Dr. Cal Newport: How to Enhance Focus and Improve Productivity

welcome to the hubman lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Cal Newport. Dr. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, trained at MIT, and is currently a professor and author of many best-selling books

focus

ed on productive

focus

and how to access specific mental states to get the best out of yes in terms of Cognitive Performance and indeed in terms of performance in all endeavors, one of his most notable books is titled Deep Work Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

Deep Work is a book that has had a tremendous positive influence on my work life and, indeed, my life in general. because it explains exactly how to do the best job possible for me in the context of science and podcasting. But it includes tools that I and many others have extended to other aspects of their lives as well and it is a book that I greatly appreciate. I highly recommend everyone read it. Cal also has a new book that I'm currently reading called Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Fulfillment Without Burnout, and as the title suggests, it includes specific protocols for avoiding burnout and achieving peak quality. work for the longest amount of time Today's discussion begins with extreme practical steps that each and every one of us can use to

improve

our level of concentration,

productivity

and creativity.

Cal shares many of his specific practices and also offers some alternative practices for those of you who perhaps don't want to disconnect from social media or smartphones or email to the extent that he does. I found the conversation extremely helpful in the sense that I am actually on social media. I use email. I use my phone and text. very often, so I'm not someone who's willing to completely disconnect from those tools, but I share the sentiment that those tools can often be an impediment to doing your best work, so today's discussion isn't focused into hard and fast rules to

improve

focus and

productivity

. but there are a variety of different tools that you can select from a buffet of sorts to suit your particular needs.

Of course, we also look at specific research studies on focus-distraction task switching and context switching, all of which support the specific protocols Cal offers. If you are someone who struggles with attention and focus or if You're someone who just feels too distracted by the amount of stuff in your email inbox or the amount of text messages or what's happening in the world at the end of today's episode. I am confident that you will have the best science-backed tools, i.e. protocols, to access the mental states that will allow you to do your best possible work before you begin.

I would like to emphasize that this podcast is independent. However, from my teaching and research roles at Stanford, it is part of my desire and effort to bring information about science and science-related tools to the general public at no cost, consistent with that theme. I would like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. our first sponsor is Helix Sleep Helix Sleep makes the highest quality mattresses and pillows. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the fact that quality sleep is the foundation for mental health, physical health, and performance, and getting the best out of it. possible to sleep at night it is absolutely key that the sleeping surface, which is your mattress, suits your specific needs.

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Cal Newport Dr. Cal Newport, welcome Dr. huberman, it's my pleasure see him. I'm a big fan. I've been a big fan. Since reading deep work, I can't say I've adopted all the principles, but that's on me, not you, you provide an incredible incentive for why one should pursue deep work and slow productivity in the service of deep work. real high quality etc. some. Some of the protocols, as we'll call them, are incredibly easy to implement, others require some discipline, so I'd like to talk about both sets today, but the first question I have is: do you have a smartphone?

I have a smartphone, yes, well, here it is. The thing is, I don't use social media, so it turns out that smartphones aren't that interesting if you don't have any social media apps, yeah, how's that? So there's nothing if you don't have anything designed to try to grab. Your attention, the smartphone actually goes back to Steve Jobs' keynote smartphone from 2007, which is a really nice phone and your music you can listen to things on it and the interface of the phone is really good and look, there's a Maps app and you may like it. Look at maps as if they're actually a useful piece of technology that you're glad to have, but don't use much.

What about text messages? Do you send text messages? If so, do you engage in text conversations? It's more of a plan and find type tool, uh, I try well, so I try, I use text messages. I mean, that's how my wife gets in touch with uh, but I'm kind of notorious among my friends for my ability to capture. My attention with texting is really hit and miss because I go hours without looking at my phone, so it's not this default appendage. I think for a lot of people, if you know someone, you can basically assume that if I text them, they're going to get back to me right away.

My problem is I'll go three four hours, you know, not looking at my phone and then there will be text messages from conversations that people were trying to start and I usually just have to do it. Filing bankruptcy via text multiple times a day, look, if they really needed me I guess they would have called me, so I text, but I'm not considered very good at it. Some other questions about your telephone practices. This makes me nervous. um, is your phone in a desk drawer? um, while you're working, is it face down, is it face up, is the buzzer on, is it off?

Oh, you mean, whether I'm writing or not he's near me, yes, Ian, he could be anywhere. I'm just not going to be around me, so I have two different offices in my house, basically, so there's a home office, the pr is there, the filing cabinets are there, like the nice big monitors, there you pay taxes that guy of things and then I have a library and there is no permanent technology in the library, there is no computer there, there is no monitor, there are no printers, nothing like this. I have this kind of custom made desk that I had made by a company in Maine that makes desks for university libraries, so that's what they do, so I had this desk custom made to fit, uh, not that big of a space.

That's where I'm going to write. I am surrounded by books that I have selected very carefully, where each shelf is, like what type of book it has. I can look in different ways for different inspirations. I have a fireplace, so I can light the fire if I need to. I'll take my laptop there to write if I'm going to write on a computer and not my phone. go in there, yeah, no, you don't look, you don't look at a phone in that room and it just helps me, it's a ritual, right, if I'm there, I'm thinking that I'm creating with the It's kind of the reflection patterns that we would have been using for hundreds of years when people were thinking professionally if I want to be near a printer and I want to access a web browser and pay my taxes or whatever.

