Ep. 354: The Workload Fairytale  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 354: The Workload Fairytale - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/9b4510c4-8cde-4f80-9cc3-4314fea35ada ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **The Workload Fairytale** - Four-day workweek trials show no loss in productivity despite less time worked. - Most knowledge workers do much more optional or non-value work than needed, debunking the "workload fairytale." Transcript: Cal Newport Over the past four years, a remarkable story has been quietly unfolding in the knowledge sector. A growing interest in the viability of a four-day work week. Iceland helped spark this movement with a series of government-sponsored trials that unfolded between 2015 and 2019. The experiment eventually included more than 2,500 workers, which, believe it or not, is actually about 1% of Iceland's total working population. The UK followed suit. They had a six-month trial that included over 60 companies and close to 3,000 total employees. This concluded in 2023. A year later, 45 firms in Germany participated in a similar half-year experiment with a reduced work week, and these are far from the only such experiments being conducted. According to a 2024 KPMG survey, close to a third of large U.S. Companies are at the very least considering the idea of experimenting with four-day work weeks, at least for some employees. All right, so the reason I'm bringing these up is not to directly assess whether a four-day work week is a good idea. Though I will return to that at the end of the discussion here. But instead, because as I'll show, these studies, if you look deeper, have an important data point in them that I think points to a really important conclusion, an idea that is critical If we want to understand knowledge work in our current moment. It's an idea that I call the workload fairyale. All right, so let's get to this hidden point that shows up in every one of these studies. I'm going to switch over now to some of these studies. Let's see. These are probably in what the browser, Jesse? Yeah. All right. Let's start with a claim from the Iceland study. For those who are watching, I have a summary of the Iceland study up here. Here's a key claim from the beginning of this article. Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces. So of the 1% of population of Iceland who participated in this, they did not see a decrease in productivity. All right, let's look at what happened in the UK. Here is a summary of the UK study. This is coming from The Guardian. This has a similar quote across a wide variety of sectors. Well-being has improved dramatically for staff and business productivity has either been maintained or improved in nearly every case. Remember, these are experiments in which they are taking five to eight hours out of the work week, keeping the salary to say and making no other changes. The German study, let me load up a summary here from a German newspaper. They report something similar. I'm reading now. Employees generally felt better with fewer hours and remained just as productive as they were with a five-day week and in some cases were even more productive. Participants reported significant improvements in mental and physical health and showed low stress and burnout symptoms as confirmed by data from smartwatches tracking daily Stress minutes. Step back. All right, let's step back and consider this for a moment. These are astonishing findings. How is it possible that with changing nothing else, just telling people you now have to work notably less hours per week, that the overall value of what they are producing, their overall Productivity didn't go down? A big part of this answer, I'm convinced, is an idea that's pretty important from my book, Slow Productivity, and it's the idea of the overlooked importance of workload management. Here's the normal setup. Most knowledge workers have a surprising amount of autonomy over their workload, especially as compared to like a service worker or someone in an industrial context. Right. If I'm a service worker, here is what you need to do. Clock in and do this. It's very prescribed. Right. If you're the barista at Starbucks, it's very clear what their responsibilities are. If I work on an assembly line, it's very clear like what I am doing. I don't have a lot of say in what I want to or not work on. In knowledge work, this is different. You have freedom say yes or no. There's a sort of unstructured way that commitments come to you. Some stuff maybe you can't say no to, but ultimately you are the source of triage of incoming potential commitments. There's also no transparency or direct supervision of your workload. You grab the average knowledge work manager and take one of their charges and say, what are they working on right now? They don't know. They can't say, here's the six things that this person is working on. There's no transparency in this. What you're working on is up to you to keep track of. In fact, most workers themselves don't even know at any one moment the full slate of their commitments. They sort of get prodded into action with like email or Slack prompts or meeting invites that, oh, I need to start doing something on this. There's no direct supervision or transparency of workload as well. Now, most knowledge workers in this, I got to say, like pretty unusual situation for the