Ep. 358: Are Parents (Finally) Ready to Fight Smartphones?  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 358: Are Parents (Finally) Ready to Fight Smartphones? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/4ee0da77-4abf-4a4e-a8c0-5e9e2eba1698 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Consensus on Smartphone Harm** - Scientific consensus now strongly supports that smartphones and social media harm adolescent mental health. - Issues include sleep deprivation, behavioral addiction, and increased mental disorder exposure, especially in girls. Transcript: Cal Newport Two years ago, in episode 164 of this podcast, I summarized where the scientific research currently stood when it came to the topic of smartphone, social media, and kids. I argued then that the scientific conversation on this topic had passed through three phases and was currently in a third phase. Today, I want to point to some new work that I think establishes that we have moved since then into a fourth phase and it's the most consequential one of all because it's the phase that's Going to lead to some pretty drastic changes. I'm talking about one or two years from now. Our culture is going to be very different when it comes to how we think about kids and these technologies. So here's what I want to do in today's deep dive. I want to explain this new phase that we have entered in the last year or so and tell you what changes are coming and what that means for you if you're a kid or for your own kids if you're a parent Or maybe for your own life if you're somewhere in between. But let me start by going back very briefly to that episode from two years ago and mentioning the three phases of scientific research and opinions on smartphones and kids that I had summarized Back in that episode. I said the first stage lasted from 2012 to 2017. This was the stage in which alarming correlations and reports begin to emerge. This is when you first begin to see things like, huh, it's kind of a mental health issue among teenagers. It's going up in a way it hadn't before. This is when we begin to say, huh, it's mainly anxiety and depression-related disorders. Other types of common teen mental health disorders aren't going up as much. Oh, we're beginning to hear kids talk about, you know, I'm kind of on my phones more often. It was very correlational. But people began to worry something might be going on here with kids and phones. Next stage lasts from 2017 to 2020. This is when we begin to actually do retroactive research on this issue. What that means is social scientists, in particular social psychologists, would take very large data sets in which you would ask 100,000 people a bunch of questions and look for correlations In this data set. And they begin to find these connections between things like social media use and smartphone use and negative outcomes for young people. They found correlations. But I called this period in that original podcast episode The Data Wars because a lot of critics came out of the woodwork as well and said, well, it depends on how you analyze the data. If you look at it this way, those correlations go away or they get smaller or we can find other things that are mundane that also have some correlations to harm. This was the period in which you would see a lot of elite publications that were just sort of shifting at this point between how do we feel about this? Begin to say things like, well, we're not sure yet if these technologies are causing harms for kids. This is a hypothesis. There's evidence on both sides. There's a lot of like on the one hand, on the other hand, reporting going on. The final stage I talked about back in that episode from 2023 was this idea that the opposition was beginning to quiet because other threads of evidence began to come in. In other words, we got other types of evidence. Of experimental design, some that were prospective, like randomized control trials, and other types were retroactive, but in very clever ways, looking, for example, at neighboring Counties where high-speed internet arrived at different times. So they were demographically similar, but social media was widely adopted by one before the other, and looking at differences in what was going on with mental health, or actual prospective Studies where you paid people to stop using social media and saw what happened, randomly selected, comparing them to a control group. And a lot of these different strains of evidence with different experimental designs were showing similar results. This sort of quieted the correlation is not causation. We're not quite sure if this is good or bad type of opposition, the sort of reporting of like, well, we're not quite sure if this is bad or not, that began to die down. That was the phase we were in until the last year or so. Last year or so, the evidence has really picked up to the point where now there is a very strong consensus emerging. And this is beginning to pre, I think this is sort of presuaging some major changes that are coming. I want to bring a paper up here. This was posted last month. It's sort of like a preprint. The title is a consensus statement on potential negative impacts of smartphone and social media use on adolescent mental health. Now, if you're watching this, instead of just listening, you'll see on the screen here, this huge list of authors, right? Why are there so many authors? Because what they did here is they took a large collection of relevant researchers and they asked them like, hey, we're going to make a bunch of statements about the potential harms Of phones and kids. Tell us if you think it's true, probably true, probably not true, or you don't know. Let's just see where the scientific community is. Now, remember again, before I show you the results here, it wasn't that long ago, 2019, 2020, it wasn't that long ago that if you looked at sort of reporting on social media, smartphones And harms for kids, you get a lot of like, we're not really sure yet. There's just some correlations, but we're not sure yet. Now, by 2025, this has shifted more significantly. I'm going to scroll through here to isolate what is one of the key graphs. All right, so I'm going to put this on the screen