Ep. 359: Should We Fear Cognitive Debt?  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 359: Should We Fear Cognitive Debt? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/e2fa8f9d-47e6-4536-a9df-39db35df3e94 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **AI Writing Causes Cognitive Debt** - Heavy use of AI for writing leads to a major drop in brain activity and poorer essay quality. - This reduction in cognitive effort is termed "cognitive debt," which impairs long-term thinking ability. Transcript: Cal Newport What is it? Who wrote it? Brad Stulberg What's the big points? The paper is called Your Brain on Chat GPT, Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for an Essay Writing Task. The paper came out of MIT. And the highest level summary is for four months, a team of researchers from the MIT Media Lab followed 54 study participants who were using chat GPT to heavily assist them in writing Essays. And the top line finding, and I'm going to quote the researchers directly, is that LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. So those are the three things. Those are the three things that they evaluated. On the neural level, EEG brain studies found that there was a 47% reduction in brain activity with the heavy chat GPT users. So their brains were using 47% less neural connections as they were quote-unquote writing. I guess in this case, they were getting a lot of help from the model. Behaviorally, researchers found that 83% of the heavy model users couldn't quote anything from what they'd just written. This compares to about 10% from the group that used no technology, and very similarly, about 13% from the group that used a simple Google search to aid them in their writing. And then on the linguistic level, they had neutral arbiters give subjective, qualitative analyses of the writing. And words that came up repeatedly to describe the AI writing was, and I'm quoting, soulless, empty, lacking individuality, typical. Now, the last thing that I'll say is perhaps the biggest finding from this study, and it's right there in the title, this term cognitive debt. And what the researchers found is that yes, using ChatGPT to write for you is absolutely more efficient than writing yourself. You don't have any cognitive strain. It's not hard. You just put the prompt in. You massage it a little bit, and it's done. Cal Newport And they looked at the time required, and they finished earlier. Brad Stulberg Of course they finished earlier because they're just prompting the model. So, yes, you have this short-term benefit, if you will, of being much more efficient. But what you pay in the long term to get that benefit seems like tenfold the cost in decreased cognitive fitness and cognitive health, and that's the term cognitive debt. They essentially argue that when we use AI to write for us, we pick up a fair amount of cognitive debt. We are mortgaging our future cognitive fitness, really our ability to think for ourselves for this sort of short-term efficiency. Cal Newport I mean, this is interesting. It reminds me of the article I told you about that I wrote last year for The New Yorker, and it was about students using AI for writing. And I looked virtually over the shoulder of a graduate student writing a paper. And that's what surprised me. And this was one of the points of that article is it wasn't about speed for the student. It wasn't about producing texts they otherwise couldn't like, oh, this is somehow going to produce writing. I'm not ready to produce. It mainly seemed to be about strain reduction. That's what really seemed to be going on is that writing is a pain, quite literally, like cognitively. It doesn't feel good to write. And they would go back and forth with the what about this? What about that? And it gave them all these moments of release from strain or sometimes it would take them a long time to get a sentence by just asking the model again and again. But it was better than from a strain perspective, the de novo construction, right? It's easier to ask questions of a model than to produce stuff from scratch with the brain. But OK, but this is interesting, this cognitive debt idea. It's arguing there is this huge benefit that comes from writing. And yet we often think about productivity enhancing tools and making things easier. How do you understand what is the dividing line between activity where you want it to be hard versus the hardness is a bug, not a feature? I think that's at the core of this argument. Brad Stulberg And I think you're, you're spot on the metaphor that I used in the, mini essay that I wrote for Instagram is this notion of fitness. So if you think about physical fitness, there's a whole manner of reasons that one would train their body. But let's just focus on physical health. Running, pushing yourself physically is good for your health. You live longer, it is associated with reduced risk of certain diseases, both physical and cognitive, and so on. Now, if you went to the gym with a forklift or some other apparatus to lift the weight for you, you could spend the same hour in the gym, but it would be much more comfortable. You wouldn't be straining. And that gym session would be a lot easier, but you wouldn't accrue those health benefits. And I think essentially what's happening when we over rely on a tool like chat GPT to write for us is we're sacrificing our cognitive fitness. We are replacing the strain of thinking, of writing with a forklift in this term, the, excuse me, we're replacing it with a forklift. And in this case, it's the model that does the work for us. And I think the result is a decline in cognitive health and cognitive fitness. And that's precisely what this paper showed. Another point I'll make real quick, Cal, before turning it back to you, is the researchers also found that when they took chat GPT away from the group that had been using it ([Time 