economic, the world of economics, this unusual situation of workload autonomy, tell themselves What I call the workload fairy tale. And the workload fairy tale claims that the amount of work that you're doing right now is the exact right amount needed to be successful in your position. That somehow it is all just worked out that like whatever it is you're doing, this is what you need to be doing. It's the exact right amount. Not more, but if you do less, it's going to be a big problem. The results of these four-day workweek studies undermine this claim. Productivity did not generally go down for these research subjects even after the amount of time they had to work was substantially reduced. And if we think about why this is, the answers are actually not that surprising, especially if you've read like Slow Productivity or listened to the show before. The key work in most jobs, the efforts that actually drive those pure economic productivity measures, you know, dollars produced per worker hours employed, the key work in most jobs Requires much less than a 40-hour work week to complete. Just go back, if you do something like time block planning, go back and highlight with a highlighter every time block from the last week in which you were working on something that directly Produced value for your organization. You're not going to have full columns marked with highlighter. You're going to say, you know what, there was like 15 hours this week. Maybe there was 10 hours this week where I was actually directly doing the things that create value. This course is very different than the service sector, the industrial sector, where outside of breaks and lunch, like everything you're doing is directly producing value. So everything else you're doing is either more – it's more optional. Like you're doing it for social reasons or it's make work or it's non-promotable activities or it's just an embrace of pseudo-productivity. I want to show some activities. I'm going to kind of bounce around the emails and make some unnecessary meetings. Now, look, not all of this is bad, but there's no reason to fill, you know, every available minute of your day with this ([Time 0:03:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1b89daaa-1ee3-4652-a1ee-e71e629b885d)) - **Reject the Hyperactive Hive Mind** - Avoid blaming tools like Slack for collaboration overload; the hyperactive hive mind workflow is the culprit. - Resist constant context switching by rejecting on-demand back-and-forth messaging. Transcript: Speaker 2 Questions from Cole. I work in tech and there are hardly any emails. Instead, I'm bombarded with hundreds of Slack messages daily. How would you rewrite a world without email 2025 as a world without Slack? Cal Newport I want to rewrite it because it already directly deals with that issue. So let me explain. As I say in that book, which came out in 2021, which, by the way, was well after the Slack revolution was underway, that I was using email as a catch-all term for low-friction digital communication. So it includes Slack or Teams or whatever low friction digital communication you're using. Email was the first, but these other ones have come along. The real villain in the book is not actually any particular tool, but it is the workflow that these low friction digital communication tools made possible. And I call that workflow the hyperactive hive mind. It is a style of collaboration where people work things out on the fly with unscheduled back and forth messaging. That messaging might happen through email. That messaging might happen through Slack. That messaging might happen through teams. It is the hyperactive hive mind style of collaboration that I say is the real problem. Why? Well, it requires a constant tending of these channels. Whatever specific type of technology tool you're using, you have to tend these channels constantly because you have many ongoing back and forth conversations. And if you take too long of a break from tending the channels, you're jamming up too many back and forth conversations. But having to continually check these channels is hugely distracting. It puts your mind into a set of continual context switching, which makes it significantly diminished in its capacity. This is going to burn you out before you get to even like mid-afternoon. So the hyperactive hive mind is the problem. So the right way to understand Slack, and I wrote a New Yorker article about this a few years ago. The right way to understand Slack and the weird relationship people have with it, where they sort of love features of it and they hate it. The right way to understand it is that it's the right tool for the wrong way to work. This is the actual trajectory of Slack is people began using email to implement this hyperactive hive mind collaboration. But there's a lot of things about that particular tool that are a little bit clunky when you're trying to do this rapid back and forth on demand collaboration. CCing is clunky. Threads aren't automatically threaded. Having to find things is difficult again. The sort of quotes and re-quotes and quotes of quotes of quotes that happen when you get these long email back and forth conversations. It works, but it's not great. So Slack came along and said, OK, if you want to use the hyperactive hive mind to collaborate, this is a better tool for the hyperactive hive mind. It is a better tool for that style of