How Do I Build “Cognitive Fitness”? | Monday Advice  🔗 **Source:** [How Do I Build “Cognitive Fitness”? | Monday Advice](https://share.snipd.com/episode/869125c9-0b92-40fe-88a9-7e39fe9c429b) ## Highlights - **Build Cognitive Fitness With Daily Reading** - Read every day to build a cognitive base and strengthen deep reading processes. - Cal Newport suggests starting with 15 to 20 pages of exciting material, then working toward 30 to 50 pages with one in three books hard. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, so let's get started with our first component here. We'll do a reveal, and it is read every day. I think this is a very effective tool. In physical fitness, rather, there's a very effective idea is that you need to lay a base of regular activity. This is my inspiration here. So in physical activity, physical fitness, we might say, for example, you need to walk at least 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day. This is associated with all sorts of positive health benefits. Well, I think we need a similar base layer of fitness when it comes to cognitive training, and I think that should be reading. Reading rewires your brain in a way that literally makes you smarter. I want to actually read a quote from my New York Times piece about exactly this effect. Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Marianne Wolfe calls deep reading processes that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance Of what we're able to understand. Deep reading is our species' bridge to insight and novel thought, she writes. My All right, so what's being said here is that the more time you spend reading, the more you're rewiring your brain to basically harness together different regions that were originally Evolved for different purposes, but when combined gives you this intellectual superpower. Complicated thought, nuanced thoughts that brings more of your brain matter to bear at trying to understand and produce original ideas and original understanding. But there's another justification for daily reading as well. It gives you practice with the fundamental skill of aiming your mind's eye at a desired internal target. Now, we're already naturally born to be very good at aiming our attention at a salient external target. So if I say, I want you to really pay attention in this basketball game to player number 23, we're very good at that. Oh, I can fix my attention and just watch that player. But when it comes to putting our mind's eye on an internal topic like a thought or an idea, that requires practice. That doesn't come naturally. Reading is giving you that practice. Rewire our brain to be capable of smarter thought, and we are getting practice directing our mind's eye in a way that will help us actually take advantage of that wiring. All right, so if that's the big idea for the first component, let me give you some practical tips for actually succeeding. If you're not a big reader, I think the key is to start with reading things that you are excited to read. Do not be snobby early on. Do not think, I need to be reading a good book that's going to impress my book club friends, or I need to be reading a big, profound book, or otherwise it's a waste of my time. The act of decoding the symbols themselves at first is what we want to get used to. The act of putting your mind's eye on one target for a sustained amount of time is something we want to get used to. So pick something you're excited to read. It doesn't matter if it's simple or fun or trashy, if it's a romance novel or like a highly emotional Colleen Hoover novel, or if you're reading a really trashy genre, adventure fiction, Doesn't matter. Whatever you're excited about coming back to. Now, I would start with 15 to 20 pages a day. Let me tell you how you hit that target consistently. Read with your lunch, read in bed before you go to sleep. That'll get you the 15, 20 pages, no problem. So it's a good automatic way to get to that base layer. Over time, you want to increase those pages, maybe get closer to 30 to 50 pages. This might require that you develop a little bit more of a reading habit. Oh, like I have some time before dinner. I'm going to actually sit and read. I'm on the subway going to work. I'm going to sit to read. So as you get more used to reading, it'll be easier to develop a reading habit where you read in more times during your day. The final place I want you to get is once you're used to reading, you can aim your mind's eye, you're starting to build those connections, is to integrate more what I am going to call hard Books. So you start with books you're just excited to read, so you do it. Once you're up to this 30 to 50 pages a day and aren't having much trouble hitting it, make one book in three quote-unquote hard. And by hard, I think of that as if it's nonfiction, it's presenting sophisticated original ideas or analysis, and if it's fiction, it's going to be a more challenging literary genre That is ultimately going to be more rewarding but takes more concentration to understand what's going on, who's who, slower consumption to make better sense of what's actually unfolding. So you can think of the difficulty of the book you intake like your mile time if you're an amateur jogger. If you're new to running, you're not going to be like, hey, I'm just going to whip off a 530 mile because I really want to do it. You're not going to