here. So there's a list on the left of claims about smartphones, social media, and kids in particular. And on the right, there's a stack bar chart where the blue is a percentage of people that says probably true. The yellow are people who say don't know, and the red are people who say it's probably false. They're asking these questions of that large group of experts, experts on these questions. And you can see, just looking at the shape of this, the probably trues dominate. There are no statements here for which the probably false outweigh the probably true. But for the first half of these, the probably true dominates five to one, 10 to one dominates the probably false. Let me read some of these that have really strong support from the experts. Sleep deprivation and social deprivation can reduce mental health. Adolescent mental health has declined. Behavioral addiction can reduce mental health. Childhood shifted from play to phone. Social media can impair sleep. Social media increases visual social comparison in girls. Social media increases mental disorder exposure in girls. Social media can cause behavioral addiction. Social media can fragment attention. Social media increases predation, harassment in girls. Phone-free schools would benefit mental health. No smartphones before high school would benefit mental health. All of this, this is the first half. All of this are things that have at least like a three to four to one ratio of these experts saying this is probably true as compared to those who are saying it's probably false. ([Time 0:02:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/390c2502-b407-42ee-b12c-50112c8423aa)) - **Parents Push Back Against Phones** - A new cultural phase is emerging where parents reject early smartphone and social media use for kids. - Norms like no smartphones before high school and no social media until 16 are becoming uncontroversial. Transcript: Cal Newport And it's a fourth phase that I think of as the parents strike back. I was just at Disneyland. We went to the Galaxy's Edge Star Wars exhibit. I have Star Wars on my mind. The parents strike back. I think this is the phase we are in. As this consensus quickly solidified that these are causing problems, parents are beginning to say, then why the hell are we putting up with this with our kids? They emphasize this. I'm going to bring up another article here. Jesse, is this in an app? Yeah. Is there like a New York Times? I see it. Okay. I want to bring up another article here that surveys both parents and kids. This came out just last week. There's an op-ed in the New York Times that talks about the data I'm going to talk about. This op-ed, I have it on the screen here, was called We Don't Have to Give Into Smartphones, and it's co-authored by John Haidt, who you probably know at NYU, along with Will Johnson, Who's the chief executive of the Harris Poll, and Zach Roush, who is also a researcher at NYU, who works with John Haidt. Now, they talk about in this article a series of surveys that John and Zach helped design with the Harris Poll. I want to read a couple quotes here. These both come from the articles. This is about how parents and kids themselves now think about these technologies. Media platforms. Here we present the second part of our investigation, a nationally representative survey of 1,013 parents who have children under 18. The overall picture isn't any better. We find widespread feelings of entrapment and regret. Many parents gave their children smartphones and social media access early in their lives, yet many wish that social media had never been invented. And overwhelmingly, they support new social norms and policies that would protect kids from online harm. There's a couple charts in here we can talk about briefly. This one I thought was pretty interesting. This is a stacked bar chart where there's different answers to fill in the blank in the following sentence. When I think about my child's experience growing up, I wish blank had never been invented. So the biggest answer to this was mature online content, 72 of parents said, I wish that had not been invented. But then you have TikTok and Twitter tied with guns. That's 62% of parents said, I wish that had never been invented. Snapchat's two percentage points away. Then you get alcohol. And within a percentage point or two after alcohol, you get Instagram, social media, and Facebook. Down towards the bottom. So just so you don't think, well, parents are worried about everything, the stuff we used to worry about, like television, right? Only 17% of parents wish that was never invented. What about video games? 33% of parents. So what are we seeing here? We're seeing here that both kids and parents are picking up on what has become the consensus in the scientific community, which is these tools and some of the apps on them are hurting Us and hurting our kids, and we're done with it. Nearly half the kids said, I wish this had never been invented. They don't want to use it. We have parents are as likely they're rating TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat as bad as guns in terms of wishing it hadn't been invented. This is a real problem, and parents are saying, hey, we have to now do something about it. We don't want to hear the sort of think tank conversation where people are trying to make themselves sound smart by being like, well, you know, it depends on the context. And like, sometimes this is not so bad. And like, maybe that is true. But I think right now we are in this new phase where people want change. And I think this change has begun and is going to over play out in about the next year to three years, one to three year window. What are the changes that are going to happen? I think John Haidt nailed this actually. So John Haidt, who has really dedicated his life to this issue in the last two years, laid out a collection of social norms that he's been pushing for. So he clarified his message based on all the work and summaries of research he's done over the past however many years. He said, here's the norms he would like to see. He listed four, but there's three of them that I think are relevant. One, don't give a kid a smartphone until high