0:04:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1c183035-e3ee-427f-82cd-680e9c4a5ee6)) - **Protect Intellectual Strain as Fitness** - Using AI to bypass thinking short-circuits cognitive fitness akin to lifting weights with a forklift. - We should protect intellectual effort that produces long-term satisfaction and brain strength. Transcript: Brad Stulberg Want to maintain and strengthen versus what capacities are we OK letting go. By no means am I personally an anti-AI purist. I think there are so many good use cases. And I do think it's true that whenever there's a new technology, there tends to be this kind of hysteria or moral panic. It happened with the fire. It happened with the wheel. The Industrial Revolution was so beneficial for so many different reasons. However, there's tons of public health data that shows that the invention of the vacuum cleaner, for example, helped people to clean a lot faster. And as a result, you are a lot more sedentary because you're not having to crouch down and stand back up and cover your whole house on your hands and knees to clean. Is it good that we have vacuum cleaners? Yes. But if we don't replace that, then you have these negative health consequences. You have obesity if you're just sedentary all the time. And I think that when it comes to something like writing, which really is maybe the best proxy that we have for thinking, and if you want to think well, then it helps to write well. I don't think that we should be so flippant with outsourcing our ability to think. Our ability to think is a central feature of our humanity. In many ways, it separates us from other species. We can very quickly become like Pavlov's dog putting something into the AI. It responds. We either like it or we don't. We give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. We ask it the next question, and then we're sacrificing so much of our humanity. Now, if AI was going to be able to, let's say, run a gazillion different permutations to somehow get to the bottom of cancer. Well, then the cost benefit is pretty clear. Let it do that. Let it use all of its computing power to figure that out. But in the case of writing, we're essentially letting AI think for us. Cal Newport And I just don't think that that's a smart thing to outsource. I like this idea, by the way, of a moral panic around the invention of fire. I like to think of like a Stone Age John Hyde. When these kids are looking at this fire, they're not out there learning how to mammoth hunt. And do we really want kids who can't mammoth hunt? Come on, fire. Fire is a problem. So then what if we say, let me throw, I'll throw out a proposal. You tell me what you think. School. Don't use LLMs. It defeats the whole purpose. School is the closest thing we have to an intellectual gym. So why would we put a Fort Cliff or Echo Skeleton in the gym? That's the whole point of writing in school. It's not getting us to something else that we're trying to get to and making that more efficient would be good. The writing itself would be the case. I'm going to say school. Don't use LLMs to write at all. I would say maybe if you're a professional writer too. This seems to be Ezra's argument. It's like I do this for a living. If you listen to this, you know, I'm trying to be really, really good at this. The outsource parts of my thinking, my thinking is what I'm paid for. Like that's the whole ballgame. This doesn't make sense to me. Like why would I want to outsource any? All I do is write these scripts for my episodes. That's my whole job to make that a little bit faster. Like, what am I trying to do here? This is not it doesn't get me to something else faster. So, OK, do you agree with those? Or am I missing something? School, professional writing. You shouldn't be using LLMs in the actual, like, crafting a prose process. I don't know. Am I, am I getting this right? I'm sort of doing this on the fly here. Brad Stulberg I'm doing it on the fly with you. I do think you're getting it right. I think that you, you would add maybe composing music or, uh, if you're going to be writing emails or notes to family members that feel important, essentially, if you step back and you Look at this maybe more philosophically or spiritually, if there are activities that require strain in the short term, but in the long term, you derive satisfaction from, then those Are activities worth protecting. So the thought experiment that makes this so simple because it's an extreme is imagine that you could press one button and perhaps we'll get here in a few years, who knows? And you could say, I want a Grammy award-winning folk song. And you press that button and the song comes out and you spend maybe 30 minutes going back and forth making edits and then you win the Grammy. Would you be as satisfied with that Grammy than if you worked on that album for two years and the lion's share if not all of it came out of your brain? I don't think so. I think that you'd be much more satisfying if you did the work. Now, there could be a world where a part of doing that work is using this as a tool, but that's very different than relying on it or having it replace the actual act. So I think it's twofold. I think it's exactly what you said, which is you don't want to use it in areas that are core to how you live your life, how you make your living, how, you know, if you, if you get paid to think, Or you're a knowledge worker, you want to be really careful about protecting your ability to think. And I think we just need to be careful of this, you know, this is a tale as old as time, this trade-off between short-term convenience and long-term satisfaction. And I personally am hesitant to outsource things that are hard in the moment, but give me satisfaction, make me content, make me satiated, allow me to feel like I'm falling asleep after A good day's work because I put in the effort. I don't want to click two buttons and have that done for me. Cal Newport I have a term I just