a third person. So I asked ChatGPT, I was like, can you rewrite it that way? And it did. And I had to adjust some things. Jesse I don't know that it really saved me that much time but it's an example like i knew what i wanted it to do and it like saved me a little bit of time with me trying to do it i was i mentioned this To you before but i was listening to the ferris seth godin one and they were talking about perplexity and clod yeah which i never used but then i started using them and it's pretty awesome Yeah i like perplex i use perplexity sometimes too it's good for you so you pay for it i have the issue is free i guess i could only add the option to pay for it but i pay for it for the year it's Cal Newport Like 200 maybe i'm paying for it uh it's it's useful it's it's still only marginally useful over google and that's because we forget how much artificial intelligence is already in Google. Google's pretty good at, hey, I need an example of this or what's this. It'll just kind of find you those pages or give you short answers to things, which works pretty well. Perplexity will like summarize it in its own words and give you the links to follow. I find it to be like marginally better than Google for certain things. Also, it makes things up a lot that does get in the way it when if you ask it for examples it'll find you this perfect example that's not right like it's just it's it's changed it to be like Exactly what you're looking for and then you follow the source ([Time 0:28:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2d21e2d9-8ada-4826-a2ef-5935bac36ad1)) - **Phantom Part-Time Jobs** - Time block and plan for your phantom part-time job. - Control your workload and collaboration to avoid overload. Transcript: Jesse What counts as non-optimal technology for the digital declutter you gave an example on a participant only listening to podcasts during his commute. I feel like I spent too long listening to podcasts throughout the day, so I'm considered completely banning them for the 30-day duration to explore other hobbies and reassess things. Cal Newport So the digital declutter, which is from my book, Digital Minimalism, it has you go 30 days without using what's called optional digital technologies. So I threw optional in there to make it clear this is not you getting out of like answering your work emails. If your kid uses text message to tell you when they're ready to be picked up from practice, you need to still use text messages right. But the stuff that feels optional, you take it out of your life for 30 days. You aggressively work on reflection and experimentation to figure out what really matters. And then in the end, you figure out what you want to let back. So Natasha's question is like, how do we draw this line about what is an optional technology or not? And I basically say, trust your gut, right? So, you know, she's pointing out, I gave the example in the book of maybe you listen to podcasts still during your digital declutter, but you don't do social media. And she's saying, well, what if I don't want to do podcasts? And I would say, yeah, don't do them. Like you're kind of trusting your gut here. What you're looking for is information, information, both about what really matters, and you will get that if and when you're more aggressively, you've taken a lot of things out of Your life, you're more aggressively reflecting, experimenting with other analog activities, and information about what you really miss or not. And so taking a lot of things out of your life will help you get that information. So it's not so important to me that you get the exact list, but that like you're being honest about it. The stuff that troubles you, you're moving out. The other option you have, and I talk about this in the book, is you could leave some things that you need to use to some degree and put fences around it to reduce it. And I think that's probably how I was talking about podcasts. I think I was probably saying maybe you put fences around it so you're like, well, I'll still listen to the podcast on my commute. That's what I do on my commutes, but I'm not going to listen to them otherwise. I have this with streaming video, right? A lot of people, when I did this experiment with a lot of people doing a digital declutter, multiple people said, oh, here was my fence around Netflix style streaming services. I'm allowed to watch during the declutter if there's someone else with me. So I could still do social watching. Me and my roommate are going to watch a movie because that seems not like a problem, but I can't do binging. I want to try to take a break from binging. So you can either take things out or you can put fences around them. There is no hard and fast line about what has to be there, what doesn't have to be there. But you got to trust your gut. I mean, if something is worrying you how much you're using it, then take it out for the digital declutter or have fences around it. But the key thing about the declutter, it's like the key point of that book. You have to spend the time when you're taking the break, you have to spend that time aggressively pursuing alternative activities that are valued, valuable to you. That is where the value is. If you just try to white knuckle the digital declutter, if you try to say, I'm just going to stop using all this stuff on my phone because I don't like it, I'm just going to do that for 30 days, You're not going to make it. You're going to be staring