school. Two, don't give a kid access to social media on that smartphone until the age of 16, which is even later. And three, schools should really enforce a no phone policy within their hallways. That last norm is happening nationwide. And when it happened, it began happening fast. Keep your eyes on this. Two years ago, this was, you know, D.C. Public schools where I am or wherever. People would be like, well, I don't know. Like, what if there's an emergency? I need to reach my kid. Now it is happening fast across the country. Schools are just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, putting these policies in place and meaning them. That happened fast. I think that social media until 16, this is going to start happening fast too. I've reported in the pages of The New Yorker back in January. You can see my article on this. Australia passed a ban. Hey, you got to be 16 to use social media. I think there's pressure to do something like that in the US. I think they probably should. Is it going to stop all kids from having access to social media? No, but it's going to give parents to cover. It will give them cover to say, here's why I'm not allowing you to have these accounts because it's against the law. It gives parent cover to the parents that we see in the survey. Don't wish these things had not been invented. It helps them out when their kid says everyone is doing it and they say, I don't care. It's against the law. So I think it's going to be useful in that way. And if you think that there's somehow no way to put this sort of an age restriction on a product without having giant privacy violations, I mean, you got to speak to everything else in Our culture that has age restrictions. If anything deserves it, this has to be among the collection of things that probably need some sort of age restriction. What about phones till high school? This is just cultural. There's a cultural shift. We reached an uneasy consensus that said, yeah, like middle school is like roughly when you should get phones. There's a chart in here. They asked the parents about it, about the 50% point. If you said, when did you give kids your kids phone? You reach majority point in the 10 to 12 year old age. It's just too young. It should be 14 to 16. That is not that big of a shift. It's just cultural. We just thought like maybe middle school when this has happened, we just changed the culture. It should be high school. But as Haidt points out, the research shows us we'll make a really big difference. You are much more mature by high school versus middle school. Most importantly, you've gone through a lot more mental development. You've started puberty. You have more of identity development, you have more of a sort of academic foundation, your brain is ([Time 0:09:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5b54a11a-ff2f-45d9-8e66-82883e9185a3)) - **Rent Separate Deep Work Space** - Rent a separate workspace if you can afford it to improve focus and signal deep work. - A dedicated space reduces distractions and triggers cognitive context for better productivity. Transcript: Cal Newport I'm a mid-career academic and just signed my first book contract for law. I have a work office and a home office. However, I'm thinking I need to rent a separate space to really focus. Is this too extreme? I always support that idea. I mean, if you can afford it, and honestly, this is a good use of the book advance, in my opinion, having a separate deep workspace is great. And I think people underestimate the value of renting low cost office space. Like if you live in a town, the office space, it's above certain stores. Or if there's a office tower in your town, like Tacoma Park has like a 10 story, the metro center office building. There's a lot of vacancies, especially for the small offices, especially post COVID, right? Go rent an office, you know, shell out a few hundred dollars a month. If you can afford it professionally and have a place you go just to do your deep work. I'm telling you, it's a completely different mental experience than being at your normal computer. You're filing cabinets open. There's piles of bills and papers next to you. You've just answered your 700th email of the day and you're like, all right, time to write. And then you just open up Microsoft Word and want to get going. That is painful. But when you can go to your dedicated space, the transition happens as you move to that space. There's no other distractions there. Your mind associates that space with deep work. It really works well. If you want more evidence for this, go back and see my 2020, maybe 2021. I think it's a 2020 article for The New Yorker called – I don't think the article is called, but the term I introduce is work from near home, WFNH. And I talk about how famous writers throughout history who had very nice homes to write out of would often go to various centric places to do their writing because having a new space was Very important, even if the new space was objectively worse than just writing at their home. It's not about featured or non-featured. It's not about nice versus non-nice or aesthetic versus ugly. It's about cognitive versus cognitive clutter. So if you can pull that off, Henry, I would spend every dime of that advance. ([Time 0:23:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3b53b68d-20af-4c03-aa44-7ef4ec308615)) - **Maintain Cognitive Context While Waiting** - Avoid unrelated tasks during AI-assisted code waits to keep your cognitive context pure. - Engage with relevant code tasks to maintain flow and reduce mental fatigue. Transcript: Cal Newport There's a lot of waiting, a lot of waiting while it's doing these queries. I would recommend keeping your cognitive context uncorrupted. So if you're waiting a minute here, 30 seconds here, four minutes here, if you go and introduce a new context unrelated to the project that you're working on, it really is going to make It harder to make, you know, focus on that when you come back to it, to look at whatever results that are produced by the AI, to figure out what to do next or write that next prompt or answer The questions that the AI agent is asking you. It is going to be hard. If you check your phone, if