invented. You're so good at naming things. All right. What do you think about this? And it's a it's an adjustment of existing term type two thinking oh right so we type two fun is this well-known term for activities that like aren't fun in the moment while you're doing Them like hard mountaineering or something like this or a really hard workout but it's very satisfying and fun when you're done you're glad that you've done them we should ([Time 0:13:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b9136527-b3e3-4fc1-b48f-ac5fd6ccb08e)) - **Limit AI to Drudgery Tasks** - Students and professional writers should avoid using AI to write to maintain cognitive fitness. - Use AI only for drudgery tasks like scheduling or copy editing under time constraints. Transcript: Cal Newport Saying, or at least I'm saying. If you're a student, don't use AI to help your writing. The whole point there is to make you smarter, make you a better thinker. Writing is an incredible tool. It's the pull-up of the cognitive world. Don't use AI. If you're a professional writer, that's your whole job, is to have a nuanced, subtle grasp of this. It's like an athlete needs to actually do a lot of training. Don't use AI to do your writing. If you're in a professional circumstance, and there is a sort of tedious work to be done of, I have information in one form, I need to move into another, or I have a long CC email chain where People are talking about their availabilities. And I want to suggest three times that works for everyone. Fine. That's maybe a good use of AI because that drudgery is not helping you. It's annoying that we have to do this via email in the future. We wish like my AI could just schedule with your AI, but in the short term, fine, use it if it's going to automate that. The final thing I would add, if you're in a professional context and you're nervous about your writing quality, maybe you're sending out an important email, you're like, look, AI can Help me, you can check the tone. Grammarly does this well. It'll actually say like, here's places you could make this sound more professional. I would say in the short term, if you're worried, hey, that could be helpful. Long term, that should also be a signal. I should actually deliberately work on my riding in lower stakes situation till I get to the point where I'm not so nervous about it. I think it's sort of like you go to the national park and you're like, I don't know that I can actually make these trails. I'm going to like drive a scooter around. The scooter will get you to the end of that trail or whatever in that context. You should come away from that saying, like, maybe I should get in better shape. So like next time I go to a park, I don't have to take the scooter around. So all right. Those are my four pieces of advice. So Ezra, like we're I think we're on your page here. This is not using a typewriter in the age of word processors. This is someone who uses their brain for a living, worried about their brain, wanting their brain to be as strong as possible. So I would say ([Time 0:36:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2968b3b5-8498-4770-9f27-a02269f17f81)) - **Use a Master List to Organize** - Start organizing by capturing all responsibilities and tasks on one master list daily. - This reduces mental stress and provides a foundation for managing time and priorities. Transcript: Speaker 3 All right. Cal Newport That's a good question. A lot of people ask about this. Like what is step one? If I want to get some sort of a minimum effective dose, get some sort of sense of organization out of it. I thought about this a little bit. Here's what I would suggest. You're completely disorganized at work and at home and you constantly feel like you're behind things and maybe you're in your email inbox a lot or on your text threads like reacting To crises. I think you need some sort of master list. You need some place where you write down everything that is just in your landscape of things you might have some responsibility for or need to deal with. This is probably step number one. And you have to tend to it, right? So at the end of every day, just dump what came up today that I'm just keeping track of in my head, what text message that I get that I'm kind of forgetting about? What is coming through on some emails? And now I realize like this is a bigger project I need to do. Just get it all written down somewhere. Do it on like a legal pad so you can like carry it with you or maybe like a Google Doc or something like that. That is probably like the minimum thing you can do. But what it does give you is permission to not have your brain be constantly trying to refresh and remember everything that could cause a problem. Your brain does not like stress. It does not like that negative subjective experience of, oh, man, I forgot this. And now they're calling and saying, where are you? We don't like that. Your brains don't like that. And if it thinks that this could happen, unless it remembers something you're forgetting, it will put in a lot of cycles to try to prevent that negative experience from happening. So if you can reassure your brain, you don't have to keep track of everything anymore. We're not forgetting something. It's all on this list. And I just have it and I throw stuff on it. And I look at it, you know, a few times a day. And I don't know how I make sense of it. But at least I see like, oh, God, I forgot about that. Or I should do this or I'm never going to do this but at least I wrote it down and I'm reading every day that's going to make a huge psychological difference and that's a foundation on which Real time management can then be built the hard part is how do you figure out what to do and when you're going to do it how do you organize these into bigger projects and make sure that progress Is made but that's more complicated. The master list is the time management equivalent of saying just get up and