I'm curious about the fireplace. I have this theory based on my understanding of visual neuroscience and the fact that when we look at visual scenes that have some degree of predictability, yes, we go into an anticipation mode. our thinking is at least somewhat linear, etc., when we look at, say, ocean waves or, in a skyscraper, we are looking at the streets of, say, New York City and the cars are moving obviously not randomly, but at least for our visual, pseudo-random perception, you're not tracking anything in particular, the Mind goes into this kind of state where our thoughts become non-linear, they're not anchored to any kind of what I call DPO duration path. .

Type of outcome trajectory There's not a lot of neuroscience in this, but by the way, the same thing happens when you look at an aquarium, so I'm wondering about staring at fire, which is something that humans have been doing. for many, many thousands of years, because it has that random aspect, it tends to spark creativity, linear thinking, at what point in your writing do you turn to the fire and stare at it, oh, that's interesting, actually, there are a neurological explanation. when I usually shoot is actually when I read well, so chairs by the fire, but I think for exactly this reason, because when I read I'm looking to generate ideas, like well, what am I?

What is my conclusion from this? connection that you're making between this thing you're reading here and this idea over there, that kind of connection is a big part of my brainstorming and reading by the fire when the weather permits. AlsoI walk a lot, so I'm wondering if something similar happens, like when I'm trying to work on an idea for a paper or a math test or something, I almost always do it on foot and something similar might be happening where you are. When you encounter stimuli that are not completely exotic, so it's not, oh my gosh, you know my attention is being drawn, but it's you, you don't know, you don't really know what you're going to see and you also have that circuit squelching effect. .

As its motor neurons walk, it can tell me if I'm doing it right or not. Probably the motor neurons are working and some inhibition occurs in some of these key networks, which allows you to actually maintain the internal focus on a concept is a little better, so I do a lot of my original ideas focused on foot, but many of my fortuitous ideas will be with the fire lit, it is a victory. I read by the fire and so when I read that, I get a lot of my original ideas. I have this theory that the two opposing mental states facilitate creativity and productivity look like this and can you tell me if this map or not, something that you know is just like you described, our body is in motion, it could be running, walking , I could be in the shower or something, huh, but we're not trying to direct our mind toward a specific linear trajectory or outcome, it's not like solving an equation or a theorem, the same way we would if we were faced with a piece of paper or writing a sentence, a structured paragraph.

It is the body and mind in movement not channeled towards a specific goal. The opposite extreme for me is the body, the still, very active mind, which is similar to rapid eye movement sleep when we learn a lot and neural rewiring occurs and we dream, but for which there are also many examples of very successful creatives. that use those kinds of meditative approaches like um, you know, forcing yourself to be still and think, so it seems like you incorporate both, um and I'm curious because a computer scientist who writes code makes theorems and does a lot. of mathematics where you can't just improvise, yes, right and wrong answer, it involves what is your way of sitting and working on something that is linear and difficult, yes, it's interesting the right way you talk about it, because when I'm walking and This is something you can train, you know?

I once talked in one of my books about the fact that you can train yourself to keep your inner eye focused more stably while walking correctly, so I called this productive. deep work meditation actually uh and I practiced this in grad school okay so I'm going to work on a particular problem while I'm walking and then you practice bringing your attention back to the core problem and I don't know exactly. what's going on, but you get a little bit more ease in working with your working memory, a little bit more efficiency in bringing things in and out of working memory, so I trained myself to be able to write a couple of paragraphs in my head, maybe not words. but basically word for word, like figuring out how I'm going to do it or figuring out enough steps of a mathematical proof to capture a key idea, like okay, I know I'm going to solve this, so you have to sit down. and actually capturing that formally and yeah, to me, that's still working with notebooks, although when I was in grad school and I was just excavating these thoughts recently, we were talking before recording, you know, I just wrote this essay about what I learned. as a grad student that affected all my writing uh as a grad student in the MIT theory group that was just purified concentration from here is where all the deep work ideas come from, I mean, they were just world class concentrators, their method was very still there is more than one person on the board, so if you have two or three people looking at the same board, you will actually increase the level of concentration that you achieve because if you let your attention wander, you turn it off, there is a cost of social capital because now I've gotten out of the discussion about the blackboard effect, that's going to be a problem, so you actually keep your focus at a higher level and then when someone else is making their move, you know what?

What's wrong with this and are they working on mathematics? math on the board you're giving as much attention as you're capable of because you want to keep up and you don't want to be left behind, so it was like this trick that was discovered in the theory group that if you put two or three people on the same board to try to alchemize this knowledge into real mathematically precise tests, you get a 20 to 30% increase in your concentration level and that could make the difference if you are working on a very difficult test 20 A 30% increase could be the difference between Work it out or not in one of these situations where you're at the whiteboard or whiteboard and your other two people in front of it are interrupting you or it's etiquette, in that scenario, just let the person go up to their natural inclination, yeah, uh, raise your hand and shout, help whoever has the marker on the board, they're the ones talking, so go, okay, what's up with this? you say and now you're working, you're writing equations or drawing your diagram and everyone is looking and then when they're done everyone steps back and looks at it, then you can step forward, okay, but what if we did this and then you will still work on it?

So when I got there, uh I built some offices or fixed up some offices near my house, like one of the first things we put there was a whiteboard so we could invite IT collaborators because we can't work in theory, otherwise, What we need is a whiteboard right when I started grad school, they had just built this new $300 million Frank Gary design building for the AI ​​lab for computer science and, uh, linguistics, but half of it was science. of computing. I know those buildings because the peow and the McGovern Neuroscience C and those The buildings are very interesting people should check them out if they are ever in Cambridge Kendall Square stop by the Status Center yeah right down the street from the K sop , yeah, so the sixth floor was where the theorists were, this is where I was, so I.