into the void and it's going to drive you insane. You have to be aggressively pursuing the alternatives to fill the time. That's what makes something like the digital declutter actually work. And it's why I call it a declutter and not a detox because the detox terminology in the context of digital technology is too much used as this idea of taking a break. If you can just get away from things, you can clarify yourself and then go back to using your stuff just the way you were before. I don't like that detox mindset in the realm of digital. ([Time 0:33:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f7e79eac-f651-4467-997c-69f80ab7ad7f)) - **Career Planning** - Pair lifestyle-centric planning with evidence-based planning. - Research potential career paths thoroughly. Transcript: Cal Newport Just taking a break from your digital life and then returning to it unchanged on the other side. That detox thing is to get to me. I mean it's also not the right use of the word detox. I mean, in substance abuse treatment, detox, yes, you're kind of getting something out of your system, but you don't go back to it. You don't detox from alcohol and then go back to drinking. It's the first step towards sobriety. So it's weird the way the digital world has, digital wellness has taken detox to now just mean like a temporary break like if i could just get some breathing room from social media i'll Be that'll be helpful and then i'll just go back to using social media again the other end never made sense to me on the new white lotus on max they call it a detox when they go to thailand Jesse And they're like introducing the guests and stuff and i watched your phones. I watched it. Yeah. Cal Newport But, and that is using detox in like the digital wellness way, which is like, take a break while you're in Thailand for a week. I just saw it last night. I was thinking of this. Yeah. I know we watched it too. You watched it too. Jesse All right. What do we got? Next question is from Ethan. Can you be in a state of deep work, even if your cognitive capabilities aren't being pushed to the limit and not improving a skill? Cal Newport For example, reading a book? Well, I mean, deep work is a term that was introduced in the context of professional activities. So it was very specifically talking about professional activities where you're doing something hard, like something you've been trained for, and you're doing it with your full focus. And the whole point of identifying that professional activity in that book was to say, don't forget, this is really the thing that most moves the needle in most organizations. Like this is the thing that ultimately produces the valuable things that lets you keep your lights on. So don't be seduced into having everyone's day be spent doing the shallow instead, just on email, just in movies. Don't let that – meetings. Don't let that busyness somehow in your mind make you feel like you're hustling or running a sharp organization. It's the focus stuff on things that's not easy to do that ultimately produces the value. That's hard to replicate stuff. So we shouldn't forget that being important. So it's really talking about professional activities. I think the notion of deep work for a lot of people has taken on this sort of moral valence. It's like good activities versus bad activities, which I don't think is right. I mean, even in the work context, it's not like the non-deep activities are bad. I mean, the non-deep work activities include sending the invoices that is going to get you the money, you know, for the thing that you created. I mean, it's going to be booking the travel that allows you to go present the lecture that's based off of a lot of deep thinking. Like, it's not bad. My point is, though, work can't just be that. You can't let it crowd out the thing that's actually producing the value. But anyways, there's this moral valence people take to it. And then this sort of makes people upset because then they feel like they're being accused that if they're not doing enough of this, that it's somehow bad. And then it captures once you have a moral valence, you begin to use this term to talk about nonprofessional activities like in your life outside of work. And deep means good and shallow means bad. And you're like, well, reading a book seems like it's a good activity, so can't I call that deep work? And I'm saying, no, no, this is a narrow concept. It has to do with professional activities in professional settings, in particular knowledge work settings. Reading a book is what I would call a focused activity, right? It has that element that is a part of deep in which you're giving something your full attention. I do think focused activities are useful. Your life should have them. Our mind expects them. It ([Time 0:37:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d2a2b4de-9f0e-41f7-b96f-a54874d02a68)) - **Professor's Community College Interest** - Cal Newport's friend, a computer science professor, considered teaching at a community college. - This highlights applying skills to diverse populations and settings. Transcript: Cal Newport Can be very stressful and ultimately sort of deranging to have no focused activities in your life. I mean, if you're constantly on a phone and your mind can never just do one thing, that is a problem. You're going to exhaust your mind. I talk about this in digital minimalism. Your mind needs what I call solitude, but freedom from input for other minds and focused