you check email, these are just such diverse, unrelated cognitive context to the coding project you're working on. You're just going to destroy that cognitive context. So I would, in that situation, be looking at other things within your code to work on, adding comments to the code that was just in there, thinking about, like, what's going to come next, Trying to make sense of, like, a past contribution. Keep your context pure, right? It's going to make a huge difference in how efficiently you make progress. It's also gonna make a huge difference on how much cognitive drag you feel. It can be a really exhausting experience if you're trying to work with an email check here, a phone check here, back and forth. It just is going to feel more draining in addition to being less efficient. You're just going to be thinking, ah, this is really hard. But if you keep the cognitive context pure after 15 or 20 minutes, you're going to flow. So find things to do that are related to the project, even if they're not that interesting, while you're waiting for the AI to get back to you. Do you get urges to check email when you're doing deep work? Yeah, I have to like news more, or yeah, if like there's something interesting going on, I want to check in on. Or to check a text message or something. Yeah. Text messages. I don't work with my phone nearby often. I'm just bad at my text messages. But other things I do get, I might get tempted to like, it's like, oh, there's like an interesting story unfolding. I want to do it. Or if there's someone who I think writes interesting things, I might want to see if they've written something interesting or like go over and check the new york times or something like That that's why i like having separate spaces for deep work like i really want to try to separate away from my normal digital cognitive context so if people are in a cube and they have their Phone should they just like put it in the bag or something or put it in like a little drawer yeah uh or put into a do not disturb mode where only calls from like your spouse or school come through And then the ringer's on and then you can put in your drawer your bag like hey if there's an emergency it'll ring otherwise i don't use it clarity matters as soon as you have to have a war With yourself like i'm going to look at my phone occasionally throughout today like it's a porous line but i'm going to try not to look at it that often that is a terrible gauntlet you've Just laid down for your brain because your brain's going to say, well, what about right now? Okay. Oh, what about now? Not now. What about now? Right? Like it's going to, you're going to have to fight with your brain every minute about why not now? Why not now? Why not now? You're going to lose that fight eventually, probably within the next five or 10 minutes where if instead you just have this clear rule, I have a special do not disturb mode on. I've time blocked. I'm doing this deep work for two hours. I'm not looking at my phone for those two hours. That's just the rule. The only thing I argue I'm going to have with my brain is do I agree with that rule or not? That is a much easier argument to win because it's binary. I agree with this rule or not. You can have the argument once and then you've had it and then you can move on and focus on what you're doing. ([Time 0:26:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ecee8c08-f199-4725-b055-55ec1ef4bcef)) - **Organizational Skills for Kids** - Teach kids dual-direction calendar planning: look ahead weekly and work backward from big deadlines. - This habit reduces stress and improves organization as academic demands grow. Transcript: Cal Newport I have 11 year old boys and they get a day planner to get organized. I thought this might be a perfect opportunity to start teaching them organizational habits. What should I teach them? Well, I mean, I think by 11 years old, um, your database-driven multiscale planning probably through like a multi-view notion implemented time blocking schema. And if you don't have that, you will probably fail in our modern economy and die early. So there you go. 11, okay, I can speak to this because I have a 12-year and they do give them a day planner. So I understand this. Here's how I start. Here's what I'm doing with my own kid. When I think about that age group, like 11 or 12, it's like fifth, sixth grade dual direction, calendar based planning. That's probably the, the initial skill to pick up. So what do I mean by dual direction, calendar based planning? Well, it means when you sit down, let's say at the beginning of a, a marking period or at the beginning of a week, like whatever time period we're talking about, one direction you go is You look ahead. Hey, what's due this week? You know, what's coming up? Let's make sure we have time for that on the calendar. So you have a math test coming up. You have a draft of this is due on Friday. Great. When are you going to do the work for these things? So, you know, that's a looking forward to like the week ahead and making sure that like you see what you need to do that week and that you've chosen when you're going to do it. The workload for 11-year is pretty easy. So this is like an easy exercise to win at. So it's not about trying to squeeze efficiency out of these. Like you could do the work the night before, be fine. It's to get used to this idea of, I look at what's coming up and make a plan for when I'm going to do that work. That's looking forward, direction number one. Direction number two is looking back from big deadlines. And I suggest you do this at the beginning of a season or a marking period or a quarter, however they break it up at your kid's school. That's where you go much farther in the future and say, what are big things that are coming up? And let's now work backwards from those and make sure we've marked in our calendar when we have to start thinking about them. Like, oh, there's this big fifth grade, your first research paper, and it's going to, we're going to start working on it. It's going to be due at the end of May or something like, great, let's go back and put a note here in April. Like, hey, start working on this. Or, you know, there's a big