I know they opened that building the year I started my PhD program and what they wanted to show me when they brought me into this $300 million building. Look at our boards, that's what they were proud of. They had filled the common space on the sixth floor, the theoretical floor with these freestanding double-sided whiteboards, it was like a maze of whiteboards and this is what everyone was so excited about. Yes, check out our slate coverage surrounded by a $300 million meal. I Tred, I was trying to explain this. to someone recently, uh, who has good whiteboards, for us like an astronomer would say, look, we have this big radio telescope like this, which will allow us to get data to work with that we otherwise wouldn't have access to, I think for a theorist Uh, that's it.

Why do you see a blackboard? Because you know that if you want to think at the highest level you need two or three people looking at the same thing, taking turns with the scoreboard or pushing each other to pass where they feel comfortable. I love this because we often think of visual maps that represent our internal memory stores and plans, etc. for productivity. I have always depended a lot on the whiteboard. I bought one for home. I have one here in the podcast studio. All of my podcast notes for my solo episodes are distilled. up to four notes of 8 and 1 half by 11 that are photographs of the board, yeah, and um, I don't use a teleprompter, um, I've been accused of using one before, I don't even know how that would work, um, but um.

It's extremely useful to use the whiteboard and I think because ideas are placed and removed so easily, there's something about writing on things that are vertical rather than on a flat surface, really because that's the way our visual perception projects . things we don't project the visual perception onto the ground that we are used to we experience the visual world primarily in front of us. I think the cognitive map and the visual map are inextricably linked at least for the people cited. So I think there really is something. So in the absence of colleagues sitting there and increasing our attention by 25-30%, what could be done?

Do you have a whiteboard at home? I certainly use the whiteboard. Do you work on it in the same way? like you would do in those early days alone in the absence of colleagues watching, yes, yes, so you work on it as if there was someone there. The trick is to use really good notebooks, that has always made a big difference for me. Paper notebooks. Paper notebooks. Yes Yes. although lately I've been playing with something notable, which is one of these digital notebooks powered by eink, so it's like a Kindle, but you can write on it, but it has infinite pages, so I've been playing with that recently, but I remembered when I was postto, for example, I found it recently.

I went and bought a lab notebook because they are expensive, at least for a postto, they cost like $70 because a lab notebook should have archival quality paper. bound, it's bound, yes, people may not realize that these lab notebooks are meant to be kept for many years, yes, you, uh, you're not supposed to tear the pages out of them, so they tend to be bound , so if you have terrible handwriting like me I just have to deal with it, yeah, you can't tear it off and it's thick, thick paper, acid-free archival paper, big sturdy covers, um, but I bought this because I thought, "It's Well, look, I'm going to take it more seriously because I think that's part of it too." What happens with the whiteboard is that your mind thinks about writing in the large vertical space as a public crystallization of thoughts.

I'm putting this up for people to see even if no one is there to see it, so you take it. more seriously, right, if I'm writing on a whiteboard in class, I'm not going to talk nonsense like I'm GNA, be very careful what I'm writing because you imagine there's an audience, this is something for other people to look at, you get a bit similar effect if you have a very nice notebook. You think look, I don't want to waste pages and somehow that helps with the thinking. So I found this notebook because I keep my old notebooks in my closet so I found it when I was working on a recent book I found it I went through it well and then I started marking uh this became a paper this became a grant this notebook I used it maybe for two years I only used it maybe about half of the pages are very careful and neat diagrams and scripts.

I think I found seven different peer-reviewed articles or funded grants where the core ideas in this notebook were, so $70 was an incredible investment because when I got working on that notebook it must have taken my thinking to a new level because it was a incredible concentration of real publishable results coming out of its pages. Yes, it seems like we would all do well regardless of our field. Low bar capture method where, if we just have an idea that comes to mind spontaneously, we can capture it in a voice note or, dare I say, a segment of phone notes, but then something like what you're suggesting, like a whiteboard, um like. a bound notebook where the moment we look at it it brings a level of seriousness, yeah, to our thinking and our actions like this is different than just texting, um, what we're really talking about, our kind of layers . of sophistication um but not in a snobbish way in terms of um higher productivity and quality to something like um I don't know gum wrapper on the floor levels of productivity in quotes well, I mean, I become a fan of this idea of ​​de having specialized capture for a specific type of work, so for example, I'm a big believer that you quickly want to capture ideas in the tool you use to do that job, so when I have ideas for an article or a book, I go to write the scrier, which is a specialty, these are the specialized software writers who used to write well.

I'm going to go straight to a scrier project and start putting them in the research section of that scrier project when I'm working on math or computer science. I could work out test ideas on paper, but I quickly want to get them into a closing document, so the markup language used to do something like applied mathematics papers is the tool we use to write papers. I'm going to move an idea there as soon as I can. I'm going to move proofs from a notebook to some formal marks like you would with a paper, you know, as soon as I would, so this idea is just something that I've been leaning towards capturing the notes in the tool that you're going to use. , eliminate the middleman in some sense, so it reduces friction but also puts you in the right headspace, like, okay, this idea I'm going to put it where I'll need it later instead of a system ofIf that's what it is, it's not funny, well, everything we know about neuroplasticity, which of course is the ability of the nervous system to change.

The answer to experience says that there needs to be some neurochemical or electrical condition that changes in the nervous system to queue plasticity and, as far as I know, one of the most robust is the release of the so-called catac colomines. dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine um dopamine because it's involved in so many things, it can be a bit of a distraction, so let's say epinephrine, norepinephrine, adrenaline ni adrenaline, it creates in the body and mind to some extent a state of alertness and often a state of agitation. but if you think about it in the absence of some neuromodulators like that, yeah, um, that change the conditions for the wiring of neurons, you know they all love to fire together, wire together, yeah, beautiful statement from Carla shatz, not Donald Hebb .