be able to do it. But on the other hand, if you're continuing to train and you're running more and you're building up your endurance, then you can see that mile time coming down. That's the way to think about hard books. The more you read and the more sophistication you begin to interleave in, the more ease you'll have with tackling more and more difficult books. And so where you want to end up here is this, a solid amount of reading every day, one out of three books hard. One little addendum I'll add to that is you should feel free to reduce the daily page count if you're reading a very hard book. So what matters there is the slow contemplation, not the raw pages at that point. ([Time 0:02:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/37f10670-278e-4301-badc-f2e63ed0c211)) - **Use Writing As Cognitive Strength Training** - Do not avoid writing because the mental strain is part of the workout that builds cognitive strength. - Cal Newport recommends journaling or structured notes, studying technique while reading, and expecting the first 10 minutes to feel worst before it gets easier. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, so that is component number one of five of our plan for cognitive fitness. Let's go to component number two. Don't avoid writing. Now, here's something I've learned. Most people don't like writing. They avoid it if they can. And now that we've introduced generative AI tools that are capable of doing more and more of especially like the low stakes everyday writing for you, many people are writing less than Ever before. What I'm suggesting here is that you consider rejecting this trend in your own life and seeking out as many opportunities to write as possible. Now, to be clear, I understand why people don't like writing. This is not a moral failure. It's actually a physiological reality, a rational response to a physiological reality. I want to read a quote I wrote in a New Yorker piece I published a couple years ago about what happens in the brain when you write. All right, so here's what I wrote. Writing is hard. It requires us to use multiple parts of the brain in an improbable symphony of high-strain effort. Our hippocampus summons relevant facts. The prefrontal cortex tries to organize them. A brain region known as Broca's area helps us narrate in a familiar inner voice. Our verbal memory stores and manipulates the narration as we transfer to the page. Meanwhile, our brain recruits our spatial working memory, which evolved to track our location and physical space to orient our words within a whole, right? So this is why we feel resistance to writing. We basically have to orchestrate many, many regions of our brain to work together in a way that they weren't evolved to do. It's hard and we feel strain. But here's the thing, that sense of strain or difficulty that you experience when you face the blank page serves a useful purpose from a perspective of cognitive fitness. If we think of reading as helping to rewire your brain in a way that makes it capable of smarter thoughts, then writing we can think about is an activity that actually then makes use of Those capabilities. It makes your brain more capable. It takes those yoked together regions of your brain, reverses the flow, and says, let's use this to produce original thoughts. We wire these to understand complicated thoughts. Now we can use them to produce original thoughts. So if we want to follow the fitness analogy we've been using here, reading is sort of like building a cardiovascular base and getting your body used to activity. You know, I jog, I walk every day, I stretch, I'm no longer inactive. Riding is like the intense gym workout. You need that base to be able to go to the gym and do a hard workout without just ripping every muscle. But it's that hard workout that's actually going to then grow demonstrable strength. So writing creates more strain and resistance than reading. It's harder, but it gives us a lot of cognitive strength. And if you think about that way, I think it makes more sense. You can walk and do steps and maybe even get in light runs every day. So you should be reading every day. Writing is like your gym workout. You want to seek out writing, but also recognize that it's going to require more concentration. It's harder. It's a harder thing, but we get the bigger gains from it. So I want you to change your mindset about writing. Instead of thinking of that strain of facing the blank page to write that group email as intolerable feeling. Like, I would do anything to get away from this. Instead, think of that strain you feel when facing the blank page like the burn of a muscle in the gym. And if you're working out, you learn to retrain your brain to say, ooh, I like that feeling. That means I'm about to get stronger. Yeah, it's hard in the moment, but I'm going to feel good afterwards and I'm going to get stronger. That's how I want you to think about the strain of writing. Do not flee it. Do not say, Gen AI will do this and somehow this will make me more productive as if that's really the bottleneck to your value production is how quickly you write the occasional email. It's just you fleeing the strain. Don't, you want to get that muscle stronger. All right, so here's some practical tips. Your self-perception matters. So you say, hey, I'm someone who likes to write. Just keep telling yourself that. Make