baseball tryout for like a travel team coming up. You're like, OK, so we really want to be practicing three times a week for a month ahead to kind of get sharp for it. Let's go now work backwards a month before that deadline and put those things on the calendar. So you look forward to like the near future and make a plan for the things that's due. And you work backwards from the big things to make sure that when you get closer to those things, your calendar tells you like, hey, start thinking about this. So that gets you used to much more sort of long range forecasting. Oh, there's things happening in two months. A month from now, I'm going to want to start working on it. And it's sort of like magic to see these things work. Right. Again, it's not that anything that the 11 year old is doing requires this. It's just the magic of seeing, oh, when I make a plan for my week ahead, I'm not stressed on Wednesday. I just know what to do and the stuff gets done and I get good grades. I don't have to think about it. Oh, I see if there's like something big that I want to do well on. If I work backwards from that deadline, it may be in the moment like, wow, am I really going to work on this today? Like this isn't even on my radar. This thing is not even due for a month, but I guess I'm going to work on it today because I made a plan working backwards from the deadline. And then when that goes really well, you're like, oh, that works well too. Those two things, when you get to high school, now they're important. Now it's killer. People who make a plan for their week ahead and work backwards from major paper and test deadlines, they don't get stressed out. They get really good grades. When you bring that to college, it's like a superpower. People think like, okay, you can probably move things, physical objects, just with the power of your mind. Because everyone else is just stumbling around trying to get this work done at 3 a.m. The day before two term papers are done. But you, at the beginning of your semester, worked backwards from those deadlines and realized you needed to start them about a month ahead of time and alternate week by week between Them to really get that done in a reasonable time frame. And you did, and it wasn't so bad. So that's the key skill I would teach a student at exactly that age, looking forward to the week ahead, working backwards from major events in their life that they want to be prepared For. Just kind of get them used to that muscle. Yeah. And it makes a big difference. ([Time 0:29:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b6f1cda6-bb99-4e85-8c5c-0545cc31d2d2)) - **Focus on Reliability and Career Capital** - Prioritize being reliable: deliver what you promise on time or communicate delays. - Build rare, valuable career skills to accumulate career capital and advance your career. Transcript: Cal Newport I hear time and time again, that these skills are every bit, if not more important than technical skills. I don't know if that's entirely true. Now, let me say, first of all, my answer is biased because I come out of the computer science world. And let's just say computer scientists aren't known as nuanced, scintillating conversationalists. They try to be sort of nice about it. Some of us are technical, if that makes sense. We're not exactly, we're not the life of the party where the people making like very precise observations about the room in which the party is being held in a way that makes the host eventually Say like, okay, great. Yeah, I get it. Okay. Yes. The lights are not an optimal pattern. I need to get back to my guests. That's computer scientists. So I'm from a world where soft skills don't necessarily go a huge way. Yes, you don't want to be a jerk. You want to be like a nice person. But what really matters? Two things. And these are more important than soft skills like being very personable, being someone who like people really get along with, like you're really friendly to people, good networker. Here's what's more important. First, and this is what you have to pick up right away in a new job, you need to be reliable. You don't drop the ball. If someone asks you to do something, it gets done. And if you're not going to get it done in time, you let them know that it's not going to get done in time and when it is going to get done and then you deliver on that new date. People don't have to think about it after they hand something to you. They know you're reliable. Early on in your career, that's much more important than being personable. That's much more important than networking. That's much more important than, hey, that's a really great guy. You can be weird, but you need to be reliable. That's incredibly valuable. This person will do the things I tell them to do. They'll do it well. They'll do it in a reasonable amount of time. I can trust them. Then two, so that you can do right away. Two, it's career capital, rare and valuable skills. I can do this thing well that a lot of people can't, but it's valuable to you in our organization. That's what moves things. There's a lot of weird people in business, You're like, I don't know if I want to take a five hour train ride with that person there. I might get a long, you know, inquisition about the relative merits of star Trek, deep space nine versus TNG, the next generation. Right. And it's going to be a long conversation. And I don't want to hear about the gravity simulation on the space station DS9. Right. But. They are really good at a particular type of compliance law. They really understand it. It makes a whole HR system function. We'd be lost without them. And they're reliable. I don't care. Can wear their cork fake forehead or whatever cork or big ears i don't know star trek well jesse i'm trying i'm trying i don't know i'm just laughing over here i think there's a character I think whoopi goldberg was in this show and she's like a bartender and there's like a character who had on like a goblin face i don't know i guess there's monsters in space i don't understand These shows very much, but you know what I'm saying? That's okay if I have rare and valuable skills, right? I have rare and valuable skills and I'm reliable. That's what really