Ep. 362: The Texting Dilemma  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 362: The Texting Dilemma - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/9d70c738-980c-4409-b86a-6753130a36ac ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Break Constant Companion Habit** - Break the constant companion phone habit by physically distancing your phone and batching message checks hourly. - Manage others' expectations by explaining only when necessary and prepare thorough replies to limit back-and-forth texting. Transcript: Cal Newport Now, I call this the social stress trap, the situation I just described, because we have sort of these two things that are in contradicting contrast to each other, right? So on the one hand, it's hard for us to address or reduce other habitual behaviors that we don't like on our phone, so like the addictive use of our phone, if we feel social stress about Messages that we're ignoring. But it's hard to avoid feeling social stress about messages we're ignoring unless we become significantly less social. But that could make us feel just as bad. So either we have to feel bad about using our phone too much because social stress drives us there, or we have to eliminate social stress, but then we're lonely and we feel bad anyway. So it feels like a trap, like there's no way out of it. I want to talk about some concrete ways to escape it. Basically, we need to find a way to rewire the social brain so that long stretches away from messaging apps does not create that sense of really distressing social stress. As you will see, this is going to be just as much about rewiring your brain as it is rewiring the brains of the people that you know. All right, let's get more specific about it. The concrete thing you're going to do first to try to work on this social stress trap is break what I call the constant companion model of phone use. This is an idea I first introduced in a New York Times op-ed from five or six years ago. The constant companion model of phone use, as the name implies, is that you have your phone with you essentially everywhere you are. If I'm at home, it's in my pocket. If I'm at the gym, it's in my pocket. If I'm at work, it's right next to me on my desk. If I'm in bed, it's right next to me on my bed. It is a constant companion. When it is your constant companion, it is very difficult to get away from habitual phone usage. So what we want to do is try to break that constant companion model. So let's talk about how to do that first, and then second, talk about how to deal with the social stress that might create. So the easiest thing to do is to plug it in. And what I mean by that is in the primary locations where you operate and have a phone with you, you find a different location for the phone where you plug it in. So when you're at home, it's like in your kitchen or your foyer, you have it plugged in in that location. When you're in your office, you have it on like a bookshelf or a chair across the room plugged in. It is not with you as a companion. When you're at the gym, you keep it in your gym locker, which means, and I know this is going to be shocking for people who go to the gym, you're going to have to bring a paper notebook with You to keep track of what you're doing. And you're going to have to have a simple music player if you want to listen to music, not your phone. You can't just sit there and stare at your phone in between sets. All right. So that's the physical thing to do. Get some physical separation between you and your phone. What do you do about messaging? Well, now what you're going to do is batch check your messaging apps on a semi-regular basis. You should let probably at least an hour go by between checks. It's something you can schedule at the top of the hour at lunch, I'm going to go check and catch up on my messages, my text messages, WhatsApps, etc. Now, when you do this, be ready for it to maybe take more time, right? If you are social, you might have a lot of messages. You might not realize like how much you're tending to these conversations throughout everything else you're doing. So when you batch this more, it might take you more than a few minutes. Oh, I have a lot of messages I have to catch up on here. This is going to take me, this is going to take me some time. Okay. How do we then deal with the social stress situation? Here, I think the idea is to manage expectations and emergencies. So based on experience, first of all, you do not want to explain to people in advance your new plan. Oh, I'm checking my phone less often and here's why and I want to tell you and I want to apologize in advance. Do not preemptively apologize. Most people don't care. Some people don't know they care until you preemptively apologize and then they start caring. There's no reason to sort of waste people's time with that. It's also a little bit self-focused. People don't really care what your texting strategy is as much as you think they do. Only explain what you're doing if people complain. So if someone is texting you, hey, where are you? Are you mad at me? How come you're not responding to text? That's when you say, hey, you know I've been having trouble with my phone use, so I'm trying a new thing where I keep my phone across the room for big swaths of the day, so I'm not always seeing Texts anymore as they come in. Over time, people's expectations will change. If they hear that enough times from you, the small fraction of people in your circle who care will adjust