make sure you walk 5,000 steps a day when it comes to trying to get yourself back into shape. Just get used to movement from sedentariness is a big first step in the physical world. So full capture to use the David Allen term versus haphazardly keeping track of things spread between emails, chats, text, and your brain is like a really big step. And you're going to feel an urge after a while, like, well, I have this all down here. I look at it and I keep it up to date and it's reasonable. It's not much friction. Like it's not some big lift that I'm going to be like, this is impossible. I'm going to give up on. Eventually, your mind's going to start saying, OK, well, maybe we could have a couple of rules for how we make sense of this. Or maybe we're going to make a list for the day. Or maybe we're going to look at our calendar. And sort of organically, you get this bottom-up time management that will emerge from it. So I think that's the minimum effective dose. It's not going to give you a fully organized life. But it is going to save you from the worst of the stresses that could be caused by disorganization. I'm thinking about Jesse, a podcast topic. We might actually do this next week. I'm not quite sure, but I'm thinking about like, what is the minimum time management organization system that can kind of keep your head above water for a while? Because I'm interested in this question of like in the summer, for example, if you're a very organized person, it takes a lot of cognitive load and effort to maintain a intricate time Management system. So what is like the minimum effective dose system that you can downgrade to something that if you tried to do it for five years, like you're going to start missing stuff and it's not sustainable. But you could do a couple months in the summer and not come out of the summer feeling like you're really behind and stressed out. So I'm thinking about that now. I have some ideas for it. So stay tuned. I might do that for next week's podcast episode. Speaker 3 Is this something you're going to try or? Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Cal Newport Yeah, maybe. Maybe that's what I'll do. I'll try it and by try it mean i'll make you try it and i'll warn you it does involve semi-regular electric shocks but this way like you don't forget it's it's all pavlovian guys if you get Shocked every time you forget an appointment you're not going to forget those appointments anymore. Speaker 3 All right. Who do we got next? Next up is Duncan. I have lots of projects I would love to tackle in my life outside of work, but struggle to ever find enough time. What can I do to fix this? Cal Newport Okay. I'll tell you, Duncan, I'm going to connect this to an unexpected source maybe. But it makes sense for me because I just got back from Disney, and I've read a lot of things about Disney, but because I was at Disneyland, I'm rereading this book I first read five years Ago about the history of Disneyland itself, okay? Interesting analogy from that book, or interesting case study, I guess, Right. It's the 1940s. Disney is like a big concern at this point. They've had a bunch of hit movies. They have been more really involved in the war effort. It's it's a big, biggish company. Walt Disney is pretty famous. Also, like a little bit stressed out ([Time 0:48:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9ef5bf76-44ee-4583-9785-434c39fee2f3)) - **Disney Built Train Amidst Stress** - Walt Disney built a large model train over two years despite a busy schedule. - When a project matters deeply, you find the time by adjusting your schedule and mindset. Transcript: Cal Newport I'll tell you, Duncan, I'm going to connect this to an unexpected source maybe. But it makes sense for me because I just got back from Disney, and I've read a lot of things about Disney, but because I was at Disneyland, I'm rereading this book I first read five years Ago about the history of Disneyland itself, okay? Interesting analogy from that book, or interesting case study, I guess, Right. It's the 1940s. Disney is like a big concern at this point. They've had a bunch of hit movies. They have been more really involved in the war effort. It's it's a big, biggish company. Walt Disney is pretty famous. Also, like a little bit stressed out and dealing with some depression. He begins to put a lot of time into the development of a scale size train for himself, for himself. So he buys a new house that has five acres of land for this train idea. Then he has a custom built locomotive, actual steam locomotive, but it's scaled down. I don't know the scale, specific numbers, but it was just big enough that you could sit on it and like kind of have your feet up front. So think about like a hot wheels, not hot wheels, power wheels. What's the, you know, the plastic cars kids can drive like that sort of like that size, right? And he had this thing built and he built rolling stock. And then they built this track through the property that he bought. I think this was in like Beverly Hills or something like that. And it was elaborate, right? They had a train bridge on it with trestles that was so big. It was big enough that it fell under like the jurisdiction of the county where you actually have to have it inspected like any other bridge you would have. He built a tunnel that did an S turn so that when you go into the tunnel, so it's a big enough tunnel that like people, grownups riding on a train can go. When you go into the tunnel, you can't see the light on the other side because it goes through a turn to get to it so that you have the effect of like, I don't know how long this tunnel is going To go. So they, you know, they're like buried over completely landscape, this whole thing. I forgot the exact total length of the track, but maybe it was something like a quarter of eight, half a mile or something like that. Anyways, here's what hit me about this. That's an incredible amount of