that part of your identity. When our group at work is like, hey, who wants to send this message to the client? You be the one who says, I can do it. I can write it. I like writing. I'm good at writing. I don't mind doing it. Two, study technique when you read. Hey, why was this article good? What's the author doing here? Why is this flowing so well? Oh, look at this rhythm. Look at this switching back and forth between A and B. Look at this integration of quotes. It's like quote, sentence, quote, explanation, callback. Begin looking for, analyzing, understanding, and appreciate the art of writing in your reading. What you're doing there is you're pulling out techniques that you can then utilize in your own writing. It's going to make your own writing feel better. Use journaling or if you have a newsletter or whatever it is, but have some way that you are writing regularly, but also doing it in a way that forces you to structure your thoughts. That's why I like journaling or maybe if you're publishing a small newsletter. These activities force you to not just write words but to use the writing to organize your thoughts, to take something that seems kind of clear in your head and have that feedback loop Of like, how do I express this clearly on words? Oh, it wasn't as clear as I thought in my head. And that feedback makes me clarify it and then the writing helps me again. And you get much more complicated thoughts out of it. You have to practice structuring your thoughts with text. You need something that you're doing semi-regularly that does force you to do that. It really could even be if you're reading interesting books, just taking notes in a Word file somewhere about the core ideas from each chapter as you read it. Even that internal exercise alone can help you make sense of thoughts and add much more structure to the thoughts that are in your head. I also want you psychologically to acclimatize to the 10-minute rule. So the hardest part about writing is the first 10 minutes. That's the part where you feel the peak intolerable seeming resistance because, again, remember that symphony of brain regions I talked about earlier. You have to coordinate a lot of your brain together before you can effectively start producing words. That takes time. That could take 10 minutes. So until all of those areas are successfully connected together and firing together, the writing's going to feel really bad. But then once they are, it gets easier. So if you're used to that, oh, the first 10 minutes are going to stink and then it's going to feel better, it feels much more tolerable. Like I know how this movie plays out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is really hard. I'm writing nonsense. But it's going to get better once I get to the other side of that 10 minutes. So really acclimatize yourself to that, and I think you're going to find writing to be less demanding. ([Time 0:10:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/92356e47-b1d5-42c3-801b-458492ee8b61)) - **Use Thinking Walks To Train Inner Attention** - Go on thinking walks without your phone and hold your attention on one personal or professional problem. - Cal Newport says even short walks help you practice inward attention, and journaling afterward exposes fuzzy thinking and sharpens insight. Transcript: Cal Newport Go on thinking walks. All right. Here's what I mean by that. Jesse's amused by my tape. I think it's dramatic, Jesse. What do you think? I kind of like it. Oh, there we go. All right. Those who are listening don't know. You're missing a real, I would say, and Jesse, correct me if I'm wrong here, avatar caliber effects we are deploying in this episode right now. Just that's what I want you to imagine is actually happening on the screen. All right. Let's keep going. What do I mean by a thinking walk? I want you to go for a walk several times a week. Do not bring your phone. If you have to have your phone, have it buried in a bag. Put on the ringer and put a headphone in your ear so if it rings, you'll hear it. So you're not checking it. It's actually going to be a pain to get it out. On the walk, I want you to think about something important to you. It could be professional. It could be personal. It could be a problem you need to solve. It could be something you're working through or maybe you're brainstorming or daydreaming about something you're excited about, but a solitary target that you're turning your mind Towards. The key is to get practice on this walk of turning your intention inwards and making sense of some sort of information or yourself, that there's exterior distractions around and you're Able to turn your intention internally and actually operate in an internal world of abstract thoughts. Now, in an age of constant algorithmically optimized diversion, we're sort of losing our comfort with this type of self-reflection. And I really think this is a problem from a cognitive fitness standpoint. Self-reflection is where you make sense of your life. It's where you develop your sense of self. It's where your best ideas come from. And it's very cognitive demanding because, again, we love to look at the tiger. We have a hard time turning inward. So it requires practice, and thinking walks are a great way to do it. I really think we underestimate now what we're losing when we don't spend time with our own thoughts. There's a famous book, for