Dr. Carla shat said no Donald Hebb, um. But why would neurons need to change their connectivity patterns if you can complete the operation that the nervous system needs? It's the failures that really trigger plasticity it's the discomfort that indicates that conditions are different now, otherwise there's just no reason to devote energy resources to rewiring neurons and I feel like we don't learn this when we're kids, um and I. . I think as children we can learn a lot without that feeling of agitation where we get into these modes of seeking flow and I respect the research on flow and the people in which Bal, but I would like to talk a little bit about flow.

The only thing I really know for sure about flow is that it's spelled wolf backwards, so flow one, it's a very attractive idea, it's like Star Wars, like you have the strength and you're kind, you're doing things. mindless things and um. Awesome, but I can't flow through a Y document and extract the critical data. I can't create a podcast in flow, but when it's done it feels great, especially if you define the key metrics, so what do you think about flow? I'm not trying to beat it up, I just want to understand how it fits into the deep learning and deep work framework, if it belongs there at all, it doesn't have a great place in the deep work framework and this is what it was. controversy for a while and I knew Mahaley a little like we did, we corresponded and I knew Andre a little like we did.

I corresponded with some of them so I felt like he was um you know and they both actually died tragically in the last three or four years. I think that's very sad, yeah, I think both recently, um, Flo doesn't play a big role in the Deep the Deep framework, right, when I was trying to justify deep work, so why was it important to focus No distractions? He was drawing a lot more for work, because why is it important to concentrate without distractions? Well, you have to silence the neural. circuits so that you can isolate the circuit that is really relevant to what you are doing well, you are not going to get better at something if you have noisy circuits, this requires really intense concentration, so it is one of the big advantages. of deep work was that if you're used to that cognitive state, you'll learn things faster and I think Anders had to understand why, so if you're not distracted, I'm really concentrating hard on what I'm doing.

By trying to learn something new, you are providing the right mental conditions, but it is not a flow state. I always used to say that it's okay when your deep work doesn't flow because of this, like a lot of deep work you're trying to do. doing something that is beyond your comfort zone and that is going to be difficult, is a state of deliberate practice and there is a famous article about this where Anders explicitly says that deliberate practice and flow are very different and I wrote an essay ago years called The Father of Deliberate Practice Rejects Flow and again, people are really into flow, it's interesting.

I think people just like the idea because it feels good, but I mean flow is the feeling of performance, that's the way I think about it, like it's really hard to train. for certain sports, but then when you're actually performing, you're in the game, you can fall into the flow because then everything falls apart, it's very difficult to train the guitar, but when you perform in front of a big crowd, you probably maybe fall into the flow. mainstream maybe not, but you could be right, but it's the state of performance, not the practice to improve the state, so for me, Flo plays very little role in how I think about what I do as a cognitive professional.

It's just not something that comes up that often. I agree that we learn through focused work and that flow manifests itself during performance and sometimes so much so that people exhibit virtuosity and are surprised even at what is there and that is kind. I always think that it is something that is not expert Mastery virtuosity virtuosity seems to incorporate some kind of random elements of maybe even the performer hasn't done that before and they surprise themselves or something like that who knows these are these are words for um for something That can't be easily quantified in the first place, but in terms of deep work and going back a little bit to practical steps towards steep work, I also have to ask you why I didn't do it before when you were on your laptop in your library with your fireplace and these books is a beautiful picture actually that you have drawn for us in our minds um is the Wi-Fi connection to your computer on or are you offline uh is it connected um because I don't really care, you know, because what Is that what catches my attention?

I mean, the biggest decision I think I made technically speaking to be a cognitive worker is the lack of social networks like me. I think we underestimate the extent to which our problem with digital distraction is not the Internet, it's not our phones, it's specific products and services designed at great expense, they draw you back to them when you take that away, the Internet is not as interesting as if I didn't have a cycle of places to go. Just so you know, I can check my email, but I don't really know where to go. I mean, I could go to the New York Times, I guess, but if you've seen the articles, they change it once a day.

I just haven't set things up so there's not much that's all that interesting to me we've all heard of fomo fear of missing out I feel like there's another thing which is fear of missing out on something bad kind of like another anxiety Primitive anxiety inside of us that if we're not involved in social media or looking at our phone frequently or texting frequently, it's not like we're going to miss the party, we're going to miss the emergency, it doesn't sound like you suffer from that type. of everyday evils, yeah, I mean, it doesn't happen much, I mean, I have a phone, you know, a standard, I mean, I have my phone, I guess if I'm working away from it, yeah, I guess that's true if there was an emergency, uh. but this was the case for a long time, we didn't have smartphones until relatively recently, you know, 15 years ago, so we were used to this until yesterday, essentially, there are periods of time when you are away. out of contact like if you're in a restaurant with someone you're out of contact until you get back to your office like we're fine you know we weren't plagued with emergencies that led to disastrous results because we couldn't hear about it at that time you go to the movies like you're out of touch and it's a couple of hours until you're in touch again so I don't know it's not something that has affected me that much so maybe I'm working without my phone around a lot of people have this answer , they start sort of catastrophizing, like what if this or this or that happens, and I'm thinking, you know, I survived before, my parents survived without that, my grandparents survived without that, um.