collaboration. So the reason why people love it and hate it is that if your work is using the hyperactive hive mind, which it probably is, Slack is better suited for that. Searchable transcripts, different conversations on different channels, back and forth, as opposed to like having the quotient, you can go back and find conversations before. It's just like a better implementation of the hyperactive hive mind. But we also hate the hyperactive hive mind because it forces us to constantly be context shifting. So Slack is better at implementing that hive mind. So we don't have rough ends on our features, but that means we have to be even more hyperactive and we have to check channels even more often. And so we hate the things we hate about the hive mind more while simultaneously liking that at least this is a more efficient way of implementing this thing we hate. And it's an all circular sort of terrible mess. But the problem underneath this all is not the tools. It's the workflow style, which is the hyperactive hive mind. That is what we have to get around. And you know who doesn't put up with the hyperactive hive mind? Cal Network. Cal Network. Damn straight he doesn't. You want to talk to Cal Network, only one way to communicate with him in the work, registered mail. You have to send it registered mail, and he will sign for it when the mail person comes to his office. The rest of us have a lot more work to do. So don't get caught up in the tool. Speaker 2 It's the collaboration style that's the problem. ([Time 0:18:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/627affa3-0207-4303-addf-15ae66c3791b)) - **Manage Writing Projects Sequentially** - Focus on one large writing project at a time to minimize costly cognitive switching. - For smaller or different project types, interleave research but pause deep writing until completion. Transcript: Speaker 2 Am I supposed to spend a couple hours on each project every day? Should I only work on one project each day or should I focus on just one project until it's complete and then move on to the next? Cal Newport That's a good question. It depends on the type of projects we're talking about. So when it comes to deep work, long ongoing projects, if they are of the same type, sequential is usually better, right? So if you were saying I have three script projects I was working on, I would work on one, then work on another, and then work on a third. I would definitely not interleave three similar type projects on a very small timescale. Like, I'm going to work on a little bit of each each day. That's just too much context shifting for you to really make progress. You have to pay a price of a cognitive overhead to get going with each of those, and that overhead is just going to add up. If you're working on multiple projects on a small timescale, too much of your time is just on the overhead of trying to switch your thinking from one to another. Now, there is a caveat here. If it's a very long project, you can break the project into large chunks and do those sequentially. So I've seen this with screenwriters before that maybe they'll work on act one of a screenplay, sort of finish it like okay i don't quite know where to go to act two yet and i'm a little stuck Now i'm going to go work on the act three of this other screenplay i started and finished that then i'll come back and do act two so you can break a project up into like big chunks but you're Still going to be working multiple weeks on one before you switch to the other if you have projects of different types or maybe you have a long-term project and then shorter projects That that to go on as well, then there is some interleaving that has to happen. I have to do this because I'm typically working on something like a book project, and then I'll be interleaving in things like New Yorker articles or academic articles, which happen On a smaller timescale. And typically I'm always writing books. So if I was like, let me finish my book before I write like my next New Yorker essay or my next academic paper, those just wouldn't get done. So if it's a different type of project, like a smaller project, yeah, just get to a good stopping place on the big project. And then I'll pause it for a week to really push another project through to completion, then return to the big project. Again, there is a caveat. The caveat here is I separate out preparation, which is brainstorming and research, from actual writing. So I might be working on my book. Like today, I'll use my actual day-to as an example. I am working on the final section of chapter four of my current book. I've been working on it for a while. I also have a, there's a New Yorker piece I'm working on and there's an academic paper I'm working on. Those two, those two smaller things are in the research thinking phase and that is fine. So I wrote all morning on my book and then I have two calls this afternoon. One is with the philosopher that I'm working on this academic paper with and the other is on an AI researcher that I'm interviewing for my New Yorker piece. That's fine. That's research thinking. I'm happy to add that into the afternoon. It's not as, I'm not in the full cognitive context of trying to figure out and write. I'm just sort of gathering information or discussing things. So I wrote this morning, I'm doing background research on those. When it comes time to pull the trigger on one of those two