example, it's published back in 1948. It was called The Seven-Story Mountain. It's the autobiography of Thomas Merton, who goes from being a sort of a drift academic in New York to a Trappist monk down in Kentucky. If you read this book, and I reread it recently, I have a first edition of it, his transformation from this unhappy academic to a monk is all about self-reflection. He dramatizes throughout this memoir his thoughts, his engagement with his thoughts, his dialogue with himself. It's all discernment. It's all exploration of what is going on inside his own head. Let me read you a quote from the book. This is a key scene when Merton gets this big feeling of inspiration from reading a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. Hopkins is a sort of Jesuit poet and thinker, and he turns inward to try to make sense of this feeling and has a big revelation. All right, so let me read from the book here. Suddenly I couldn't bear it no longer and got into my raincoat and started down the stairs to walk to the local Catholic parish. And then everything inside me began to sing, to sing with peace. Later, while walking the late night streets after a particularly debaucherous night, a crystal thought emerges, I'm going to be a priest. Now, I'm adding there, there's a little bit of the quotes from the book, and some of that is my own summary of it. But basically what I'm capturing here is there's these key scenes in the book where he's reacting to the strong feeling from a poem, goes walking, thinking about it, thinks about it The next night after a hard night of partying, introspecting, turning his attention inwards and realizing, I think I need to be a priest. That's self-reflection. That's discernment. But it's not just about understanding yourself. It's also about cognitive fitness. If you can turn your mind inward and keep it on a target, not only does it make your own life better, it makes your brain stronger for almost any type of purpose. All right, so here's some practical tips. These walks can be short at first. Maybe you do like one long one each week, like on the weekend. But otherwise, these can be like relatively short walks. I'm just going around the block. Just get used to that rhythm. As I mentioned before, if you absolutely have to bring your phone, put it in a place where you can't do a quick check. Right? Because your short-term motivation system is always measuring the cost of various activities towards the benefit. So if the phone is in your pocket, it's saying, we could pick that up and look at it. That's very low friction to do, but we're almost certainly going to get a reward for doing that. The reward wins over the cost. Let's do it. But if the phone is in the bottom of your bag, it's like actually the cost of having to stop and open the bag and go in and get it. That might outweigh the reward of what we see on like TikTok. So actually, I'm not going to generate a sense of motivation to do it. So it's easier to avoid distraction if you make the distraction less available. I think the gold standards just don't have your phone. But if you do make it less accessible, it can also help if at the end of these walks, you journal your insights. So it forces you through this exercise of like, let me try to structure and make clear in a physical artifact what it was that I was wrestling with inside my mind. That's a feedback function that over time clarifies your internal thinking. So you need to think about, what did I figure out on this walk? And when you write it down, you're like, oh, maybe that's not as clear as I thought. And that's going to actually help you get more cognitive fitness out of this actual exercise. ([Time 0:17:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cfeb180f-000b-497b-a156-7ebfcdd54665)) - **Keep Your Phone Plugged In At Home** - Plug in your phone at home instead of carrying it as a constant companion. - Cal Newport argues the constant companion model came from attention-fracking business incentives, and people report lighter minds and easier focus when the phone stays in another room. Transcript: Cal Newport It's time for our fourth item. The fourth component of my cognitive fitness routine, plug in your phone. You may have heard me talk about this before, but I think it's absolutely vital. So I actually want to emphasize it. When you're at home, do not have your phone with you. Keep it plugged in. I suggest keeping it plugged in in the kitchen. You can put on the ringer. So if someone calls, you can go look for it. You can go in there to check in on messages or to look things up. If you're waiting for someone to text you about something important and you worry about missing it, tell them, hey, my phone's in the other room. So call when you're ready and I'll hear the ring and then I'll know to come see what's going on. The key is to spend hours each day in your house without your phone there as a constant companion. Now, this might seem weird at first. Like, why am I artificially not holding onto my phone? But actually, the weird thing is always having your phone with you. I call this the constant companion model of phone usage, and it's not intrinsic to the device. This is actually an idea I've been writing about for a while now, that the original idea for a smartphone was not to be something you have on you at all times. That actually evolved later after the advent of the