time. This is a hobby, so to speak. And it was like an incredible amount of time and treasure to build this thing. And he is a very busy person. He's the CEO of this like large movie company that was doing lots of different projects and there's lots of money things moving back and forth. Like how did Disney have time to build like such a big project? Now, part of the answer is, well, if you own the company, you know, you have more flexibility. That's true. Part of the answer is also in a pre-digital world, you had a lot more flexibility. You didn't have to be on demand in the same way because you couldn't be on demand in the same way. There was no email, right? There were no Slack messages. People were used to more autonomy just because of actual obstacles to access. You know, every time Disney needed to go talk to financiers in New York, that's three days on a train and then three days back from the train. When he goes on vacation to Europe to rest, that's going to be six weeks. It just takes that long to get across the country, to get on a boat, to take the boat across. So we're more used to it. It wasn't as fast paced as things were back then. But still, he was a busy guy and he found time to do this massive project over about a two-year period. So part of what's going on here, I think, is the mindset. So the mindset is, hey, this thing is really important to me. You find time. You find time. There's a lot of gives in the schedules. You come home early. You're working on this at night. You kind of build a lunch break around doing it, right? When something becomes important to you, if you could find something that sparks you in the right way, you'll be surprised by the time you find. Now, we've seen this effect a few weeks ago. We did a podcast on data out about the four-day work week. People had that counterintuitive, unexpected response where they just, as in these experiments, just said this day of the week is gone, like no big prep work for it. And it was fine. It turned out there was all this give in the schedule. All along, their schedule could have been four days instead of five. They had plenty of time, but we sort of fill in time. We make things take longer. We add more meanings to it. So that would argue, the Disney argument here would be, find an important enough project that you actually really want to make progress on it. You'll be surprised by how much progress you can make. Here's my second thing I want to say about this. See how much time you get back when you don't use screens. It's another thing that is using an inordinate amount of people's time and they don't realize it is this sort of default to like, let me put on a streaming service and or look at my phone. And you don't realize how many hours of your time outside of work are getting eaten up by that. So a good experiment is do something like the digital declutter I talk about in my book, Digital Minimalism, and say for a month, I'm not going to use these tools at home. I'm not going to look at my phone for social media. I'm only allowed to watch a streaming thing if it's with other people. So like family movie night, put those type of rules in place. You're going to be kind of bored at first. Like, wow, I have a lot of time. I woke up. I don't have to leave for another 45 minutes. What am I going to do for those 45 minutes? Right. I'm home. It's five. I'm not really going to start dinner for another hour. Like, what am I going to do? I'm bored. And you let that boredom drive you towards projects like, oh, I make I get make progress on things. This is, for example, how Walter Isaacson wrote many of his initial historical bestsellers, his Einstein biography, Franklin biography. How did he write these? I've heard an interviewer ask when he was also CEO of Time Warner. This is a busy, busy job like Disney. And his answer was, I don't watch TV at night. He would come home instead of watching TV. He's like, I'm going to write. And then he sort of got used to that and he could do it right into the night a little, and he sort of got used to it, and just like, hey, stuff gets done. You'd be surprised by how much can be produced. So that's what I'd put together. Make your project exciting enough that you want to fight to get it done, and then take screens out of your life experimentally. Put those two things together, and I think you might be surprised by how much you get done. What happened, Jesse, with the train, the Lily Bell ([Time 0:53:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5b801f13-665b-4800-ba59-9bc123051b64)) - **Summarize Emails to Manage Inbox** - Clear emails by summarizing demands quickly into a text file rather than answering each email immediately. - Group similar actions together to increase efficiency and reduce mental context switching. Transcript: Cal Newport Have tried this. All right. Speaker 3 Do we have a call this week we do all right excellent let's hear it hello cal my name is jamie chalmers a long-time listener first time caller i want to thank you for your books have been Tremendously helpful in my creative career i've got uh several different projects that run concurrently. And I was listening to your recent episode about Inbox Zero, which I thought was fascinating. In particular, the method that you use using Trello and your working memory text file to capture information out of email and plug it into your card system. Now, I've listened to that episode and you talking about that about half a dozen times to write my head around a bit. And while I've had some success in using the working memory file to get emails out of my inbox, as it were, I've not had a lot of success in translating those into my Notion task system. And so I kind of wondered whether you could just dig back into that a little bit more, explain some of the mechanics, perhaps the head spaces that you get into when you're focusing on translating That information into action. That would be super helpful