I don't worry about it as much, you know, and some of it maybe just that this doesn't bother people as much as it used to due to the fact that I don't use a lot of these apps or have my phone, um, but it really bothers people. people, what's up with this, what's up with that, what's up with this and I don't know how much of this is just maybe I don't realize and how much of this is people backing away explaining why they need their phone? why they need to look all the time, but it happens to me a lot, yeah, well, maybe they're upset and you don't know it because you're not looking at your phone, that's it, hey, I'll tell you what that is. blessing not knowing how upset people are with you, yes, it's a blessing as a semi-public figure.

I'll tell you, yes, I can comment on that, but I won't. I'm on social media and I enjoy it as I started posting on Instagram and then expanded to other platforms including podcast, but there is a threshold beyond which it becomes counterproductive, I think there is information there, that the questions that people ago are often informative, it's like finishing. a class and ask if there are any questions, sometimes the comments that people bring are really informative for both of us, where they may have some misunderstanding but also sometimes some really fantastic ideas, yes that's it, but I completely agree that This is a very precarious space.

Um and I'll just tell a quick anecdote from years ago. I gave a quick lecture at Santa Clara University south of Stanford and I was talking about this topic. I recommended your book and then a student came and said no. Understand it at the time I was in my early 40s he said you don't understand you know you grew up without social media and the phone and then you adopted it into your life but we grew up with it and when my phone he is speaking for himself in the first person when my phone loses power I feel a physical drain inside my body and when it turns back on I feel a lifting inside my body so I would love to hear your opinion on whether or not you think The phone and maybe also social media are of some way an extension of our brain.

It's almost like another cortical area that contains all this information. It's a version of us. This goes into Notions of AI that we can also talk about. We're involved in Ai and writing about AI, but you know, when the phone is used in that way, it really is almost like a kind of neural machinery, yeah, I mean, there's two ways of looking at it. Yeah, so there's this kind of cyborg image, I guess it's like you're extending, you're connecting to this neosphere like you have this kind of extension of digital network information and what's happening there is also much more. pessimistic view that is not, no, that feeling is the feeling of a moderate behavioral addiction, so you will hear the same thing from a gamer.

Really when I'm far from being able to play well to make my bets or do what I really feel if I don't feel like myself and then when I'm close to it and I can play make some bets play some poke or whatever feeling of the chips I feel like I feel like the chips are right they would say it could be that both things could be true. I think the moderate behavioral addiction side is truer than many of us want to admit. Actually, I like it, it feels bad because moderate behavioral addictions build this feedback. response loops and then you activate the dopamine system when the anticipation because what's there are things that have been designed for you to get these kinds of highly attractive stimuli and then you see the release of those stimuli in this really pleasant piece. of glass on a piece of metal I'm going to carefully press this icon whose colors have been chosen because we know that it will affect various parts of our neural alert systems to make it as attractive as possible um and I'm You'll see something there that will generate some type of response emotional, so of course when you see that thing there you want to use it and when you can't, it's a detrimental dopamine response, you're like this, this is not good.

I feel uncomfortable and I think that's a big part of this too, because I've had this, you know, I've had this discussion with some people and by the way, I see both sides of this as being great. advantages of what people do with these tools is just that it all gets mixed up with all these disadvantages and it becomes very difficult, it's like the alcohol at the neighborhood bar is too strong, you know, and people go there to socializing and coming home at 3 in the morning you know, uh, passing out, you know, it's like the balance is off, not that there isn't something good there, but the balance is off, so It gets pretty difficult to navigate, so I think some of that is what's happening, especially with the younger generation that grew up on this, so, by the way, I think the cultural norms are going to change around this.

I think we're going to think about unrestricted use of the Internet, not as something we simply bequeath to young people such as turning 10, but something that we're actually much more careful about, probably something that will be post-pubertal will make a lot more sense once once you have had more brain development, aonce you have had more social roots. In a way, we understand your identity, etc., because we recognize that you know the flip side of plugging this into your brain is that yes, you have access to more information, but it also pumps that into your brain, so I don't know, I'm leaning a little more. towards pessimistic reading because I know many people thanks to my books who have really reduced the impact of these things in their lives and do not do so on the other side of that transformation, they usually do not report great impoverishment and experience experience that they do not they inform um I'm less mentally agile the information at my fingertips is less I'm missing out on life, there's usually this thing that comes out of the fog on the other side of where they are like, oh, this is good, so you know, I have a little bit of suspicion about what exactly this mechanism is.

I think you're right about the article on moderate behavioral addiction years ago, when I was starting my lab, I had grants to write and I found The Telephone to be quite intrusive to that process, so I used to give the phone to someone in my lab and announce to them everyone in my lab that if I ordered it, I would order it before 5:00 p.m. that day I would give everyone in the lab I think it was a $100 bill my lab was pretty big at the time I was a junior professor they weren't sorry uh academic institutions not to be named they pay us a lot despite what people might think and um and it was difficult several times throughout the day or more.

I thought I really wanted to see that thing, but at the end of the day um, I'll tell you no one got paid. I got my phone back, but it's amazing how much work you can do when that thing is out of the room. I mean, it's my super hour. I don't work as hard in the sense that I don't put in long hours like I don't. Constitutionally fit for long hours, this was never my thing, huh, my brain gets tired, right? I mean, I'm good at four, four and a half hours a day producing good things with my brain, probably Max, but you know, I don't use my phone much, I don't use the Internet much and I prioritize it and a lot of things just get done. , they build up over time, you know, and there's this feeling that you must be burning through the cracks and you've got all these things happening, but again I think people underestimate and they don't, they underestimate the impact.

