Should I Press Pause? | Monday Advice  🔗 **Source:** [Should I Press Pause? | Monday Advice](https://share.snipd.com/episode/94f5eb5d-9d54-41ea-9c8f-8ba0e495fa66) ## Highlights - **Asheville Pause Helped Get Unstuck** - Cal Newport pressed pause by staying at a mountain lodge in Asheville to finish book edits and brainstorm with writer friends. - He spent days walking, writing, exercising, and meeting peers, which helped him get unstuck after a demanding semester. Transcript: Cal Newport I'm not recording this from my normal studio in Washington, D.C. I'm actually in Asheville, North Carolina. I'm staying here in a mountain lodge where F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly wrote part of The Great Gatsby. Now, for those who are interested, here's what it looks like. I'm here to finish edits on my next book and to visit with some writer friends to help figure out our future in the publishing industry. Now, there's a name for this strategy. I pressed pause on the busyness of my normal life to find space to think deeply about what comes next. I actually do this on a regular basis. It's something that has been immensely important in my life. So here's the key questions you might be asking. Is this something that you should be thinking about doing? And if so, how is it possible to press pause if you don't actually have the ability at the moment to just drop everything and escape to the mountains? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which makes this the perfect opportunity to go seek some answers. So here's the plan. I'll argue why pressing pause has become so necessary in our current moment of digital distraction. Then I'll explore some ideas for how to achieve the benefits of this general strategy, even if you're not able to go on an epic trip. So if you feel like you're stuck, always busy, always distracted, but not really making progress towards a deeper life, then this episode is for you. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. All right, so I'm recording this in the evening. Let me tell you what I did today up in Asheville. I woke up early. The entire mountaintop at the lodge where I was staying was shrouded in fog. So I brewed some coffee and I went for a walk to do some thinking. There's a nice little footpath at my resort that winds up on a nearby hillside. I then did some work on my book in a, I don't know how else to explain this. It's like a rock-hued atrium overlooking the mountainside with an artificial waterfall falling. So it's an interesting place to get something done. After that, I met up with some of my writer friends at a local gym where a trainer that some of us know, shout out to Zach of Strength Ratio, put us through a workout that, I'll be honest with You, still has left me sore. Don't even talk to me about pendulum squats. It's too soon for me to go there again. Then we relocated as a group to an office to brainstorm and chat about what's going on in our careers, the things that worry us about publishing, our plans for continuing to thrive in This industry. In some sense, let's step back. In some sense, this day was remarkably unproductive in the sense that I didn't actually finish a lot of work or answer a lot of messages or otherwise, as they say, get after it. But in another sense, today was remarkably productive. I've had a demanding semester and it really wore me down. I was wearing a lot of hats. I was really busy. I felt stuck on a lot of the bigger things I cared about. This trip is helping me get unstuck. The three days I spend down here will yield benefits for many months to follow. ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6816555e-caff-4968-85a5-d85565d8a251)) - **Why Pausing Boosts Original Thought** - Pressing pause improves thinking because reducing context shifts restores cognitive capacity and makes your brain 'smarter.' - Novel environments further free semantic networks tied to routine, opening space for original ideas and insights. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, I got three benefits of pressing pause that I want to identify here. Number one, your brain struggles to think when it must be constantly context shifting, right? So when you are in a busy, normal day, you constantly have to shift your cognitive context from one target to another because we're busy, especially in the age of digital. There's text messages, there's emails, there's Slack messages, there's social media, there's news streams, there's podcasts. All of this is pulling out our attention all the time. We're jumping back and forth. A brain that is constantly switching its context has a hard time thinking well. There's terminology I use in my books where I say context shifting leads to reduced cognitive capacity. It's a way of saying when your mind is busy, it gets dumber. When you press pause and you get away from this busyness, you in a quite literal sense get smarter. Your IQ goes up because you are not reducing your cognitive capacity with all