smaller projects, let's say like the New Yorker article gets to a point first where I'm like, okay, I'm ready to write this. Then I will pause the book and just for a week, write that article. So like when it comes to the actual deepest of deep efforts, like writing, the actual putting a pen to paper, I don't interleave at all. I want to be working on one thing at a time, but I will let like research overlap. So if you're working on one script from a writing standpoint, but you're still doing like background reading and taking notes for another script that can interleave fine, but only Work on one at a time or really big projects. You want to interleave, you'll go more sequential, whether full project and then work on the next full project or big chunk of one project for you do big chunk of the other for smaller Stuff interleaving for bigger stuff. You want to pause the big thing to work on the small, but you can allow the research to overlap. So it's kind of a complicated set of scenarios there, Jesse, but hopefully that I think about this type of thing a lot. ([Time 0:22:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/94ff48c4-5807-4246-88d0-ceb4e6246ef8)) - **Lifestyle Planning Meets Moral Ambition** - Lifestyle-centric career planning aligns well with Rutger Bregman's moral ambition. - A clear lifestyle vision can guide meaningful work that benefits the world without obvious tensions. Transcript: Cal Newport Planning? That's a good question. So Rucker, I don't know if you know him. He's a Danish writer. He's a philosopher, maybe. He got he got a lot of attention and some cool books. I think they're in translation in the US, but they did very well. That was more of like a optimistic look at the future, which I think caught some people's attention. Yes, this new book out called Moral Ambition, which I blurbed. I think it's out now, but I read that and blurbed it. And he's arguing that young people, especially like talented people coming out of elite should have more moral ambition. They should they should use their lives more to go do like useful things for the world as opposed to, say, like going into finance or law to try to alchemize their elite training in the Money. So interesting argument. So the question is, is that somehow working against my vision of lifestyle-centric career planning? And I don't think so. And I think the issue here, I've been realizing this recently, is the word lifestyle, right? I think about lifestyle in a very clinical definition sense of the word, which is just literally what is the style of your life? What is the day-to realities like, like your life? And so when I say lifestyle-centered career planning, I'm saying, look, fix what you want your life to be like in a more general sense, and then work backwards from that to find specific Ways to deal with obstacles and opportunities that face you to make your way closer to that lifestyle. Because ultimately, you want the lifestyle that is appealing to you as the ultimate goal, not accomplishing any particular goal. So we might as well get directly to the problem. But I think a lot of people associate lifestyle with something that's maybe softer or a little bit more like self-indulgent or lazy. Like there's the term, for example, lifestyle entrepreneur, which is typically pitched as, well, you have your own business in part so that you can have like a lot more like flexibility. The work is not too hard. If you work for someone else, you'd have to work harder. But if you have your own business, you can sort of trade working harder for, you know, having more vacations or not having to work. So, you know, not having to put in really long hours, but that's not, I don't necessarily mean lifestyle to be soft. And one of the core things that could be a part of your lifestyle vision is moral In fact, lifestyle-centric career planning, I think, is probably better suited for Rucker Bregman's Vision of moral ambition than other ways that people think about it. Because if you have this strong vision, this ambition of like, I want to improve the world, this could be a big, vivid component to your vision of your ideal future lifestyle. It's a lifestyle where you're like heavily involved in like directly being useful to the world. And then you can get a little bit more specific about like, for you, does that mean like I'm directly involved with people who I'm helping? Or maybe you have more of a intellectual conception of moral ambition that I am producing ideas that are really changing the world. I did a cool profile like this in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, Pardi Sabedi, who was a computational biologist at Harvard. I went and spent some time in her lab. And I sort of profiled her as someone who was doing this, who had this sort of moral ambition and found an interesting way to get there. And she ended up in a biology lab working on genetic algorithms. And they were using them to study ancient diseases and to try to find ways to get around them. Really cool. She works in computers in the lab, but they also go with the partner institution in sub-Saharan Africa where they go and spend a lot of time. And it was just like a really cool mission-driven life. And my argument there was she didn't sit down at some point and say, here's my grand goal. I want to be a algorithmic geneticist who works in a lab in Africa. It was working backwards from the more