I don't know about this. It's not just about the accumulation of time you spend looking at your phone, but also that network switching costs a lot because, like the phone, it is very good at inducing a network switch and that is expensive time consuming energy and consumes neural operation. I'm going to shift my focus from this to that like we can't do that in two seconds, right, it's a difficult process, it takes a while, so when you sit down to work on something really difficult you have that feeling of being the first. . 15 minutes this is terrible, you know, and then after 15 or 20 minutes you get into the rhythm.

I always assumed that part of what's happening is that it takes a while for your brain to start sorting itself out. Okay, so what semantic networks do we need? to start activating here oh we don't need this let's inhibit this we won't do it anymore it takes a while so what happens then when you have a lot of these quick checks on social media are you responding via email? and ahead is that you have this catastrophic, disastrous buildup of aborted task changes happening correctly, so it's not just the total time you're looking at, say email or social media, it's the 15 minute window that you have to add around each of those checks where you have this cognitive disorder that really builds up and then you realize there was no point during my day where I was more than 15 minutes away from looking at something that induced a shift in network on the data site I like that I was looking at. email and slack checks and knowledge workers this came from Rescue Time, the software company, the average average interval between checks was 5 minutes, it's the median and the mode was one minute in this data set, so which was like we were checking all the time. it means that you've never been in a state in your day where you don't have a fuzzy cognitive space where you don't have partially you were switching to this task but then you go back to this task before it's over, but before you can do it completely.

If you focus on this task, you look back here and spend the whole day in a state of cognitive disorder that will reduce cognitive performance, so you get rid of that. I mean, I always say that's one of my advantages. It's not that I'm doing anything smarter. I'm just avoiding sometimes the stupid things, just keep holding other people back, you get rid of that and you feel like you're on the best neurotropic in the world or something like oh, me. I'm just doing this and I'm doing it pretty well now that I'm done with you, why this didn't even take that long.

I mean, I think people underestimate what's going on here. I'd like to take a short break to acknowledge. Our sponsor element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't, that means zero sugar and the proper ratios of electrolytes sodium, magnesium and potassium, and that correct ratio of electrolytes is extremely important because every cell in your body, but especially your nerve cells, your neurons depend on electrolytes to function properly, so when you are well hydrated and have the right amount of electrolytes in your system, your mental and physical functioning improves. I drink one packet of element dissolved in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning and while I exercise, and if I sweat a lot during that exercise, I often drink one packet of the third element dissolved in about 32 ounces of water afterward. of exercising. in a variety of different flavors, all of which I find very tasty.

I like citrus fruits. I like watermelon. I like raspberry, frankly, I can't choose just one. It also comes in chocolate and mint chocolate, which I think taste better when put on. in water dissolved and then heated. I tend to do that in the winter months because of course you not only need hydration on hot days and in the summer and spring months, but also in the winter when the temperatures are cold and the environment tends to be dry. , if you want to try element, you can go to drink element written el.com huberman to try a free sample package again, that's drink element.com huberman, yes, I would like to go a little deeper into the concept of context and task switching. more, I think the brain has something like a transmission system in which you know, for people who drive and have driven, you know the amount of energy that needs to be used to accelerate a vehicle to get to you.

I know that a higher gear is very different than the equal amount of speed increase in a given gear, right, so it's like if you hear this if you're not familiar with the transmission, you say it sounds like it exists, it's easier. At higher speeds, well how could it be that you are burning less fuel at a higher speed? It's not exactly like that, but I think the brain has these kinds of transmission systems and what you're describing with people switching back and forth. and checking email and phone etc. and getting back to work, what should be at hand is like constantly going up and down the gear system, yes, trying to get to a certain destination and be sure you can getting there, but you're going to burn a lot more fuel is the least efficient way to do it, you want to get into that deep rhythm and I think when we hear about flow I feel like at least for me that's the kind of notion of flow that I'm looking for or fall into that deep rhythm even if there is some friction within that rhythm of the challenge of the work that I'm doing it's about not thinking about anything else, it's really about focus, yes, right, and the word flow is just a wonderfully attractive word, um, that I think gives us the false impression that we can just fall into things like a square wave function, sit down, pencil and paper, and there's no possible way for neural circuits to work that way, no, let's make up the term. and I am you.

Tell me if the term makes sense. I made it up as I went along, but, uh, neurological semantic coherence, this will be my fallback term for flow when you're working on something difficult. It's not that you're in a real flow state where you lose track of what you're doing, you're concentrating a lot, but that's why I say the semantic coherence of neurons is that you get to this place where the kind of neural networks relevant semantics are all, um, those that are activated are all relevant to what you are doing and over time you have inhibited most of the unrelated networks that were activated before and then you have the feeling that it's difficult, maybe I'm not losing track of time, but like I'm all focused on this, you know, I'm dealing with the bear here, the mathematical equation, the book chapter, whatever it is, um and so it's kind of different from the flow, but it's also different than Linda Stone had the term partial continuous attention, which is what Is that cognitive disaster?

I'm constantly switching networks back and forth, so we'll call it neurological semantic coherence. I'm going to coin that term because you have this semantic neural network coherence in what you're doing and that's the feeling I get after this difficult problem and it can be very difficult to do. I mean, I know the feeling of trying to solve a math test for me, for example, could be very difficult because I mean, what does it really mean? I feel like in your head when you're solving a math test, a lot of times you keep this here and then you try to go to the next step by doing this and it doesn't work, but you have to keep holding this here, which takes a lot of concentration, okay, let me try this didn't work either, but it looked promising, so now I need to go back and mentally update this configuration and now let me try this, so there's a lot of stuff to keep in your working memory, um, and keep them loaded while you test an extension and then evaluate how it works without it, so it requires, um, just internal concentration, which is not pleasant, but in neurological semantic coherence, it's everything that's happening in your world, you know, it's that in that test, so like Maybe that's what we should be proposing, what people should be looking for is yes, forget about flow, but also remember like this the default where you're like the participants of the rescue time dataset checking email once every 5 minutes , that's cognitive nonsense, that's crazy, that's just like you.