that context shifting. All right. The second specific benefit from pressing pause, new physical context can support new ideas and insights. When you're surrounded by the familiar, your brain is firing familiar circuits. When you're in a novel situation, other parts of your brains turn on. And more importantly, networks that are associated, semantic networks that are associated with normal things in your everyday life don't fire up, which leaves you more capacity For original thought. ([Time 0:04:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/13ace8fc-25bb-4648-a2e7-6b6a25ec1b23)) - **Distance Reveals Future Possibilities** - Distancing from your present routine makes it easier to imagine different futures because immediate tasks no longer dominate your attention. - Being away reduces present-focused friction and allows future forecasting you couldn't do at home. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, the third benefit from pressing pause, you need to distance yourself from your present to better see your future. All right? When you are in the normal things you do, it is hard to think about different futures because your brain says, we've got things we need to do. This is what we care about right now. So to try to squeeze out original thoughts about what do I want in my life? What could happen? Where am I trying to go, is really hard when the things you need to do are all around you right now. Our brains do not like to do future forecasting when there's present challenges that we face. When you press pause, you're hoping to get some distance from this present so that you can look outwards towards more interesting futures that you would otherwise not have noticed. ([Time 0:06:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a002762f-fda5-484f-a245-721fb21a2042)) - **Choose A Mini Pause Based On Disruption** - Use a spectrum of 'mini-pauses' from low to high disruption to get pause benefits without major life changes. - Cal outlines four levels so you can choose based on available time: coffee loop, doctor's-appointment leave, 24-hour escape, or multi-day trip. Transcript: Cal Newport So what I want to do here is I want to go through four different levels of pauses that you can implement, four different ideas. And I'm going to order these from least disruptive to most disruptive, okay? The least disruptive will barely change your day. The level four most disruptive pause type will be what I'm doing now. ([Time 0:07:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/36102b95-6d25-475f-9186-2ac19fbff957)) - **Do A Morning Coffee Shop Loop** - Make a morning coffee shop loop: wake 20 minutes earlier, buy coffee, walk, return, then journal before the day starts. - This uses the clear pre-work mind and early novelty to reduce context shifting and spark ideas. Transcript: Cal Newport Level one, make a morning coffee shop loop. All right, here's how the strategy works. First thing in the morning, you might even want to wake up 20 minutes earlier than you normally would to make this work. First thing in the morning, early in the morning, go to a coffee shop, okay? Once there, get whatever, coffee, tea, whatever it is you normally drink. Go for a walk. In that walk back at the coffee shop. Okay, so you go for a walk with your coffee, with your tea, and then take out your journal to write down whatever thoughts you had on that walk. All right, so you're there early, and then you start your day. This is before you do anything else in your day. You get out of bed, throw on a hat, water, boom, right out to the coffee shop. That's level one from a disruption scale. ([Time 0:10:46](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f5b0c15c-1847-4b0e-90b5-d0c860ca6c75)) - **Schedule A Fake Doctor Appointment** - Schedule a 'doctor's appointment' by leaving work early, fully shutting down open loops, and visiting a nearby novel place with your phone left behind. - Bring a journal, spend an hour or two exploring, and write observations. Transcript: Cal Newport For those who are listening, instead of watching, I am doing furious air quotes as I say doctor's appointment. So what I'm talking about here is you just, you're going to leave work early. People say I can never leave work early. Well, you do leave work early. You leave work early when you have a doctor's appointment. So you're able to do it, most people at least. So you choose a day in the future and like, I'm going to have to leave it to this day or whatever. Like people don't care. You're taking a few hours off. All right, this will be your doctor's appointment. Do a full shutdown before you go. Do not leave any open loops like, oh my God, there's emails I have to answer. People are waiting for things. You know, go through, have a plan for the next day. Shut down any open loops. Check out your inbox, look at your calendar. You want to make sure that you've got that off your mind. Then during your quote-unquote doctor's appointment, go somewhere nearby but