general moral ambition is like, I want to use my smarts to try to do something good for the world. And I want it to be intellectual, but also connect directly to people. And then there was a, I in the book, all sorts of different serendipity and opportunities that came out of nowhere that she sort of followed. And it led her eventually to this place. She was guided by that lifestyle vision very consistently. The path was jagging. So no, lifestyle planning doesn't mean lifestyle entrepreneurship. It doesn't mean just chill. So moral ambition could be a part of it. That's why I blurred that book is that people need more ammunition for their visions of the ideal lifestyle. And this book will give you one particular ambition. It actually compliments very well my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. There's a world that's really incestuous and overlapping, Jesse. ([Time 0:27:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/69e9aabc-90f1-4b39-a51a-d572684ce585)) - **Find Less Demanding Work Strategically** - Define your ideal lifestyle to guide career decisions rather than just avoiding burnout. - Explore new roles leveraging your career capital by networking extensively to find bespoke, less demanding jobs. Transcript: Speaker 2 I make double of what my husband makes and we need both incomes for family life. I constantly feel on the edge of burnout. I would prefer to work 50% of the time, but financially can't. Any advice on how to find a less demanding job that still leverages my career capital? Cal Newport It's a good question. There's a couple of different things to do here. By the way, your 40s, I'm just going to write a book about this. Your 40s are a really interesting time. Maybe this is why I'm writing the deep life right now. It's a really interesting time for lifestyle like reconfigurations, right? I mean, if you think about like especially a standard sort of well-educated middle class, upper middle class American track, right? It's like 20s, you are getting educated and doing entry-level jobs. 30s, you sort of settle into a career and you begin to – you build capital. You get good at things. And then your 40s is like this great moment of reconfiguration or reinvention of like, okay, what's our play here? Am I going to write out this or are we going to change or what's working, what's not working? So it's really an interesting time for thinking through these questions of lifestyle-centric design. The first thing I would do is like really make sure that you're doing lifestyle-centric career planning. So there's often, when there's friction in your current existence, there's a tendency to do solutionism, which is I want to find a single idea that generates in me an emotional response That's positive. And I'm going to place on that single idea or goal, all the hopes and dreams of making my lifestyle something I like more. So we want to be careful. That's not what's going on here where you're like, I'm feeling burnt out. If I was just working halftime, all that problems would go away and we'd be happy. Maybe, maybe not. Like what you really want to do is say, what do I actually want in an ideal world? What would my day be like? What would my life be like? And maybe it's not working 50%. Maybe it's like, no, but it's like working reasonable hours and not feeling so squeezed in time after that. Being able to have more time after where I'm like, maybe it's, I'm not super stressed about work when it's done. And I don't feel like I'm constantly playing catch up on home related or family related issues afterwards. Like I want to be at an office and like, like what I'm doing, but then I want to be able to like come home soon after the kids get home from school or like you have some sort of vision and we're Not rushing around or whatever. Then when you work backwards from that vision, you might be like, let me explore a lot of different ways forward to that vision. And yeah, maybe it's just like going to have time, but maybe not. Like maybe that's just going to be frustrating. Maybe you're going to be resentful. If you're like, look, I make double my husband. And if I go back to half hours, I'm going to feel like I'm being sidelined, but I have like an intellectual or professional ambition. And I feel like I'm actually better than him at stuff in my job. And this is like I'm feeling resentful about it. Like maybe that's not the right thing. Maybe you're like, OK, what we need to do is change our jobs. And I'm going to change it to a different job that uses my career capital but is less than one of these we're paying for your time. You always have to be accessible type job. So it's going to be less money, but something where like I could use my skills, but when it's done, it's done. Maybe your husband makes the shift. Maybe he goes to halftime that reduces your income much less that reduces your income by what a sixth is making about a third of the income and you cut that in half. So that's going to be about a sixth versus if you went halftime you're reducing it by a third right and then maybe he's able to take on really clearly delineated like these family responsibilities That means you don't feel so stressed about the stuff going on after work like there's different types of options here that's worth thinking about but what i'm going at is like get the Lifestyle. Like, what do you want your day to be like? Don't say like, what