matters. Don't be a jerk and don't be unethical, but it's okay if you're not super personable. It's okay if you're introverted versus extroverted. It's okay if you're not a great glad hander. You're not the life of the party. Those are the things, reliability and career capital, that moves your career along. ([Time 0:34:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c4a4cda3-20c9-4b6b-886b-fab420b83331)) - **Think Career Capital and Lifestyle Engineering** - Shift mindset from what you want in a job to what you offer the job world. - Use career capital to engineer a lifestyle aligned with your values and needs. Transcript: Cal Newport Next up is Cindy. My husband is struggling to find meaningful work. He feels very behind in his career and ultimately wants to make cool things with cool people. He has his bachelor's degree in English and economics and has worked so far in data analysis and proofreading editing roles. His strengths are finding design flaws in everyday things and telling stories in compelling ways. I mean, Cindy, I think these things you're describing are too vague. Finding the design while telling stories in compelling ways, make cool things with cool people. It's career capital. What do you do that's rare and valuable? I can do this thing. It's valuable to you as an organization. It's hard to find people who can do it. You get a job, you get autonomy. Like that's the way, that's the way think about it is career capital. Where is my career capital? How do I get better? A lot of this sounds more like you're identifying like what I want out of a job versus what I'm offering to the job. And when you make that mindset switch, it really opens things up. What can I offer to the world of work? And how can I make that more compelling? That's the right way to think about it when you're working for work, not what do I need in my job? Is it when you build up that career capital is the argument in my book. So good. They can't ignore you. When you build up that career capital, that's what gives you the control and autonomy in your career to start putting in place over time to things you like the making cool things with Cool people or having more storytelling in your work. That's cool attributes you earn by having more career capital. The second thing I would say here is to throw in that I'm going to introduce a new term here, Justin. You're going to have to tell me if you like it or not. So, you know, I talk a lot about lifestyle centric planning. I have an alternative term I'm playing with for this as I'm working on my book. You got to tell me lifestyle engineering in addition to the other term or maybe as maybe long-term as a replacement. What are we going to do with the hats? VBL CCP. Well, I mean, there's literally twos of people who have those hats in the world right now. So yeah, if we, if we change that, it would be a problem. Here's why I'm, I'm liking this term lifestyle engineering, because maybe it's a clearer way of getting at what I mean by lifestyle strict planning, which is you're engineering a lifestyle By looking at the various pieces involved and what you're like, what is the structure I'm trying to build here? And you sort of build it sort of systematically solving some problems and building new structures. So I think of it as like lifestyle design is more exotic. Like what do I want in my life? You know, it's like, I want to go live in Rio like Manish was doing. Lifestyle engineering is more my sort of systematic approach. What are the things I want in my ideal lifestyle? What's my, what's my sort of specs for my project here? Now, how do I build something that matches the specs? I can be very creative in how I do this. And there might be all sorts of different configurations of parts that makes this work. So you want to get really good at things that are very invaluable. And you want to think about this in a lifestyle engineering context, not in a like, let me just zone in like I to be happy, I need a job that is cool. And I can work with cool people on making cool things. No, I have a spec for my ideal lifestyle that I'm trying to engineer towards. My job is going to be a big piece of it, but there's other pieces I'm working on. And when I think of my job as just like one of the components I'm using to build this lifestyle, it takes the pressure off. And at first it might be, this allows us to live here and provides this much income, which makes these other things possible. Great. Our contraption here is getting closer to my spec. The job, the things I'm doing in the job, maybe who cares, but then stage two, I'm going to take this thing from this job and I'm going to put an hour every morning before I get started deliberate Practicing, getting really good at that, that career capital, then it's going to allow me to change this job to this, which increases the money, keeps location, but now shifts what I'm doing on this job. They have less of this thing. I don't like it more of this thing I do like, you know, and so you're, up a structure that is closer and closer to your spec. So you've got to really respect career capital. What can I offer the job world more than what my job offers me? And you see your job as part of a larger lifestyle engineering project and not as the underlying the solution for your life to be meaningful or not. When you have a family, you're married like you are here, the spec for your ideal lifestyle is going to have a lot of facets to it that are influenced by your job and not all about what specifically Happens with your job when you're there. The book recommendation I'm going to make is so good they can't ignore you. Cindy, I think that's the right book to read and maybe it will give some ideas. I think a lot of this is sort of passion hypothesis stuff, just sort of gussied up without that word. I mean, the more you're talking about like what abstract traits I want my job to offer when you're looking for a job and less like what am I offering and how can that be more valuable, the More likely you are, I think, to get in this own trouble. ([Time 0:38:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/48eaf421-d1ae-477d-bb09-b4265458b25a)) - **Tech Manager’s Lifestyle Engineering** - Tony