internally their expectations. Oh, this is someone who doesn't necessarily see text right away, so I'm not going to text and expect to have an immediate response. They just refile that away in their head. There's lots of people who are in this situation. People are completely possible. It's very easy for people to refile in their head your availability. Like I think about like my youngest sister is an ER doctor. We just know when she's on shift, she's not going to be answering her text messages. It's easy for us to adjust our expectations over time. And now we just know that. So people can adjust their expectations. The other thing you're going to have to do here is get better at batch responses. So when you're responding to a lot of text messages at once, because you're only checking every hour or so, you can't respond to these text messages in a way that just bounces the ping Pong back to their side of the proverbial conversational net, and they're going to have to bounce it back to you, and you're going to have to go back and forth. If you're not going to be on your phone all the time, you have to be much more definitive. You have to find a way to answer a text with enough detail and options and plans that it's okay that you might not see their response to that for another hour or two. So instead of just being like, yeah, they say, do you want to grab dinner before the movie? Instead of responding, yeah, what are you thinking? Which is not going to work because you're not going to see their response to that. You might be like, yeah, we should definitely do that. Let's plan to meet like roughly at this time. I might not see my text again for a little bit. So here's my here's a couple suggestions. You choose or we'll figure it out when we meet. Let's just meet at this location at this time. And then when we meet, we can figure out the dinner. You do a little bit more time to transform back and forth into more just like here's a response and then we can take this conversation out of the text thread. All right. So I said you have to manage expectations and emergencies. What do I mean about emergencies? Well, there are certain things that are time sensitive. An emergency is one of them. What if someone needs to reach you not when you next check your phone for text messages an hour from now, but they need to reach you right now? Or what if there is some sort of logistical thing going on, right? I need to hear from my kid when practice is over, and I don't know when that's going to be. They're just going to text me when it's over, right? How do we deal with emergencies? This is often the ([Time 0:11:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e15488a0-f743-49c4-ae7d-0b5ca92e4056)) - **Simplify Shutdown Rituals** - In shutdown rituals, focus on assuring yourself you've captured open loops, not fully processing them. - Write down incomplete tasks to review and handle the next day, which eases mental stress and speeds shutdown. Transcript: Cal Newport Points out an important nuance about shutdown rituals. So the goal of a shutdown ritual is to close open loops so that your mind can have peace after work and not have to ruminate over things that you need to do or might need to do or might have Forgotten. But what does it mean to close an open loop? This is where I think, Natasha, the problem is emerging. You are thinking, based on this question, that closing an open loop means dealing with it. Like, what is this thing? What's the next step? Let me try to like move this forward or make sure we're on the same page or get this into fully like accounted for into my system. And that can take time, right? It's like going through an email inbox is a classic example. To actually empty everything out of your inbox takes a long time. But all closing an open loop really means is that you no longer have to trust just on your brain to keep track of it. This is something that I don't have to just keep track of in my brain. So this could be way simpler. If you don't have to actually process it, you just have to make sure that you don't have to think about it. This could be way simpler. Like for example, you could have a big text file called loops to process. And at the end of the day, you're looking in like your inbox and the notes you took during the day and things you're thinking of. And like, you're like, here's seven or eight open loops. I don't know what to do with these, but there are things I need to make progress on. Instead of processing them, imagine instead you just write them all down in that text file. You check to make sure that there's nothing urgent here. Like, oh my God, if I don't deal with this tonight, it's a problem. So you reassure yourself, okay, I'm okay shutting down work right now. And you stretch out that text file really big on your laptop screen before you close it down. You say, it's the first thing I'm going to see in the morning when I open it. And then, you know, I can put aside a half hour and deal with that in the morning. That works because you've accomplished a problem of assuring your brain, there's nothing you're missing, there's nothing you're forgetting. And there's nothing that is just being held in your brain. So there's a difference between getting something out of your head and processing and actually dealing with the thing. And some people's days just end fast, right? Like I have to leave at 5 because I have to pick up my kids from daycare, and a lot of stuff tends to happen at the end of my day. Like things