do I want to get rid of? I want to get rid of burnout. Say, what do I want my life to be like? It won't include burnout, but what else do I want in my life? I think that could open up potentially more interesting options. Then there's the problem. Okay. So let's say you've done that and the best option for it is like a new job, maybe something that's 50% time or just like less demanding. Here, what I have found is that when it comes to stuff that's well past the entry level, it's not like you can go on to LinkedIn and just find this. It has to be, it often feels like for people that it's manifested. And what happens is when you begin thinking, looking and talking about them, kind of looking for something different, this can be less demanding. You talk to friends about this and you talk to colleagues about this and you have some conversations. Suddenly these super bespoke, one of a kind type of opportunities just have a way of sort of sifting out a material life. Like, oh, wait, this person is moving over this small organization and they need to start an outpost over here where you happen to live and they need someone who can run it for the next Couple of years. And it's like a great match for your skills, but it's really autonomous and probably much less time. You're like, great, I'll do it. It feels like you're manifesting it, but what you're really doing is just putting your antenna up to look for these things. And you're beating the bushes a little bit as you talk to people. I'm mixing metaphors here because I don't think you hunt for birds with antennas, but I might have this wrong. I'll tell you who can do that. It's Cal Network. He catches birds with his bare hands. He leaps and catches them. He doesn't deal with shotguns. But you see what it feels like. I've heard this again and again from people. It's like, wow, once I started thinking and looking for this like more nuanced application, my career capital, it just came out of nowhere. Where was that before? They were around before. You just weren't looking for them. You know, you weren't you weren't actually generating them. So use pure lifestyle and career planning. Do it with your husband. Remember, it's a family lifestyle you're working backwards from, not individual lifestyles that you hope mesh. Explore the broad when you explore different solutions that could get you to the lifestyle you're looking at. And then once you execute, if you're looking for something like, again, microcapital and a very narrow type application, you have to manifest it, which means you have to start looking For it and talking to people and beating the bushes, and you'll be surprised what comes up. ([Time 0:34:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/293b5eb7-9974-4caa-a719-be0731cfae34)) - **Plan Your Week on Fridays** - Plan your week on Friday rather than Sunday night to reduce anxiety over upcoming work. - A Friday plan calms your mind and makes the weekend more relaxing and less anxious. Transcript: Speaker 2 I'm trying to determine if I should switch my weekly planning to include something for Sunday night to help mitigate this. But on the flip side, is there a boundary to set here to protect family time? I do get the Sunday scaries. Cal Newport I can minimize it. It depends when. It's like, in my summer schedule I don't schedule stuff on Mondays because it will reduce that. I have them a little bit less these days because honestly, our family life is incredibly busy on Sundays. I have a bunch of kids that do a bunch of stuff on Sundays. So there's also a countervailing sense of there'll be some relief to getting those kids to school on, on Monday. So Sunday you're like, I'm exhausted from all the family stuff, which is nice. So I'm kind of looking forward to just like having some autonomy, but I also get the Sunday scaries about like, I got to go back and do work here. I think it's the ideal plan. And it's not Sunday night. Here's what I think the ideal plan is. And I struggle with this, but I think it's the right thing to do. End of day Friday. That's when you plan the next week. If you can do that and it's really worth fighting for, especially if you get strong Sunday scaries, it's better because you also get a subtle benefit Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday Morning. We don't get as demonstrably anxious on like Saturday about the week ahead because we still have some time, but there is a background hum of anxiety because your mind is like, I don't Quite know what's happening next week. I hope it's okay. I hope we have a plan. I'm a little bit nervous about it. And I think it amplifies some of the scaries. If you make your weekly plan on Friday for the week ahead, at the end of the day on Friday, the whole weekend you have the mental peace. If I have a plan, it's reasonable. I don't have to worry about it. I not missing anything. So that part of your brain is like, what if we're missing something? That part of your brain is much calmer. And it might just instantiate itself like a slightly more relaxed Friday night, a slightly more relaxed Saturday. So that's what I want to do. I'm always scrambling at the end on Fridays for various reasons. But that is, I think, the ideal. And if I was having really bad Sunday scaries, that is 100 percent. ([Time 0:40:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/553fc829-5b8c-4924-b934-973a26748882)) - **Deep Work Powers