Apple App Store and the discovery by the social media companies that if people keep their phone with them at all times, they can exponentially Increase the amount of engagement they get. So the constant companion model of using your phone is not some deterministic inevitability of having a smartphone. It's a business model based on fracking your attention. So the weird thing is actually having the phone with you at all time, not keeping it plugged in while you're in your house. So this is one of the best ways to fight back against this. Now, why does this matter? Because it gives you lots of practice doing things without that constant short-term motivation ping of pick up the phone, pick up the phone, pick up the phone. You don't realize the extent to which you're battling against your short-term motivation system with every single thing you do when the phone is with you. People report when they run this technique that it feels like a weight has been lifted off of their brain or they've been given some sort of like highly potent synthetic Adderall. Because without that constant battle against your short-term motivation system to pick up your phone, you focused effortlessly. You get clarity you didn't have before. Every show you watch, conversations at the table, reading a book, doing chores, like doing all these things without that temptation to pick up the phone completely changes your experience Of what it can be like in the world. And that makes your mind much stronger. This is a great way to build up cognitive fitness. So here's some practical tips about it. If you want to listen to a podcast like mine during chores, use AirPods. If your house is large enough that you're going to another floor and the AirPods can't reach to where your phone is, then you can bring the phone to whatever floor you're on and plug it In somewhere there. But don't put it on your person. Train people who are used to texting you and getting rapid responses that you don't have the phone on your person when you're in your house. So if it's in the evening or the morning, they might have to call if they want to get your attention. And of course, the other advanced tip here is make the phone itself less desirable by taking off any app that makes money from your engagement, any social app, for example, take that Off your phone. And this will give you a sort of diluted simulation of the phone plugged in effect when you're away from the house and the phone might be with you. The less interesting the phone is, the less strongly your short-term motivation system fights to try to get you to pick it up. And you get more training and practice just keeping your focus on whatever you happen to be doing. So it's a great way to pick up cognitive fitness. ([Time 0:22:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f661ecfe-2684-429f-9fab-de88018ef7fb)) - **Learn Hard Skills That Reward Sustained Focus** - Learn a hard skill on a regular schedule so focus produces visible progress and trains discipline. - Cal Newport says sports, music, and crafts strengthen long-term motivation because mastering songs, shots, or sweaters beats the reward of TikTok. Transcript: Cal Newport Let's give the big reveal. Learn a hard skill. This is the final component of my plan. Master a skill that requires you to focus to get better, but that also gives you clear rewards. You get a clear signal that, oh, I am getting better. So I have to focus to get better, but then I get a clear reward when I do. I think athletic pursuits fall into this, golf or tennis or pickleball or whatever it is. As you work harder on this skill, you get a clear reward of, oh, I'm getting better shots or I'm scoring more points. I think musical pursuits are obvious as well. Oh, I can play this song that's hard and it's cool and I couldn't play it before. I'm clearly getting better. Artistic crafts or pursuits, you can see the same thing. Oh, I'm better at knitting and you can see it because the sweater is more impressive. So I think this is a great way to build up skills. Now, actually, last week, I had the author Brad Stolberg on the show to talk about how building a discipline practice can make you less distractible, right? So, for example, he uses weightlifting, powerlifting as a centering force for his own cognitive life. And so that's part of it, right? If you're learning a hard skill, it builds up a sense of discipline so you can resist distractions easier. But there's other cognitive fitness advantages here as well. One of the big ones, I think, is it helps train your long-term motivation system that when we focus on something hard, over time we get really meaningful rewards. The more your long-term motivation system can get involved in the game, the more of these sort of hard-won meaningful rewards that you introduce into your life, more primacy your long-term Motivation system gets over the short-term system. The long-term system can swap it, right? So if the short-term system is pick up your phone, pick up your phone, you know what can squash that? The long-term system can come in and say, no, we're going to keep practicing the guitar because I have learned the rewards of mastering these songs are great. And it's much bigger than the reward of seeing something interesting on TikTok. So I can just turn down the volume on that short-term motivation system and you're much easily able to keep your attention