come in hot and heavy like that last hour. I just don't have time to really sit down and handle things. It's fine. I just have a very quickly, I'm serving my inbox, my calendar. I'm jotting down on my working text on TNT, like all these different things. I just want to make sure I'm not forgetting anything. There's nothing due in the morning. There's nothing urgent. There's no emergencies. It's all written down. And if I wait till the morning to deal with this, nothing bad is going to happen. Great. Schedule shutdown complete. You can move on and go home. So you don't have to process things in your shutdown. You just have to reassure yourself that there's nothing that's just being kept track of in your head that you have to remember or might remember later on. And if you have a busy end of day, I think dealing with stuff at the beginning of the day is fine as long as you've written it down in a place you trust you'll see right when the next day begins. I often do this, Jesse, with my time block planner. I'm doing a shutdown ritual, especially like during the busy part of the school year. I will often, there'll be some like open loops that are popping up towards the end of the day. I will write them on the page for the next day because now my brain trusts, well, the one thing I know I'm going to see is my time block planner page tomorrow when I build my time block plan. And in particular, if I've already done my shutdown ritual and I remember something during the evening, oh, what about this? I go and I write it on the next page of my time block planner. I've done no work on it. I've made no attempt to process it or act on it. I haven't gone to my systems. I haven't gone to Trello and found the right board and created a card and put the stuff in there. I just jotted it down. I keep it on my dresser upstairs. But that is enough because I know the next day I will see that page when I build my time block plan. So that is enough for my brain to say, I don't have to worry about this tonight. So don't process, just get this stuff down to a place where you know you'll see it. Now, if you have a lot of time processed, that's fine. I'm going to get stuff in the Trello. And if you have a slow end of the day, like that last caller that is working like 19 minutes and then the rest of his day is bored, he can shut everything down. But Natasha, if you can't process it, that's fine. Just get it somewhere where you are not relying on your brain to remember it. You don't have to deal with it. You just have to make sure that it will be dealt with. ([Time 0:36:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a51fb5f7-80cc-4943-9ab6-b9702948b14f)) - **Streamline Student Communication** - Hold regular office hours and use messaging apps during those times to reduce student email volume. - Redirect complex issues to be discussed during these slots to prevent constant back-and-forth via email. Transcript: Jesse Miller And streamline email communications with my students? I teach at a university, and over the years, the amount of student emails keeps increasing. How can I better organize communications and expectations with them? Cal Newport Well, I'll tell you what I do with my students at Georgetown. I've devised a series of increasingly difficult and dangerous physical challenges that if they can make it through all of them, they will make it to a place where they can actually send Me an email. So that's worked out pretty well. We've had a few hospitalizations, but I got to tell you, my inbox volume has been lower. So I think that's the way to do it. If you don't do that, there's another strategy, which is I would suggest if you have a lot of this coming in, like you're teaching a large class or multiple classes that are – some classes Just have more student interaction than others just based on the material. I would hold office hours three times a week, right? So you're never that far from an office hours. I would introduce a virtual option to those office hours. And maybe you would say this is just for the second half of or through the whole where they can message you. The kids these days, I don't know if you know this, Jesse. The kids these days are sometimes worried about in-person conversation and the friction it involves and feel very comfortable if they can type things. That's why they want to send you an email. It's safer socially than having to go and actually talk to you in person. Have a messaging option for your office hours. Here is a messaging app, a WhatsApp, a Slack thing for my class where during those office hours, I will see things and interact with you on there as well. So no email. Don't send me an email that's going to sit in my inbox. I eventually have to answer, but you can during office hours, come by my office or message me. It used to be you would say you can call me, but no one wants to call. So you have to do messaging. All right. Anything that can't be answered with a single response, you say, look, if it can be answered with a single response, what time is the test going to be? Can you sign this thing, right? If it's not something you can answer with a single response, you say, this is for office hours. And once they email you anyway with something that just can't be answered with a simple response, some back and forth or whatever some extra work you say bring it to my next office hours You can make it virtual in person they adjust students adjust right they just need to know i i have an issue i want to solve how do