activities like reading the book give you that. So it was working on like a woodworking project. It might not be in the moment what you're doing, which might be like sanding, is not cognitively demanding, but it's a focused activity. It's getting your full attention or you're knitting. It's not a hard stitch, but it's taking your full attention. Focused activities are great, but I would use that terminology different than deep work. Deep work is a very specific knowledge work, specific professional pursuit activity. Focused work is more broad. You do need focused activities. Reading a book is a great focused activity for a lot of reasons, but I wouldn't mix that up with the terminology for deep work ([Time 0:41:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/05c4d42f-3159-4789-a3e2-4bf1938dc3a7)) - **PhD and Parenthood** - PhD students can excel as parents with focused work habits. - Communicate your constraints clearly with your advisor. Transcript: Cal Newport Bad, and whoever does more deep work is better than someone who does less. Then people start to get upset because they say, well, wait a second. There's different jobs and different people have more opportunities to do deep work than other people. And why are people judging me? And it opens up these whole can of worms. Among others, that's done in a knowledge work organization that has been receiving, it's been forgotten or it was being forgotten because high-tech tools were crowding out the attention Space. And it was just pointing out, don't forget that. That's actually the thing that keeps the lights on. We might have to go out of our way to protect it these days because of the velocity of distraction coming from things like digital tools. So I like that distinction. Focused activities is a broad category. Reading books is in there. Knitting is in there. Sanding wood is in there. Deep work is under that umbrella, along with other things, like sports or flow activities can be under that umbrella too. They're all under that umbrella. So I think that's a useful distinction. All right, who do we got? Jesse Jeff, what are Cal's thoughts regarding content aggregator services such as InnoReader, which allow you to subscribe to and view content such as blog posts, YouTube videos, and social Media channels outside the original platforms? Is this a good way to be more intentional about content consumption, or is it just another distraction? Cal Newport Well, I'm a huge booster of aggregators as a way of reclaiming some of the value proposition of the original internet. I don't really get the point of aggregators that are aimed at algorithmic platforms, however, like the whole point of an algorithmic platform, like a social media platform, their Whole point was to push back against the aggregation model, right? When I first got started in new media, I got started with a blog. This would have been back in 2007. I loved that time period because it was individuals producing their own content on their own servers. And what people would do is have a RSS reader. So a reader that could read the automated feeds you could, that would describe like when you had new blog posts, you would have an RSS reader that would go around and check for all the blogs You subscribe to. And subscribing was just like you telling the reader, this is a blog I want to follow. And it would just check, Hey, is there a new post on this blog? If so, I'll pull it into the reader so you can read it in the same right there next to any other blog post. And so your reader would just have like, here's the newest articles from around the blogs you follow. You had one tool you would read. I still have memories of, I don't know what tool it was. Google had a good reader. Maybe it was Google's, but being in a classroom, this might've been distributed algorithms I was TAing. I remember reading Zen Habits, Leo Babuda's Zen Habits post in my RSS reader in like 2007 or 2006 or something like this. That was a great technology. They got rid of like Google stopped supporting that. And other companies that were trying to do this went out of of business why because this was a bad model for trying to create a giant company it was a great model for consumers I could subscribe To these different sources of information I like and uh they'll all show up in one app so I just have to open up this one app or website it was it was websites mainly back then and it will just Tell me if there's a new thing over on Cal's blog. It'll just show up and I can just read it. It's like my own personal newspaper. That was fantastic. But you can't make money on that if you're the company because their content is being pulled from people's individual sites and they're being brought to an individual to read. Companies were like, no, no, no. We need you to live on our walled garden platform. We own all the content and we'll use algorithms to give you a feed of things to read. And then we control all the content you see. We can monitor all the behavior you do and we can sell you targeted advertisements. So RSS went out of fashion because they said, don't, you don't want an RSS feed. You want a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed or an Instagram feed. That's much more profitable for the small number of investors who are early in those companies. There are, there's like a return to the aggregator model, notably podcast read, podcast listeners, podcast apps, podcast apps are basically blog RSS readers, right? So