focused. So the more experiences you give your long-term motivation system of successfully reaping long-term rewards, the more you have the ability to modulate the influence of the short-term System. And in other scenarios as well, that short-term system no longer is going to have as much of a bite. The other cognitive fitness advantage of learning a hard skill is just practice focusing. You know, it's hard to say, let me just sit down and focus just to practice it. But if I have a reason to do it, I'm trying to learn this chord, and then I learn it, and then it sounds better, it's easier to sustain your concentration. But that is just practice, again, with aiming your mind's eye, which a lot of cognitive fitness comes back to this facility with blocking out noise, modulating your short-term motivation System, sustaining focus on a target of your choice. This is an excellent way to practice that on a regular basis. So we get the three benefits of this one. What we talked about with Brad, in general, you're just more disciplined, makes you easier, able to resist distractions or diversions. Two, it specifically rewires your long-term motivation system to help you with that. And three, it's a great way to practice sustaining focus on a complicated target for a longer piece of time. Some practical tips here. This needs to be something that you do on a regular schedule, not just when you feel like it. It should be a more disciplined pursuit. It needs some sort of skilled component that improves with deliberate practice, but then gives you clear indications that you're getting better. That's what's going to help your long-term motivation system learn. There's some sort of coaching you can do here. It helps. Any sort of feedback or coaching from another person can really help you stick with it. All right. So there you have it. I gave you five components for improving your cognitive fitness. This is like a standard exercise routine before your brain. Read every day. Don't avoid writing. Go on thinking walks. Plug in your phone and learn a hard skill. ([Time 0:26:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/71d49755-33e3-4885-a1ef-14f91d1699bb)) - **Former Influencer Felt Clearer After Leaving Social Media** - A former nutrition influencer quit Instagram and TikTok after feeling chronically online wrecked her mental health, originality, and happiness. - She now writes about leaving the platforms and plans a community group for people trying to do the same. Transcript: Jesse Miller First message is from a former social media influencer. Cal Newport Oh, interesting. All right. So I'll just call this anonymous because I don't know if they know if I was going to read this or not. During my time in school, I accidentally became an influencer of sorts, which sounds weird, I know, on Instagram and TikTok in the nutrition space. I gained followers, had millions of views, went viral, etc. At first, I was over the moon, but I quickly felt the mental impact of being chronically online. I walked away from the slot machine and stopped posting on the platforms in 2024. My experience with social media and the decrease in my mental health, productivity, original thought, individuality, happiness, etc. Really shook me. It's become a topic I'm extremely passionate about. I share my journey on my blog and plan to start a community group here for those looking to leave these addictive platforms. It's definitely isolating being a 25-year who's not on social media, but reading your book was a nice reminder of why I chose this path and how I know I'll be happier for it. Thank you again for standing on your beliefs and being a guiding voice in this space. I also find it extremely admirable that you're not on these platforms. You walk the walk. Well, that's great to hear, right, that when this person left their influencer role, they're like, oh, my God, everything is so much clearer. I'm actually happier. I didn't realize how much this is weighing on me. I'm interested in that. I think that is becoming less true as these platforms over the last three years have to their doom. Follow the TikTok model of breaking away from following people, following friends, choosing who you're trying to get content from, and have instead moved to a model of just we're going To algorithmically show you random short-form stuff that will press your internal buttons. The more these become just abstracted slop entertainment, the smaller the impact becomes on, oh, I don't use these anymore because there's no one to notice it. There's no one that you're talking to on there. There's no one who's following you on there. So no one knows that if you're on there or not, with the exception of like some memes you may or may not know. So hopefully that is that's becoming easier. ([Time 0:36:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0d92777e-c20b-4e62-8cc5-3e8049cc5fa8)) - **A Novelist Used Typewriters To Escape Screen Distraction** - Novelist Anjali Banerjee returned to manual typewriters after screens and notifications became too distracting. - She drafted much of a novel on a 1956 Hermes Rocket, then scanned pages into Word, using the slower workflow to discover what mattered and cut aggressively. Transcript: Jesse Miller Next message is from a writer reacting to your interview with Amy Timberlake. Okay. Cal Newport Interesting here. All right. So this is from Anjali