that you've never been before. A little museum people have been talking about that you never got around to visiting. There's a lake 20 minutes out of town with like a walking path around that you've heard about but never been there. Go somewhere you've never been before. If possible, leave your phone in your car once you're there. And then go wherever this place is, walking around the lake, going through this museum, go to this novel place, spend an hour or two, bring your journal, write down your thoughts. ([Time 0:11:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ed9e20a4-658c-43a1-84d3-ed1e8bf8449d)) - **Take A 24-Hour Escape** - Book a 24-hour escape by reserving a nearby Airbnb or hotel, leaving after work, and spending the next day immersed in the new place while journaling. - Use the night away plus a full personal day to clear routine-driven thinking. Transcript: Cal Newport Level three of disruption, book a 24-hour escape. Now, what I mean by this is I actually want you to book an Airbnb or hotel room someplace that's nearish by within a few hours, okay? You're going to leave after work. You're going to drive out to wherever this place is. You'll stay in that Airbnb or hotel room that night. You will then spend the whole next day into the afternoon just being in this place. It's a new city or maybe you got an Airbnb that's in the countryside somewhere, on the shore, whatever. Spend time in that place. You can keep coming back to the Airbnb throughout the day to do some journaling and then come home like you would at the end of a workday. So you have to like take a one full personal day to make this particular strategy happen. And you have like a night where you're staying somewhere. ([Time 0:12:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/de8f87a1-d888-4ab7-b3da-5f33050d1896)) - **Take A Multi Day Trip For Deep Reset** - If possible, take a multi-day trip to a novel city or beautiful place to maximize cognitive reset and creative clarity. - This most disruptive option yields the largest long-term returns for big decisions or projects. Transcript: Cal Newport Level four disruption, fly to Asheville. You don't have to literally come to Asheville, but you do something like that. You fly somewhere that is notably novel or beautiful or aesthetic or interesting, and you spend a few days there, and you really get into what's going on, what do I want to do with my life, Right? Four levels of disruption. ([Time 0:13:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/516c4dbd-fce3-4a5b-9be2-965ed55b7d43)) - **Use A Three Step Journal During Pauses** - Use a structured journaling sequence during pauses: note what is going well, then what is not, then brainstorm radical-to-practical solutions. - For stuck items, mark the next concrete actions and circle them to bring back into your task system. Transcript: Cal Newport Every one of those scenarios I just said pretty cursely, like, yeah, write in your journal. What are you actually doing during these various pauses? What questions are you answering? What are you actually writing in your journal? Well, let me tell you my suggestions. This is what I'm doing here in Asheville. Number one, you ask yourself, what parts of my life are going well? Write those down. Why you want gratitude? It's a great foundation for all of this. You know, that really is going well. I have some time to reflect away from the busyness, and I can just sit with a little bit of gratitude about parts of my life that I actually like. Once you've laid that foundation, the second thing you're going to address in your journal, what parts of my life are not going well? Where do I feel stuck? Like professionally, do I feel trapped? Do I have these certain ambitions that I had as a young person that aren't coming true? Like wherever it is, this is where some of the more serious work happens. Now, here's what I want you to do. Take each of these items where you feel stuck, and maybe you're just going to look at one in your pause. That's fine. Take one of these items. You're going to start with the most radical blue sky solutions to this possible, the real drastic like, you know, going to quit and join the circus type of solutions, right? Of radicalness or disruption of your ideas. And you're going to start kind of like marching from like very blue sky radical ideas to increasingly simple and practical ideas. Okay? Now, what you're looking for is where is it on this march, on this march from like the radical ideas down to the very simple and pragmatic, where along the way did I feel like my suggestions Are no longer working? Like, ah, that's not really going to fix it. What you've identified then is like the exact level of radicalness or extremeness that you probably need to try to get unstuck. You don't have to solve these problems completely, but this is just like an exercise you're going to do. So you've kind of discovered from places you feel stuck, how radical or extreme do I really need to get to try to