i solve it oh this is how i solve it i have to go to your office Hours there's one you do three a week so i'm never far from one good that's i don't have to worry about what to do about that and what's next and they move on. It's minimal extra overhead for them. For you, it makes a huge difference. And now all these things that are coming in emails and all these back and forth emails go away. The only emails you're getting are ones that like actually it's a good use of email. Like, oh, I have the answer and I can send it back when I have time. And now you're doing much more sort of in-person synchronous interaction during these office hours and boom, boom, boom, you get through a lot of things and you're not having to like Constantly be going back and forth in email. So I think that's the easiest thing to do. If you're a professor, you have some autonomy here. It's you're in charge. Historically, professors are in charge about how you talk to them. And you can tell your students, this is how you interact with me. That will work. That method does make a big difference. Harder in companies, works in academia. ([Time 0:40:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0b5948aa-fad1-4e45-aebe-f90e41c67964)) - **Avoid PhD Overload** - As a new PhD student, say no to extra extracurricular commitments to avoid overload. - Prioritize deep academic work and avoid pseudo-productivity that fills time without meaningful progress. Transcript: Jesse Miller Up is Sarah. I'm starting my PhD at MIT in nuclear engineering. I was recently asked also to serve as committee chair for a student organization. I worry about my ability to manage my first year studies and research simultaneously with these tasks. Should I follow the principles from slow productivity and do less? Yes. Cal Newport Yeah. Your first year PhD student, MIT is tough, tough program, no firm experience. You don't know what to expect. Don't do the student committee chair. Say like, look, I'm starting my PhD program at MIT. I don't know what they're expecting to get my full time. I can't do it. They'll be like, oh, no. Okay, great. We'll ask someone else. Like you're a solution to their problem. They're probably someone who's like reliable. Like this person would be good. Maybe they'll do it. And then you're like, oh, I can't because I'm starting my PhD program. Like that makes sense. They move on to the next person. That was like a nothing in their life. You just saved yourself potentially from a huge amount of pain, super asymmetrical. So I think starting something new is a perfect time to do less, a perfect excuse to do less. You'll be okay, I think. I don't know the nuclear engineering program, but I've talked about like the doctoral program in computer science. The coursework is really not that bad. I mean, I'm sure those courses are hard, but if you're in the program, you're not going to find them that hard. But just might as well give yourself some breathing room. I want to get used to being a doctoral student in the classes. And MIT is this cool campus that's very intimidating with these like old school classrooms with the chalkboards going up and down. And there's scientists on jetpack shooting freeze rays at each other as at least people assume happens at MIT. And there's like all sorts of craziness going on. So do less. This isn't urgent. Say no. There was something, I can't remember what it was. There was something like this early in my time at MIT. I saw a program and I don't remember what it was. So I apologize for that, but it was some sort of extracurricular whatever. And they were looking for students, grad students to be a part of some sort of pilot program or whatever. And I had this moment of inspiration where I was like, oh, this sounds cool. This matches some interest. I was like, hey, I want to volunteer. Like, hey, yes, you've been selected. This would be great. You should do it. And I said, whoa, wait a second. I wasn't thinking straight. I got ahead of myself. I really need to be focusing on what I'm doing here. I probably shouldn't bring on something else. And I sort of backed out of it. And that was the right decision. You don't need a lot of extracurriculars. Now, here is a warning I want to give to you and any sort of graduate student. There's something I call graduate student overload syndrome that you have to be very wary of, particularly if you're a doctoral student, because here's what happens. If you're a doctoral student in a lot of programs, your friends of that age have normal jobs. And they're probably smart if you're going to like MIT or something. So they have hard jobs. They're all like lawyers and bankers. And they're talking about like how much they're working and how hard it is. And let's be honest, being a graduate student is kind of a fake job. It's hard in certain ways, but it's also you're rolling in at 11 and you have all this sort of flexibility. Some new graduate students get uncomfortable. Like I'm not doing enough stuff. I feel like I'm not somehow using my potential. And so they overload with a bunch of extra, are going to be on the graduate student committee for this and the student government. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that because they find comfort in busyness. It's pseudo-productivity writ large. I want to be doing a lot of stuff so I feel like what I'm doing is worthwhile. This is hard and I'm busy. But that's not how graduate school works because it's an academic intellectual pursuit, and academic intellectual pursuits need space, and they need time. And sometimes you need to just spend hours and hours trying to figure out a problem set problem or trying to make sense about an experiment. You are not supposed to be busy when you're training your mind to do things at high levels. So you have to make peace with this idea of I am not busy in a traditional sense and yet what I'm doing is still hard and important. So be worried about graduate student overload syndrome as well. But short answer, don't do the committee chair. ([Time 0:44:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b0415f28-bc8e-4b76-9fb6-8712b264032a)) - **Success with Digital Declutter** - Mike took a 30-day digital declutter from social media and felt less anxious with more time. - He enjoyed physical interactions more and found social media added little value to his life. Transcript: Cal Newport Today's case study comes from Mike. Mike says, as a creative being on social media, as a creative being, oh, not a creative being, as a creative comma, being on social media felt like a necessity, but it was often a chore. So I finally did a 30-day digital declutter. I don't know why I waited so long. Here are my takeaways. Just as other people have described, the first day or two, I felt very antsy, like I should be checking something, but I quickly subsided over the next few days. I got used to the slower, anxious life. I felt like I had more time in my day because I did. I realized how little value I actually got from being on social media. I started to enjoy physical conversations with people as I knew I didn't have social media to check on their lives. And just as you said, no one even noticed I wasn't on social media that month. As an unexpected benefit, I started making decisions faster and with more certainty. I stopped letting folks on Instagram tell me what to do. Now that the 30 days have ended, I'm going back to establish rules for future social media use. Well, I love this, Mike. Great digital declutter where you step away for 30 days, aggressively focus through reflection and experimentation on what's more meaningful. And then when you're done, say, what do I really need in my life? What did I really miss? And what are my new rules going forward? So I'm glad you had some success with that. Really consider, now that you are trying to decide what are my rules for social media going forward, really give the null hypothesis. What if my rule is doing no social media still? Give that a good look. Like you said, it was fine. So why stumble back into that world where they're desperately trying so desperately to hook you? If it didn't really matter that you were off from a professional standpoint, keep that option in mind. If you do add it back, make it on your desktop, make it boring, and be very specific about what you're doing on there. Stay tuned. Here's my preview. Stay tuned for the next segment because I have something, an article I read I want to talk about from a creative talking about exactly this point. So stay tuned for that. I think you'll like it. I also want to point out from this case study where Mike says, I started to enjoy physical conversations with people as I knew I didn't have social media to check on their lives. That's just what we were talking about in the deep dive, that one of the nuances to trying to reduce messaging in your life was to compensate by adding more analog interaction your life. That's what really matters. Mike did ([Time 0:51:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a6e0dfde-1291-4878-86d6-9af2741a3659)) - **Quality Content Beats Algorithms** - Social media success mainly happens when quality content spreads through organic recommendations. - Creators need not burden themselves with constant posting; good work sells itself through audience sharing. Transcript: Cal Newport Now, this article, I don't know if you can bring it up on the screen or not, Jesse. It's called I'm Done With Social Media. And it is from a writer named Carolyn Crampton. And it's on a blog. Oh, I love blogs. Isn't this great, Jesse? Blogs you can have. It's clean. There's like lots of text. You can take your time to explain something and it doesn't have to be in an app. And there's very few dancing, very few people dancing on here. I love vlogs. All right. So I'm just going to read a couple excerpts from this and then I want to give you my more general thoughts. All right. So here's the setup. Caroline says, I started last year with a clear goal. It was going to be the year that I finally did social media, regular posting, a content calendar, a strategy, a plan for growth, all of that. And yet I ended the year pretty certain that I never wanted to open those apps again, let alone post my photos and words on them. All right, that's the setup. Why was she making this year the year social media? She's a writer. She had a book coming out and she wanted to do everything she could. This is very typical for creatives. I want to do, she wanted to do everything she could to help this book sell. And she said, okay, I'm not a big social media person, but I will do all the things. I'll get all the advice. I'll do all the things because this I'm told helps. And I want to make sure that I'm doing everything that I can. So Caroline goes on in the article and talks about, you know, all the stuff she has to do, the videos, the updates, every accomplishment, posting it multiple times so people could see It. And so she really was working on this and giving