Banerjee, who knows Amy Timberlake. So we, we interviewed the acclaimed children's book author, Amy Timberlake, I think two weeks ago, because we were interested in the idea that she uses a typewriter, which is a slower Piece of technology than a computer and has fewer features, but makes her a better writer. We use this as a metaphor about slowing down can actually produce more, and technology doesn't always understand that. It's always about just speeding up. So Anjali Banerjee wrote and said, I wrote stories as a child on a typewriter, but switched to the Mac when it first came out and used computers thereafter. But then about seven years ago, I decided that screens notifications were too distracting. So I went to my local typewriter shop about an electric typewriter, but I had to keep programming the margins. So I took it back and bought my first completely manual typewriter, a Hermes rocket circuit 19, circuit 1956. From there, I caught typewriter fever and now own over 100 manual machines. That would be me, Jesse. If I started getting typewriters, this whole office would be full of typewriters everywhere. I'm curating my collection, focusing on keeping typewriters with typefaces that can be easily scanned into Word using OCR apps or unusual models with unusual typefaces. I wrote much of the first draft of my 14th novel on a typewriter, and I posted an image of the typewritten draft of the first paragraphs versus the final version on my blog. Oh, we should look at that. Let's bring this up here, Jesse. This is the blog post. So Anjali Banerjee publishes under the name A.G. Baner, and I'm putting this on the screen here. Okay, there you go. So look at that, old-fashioned typewriting. And then this is actually an interesting article because she talks about what her final published opening was versus this. So she cut most of this, but she wrote about how this is how she got out all the relevant thoughts. And then she realized what's actually core here. And then she cut a lot to get to the final version of it. But the essay helped her, the typewriter helped her work out, helped her work out those views. So I think that's, I think that's pretty cool. I mean, again, the idea here that this comes back to, it's all about bottlenecks. In fact, I think we might get into this in more detail in an upcoming episode. But it's this idea that there's a lot of steps involved in doing creative or cognitive work. And a lot of the tools we come up with, the digital tools that are supposed to make us more productive, speed up parts of that process. But it's like an assembly line. And what really matters is the bottleneck pieces, right? So if you do the other steps faster, it's just going to pile up work at the bottlenecks. You're still not going to get more actual results out. And often the bottlenecks in cognitive or creative work are not sped up by just having better tools. And in fact, sometimes they require that you step away from tools to be able to actually improve your output there. And I think typewriting is a big piece of this. Like the bottleneck for book writing is often producing really good words. And improving that bottleneck is often not about some tool that makes you go faster, but actually being able to spend more time in a cognitive state where you're more likely to come up With the good things. And so you can have as many AI, sped up, research, database tools as you want. But if that bottleneck stays small, you're still not going to be producing books much faster. So I think that's cool. Also, I didn't realize this, Jesse. It's a good idea that what people do who write on typewriters is they scan it. That was new. So she was saying she finds typewriters that have fonts that can be easily scanned into like Word with an optical character recognition program. So you type, and then at some point you scan those in a computer, and now you're editing on the computer. ([Time 0:38:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/234885fa-5088-469a-99c1-a418aa66f15b)) - **Deleting Social Apps Gave A CEO Back His Attention** - A CEO in Pakistan deleted social apps from his phone and cut usage from 6.5 hours a day to 3.5. - He says he sleeps better, works out again, and became more present with his six-year-old daughter through more drawing, building, and play. Transcript: Jesse Miller All right. Cal Newport Let's see what we got here. This comes from Salman. Salman says, I run a textile company in Pakistan. I employ about 200 people and it's growing fast. I came across your podcast and then picked up deep work a couple months ago. I want to share what happened because I think you'd find it interesting. I deleted Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter from my phone. Not my accounts, just the apps. If I need them, I can log in on a computer. And that's it. That was the whole intervention. The first few days were rough. I didn't realize how deep the habit was until there was nothing to scroll. I literally asked my wife if I could use her Instagram. Her feed was built for her, though, and I quit after two minutes. A week later, I forgot those apps even existed. My phone usage dropped from 6.5 hours a day to 3.5. That's 90 hours a month I was just handing over to feeds. But the numbers aren't even the main thing. I started sleeping better, started working out again, and this is the one that hit me hardest. I'm actually