find a solution? And sometimes it might be like, man, the only solution here is to quit and join the circus. And other times there'll be a, oh man, this real little fix is going to make a huge difference. This is a great exercise, but it takes, you need time. You need a new context. You need to get your normal stuff off your mind. The final thing you want to write in your journal is for each of these, you've identified these solutions, write down what's next. So if these are the things you think you might have to do for where you're stuck, what would be the things you have to do next? You have to talk to this person. You have to have discussion with your spouse. You have to gather some more information. Are there something you want to sign up for? Write those all down. Put a big circle many times around those. That is the outcome of this pause. And it's what you're going to bring back with you into your normal life, put into whatever system you use for scheduling and tasks. ([Time 0:16:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/47ae0351-4500-4d79-891e-cd49072a9d25)) - **Handle Sabbatical Email Sparingly** - During a sabbatical, avoid autoresponders unless required and check work email infrequently; Cal plans once a week for most accounts and maybe twice for Georgetown. - Do not preemptively apologize; answer when you return and keep responses simple. Transcript: Cal Newport So what am I going to do with email? Well, first of all, like the obvious thing is I wear many hats and only some of them are associated with Georgetown roles affected by the sabbatical. So I don't have service obligations or teaching obligations. And that is a lot of email. I have all my other hats. I have my books. I'm on my podcast. I've got my newsletter. I've got the articles I write. So I'll be working very hard, but that part will be out of my life. All right. So I still have a lot of email. What will I do with Georgetown email? I'm not going to do an autoresponder. I'm not a big believer in them. I know they make sense in certain contexts where you're in a work environment where fast response is required. And so like you need to, I guess, communicate to people if you're not going to respond. But I find in a lot of contexts, autoresponders are more about the anxiety of the person who's away from their inbox. They imagine in their mind, this is very natural, but they imagine in their mind that there's basically a back room somewhere where their peers and their boss come in and they have a big Bulletin board where there's all these like statistics and observations and messages from you where they're trying to track like, hmm, how long were they? What's their average delay time and responses? This has gone up. What is going on here? There's a big question mark. Where is she? What's going on? And everyone's tracking and caring. And if you don't get out in front of it, they're about to burst out of that back room with torches and come find you. The reality is people actually don't care. The biggest benefit they often get by sending the email is that something got off their plate. They often aren't going to recognize that it took a while for you to respond. So I'm not a big believer in autoresponders unless your office absolutely demands it. I'll get back to people when I get back to them. I also don't preemptively apologize, right? If they're like, hey, where were you? I'll be like, oh, I'm away. I'm on sabbatical. I mean, maybe if like it's been a week or two, I'll be like, hey, sorry for the delay. I'm on sabbatical. And then I'll answer. And no one cares. Like, they're probably happy that it took a week or two because that's a week or two. They didn't have to deal with whatever the thing was they were emailing you about. I'll check my email once a week for sure. My Georgetown email, maybe twice. That's it. No autoresponder. But it will be nice to have a little bit of reduced message volume. ([Time 0:23:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bcd51f0a-fa98-4c38-8776-aa121078f378)) - **Thinking Is The Active Link In Read Think Write** - Read Think Write combats 'dopamine surfing' by forcing pauses to reflect and move ideas into durable memory. - The 'think' step interleaves with writing and is essential to transform passive reading into genuine understanding. Transcript: Cal Newport Well, read, think, write is a sort of a classic mode this is like a classic mode of information intake that scholars have been using since, you know, the codex was first invented. But we're not used to it today. In our current world of algorithmic digital information, we are consuming information more and more in a different mode that I call dopamine surfing. And the way I think about it is our brain has been trained to be getting this like really positive stimulus from whatever we're engaging with content-wise. And as soon as that positive stimulus starts to go down a little bit, we have to make drastic changes to get it back up again. We skim, we