like if you go to Apple podcast, you're not, this is not like an Apple app and all this data is in Apple's world. It's not like going on the Instagram. All a podcast listing app does is you say, I want to subscribe to deep questions. Just like in the days of blogs, it just goes and notes to itself, keep an eye on the RSS feed for Cal's podcast. Our podcast is just on a server somewhere. It's nothing fancy. It's not owned by some platform. Just like a blog, it has an RSS feed that updates every time there's a new episode and it has all the information, the metadata for the information and a pointer to where the MP3 file is On the server. And your podcast listener, once you say, I care about deep questions, it just kind of pulls that a bunch. Hey, is there anything new? Is there anything new? And if I see something new, it downloads that file off of the server that we just happened to store our podcast on, and you can access it from your listener. So podcasting actually is a return to like blog RSS readers, and I think it's fantastic. So the content independent. ([Time 0:42:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ce0da720-9076-457e-8eed-862e88444b61)) - **Cal's Grad School Productivity** - Cal Newport wrote books and blogged regularly as a graduate student. - He demonstrates that focused work can yield high output. Transcript: Cal Newport You know, we own our own content. It's on our own servers. And anyone with any type of podcast app can subscribe and listen to our content. Or you even go to like the deep life.com/listen and just listen to it right there. So I think that's really cool. So I would like to see a return for it. What I think that the technology is interesting to me now is aggregators for email newsletters. I think that's going to be the blog reader of, you ([Time 0:48:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/07d6746c-6a40-48c1-86eb-e4380583f093)) - **College Success** - Treat college like a job for better time management and success. - Structure your studies, plan ahead, and use effective techniques. Transcript: Cal Newport Know, 2026. It's going to be like what blog readers were in 2006. That's what I'm looking for because email inboxes are crowded. Have personal stuff. You have work stuff. You have urgent stuff. The context shifting is immense. You have spam. You have promotional stuff. It's a very crowded attention arena. And I know some of these tools exist. And listeners, feel free to write to jesse at calnewport.com if you have good ones to point out to me. But I think these tools are going to evolve to be really important. Substack is trying to do this just for Substack blogs, but I want there to be independent apps where you just tell it. And I know there's a couple like this where they actually give you an email address you use to subscribe to the newsletter. So like it comes straight to it. But I want there to be a way that all my email newsletters, I just have like one app or website I go to and it's just like a newspaper, except for what you're seeing is what's coming from these Email newsletters. And I don't want it to be Substack's app because that has lots of other stuff going on. I don't want it following me and giving me algorithmic recommendations and trying to keep me in there. I just want it to be the things I subscribe to, it's showing it to me and I can read them all there. And I don't have to go into my inbox that has other distracting things to read them. I think that's going to be of this decade, you know, what blogs were. It's going to be a way that you can have this content experience that's non-algorithmic and independent. So I'm a big believer in aggregators. I don't believe in aggregators for giant social media platforms because their whole point was to try to destroy aggregators in the first place. Jesse So then those emails would get deleted from your email account, right? They'd just go right to the, whatever the solution is. Yeah. Cal Newport So I would be happy with that. Jesse So then you would never see them. Cal Newport That would be pretty sweet. Yeah. Just have an app, right? Like here's the latest from like the different things you subscribe to. Oh, hey, can I see like the archive of this one? And here's the older, older articles, right? I mean, I think it'd be cool. Yeah. Like a podcast app. I mean, maybe just integrate these two things. That'd be a cool app. It's like, I like this person. I subscribe. It's like, Oh, here's something to read. Here's something to listen to. The whole thing could look like the New York times app or something like that. Like people who have newsletters or podcasts, you can just have them. Here's the newest stuff. And you just listen to it. And you have like a nice app and it keeps track of where you are. Jesse Like a whole, I like the Washington post app a lot better than new york times because you can still see the physical paper in the post i haven't uh tried that app i subscribe but okay i should Try it check it out yeah um the times app's pretty good i don't like because you can't see the paper so what do you mean like it won't show you like what the actual paper looks like yeah at Least in the post you have two options. You can see the feed like it is in New York Times, but you can also go to the print edition and you can see. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. You can do that with the Boston Globe too, but for some reason you can't do it with the Times. Yeah. Cal Newport Doesn't make any sense. Yeah, even at the same company. All right, what do we got next? We have our slow productivity corner. Ooh, this is where we have a question each week that relates to my book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. It's also our excuse to play the slow productivity corner theme music, which we'll hear right now. Jesse What do we got, Jesse? It's from Jacob. I'm a senior executive looking after sales and marketing teams for a medium to large-sized business in New Zealand. With a large team and ever-changing demands and a competitive retail environment, is it possible to avoid pseudo-productivity and busyness? Time blocking is very difficult with constant disruptions both in person and via other channels. Cal Newport Well, I see sort of two unrelated issues here. Can you avoid pseudo productivity and business and busyness in a competitive retail environment? And then second, can time blocking somehow by itself help you accomplish this goal? Answer the first part, yes. I mean, think about what is pseudo productivity? This is the core definition of my book, slow productivity. It's the thing that slow productivity is trying to solve. Pseudo productivity is the belief that visible activity is a reasonable proxy for useful effort. So busyness is the point. If you're busy, that's good. If you're less busy, you're not. The embrace of pseudo productivity as your primary metric for actually doing things useful is what leads to these sort of hyper-distractive environments where we're all hustling And getting after it and jumping off and on and calls and slack. And we figure if we're really, really busy, we must be doing something right. But it's also self-evident after just a little bit of reflection that pseudo-productivity doesn't translate or correlate well with actual value produced. If anything, it can make it worse. If all you're doing is trying to be busy, where is it that you're actually allowing your mind to fix on a single cognitive context and apply your hard-won skills to produce some sort of New value, some new information that has value? Where are you doing the actual work of producing value in knowledge work? It's like running a car factory where you're constantly running around and having meetings about the quality management and the best way to produce cars. And you're constantly going around and making sure that the machines are oiled and putting in place new techniques to oil the machines and making sure that everything is working right And talking to people. Hey, what about this? What's going on with your machine? But no one's actually building the cars. You're all very busy, but eventually that plant's going to go out of business. So no, pseudo productivity self-evidently is something you can get away from. How you do it is hard. That's why I wrote a whole book about it. Time blocking, that's like an individual time management strategy. I don't see how that's going to break a culture of pseudo-productivity among an entire team. So what sort of things do matter? Here's some greatest hits from the book. First of all, make the work that needs to be done transparent and external. Do not just have tasks exist implicitly on people's plates that are being just passed around through emails and requests. ([Time 0:48:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ff182280-84e3-464d-9a7f-fd8cd6077481)) - **Managing Complex Workloads** - Structure your work like a multi-department organization. - Implement processes and communication protocols to avoid being overwhelmed. Transcript: Cal Newport Already working on three things. I'm not going to give them a fourth. Have some sort of systematic collaborative way of deciding how to update these assignments. All right, what should we be working on next? Who has capacity? Okay, you have capacity. I'm going to move this card virtually or physically onto your column. What do you need from other people to get this done. Let's just talk about this now while we're all here. And so now you're keeping track of workload. You're preventing people from having too much on their plate at the same time. And you're getting much more efficient collaboration because you can front load the decisions about who needs what from whom, as opposed to having that sort of be dragged out in a distributed Fashion with just emails you're being sent back and forth. Work with things, alternatives, alternatives to ad hoc messaging. So maybe you have office hours for individuals. If I have a question for you that you can't answer with a single message, I will go to your office hours and we'll have a five-minute discussion. Me talking with five people during a one-hour office hours can prevent 50 messages that I have to receive and respond to throughout the rest of the day, which is a much bigger burden. Your team, in addition to keeping track of your external tasks, consider having things like docket clearing meetings twice a week. We get together. This could be in smaller units. We have a shared document. We're up to that point. If anything came up that we need to figure out as a team or someone needs to tackle or have a question about, I add it to that shared document called a docket. And in the docket clearing meeting, we go down that list one after another. All right. Do we really need to do this? Who's going to do this? What do you need? What about this? Maybe we'll move this onto our list. We're going to wait to do this. What about this issue