Court Success** - Sam prepared for a high-pressure court argument with 60 days of focused deep work and active recall. - This intentional practice boosted his memory and confidence, enabling him to perform without notes before judges. Transcript: Cal Newport Roberts would step up to the podium without any notes and make his argument, never break eye contact, and cite to the expansive record from all memory. I decided that when I got my chance, I was going to take a page from the John Roberts playbook. I got my chance before the New York Court of Appeals without a note, all from memory. I stepped up to the podium and engaged in a rapid fire discussion with the impressive panel of judges. It'd be funny if he added, and by the time I was done, I had been thrown in the prison for contempt. One other way. You know, the one time that Cal Network had to speak in front of the supreme court they ended up inviting him to become an associate justice that's how good he was i wish i could attribute My confidence to a memory superpower that would have been a lot less work but instead it was all about deep work active recall and another secret ingredient exercise for 60 days lean Up to the argument i read and studied each night in my home office with no phone TV or internet other than for case research in the next morning while on the treadmill or bike trainer. I reviewed in my head the material from the night before again, no music, no TV, just a breathy rhythm, a blink while to stare at and some active recall. He didn't give us a link to the recordings of his arguments, which is pretty cool. So I watched it. Yeah. Was he a beast? Speaker 2 Yeah. Judges interrupt so often. Cal Newport So you've got to just be on your game. Speaker 2 He's getting pounded left and right by all the different judges. Cal Newport Good for him. In the first couple of months in 2025, I had more imaginary conversation with those seven judges than with real people. That's a really cool story. Here's what I like about this, right? I mean, he got after it. It was hard work, right? So 60 days, he just was like, I'm going to do the thing that actually matters, which is active recall. I argue that all the time and I'm going to do it. Yeah, it's daunting in the abstract. How am I going to be as prepared as like John Roberts famously was? When you break it down, it's like I'm going to do 60 days worth of deep work, the right type of deep work on the right things, and look at what he accomplished. What comes to my mind when I see that is think about, you know, if you took the time that you're probably dedicating right now, Now to helping the share price of, of meta or, uh, you know, Bite dance who makes tick tock all the time you're spending on your phone and having like arguments with people on blue sky or following rabbit trails on YouTube. Imagine if you put that time over the next 60 days, like something you wanted to do really well. And you actually put in the right time. You did the hard work that actually matters. And like every day you gave it an hour. Like Sam, you could be a beast after that 60 days and then repeat that again and again. Imagine the skills you could build. Sometimes we look back at intellectuals from time long past, especially those that like came from the gentry and had some free time. Like, my God, they speak like 19 languages. And, you know, in their spare time, like, oh, they translated Euclid from the original Greek to do a new version of it. And they also like mastered Gaseous chemistry or this or that. It's just the application of doing the right work that's hard again and again and again and just getting used to that. And you repeat that, a lot of really cool stuff aggregates. So anyways, I think that's a great case study of deep work applied regularly produces really deeply meaningful, cool things. ([Time 0:43:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a8b13559-3dc9-48fc-be62-09de553d973c)) - **Minimize Cognitive Switching Costs** - Avoid rapid task switching within short time spans; switching costs 10-20 minutes to regain focus. - Schedule large projects sequentially over weeks to minimize cognitive reorientation overhead and improve output quality. Transcript: Speaker 2 Cal. My name is Jordan, and I'm a conductor and an academic, currently completing my doctorate in Baltimore, and meanwhile, conduct a number of different orchestras and other ensembles. I wanted to ask you about the concept of interleaving. It's something you've talked about before, and it's come out in Adam Grant's recent book, Hidden Potential. Musicians know this concept well. You might work on skill A for a while and then go to skill B, and then go back to skill A, then skill C, then skill B, something like that. But when I think about this idea, it reminds me a lot of the idea of task switching, which I know very well is something we want to avoid when we're trying to engage in deep work, especially. I wonder what you think about this. Is it that task switching in this particular case is between various deep work related tasks? And therefore it is cognitively demanding, but it's the appropriate place to spend that cognitive buck. Or is there some other way to contextualize and reconcile these two seemingly opposing ideas? Cal Newport All right. Well, we talked about this a little bit with the screenwriter question. I'm going to get more precise in answering this more precise