used deep work and career capital to move to part-time remote work without salary loss. - This allowed him to focus on family life while maintaining financial stability. Transcript: Cal Newport Tony says, I'm a longtime fan of the podcast. Every Monday morning, I listen to the latest episode. And over the years, Cal's work has had a deep and lasting impact on how I live and work. I'm a tech operations manager based in the Canadian prairies and about to become a dad for the first time. As I prepare for this big life transition, by the way, Mazel Tov, Tony, I've been reflecting on the intentional choices that led me here and Cal's ideas have played a significant role. For the past eight years, I've focused on building career cap Tony says, by being consistent, reliable, and continually learning within my domain. That effort and the efficiency I've developed through deep work allowed me to shift into part-time work without sacrificing income. I now have the time and energy to focus on what matters most, my growing family. Cal's principles of deep work, digital minimalism, and lifestyle-centric career planning, or as we now call it, lifestyle engineering, have each shaped a different layer of my life. Deep work helped me earn promotions and reach my ideal role. Lifestyle-centric planning gave me the clarity to pursue remote tech work and settle in a safe neighborhood near friends and family. Digital minimalism empowered me to leave social media and I've been social media free for three years now. These ideas have helped me avoid burnout, tune out distractions, and build a life aligned with my values. He has a blog. I'll point people towards it. I looked at it. It's cool. He's kind of writing about what's going on up there. It's called Tony Neufeld.blog, T N Y N E U F E L D dot blog. If you want to see more of a sort of Newportonian lifestyle in action, Tony, I like this case study. I mean, again, I think it's a good contrast to the question that we had right before it. Right before it, Cindy had this question about her husband trying to find meaningful work, and it was all about like, Hey, I want a job that like me do this and that, and this is what I'm Interested in. Tony's got a really cool life, and how did he get there? Not by just listing, like, here are the abstract things my job should have. He used deep work to get really good at things that are rare and valuable. Then he used that to gain autonomy over his career, to move it remote so that he could move to a location that was going to serve a lot of things in his ideal lifestyle spec that he was engineering Towards and kind of keep the work. I mean, he's not talking about it as like my work is the end all and be all of my life, but it allows it supporting and a key component of a life that he finds very valuable. He's also offline. He's not spending time on social media, spending more time with his family. And most importantly, this was a cool move he did. He used his career capital now to shift the part-time at roughly the same salary he was at before. So now he's going to start a family with only part-time work without financial strain. You get to that type of point. Like this is a huge win for me. But we don't think about it that way when we're not doing lifestyle engineering. We don't think about it that way. We tend to think about it, in the North American context of just like, what's my job and how do I crush it out? And this is where all my meaning is going to come from. And then you end up, you're having this kid and you're super overworked and you're stressed. And it's, you feel like precarious every day. Like, am I going to lose this job? All I do is answer emails all day. That's not great. But he lifestyle engineered by building career capital through deep work, being very clear about what he wanted his life to be like. And he's engineered one that's really cool, friends, family, and a place he really likes, working only part-time as he starts his family with lots of time to focus on that. So great case study of a deep life in action. ([Time 0:43:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fe82a4ec-6cbe-4aa1-bea4-c1dabd42cfaa)) - **Use Handwriting for Planning** - Use handwritten notes for brainstorming and long-term planning, digital notes for rapid daily task management. - Typing is more efficient for managing large volumes of incoming knowledge work. Transcript: Cal Newport Well, when it comes to handwriting notes, there are some I do, and there's some I don't. So let me get into the distinction between two, because I also like handwriting things. I prefer it when I can do it. I like that connection to it. I have a couple different tools I use for that, which I'll get into in a second. Where I use my digital file, my workingmemory.txt plain text unformatted file, is for really taming and organizing the incoming of my day-to knowledge work. My email inbox, things that are showing up in meetings, things that I remember on the fly. The volume and details of this work is so significant that trying to track it on paper manually would be hopelessly inefficient. Right? Because if I'm trying to empty my email inbox, for example, I'm going to go from email to descriptions of the relevant tasks in that text file. And then I'm going to organize that, throw out stuff I can ignore, consolidate things in the tasks that make sense. Like, oh, these four things all involve Jesse. Why don't I put these all here as like things to ask Jesse when I see him on Thursday, I'm going to put these all together and then I can move those over in the task. It's so much information is being typed, erased, and reorganized and edited. I need to be typing. I'm much faster typing than writing and it'd be way too much like crossing out, for example. So just in the flow of the fire hose of obligations and thoughts that fills like my knowledge work roles, my traditional knowledge work roles, working memory dot TXT. However, I handwrite almost anything that's going to be brainstorming or long-term planning. I'm often using handwriting. I'm either using my Remarkable Pro notebook, which, you know, is, has within it 50 different notebooks that I use for books and article ideas and ideas about