You're trying to figure out how to play soccer and you're covering one of your eyes and wearing a 50-pound backpack. It's like handicapping your abilities here for no reason so what's in the middle is this idea and that requires Focus you know it requires deep work yeah we're playing soccer and then about every three Downs we run into the stands and we chat trying to figure out something challenging with your spouse or whatever, then we come back and try a totally different game scenario. right, um, I run the risk of throwing out too many analogies and too different stories, and I will briefly say that I went and saw the play in New York with my sister this year, I think it was Harry Potter and the Cursed Child or something, um Not really I really enjoyed the play, but the ensemble was incredible and they had this magical library.

I think it's very relevant here, where essentially the book you open has a certain theme, I don't know, maybe it's spells. or something like Harry Potter again, uh, fun show, but the cool stuff didn't resonate too much with me either way and then the book around it changes its theme, but it's related to that Central book, interesting and then if you watch a particular thing like maybe it's potions or something I'm inventing and then suddenly the books, the books around it change, they become more specific, there may be a distant but related idea that could lend itself to creativity, so This is how the brain works in cognition: we enter a frame of a certain discussion or a certain topic and the books on the shelf change according to their relationship based on memory of the past, what is happening now. and plans for the future, I think every time we look, we switch context and we look at, you know, a raccoon video on Instagram or our calendar and, oh, there's that thing, the books become very scattered, so when we go back There is much more friction to him.

It takes a lot more work or neural energy to get back to that. These narrow states of cognition explain exactly my experience and the way I think about it. Yes, yes, because it takes time to load. These secondary and tertiary semantic ideas are relevant and now they are there for you to extract and then as you change, you have to change all of this, that requires a lot of concentration. I mean, I wrote. This article once caused me a bit of trouble, no not trouble, but slight trouble, uh, but it was called forChronicle of Higher Education, um, and the title they gave it was: Email That Makes Professor Stupid, which wasn't mine. title, you basically called every single one of your colleagues stupid, we all checked email, the dean at the time called me for lunch, but he was actually here and it was like, hey, this is real, I'm okay with this, um, um, but what was actually, what was argued in that article is essentially what we do in a university, is partly what we are supposed to do, try to teach what the life of the mind is and how It works, and we've sort of forgotten it, so what?

Maybe we should think that in universities we explicitly need to not only teach how to think but also model the life of the mind at the highest level and so this idea that we just allow Professor Serot to drown and um emails and uh homework and being distracted, you know, it's the main war that every research professor has is how do I fight administrative overload until I'm famous enough to get an assistant like that, this is the big problem and I was Making this University proposal should be a concentration of the citadel. I said if you want to bring the best academics in the world to your University, just tell them.

Here it is at the top of our contract. You will not be assigned an email address like your own. We're going to have Nobel laureates coming from all over the country to come to this place, so I was making this argument: um, we should think a lot more about thinking, we should talk about it more, we should model it exactly like the kind of thing you're talking about. speaking, um, but we don't, it's much more content. Focus, but actually this should be something else that we get into specifically, this is how you actually use the mind to produce innovative, interesting, high-value new cognitive artifacts.

It's a very difficult thing that we're asking you to do, but you can apprentice here because this is what we do and we've mastered it, we'll teach you how to do it, but we never have that kind of meta conversation. Kind of a conversation about metacognition. I always thought it would be important. I think you would get much better results if that was part of what you learned in college, how to take what you have in your head and really put it to work. Know? really draw from it your capabilities or even high school level or even elementary school level.

I agree. Do you have kids, yes, they have smartphones, no, yes, how do they feel about it? Well, I mean, they're not old enough. However, it's a real problem, um, but they're not going to be happy with me, they'll probably hate me soon, now they'll love me later, like my mother used to say, basically because I, you know, I'm convinced. Having spent some time thinking about this writing about this doing some journalism about this talking to a lot of the experts who like it, I think where are we going to end up, where are we going to end up, where all the arrows of the relevant social psychology research that I have been following.

This research since you know, 2017, this is 2017, this is about when you see the first one. Warning signs are emerging that we need to be concerned about the potential mental health impact of these tools, especially social media and smartphones, on young people, and I can rightly follow this. I have a talk. In fact, I gave it to my kids at school. I'm not happy with this. I tracked how this research evolved and you know, like any literature, it's controversial at first and then you start to see consilience between different lines of evidence and I think everything now in the last two years is starting to come together. idea that we really don't know if this is bad or not, I think it's just an old idea that researchers left behind and I think we are landing on unrestricted use of the Internet before puberty is risky and as the new standard will be uh, after puberty is probably the right time to be given a device that gives you unrestricted access.

We're talking about 16 being probably the right age, so this doesn't make me popular at my son's high school. The eldest son is about to die. I think in two or three years that will be common sense. This is the direction I see the research and advocacy literature going, and I think there's a solid basis for this because you're a computer scientist. Can I ask this question: What about video games? I'm not a big consumer of video games. It's been years since I played one. In fact, but video games are very different from smartphones and other technologies because they seem to put. at least the children I've observed play with themselves and adults in a very narrow attention trench, yeah I mean there are definitely problems with that, I mean look I'm not a social psychologist I just interpret one in my articles . but I've looked at this literature a lot, there's a kind of gender breakdown that has a lot of overlap, when you look at the potential harms of these technologies, uh, young adolescence, right, pre-teen young adolescence.