version of the question. So when it comes to task switching, the main thing that we worry about is the cognitive overhead of that network switch. So when I switch my attention from the thing I'm writing to an email inbox, the target of my attention is switching from that thing I'm writing over to whatever demands are made of me in That email inbox. And this institutes what a psychologist would call a network switch. Our brain is trying to shift its focus from this cognitive context over to this other cognitive context. That's expensive and takes time. That can take 10, 15, up to 20 minutes to fully switch your context. So what happens when we glance at an email inbox for five minutes is we start a network switch, we abandon it and go back to the original thing. And now we have a mix of both of those networks together. And before we can completely regain our cognitive context on the original thing, we look at our inbox again and institute another network switch. And that's that state of sort of partial, continuous partial attention, to use the Linda Stone term or the diminished cognitive capacity I talk about. So the cost of task switching, our problem with task switching, is this like 10 to 20-minute cost of trying to change your attention. It's slow to change attention. So when it comes to like a deeper task that's done over a longer period of time, that type of task switching cost doesn't matter much as long as you're spreading out these switches over A long enough time that the ratio of switching cost to execution gets really small. So like if I'm working on one skill all day Monday and another skill all day Tuesday and then back to the first skill on Wednesday and the other school on Tuesday, that the test switching Costs here is negligible, right? Because it's, yeah, it takes me 20 minutes to really get in the mindset of that skill, but then I'm spending eight hours that day working on it. And then I, I, I work the next day. It's, I have to switch to the other skill. That's 20 minutes, but I'm spending all day working on it. So once you get to bigger time scales than like once every five minutes, I'm checking something. That type of overhead matters less. But there's a second type of overhead that I mentioned in the screenwriter question that also sort of matters. And this is like a bigger orientation overhead. Like when I'm working on a book, yes, there's a cognitive cost to actually getting my attention all the way on the chapter I'm writing now, but there's a bigger orientation I have over A bigger time period just towards working on that book. And I'm thinking about the book and when I'm not writing, it's in my head and I'll bounce around thoughts and it's kind of there in the background churning. And then I come back to it, I work some more on it. Maintaining a general orientation towards a very large or important project is helpful. And there's a cost to switching that, that you'll feel on a bigger timescale. So this is where if I was working on two books and switching between them on Monday and Tuesday, and then back to one on Wednesday, back to the other on Thursday. That cognitive switching cost of just switching to my current focus, who cares? It takes 20 minutes. I'm spending the whole day working on one book. But the orientation switching cost, that would be a problem. I start to get, well, I'm kind of, my mind is oriented towards solving this book, but then I'm trying to reorient, try to start solving that book. And that could be a problem. You know, I first learned about this actually with academic paper writing. I used to work on multiple academic papers at the same time, meaning not the same day, but like some days I'll work on this one. Then later in the week, I'd work on another. And my advisor, who's, you know, famous in the field, was like, no, no, no, just do one. Stay oriented on that one until you've solved it and done the best possible work. Then write the next. And I was like, ah, it's faster to work on multiple ones at the same time. But she was right. One at a time was going to produce a better work because you can keep your general cognitive orientation towards that one project. So what's the scale at which you'd be switching those? That's at like multiple weeks or months. And that's why I was saying to the screenwriter, if you want to switch your context between different screenplays, you want a chunk that's like, I wrote the whole first act of the screenplay Took a month and then if you want to switch your orientation to another screenplay and spend six weeks working on its second act that's okay it'll take a few days to sort of get your cognitive Orientation fully switched over but then you'll get into the groove of it so we have two scales of context switching the sort of in the moment immediate focus scale which is what kills Us when we check our email or Slack so much. And then the bigger picture, like general cognitive orientation, that can take days to really switch over. And so in the end, what this tells us is for like really big, long cognitive endeavors, you want to give things multiple weeks before you switch to another really big thing. And if possible, like push something through to a really clear finishing point before you switch over to something else. So we got two levels of test switching. ([Time 0:47:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d195232b-2650-42d8-a8ed-6d892b371aa3))