my life. There's all these notebooks in here. You write on the Remarkable surface. The Remarkable Pro is a fantastic product, and it really does feel like real paper. I like to draw and circle, and the Pro has colors. I highlight with different colors and draw boxes around things, and I use that for planning. I also then use single-purpose notebooks, fields notes, notebooks. If there's a particular project, like I brought one with me just to work on a particular part of my new book when I was on my trip, I'll bring this one notebook with me that all I do with it Is collect notes on this one thing. Particularly time sensitive, I do prefer to handwrite. So it's just about knowing when you would do it. So thinking, planning, low time sensitivity, handwriting is fine. In the mix of it, like my knowledge workflow, get the fastest possible thing, which to me is like typing. How fast can I type? No formatting. Forget the spelling. I'll just format with asterisks and dashes for bullet points and sub bullet points, and let's just get information on there. So it just depends on the speed and volume of information that you're dealing with. ([Time 0:48:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8e6fa534-6781-4034-bee9-db35578b42ee)) - **Exploration's Role in Wellbeing** - Humans are wired to explore actively; passive digital entertainment alienates us from this essential drive. - This disconnection contributes to unhappiness and emotional dysregulation in modern life. Transcript: Cal Newport So I want to talk more about things I've read that I think are interesting or good, whether they're about the deep life or just the type of thing someone who's living a deep life might enjoy Reading. So today I want to talk about a book I read over my trip last week. I have it here. It's not very useful, Jesse. I took the dust jacket off. It's kind of a great book, as you can see. They do need to work on the cover design. I would say there's probably a better cover design now this book is i took the dust jacket off but it's the explorer's gene by alex hutchinson um enjoyed this book i think the reference The explorer's gene is probably a reference to dave epstein's book the sports gene alex's last book endure was about the science of endurance athletes he kind of runs in similar circles I don't know him but he kind of runs in those same like Epstein, Steve Magnus, Brad Stolberg circles. So of writers with a background in like sports performance. I thought the book was really cool. Here's the central question that sets up is why do humans explore? And there's kind of a cool way Alex sets this up early where he talks about the peopling of the Polynesian Islands. Like why did we do that as a species? It is not easy to get to Easter Island. It is not easy to get to New Zealand. It's not easy to get to Hawaii. You had to be willing to put your life on the line, get in like a boat, and just go. And he gets into like the research. It's like, look, we, we, this was probably intentional trips. Like the drift hypothesis has these sort of issues. So we, we, we explore why to explore the book wants to find out why. And it's really, it looks into the science of it. There's all sorts of different angles that he takes on this. He looks, there's some angles, there's some genes here that people who have it are more prone to an exploration mindset than others. But there's also just things that are hardwired into all people, like uncertainty minimization. He spends a lot of time with multi-armed bandit, exploration, voice exploitation trade-offs, and why we might do this in our own mind. There's cultural aspects in this as well, like what's shifted in our culture. It just gives you a sense of like, hey, why do humans want to explore? Why is it good for us? And why might that affect the way we live our life? There's a section I want to read a quick quote from. He covers a lot of topics in this book, but most relevant perhaps to our show is where he's talking about some of modern technology and how it plays well or not so well with these instincts We have for humans to like actually go out there and explore. So let me read from page 172 here. To explore the world, you have to be in the world, capable of acting on it and being act upon by it, making decisions whose outcomes are unknown and have consequences. Taking a penalty kick or playing a concerto are many adventures whose endings aren't yet written. Csikszentmihalyi's distinction reminds me of all the times I wandered through arcades as a kid with no quarters in my pocket. I'd stop to play, in quotes, some of the games. Moving the joystick and punching the buttons as the game's demo mode cycled through its various worlds and showed me the adventures I could be having. But the joystick and buttons didn't do anything. I wasn't causally connected to these worlds, so I got bored very quickly. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth, Csikszentmihalyi wrote. Passive entertainment leads nowhere. There's an interesting argument in here that the more that we move towards the passive from the active, seeing things in photos on social media instead of going there, sending the tweet Instead of actually being involved in the activism, playing the video game instead of playing in the softball league for your local fire department or whatever it is. This makes a difference. We are meant to be in the world exploring, learning, having errors, correcting the errors, updating our understanding, having suspense, extending effort, having victories and Losses. This is what we makes life interesting. It's what our brain expects. It's what we are wired for as humans, both culturally and physiologically to do. And one of the unexpected but powerful consequences of shifting towards a world of the digital is that we get alienated from this and we get listless. We get depressed. We get unhappy. We get emotionally dysregulated. It's not a great way to live. A life lived through a little screen is not the life that our brain evolved for. We try to tell ourselves it's better, but it's not. It's worse. That's why we're so unhappy. ([Time 0:55:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b45222e1-a8ba-47ed-aa81-f07829d088ab))