present with my six-year daughter now. More drawing, building, and playing in the last month than the previous four. I didn't need a vacation to be a good dad. I just needed to put down the phone. I wrote about this experience on LinkedIn, and it kind of blew up. People messaging me saying they're deleting their apps. Others saying they've been struggling with the same thing for years. Wasn't trying to preach or anything. Just shared what happened honestly. Your work was the push that started all of it. I'm now doing deep work sessions for most mornings, 60 to 90 minutes, no distractions, still figuring out how best to use them as a CEO. Turns out removing noise doesn't automatically give you clarity. That's a different problem. But even the early sessions have produced some of the best thinking I've done in years. All right. I love that story. I mean, look, if you take the benefits that you get from stopping using social media on your phone and you just listed them abstractly, people would pay huge money for those benefits. If you said I have a productivity tool that is going to gain you back 90 extra hours, it's going to significantly increase the time with your kids, your ability to work out. You're going to feel better. You're going to produce better thoughts. If I said I had an app that did that or a pill that did that, this would be the ozempic of intellectual activity. Everyone would be all over it. But it exists. Just stop using social media on your phone. Just these huge benefits are just sitting there. It's like people in physical fitness are like exercise. If you could put the benefits of semi-regular, moderate exercise into a pill, it would be a blockbuster. But it's the same thing. The benefits of not using social media on your phone, especially as like a grown up with kids, are immense. Sometimes you just need a push. It's that you just got to stop it. Just like I said in that New York Times piece, stop with the moderation. Stop with the, well, I just use this in this case, and I have these apps to control this or that. It's digital ultra-processed food. It's digital Doritos. It's digital Oreos. You're a grown-up. Don't eat Oreos. Don't eat Doritos, right? Like we just need to move on from algorithmically curated short-form content. It adds no value to your life, and you get massive value if you stop using it. So I think that's a great example of what can be gained. So thank you, Solomon, for sending that in. ([Time 0:43:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/34f93e6b-4da6-41fe-8a3e-54d54e5ba5df)) - **Spiritual Sloth Can Look Like Busyness** - Cal Newport found an old idea about acedia useful because spiritual sloth can look like inactivity or frantic busyness. - The book argues despair drives either doing nothing or pseudo-productivity, and the cure is meaningful activity aimed at meaningful goals. Transcript: Cal Newport So I read the other day – the book I read last week was The Noonday Devil. This was recommended by one of our listeners. It's written by Jean-Charles Nault in French, and forgive me, but I don't know the—I didn't write down the translator's name. So this is—he's a Benedictine monastic, I believe. So it's a religious book as published by the Ignatius Jesuit Press, but it's interesting. This is why the listener suggested it to me because he thought there'd be some overlap with what we've been talking about here with the deep life. It's about the Greek term acedia, A-C which you can translate as like spiritual sloth. And it was this really big issue for the early monks, right? This is something that the desert fathers, the original monastics in the Near East deserts of the early common era, they struggled with in their sort of desert monastic cells. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote a lot about this in the medieval period. And then it sort of fell off the radar. And this book is bringing it back. It's saying we should bring this term back because it's really useful. And I did find some interesting, I mean, anytime we have people writing about one of these mental states or productivity issues for 2,000 years, I'm interested. I was like, ooh, I like these older takes. And there's a couple interesting things I'll mention real quick I learned from this book. So this idea of spiritual sloth or acedia, part of the definition is a certain lack of activity, right? So part of it is you could just not do stuff. You just stop doing stuff. And they kept that as a problem. But what was interesting is they said the other way that acedia can show up is essentially busyness for the sake of busyness. Now, the term that the French author uses is confusingly translated as activism, because obviously activism has a clear meaning in English of like you are advocating for a cause. But they actually – the author means activism differently here as like pseudo-productivity, busyness for the sake of busyness, being active for the sake of being active without an Actual meaningful goal to it. So I thought that was interesting. They're like spiritual sloth, this sort of sense of despair could either lead to I just stop doing things or I'm just doing nonsense all the time to distract myself. And the real cure is meaningful activity aimed at meaningful goals. So that was an interesting book. ([Time 0:46:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/286f5e97-134d-49da-9d68-85b383c2f9e4))