here? Who has the answer for it? So you're consolidating when things get done and you're using the docket to ensure that things will be remembered without doing what most people do to try to remember something that Occurs to them as they send off an email and they get sent out there to start bouncing back and forth between people doing obligation hot potato. So have office hours, have docket clearing meetings. Be super clear about the metrics that matter. Here's the things we produce. How much are we producing? How good is it? What did you contribute to it? The clearer you are in actual value, the less entranced you'll be by the simulated value of pseudo productivity. So that's going to matter as well. An idea from my book, A World Without Email, when it comes to external communication, people talking to your team from the outside, clients or other units within your organization, Have communication protocols. You want to talk to us about this? Here is how and when you do it. It's not just you have someone's email address individually. In fact, have communication channels that are disconnected from individuals. That itself is a problematic paradigm that all communication goes between handles that are associated with individuals. No, I have an email address for client questions. Now that changes the whole dynamic if you're a client, because when I'm sending this to Jesse, I'm just imagining there's another person like in the office next door who I'm asking something And it's rude if they don't get back to me and why can't they just talk to me? And I'm really mad at Jesse now because he didn't respond to me right away. But if I'm sending that question to client questions at company.com, I have a completely different set of expectations. Like, oh, this is going into an information tracking system and I will get a response. In fact, maybe there's some nice guidelines about, hey, here's how this works. Send this to us. This is emptied out and assigned to people to look at. Like once a day, you'll hear back within 48 hours. And if it's not a person, that's reasonable. Eh, process is a process. If it's a person, we're like, why haven't I heard back in 20 minutes? So there's a lot of things you can do to begin re-engineering a team away from pseudo-productivity, but it's not going to be like one simple hack or habit. It's going to be a whole different way of keeping track of information, keeping track of tasks, communicating internally, and communicating with the outside world. So read slow productivity in its entirety. There's a lot of concrete advice in there. Read A World Without Email, a lot of concrete advice in there about just a communication piece. This is possible, but it is really hard. All right, let's, what do we got next? Do we have a call? We do. All right, let's see what we have today. Jesse Hi, Cal. I have a bit of a silly and relatively simple, but not unimportant, I think, question. I'm, like many of us, addicted to doom scrolling. I've gotten off Instagram for probably over a year, maybe closer to two years now. But then YouTube brought out YouTube shorts, and then I would just infinitely scroll through those. And I realized that the solution to that was just taking it off my phone. But I just feel like I always need to go to something that allows me to just scroll through my phone and turn off my brain for a few minutes at a time. And the issue now is that I end up going on LinkedIn on my browser. And the advantage of wanting to do this for all LinkedIn is that the content is quite boring. And seeing a two-week post from someone with a cringy insight into life quickly makes you go off of it. But I still find myself going on it quite a few times each day. Do you have any tips about how to get rid of this doom-throlling reflex? I figure it's kind of like a smoker that just wants to fiddle with their hands or something. Thanks. Cal Newport Well, let's use the smoker analogy here for a second longer, right? So when a smoker who has just quit is trying to be successful, what is one of the key things you have to do? You have to get alternative activities, right? This is the key thing you have to teach smoker. Oh, this is a situation where you would normally smoke. So what you need to do instead is like eat carrot sticks or you drink coffee, right? I mean, it's like the coffee at the AA meetings or whatever, right? You have to have alternative activities. The fill, the role, the thing that you are quitting used to play. If you just white knuckle it, it's hard. Like I'm used to smoking here and I just don't want to do it. And I'm just going to hold my hand tight till my knuckles turn white. You don't last very long that way. You got to get the alternative activities. The same holds, I think, for these information ecosystems. Your problem is you need to train yourself to appreciate alternative types of stuff to do when you're bored that you like even better than the stale LinkedIn post. Right? You're looking at the stale LinkedIn post. Like, you must have nothing else pulling for your attention. So find other types of information. And this is, it takes, you know, I talk about this in the digital declutter, it's experimentation and reflection. So you try to figure out like what else is interesting to me and you put healthier habits in place. And that sounds really simple, but it actually is what works. It's ([Time 0:54:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4cbc69c4-6b52-4517-a993-dc9994ce6657))