this a lot of time. Here's what she learned. It didn't matter. She says, look, on Twitter, where I had nearly 10,000 followers that had mostly been accumulated during my previous work as a political journalist, the figures were even worse. So let's see here. Most of my TikToks barely made interviews in three figures. On Twitter, those numbers could be even smaller. So basically, no one was, even her followers weren't reading the stuff she was doing. So what she figured out was books weren't mostly weren't gaining I'm reading here books mostly weren't gaining momentum on TikTok because their authors were making top notch viral Videos, but because readers and bookish influencers were recommending them to each other and posting about their experience. It was about the quality of the book. So this, I think, is a key point about social media that I've tried to make before. It's not that it's not helpful for spreading the word about things. Certainly, there are books that their entire success is owed to a big push on social media. You got BookTok, you got Instagram, to a lesser extent Twitter. But as Caroline learned, it's not because the author was good at social media. It's not because the author had a lot of followers. It's because people like the book. And if people really like your book, they want to talk about it. And people use social media, they'll talk about it on social media. So social media can be really helpful for your efforts as a creative. But the best thing you can do to gain those benefits is to write something that is of the moment, that is really good, that you're the right person to write, and it touches a chord. If you do that, social media might be a big part of that book blowing up, but not because you posted properly about it, but because other people were spreading the word. But in the end, what's going to matter, and this is a key idea for my book, Slow Productivity, is the quality of what you do. So I like Caroline's experience. I often say social media has helped a lot of my books sell. It's just not for me posting on it. It's other people posting about it on those mediums as well. So it's a good nuance. I've mentioned it before, but it is worth emphasizing again, you don't have to play the game of the small number of people with these massive companies that want you to do to come and give Your time and attention and data to them so they can monetize it so that they can buy the other half of Hawaii. You don't have to play that game. Whole history of social media has been one argument after another about why you have to use their weird product. It was, you won't know what's going on with your friends. You'll be isolated. Then it was like, this is where clubs talk and you're not going to be able to be a part of organizations. And now it's like, you can't have a career or be a successful creative. It's always one thing after another. If you're not on these apps, which if you think about them objectively are really weird. It's all these weird rituals of how you put things on there and type about it. And you have to like do the vertical video and not the horizontal video. And you have to do this and that. And all these weird sort of cultish rituals. Essentially the sort of modern digital version of i'm making um i'm making a burnt burnt offering at the at the you know near eastern altar it's kind of the same type of thing if we do all These sort of things and shake the rain stick just right then all you know i'll be spared being attacked by the monster right it's it's these it's weird and it's kind of arbitrary and maybe It feels good in the moment and it's very distracting but good work sells because good work sells. And if people have new places to talk about good work, they'll talk about it on those new places. When magazines came around, they helped sell books. It was a new way to sell books. Why? Because it was a place where people could write about books and talk about books and help books take off. Not because the author's like, I'm going to write a bunch of articles and magazines about my own books, but because there's a new place people could write. Radio could help sell books when radio became a big thing. Not because authors were like, I will go on the radio and talk about my book, but because there's shows that talk about books and they would talk about your books. Like the idea is new communication mediums might help people talk about stuff that's good. Your job as a creator is still to produce things that are good. How people are talking about it doesn't necessarily matter a huge amount to you. So anyways, I like that article. It's Caroline Crampton. Check it out. She has a whole long thing about the experience. Every writer or creative should read it. But my bigger point here, again, is there's always some reason we're being told why we have to be looking at these weird, shiny, digital baubles. And it's okay at some point to be like, I'm done hearing it. Until you come back and say, you're going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars of this without too much work, or this is what's going to keep your pacemaker running. Until it's like that compelling, I'm kind of done hearing from yet again why I need to be using these things, right? Give me a good reason until I have it. I'm going to be moving on. So I appreciate that article and I love that it was on a blog, just a simple blog. ([Time 1:01:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8dad1e36-becb-413e-871d-e47f7ce33644))