because I can see that it would be a really useful way to go about things. And yeah, I'd love to find out more. So thank you once again for everything that you do. Massively important in my life. I appreciate you. Cal Newport I look forward to hearing from you thank you all right jimmy it's a good question and i think part of like the hang up here might be that i go from inbox to working memory.txt and then from There there's a lot of directions where that information can go only one of which is a task system so like let's do this again real briefly. So the basic idea here is how do you clear an inbox, right? I don't recommend going message by message necessarily and trying to dispatch completely as each message before moving on to the next, the context switching there becomes a real cognitive Load. It becomes very exhausting. It become, you, you know, the strain, everyone knows it of like, why can't I just keep going through these messages? Why am I so resistant to it? It's because your mind can't keep switching from one topic to another so quickly. It's mentally really dragging on it, right? And so what I do is I go through my inbox. I grab, I don't handle the message. I just put a summary of like what that message demands of me into a text file. Really just as fast as I can type, right? It doesn't have to be, you know, clean or interesting or something like that. And then I have all of those in my text file. I can organize them. In fact, I was thinking what I'm going to do, Jesse, is I'm going to load up an inbox right now while we're talking. So I can just give an example of how I'm going to read real messages from my inbox right now and talk about like what would be my summary and my working memory dot TXT file. Okay. So like I'm loading up. I have so many inboxes. It's crazy. This is my personal. It's a personal inbox and inbox that we do kind of behind the scenes stuff for the podcast and for like my books or whatever all right so i'm looking through this now first email is a newsletter So it doesn't matter next one is a meeting scheduling for a an appointment with a trainer um so what would i i put there i would just type down, um, uh, scheduled training. All right. Next one, ironically, is from a PT I used to work with checking in. So I'd be like, get back to their name. There's a something from you, Jesse. So I put that in ignore. It's immediately where that goes. Button I press there. I got a scheduling email about a club I help run at my kid's school. So I just put, again, get back to blah, blah, blah about whatever. I have an invoice, pay, pay invoice. Speaker 3 Do you delete these emails after you make the note? Cal Newport Yes. So then I would be. So you delete, make the note. I don't note archive okay yeah you are archive right and so there's enough information so when i say like get back to blank i put their name so now i know i can just type that name into gmail And that that email will come back um invoice to pay pay invoice okay uh respond to it's a note from actually a well-known podcaster who i sent the note to and he got back to me and um rogan It's not rogan yeah he doesn't like you doesn't like me he's like i'm convinced he doesn't like you like why don't you tweet me your move buddy tweet me um mailing list mailing list someone Sending me a galley of something uh north south korea publicity thing put on calendar right and something to schedule it's a note to myself uh put such and such a schedule for two o'clock On thursday so that type that's like what i'm writing oh i meant you emailed yourself because I was somewhere else. Speaker 3 Okay. And then you're going to note that that's actually kind of funny. Cal Newport Yeah. Yeah. Because I was, I was out and about like, if I'm getting my haircut and we're like, Oh, let's schedule the next haircut while I'm here. Speaker 3 You had a lot going on at this hair appointment. This is a Disneyland emailing yourself key in today's episode. You would like this guy actually. Cal Newport Real into, um, anyways, uh, I'll email myself on the fly because I know when I next clean my inbox, that'll move to working memory.txt and then I'll take care of it. All right. So those are the type of things I'd write. Then you sort them by type, right? So like a bunch of these were schedule. I'm just going to like copy and paste. When I say sort, I mean, I'm just copying and pasting text within a text file, plain text file. I'm going to put like the scheduling things all in a row. So I just have a bunch of like scheduling things like in a row. There's like getting back to people things. I can be like, all right, getting back to people and I'll put those like next to each other or whatever. So I'm kind of like grouping these things by type, by type of message, or if there's a bunch of things on the same subject matter, like if I had multiple, I did a lot of foreign press this Week for some reason. So like I would have like multiple things about foreign press. I'd put all those things together. I'm just kind of like sorting things. Then I will go through and tackle these things by group. And it's just easier when the groups are all the same type of thinking. So now I have like in that list there four or five scheduling things. I'm going to open up my calendar, open up my inbox, like, all right, now we're doing ([Time 1:14:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/84956652-a877-4ab6-b042-f67cbb8e286b)) - **Build Capital, Seek Autonomy** - Build career capital by gaining rare skills and seek job options that allow leveraging that capital for autonomy. - Choose internships or roles offering both skill growth and future control over your career path. Transcript: Cal Newport Comes from TAF. All right. TAF says, I was listening to you talk about the Thoreau schedule today, and you essentially described the working schedule I've managed to carve out for myself over recent years. It resulted due to a variety of