swipe, we jump around to try to find something that gets us back up again. We've got to keep that level of that sort of like stimulation level high. And so reading becomes incredibly erratic and very little information is actually stored. And we've been trained to do that with our devices. And I think this carries over to almost any of the content consumption we do. It's why like I'm trying to watch a documentary and you're going to see people having to jump on their phone because there's like a slightly boring part of the documentary. They have to keep that stimuli high. That's like a very distracted way of engaging with information, and you don't actually pull nearly as much insight out of text or other types of media when you're dopamine surfing, But it's what we've been trained to do. Read, think, write is a different way of consuming an older way that's different than dopamine surfing. I think it's useful to point out exactly how it works so that people know what used to be just second nature. We can remember and practice a better way to consume it. So the read, think, write loop goes like this. You read something that's hard in a book, in an article, right? This is like you're consuming hard information to get smarter. You then stop and you think about what you just read. Like what does this mean? You move it around in your head, right? Like, okay, what is this? Remind me of what's going on here. And then you write down your thoughts. That thinking and writing part is what forces your brain to actually take the information out of much more of the like cursory processing where you're like hearing the sounds in your Head and basic images and actually move the information into symbolic information stores in your brain. That's where insight is gained. So that thinking and writing is where it's gained. Brahm is asking about like, what is the difference between thinking and writing here? It's a fuzzy line that when you're trying to write out your thoughts, a lot of thinking happens. Like they're kind of interleaved a little bit. But I think of those kind of together. You step back, reflect, write. The writing makes you reflect as well. When you've done that think right, however that's interleaved, now you understand. Now you've gained understanding. ([Time 0:26:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1006d1b9-aeb1-4c6d-8d1b-8604b974847a)) - **Read Low Stimulus Books At Bedtime** - For bedtime reading, choose low cognitive stimulation books; avoid corner-marking or dense idea books that rev up your brain and hinder sleep. - Cal reads calmer nonfiction like Michael Pollan at night but keeps idea-heavy books for daytime. Transcript: Cal Newport Jenny writes, she says, do you read books for work at bedtime or do you stick to reading for pleasure? For example, would you ever be using your corner marking method on a bedtime book? All right, that's a good question. Yeah, let me – it is a good question. No, I don't – the reason why I'm hesitating is that the line I draw is not work or non-work. It's cognitive stimulation versus non-cognitive stimulation. So I don't want to read in bed something that's highly cognitive stimulating, which for me is often like really original ideas that I'm thinking about and I'm processing and I get excited. That fires up all my brain. We're in Cal idea mode. When my brain gets fully revved up to do idea stuff, it's what I do for a living. It's hard to calm it back down to sleep. But I could also be reading a book that has a professional reason why I'm reading it and is not super cognitively stimulating and I'm going to be fine. So that's really the dividing line. So probably no, I would not be reading a book that requires corner marking. That's my method for taking notes in books because that typically means it's a book where I'm trying to pull ideas out of it. That's going to be too cognitively stimulating. I'm trying to think of an example here. Like I recently reread, we talked about on the show, Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food because I had like a book idea and I wanted to be like, oh, let me remember how he wrote this manifesto Style. But it's kind of a calming book. And I don't do any work myself on food or nutrition, right? So it's like the ideas in that book are not super important to me. They're not bumping up against other ideas I'm working on and giving me new ideas about things I should write about. So I could read that book in bed and just like Michael Pollan is calming and I'm fine with it, right? Like that was completely fine. But if I'm reading a book on, you know, some big new idea about tech theory or what's going on with AI or something like that. It's going to be far away from bed. So that's a good question, Jenny. I do care about it. Sleep is not always my friend, so I try to be as careful as I possible about what I let into my mind and what I don't. ([Time 0:29:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3a9c050d-09d2-4ed6-a478-edcb1d0a097f))