factors, including COVID and having a young family. I have a pretty mid-range marketing job for a CPG brand managing a small team, and my current role, the career capital I've developed enables me to take ownership of my schedule because The management team knows that I will deliver strong work regardless of where and when I work. I'll stop right there briefly to point out this is a common application of career capital. If you do, you have very valuable skills and you deliver, people trust you. You do the things you say you're going to say when you say you're going to do them. You are now a super rare commodity and there will be a lot of accommodations because, oh my God, here's someone who actually does what they say they're going to do when they're going to Do it. Like we do not want to lose this person. You have a lot of control there. So here now is the schedule that TAF created. So that being said, my schedule borrows from many concepts you've discussed. All right, so here's the schedule. I wake at 6 a.m. And read, but not on my phone. I go to my office at 7 a.m. And start my day, clearing emails and checking in on core project timelines to make sure there's nothing urgent on the cards. I find that starting at 7 a.m. Means I'm working before most of my colleagues are logged on, which means there are very few distractions or meetings booked during this time, and I can just focus on what I need to get Done. Then I have time blocked my calendar from 7.30 a.m. To 10.30 a.m. For my highlight. This is a term that comes from the time dorks, where I focus on the one major priority deep work project that is most critical to my day. Then at 12 p.m., having completed five hours of work, I stop and work out. I'm outside and that allows me to think. And then once I come home, I cover off the last two to three hours of the day with any shallow work admin meetings and sign off at 4 p.m. To be with my family. In the evening after my daughter has gone to bed, my wife and I read for about one to two hours before bed. I always have a number of books on the go, a novel, something nonfiction, something theological, and a book of poetry so that I have plenty of choice for whatever mood I'm in. I basically read until I fall asleep, and I like the idea of reading at the very start and end of each day. Some additional habits that help. I have no social media apps on my phone. I use Trello to organize my work and personal life. I have one central board with my priorities for today, which contains anything critical. The rest fall into priority two or backlog. Anything that sits in backlog for a long time eventually gets archived if nobody raises it as important. I treat my Outlook as if it's an actual mailbox. So I close it once I'm finished with it and then go back to check it at specific intervals in the day. I've found this reduces the impulse of reading emails as they arrive and constantly being distracted. I also have a two-folder system for my email. My inbox has incoming mail or emails I need to address, and then filed has everything else. My reason is that once I've read an email, it can be filed, and if I need again, I can search for it. This has reduced all email admin and a necessary folder assignment or rules. Finally, I time block my work days with recurring meetings so that I'm automatically blocked off every day for my morning highlight, my lunchtime 10k run, and my time with my family At 4pm. This means every day has the same structure and my calendar availability is prescribed for anyone booking meetings. I've never had any issues or pushback from colleagues with this approach and people rarely book meetings across my time blocks. So there we go. Someone that it's not a sexy story of I became like the only nuclear physicist in the world that could handle this and therefore I have a job where I work one day a week and surf all day. It's not a sexy story like that. It's just someone who does their job very well. They deliver, they're reliable, they do high quality. They combine this with lifestyle centric planning or lifestyle engineering or lifestyle architecting, whatever we want to call it, to work backwards from their ideal lifestyle. And it's not something that would catch your attention if you hear it described, but it is a really good lifestyle. Reading in the morning. Done at work at 4. Doing a long run and workout in the middle of the day. Get stuff done. Deep work every day, meetings are constrained, email checks are not all the time, people are okay with it because they deliver, and the life is really good. So I think that is a really good example. I appreciate you sending in that case study. All right, so we have a ([Time 1:24:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ab74ccce-dd20-4ef2-9cce-f6dffbdee356)) - **Ignore Alarmist AI Job Claims** - Many alarmist AI job disruption articles exaggerate or misrepresent capabilities and impacts. - Most job cuts are post-pandemic tech contractions, not AI automation replacing workers. Transcript: Cal Newport From Fortune. And here's the headline. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says AI can rival someone with a PhD just weeks after saying it's ready for entry-level jobs. So what's left for grads? This came out on June 20th. This is an article. I saw this because, like, Google notification just showed it to me on my phone. There are a lot of articles like this where there is some sort of over the top alarmist headline, which makes anyone who's just loosely following AI be like, oh, my God, we're so screwed. Little bit deeper at this article to try to explain why you can ignore this type of thing. All right. So if we read this article, I have a couple of quotes here. Here's the first paragraph. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the technology can already perform the task equal to that of an entry-level employee. Now on a podcast posted just last week, the chat CPD mastermind went even further saying AI can even perform tasks typically expected of the smartest grads with a doctorate. Soon after, it says, as companies like Amazon have admitted, they will soon cut their corporate ranks thanks to AI and Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei, warning that the technology could Wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. It begs the question, what jobs will be left for those tossing their graduation caps into the air in the coming years? There are a lot of articles like this where tech CEOs are saying pearl-clutching, groin-tightening, scary type of things like this. This is all nonsense, and let me try to explain to you why. Okay, first of all, let's start with the claim here that, and I'm going to read this, AI can perform tasks typically expected to the smartest grads with a doctorate. What are they actually talking about here? What they're actually talking about here is the fact that OpenAI carefully tuned one of their foundational models work on a specific type of math competition question. So they hired, we got some correction on this from a listener. They used a data set from a company that hired math PhDs and paid them $100 an hour to write math problems of this type with step-by solutions. And then they could use reinforcement learning techniques to try to tune one of these foundation models to do well on this very specific type of math problem. A professor involved in this project said, oh, these are hard math problems, not the type you would assign an undergrad, but the type you might assign a graduate student. From there, we get AI can now do PhD-level workers' jobs. That is a nonsense leap from a very specific type of math competition problem that is like of the type that might get assigned in a graduate student problem set to AI is doing graduate-level Jobs. And not only is it a huge exaggeration, but as we went over in the What I'm Reading segment a few weeks ago, even those results are highly contested because OpenAI was like, look, these Are hard problems and we can do them. And independent research firms said, great, let's take these models and we'll put them on other similar math competitions that happened recently. And they did terribly, leading to the idea that they had been very, very fit to this very specific type of problem that happened to be really well suited for the reinforcement learning Techniques that we know how to use now on AI. So that is a massive exaggeration. Another massive exaggeration that's happening with a lot of this reporting is conflating of the post-pandemic tech downturn, which is leading to lots of layoffs. It's getting a little bit better now, but it's leading to lots of layoffs because there was a huge boom in the tech industry during the pandemic and post-pandemic. We're cyclical. It's a hard job market there. Companies are cutting back. We put a lot of money into a lot of these areas. We need to cut back because we need our profit ratios to be higher for the stock market. And just what happens? Companies are cyclical. So there's a cutback. And there's a lot of this sort of disingenuous conflating by these reporters that make it seem like without maybe necessarily 100% claiming it that these job losses are because AI is Automating the jobs. This is nonsense. It is not what is happening. Yes, Amazon is cutting. Meta cut a bunch of people. Microsoft is cutting a bunch of people. Why? Because they're bloated. They cut those revenue numbers. They cut those expenses numbers go down. Their profitability goes up. They got too big. They are not replacing hundreds of thousands of people or tens of thousands of people with AI that's automating them. AI cannot do that yet. So I think that is very disingenuous. I saw an article the other day that said, look, CS majors are cratering. They're going down, and it's because AI is taking all the jobs. It's like, hold on a second. CS majors are down because the tech industry is down. The same thing happens every time the tech industry goes down. When I was a computer science undergraduate, we had the same issue. Post.com bust in early 2001 tech industry contracted majors went down because there was less jobs and then majors went back up again when there was the the web 2 boom brought a lot more Investment and there's more jobs again there's a contraction post-pandemic jobs that made jobs for except for you know specialized ai jobs like if you're a machine learning person Are contracting some so majors go down. And yet people will conflate it and say, oh, it's because AI is taking the jobs. AI is not replacing software developers. Most of the cuts at these companies are not software developer jobs. So I think it's really disingenuous reporting, but there's a lot of this going on. Later in the article, we see some of this evidence. So here they say, for example, they do note, well, okay, however, I'm reading from the article now later in the article. However, in the tech industry in particular, volatility in the jobs market is nothing new, said Art Zale, CEO of the tech career platform DICE. After all, nearly 600,000 tech employees lost their jobs between 2022 and 2024, according to layoffs at FOII. Yes, the tech industry has really post-pandemic contracted. So yes, there's a lot of job cuts. That's not because in 2022, before ChatGPT was out, AI was taking those jobs. It contracted, and then it will grow again once more investment capital comes back in. Look at like Dario Amadei saying technology could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within like two years, whatever he said. All right, here's the reality. It's not going to do it, and he's just blowing hot air. And Sam Altman knows that AI is not taking PhD-level jobs because it's not really taking any jobs right now. They're blowing hot air. Why are they blowing hot air? Because ([Time 1:34:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/121c5bb0-8ba6-45db-8f04-448d657ececc))