I tend to see social media as a sign of cognitive discomfort for young women and girls, and that video games are actually the biggest culprit for young men and boys, there's a bit of a difference here because with the impact of social media , The content of what's happening matters in this image, so, um, what I'm seeing, the engagement I'm having, how this affects my social life, this is part of the mental anguish with video games, it seems to be more well an impact of simply. Discordant passion and obsession at just the right time because games can be incredibly addictive, so the problem that young people have is that they play all the time and I stay up late because I have an iPad in my room. and I'm 14 and I'm going to play fortnite until 3 in the morning because my brain can't handle what you are, what you're giving me here, so it's less of a content concern than just a time concern. concern, right, that seems more solvable to me, you know, it's my solution with my own children.

I don't care about video games. I'm a computer scientist, but I didn't say anything that's online, anything that's free, because if it were free, that's what it means. uh their business model involves you playing it all the time so you can increase the load or whatever. They have Nintendo switches like I like Nintendo. Well, Nintendo Switch, here's a $60 Zelda game that someone spent 5 years creating or whatever, you can only play those. you play games for so long in a row before you know you're tired you go back to playing um they don't have an addictive response if they get an iPad with a game on it they'll just like to play it until their eyes bleed because they're meant to be addictive so I'm wary of video games, but everything is just a game of use, so you stay away from the more addictive games, I think it is a much easier problem to solve than social networks. media question earlier you talked about books um I still read um hardcover and paperback books um what do you think about audiobooks and learning through an audiobook uh versus the paper in front of you flipping a physical device or Kindles?

Don't know. If there is any real research on this, I've seen some, but I'm curious what you've found and what your thoughts are. You could also speculate. Yes, I will tell you personally. I can only make fiction. audiobooks, because when I'm in a nonfiction experience I'm very used to constantly looking for connections and ideas, you know, so I can slow down and then speed up and then go back to something I just read. um, so I really have a harrowing experience trying to listen to nonfiction audiobooks. Fiction is fine, that's cool, let's put a thriller on it, you know, audible, cool, you know, I'll listen to it and I think some of this might be particular to me.

Engagement with books, which is what you know, I'm a writer and a thinker so I'm constantly looking for ideas, so I might have a different engagement with a non-fiction book than someone you know just listening to one of my books but I can only make audio fiction that makes sense to think about what works for me and what doesn't. I agree. I love stories and fiction on audiobooks. Ideally you would consume it on a long trip or hike. But nonfiction requires that. I take notes and I look at things in their respective spatial layout type and yes, in your most recent book, you describe this concept of pseudoproductivity, it's pseudoproductivity, a general term for some of the things we've already talked about.

This context switching or pseudo-productivity is something that includes other categories of limiting ourselves as well. I mean, I think it's more specific than that, so for me, productivity was the answer to where we came up with knowledge work for real work. The dilemma is that it is a sector that you know uses your brain primarily to create value. It is a sector that emerged as an important part of the economy around the middle of the 20th century, when it emerged. All the definitions of productivity we had were inspired by agriculture and agriculture. In industry, in agriculture, we can have ratios of bushels of corn per any acre of cultivated land, and in industrial manufacturing, we have models of ratios per hour of labor input, so you could measure these things.

We also had clearly defined production systems, so then you could say if I change this about the production system, what happens to this number and you could do a gradient to Cent okay, I do this, that number goes down, let's not do that, but I do this change, go up, that's a better way. Constructing it like that was the dominant way of thinking about productivity, because basically Adam Smith comes out knowledge work that doesn't work well because I'm working on five different things, it's different than what you're working on, um, how I am. Managing my work is completely ausc, right in knowledge work, organizational ideas are left completely up to the individual, how you manage your work and your workload and collaboration, that's up to you, that's up to you, there is no one number to measure, there is no system to improve. so I think it was a real dilemma.

My argument is that what the management class essentially came up with is p productivity, which is fine, in the absence of being able to be quantitative about it, we'll use visible activity as an indicator of useful effort, so there's that. Because we see you doing things that you're better off than not, the more we see you doing the better, I call that pseudo productivity and I think that's implicitly how we've been organizing knowledge work management since the 1950s and when you say skill with people. doing things, this is a combination of busyness with actual productivity, yes, and the problem arose when we had this general way of measuring approximate productive effort, which was not very good, but whatever, I mean, I want to see that you are in the office and you're doing things the problem was the front office, it's the revolution, because I'm essentially a technical critic.

I see everything through the lens of technology in my writing, we have computers, we have networks, we have email, pseudo productivity may not be sustainable in that context because now with something like email and then tools like Slack I can demonstrate effort on a very fine level because I can send an email and reply to this jump to a Slack conversation. Now I can do it at a very fine grain level um and essentially everywhere and anywhere throughout my day I can be demonstrating work at home I can be demonstrating work because we have mobile computing, we have the smartphone revolution um , so now there is the ability to constantly demonstrate effort at all points in our days and that's where I think the wheels came off the bus and led to this point that got worse and worse starting in the early 2000s and moving forward in the pandemic of knowledge worker burnout and the nihilism of like what is happening with my job like all I do is zoom all day what is happening I think pseudo productivity plus the front office is Revolution did not work well together and you can see this by the way if you look even at the books on productivity. this big change happening in the early 90's versus early 2000's is like a complete change of tone in the early 90's it's stepen cvy being very optimistic it's like how are we going to self actualize and carefully choose the most meaningful activities to fulfill all Our dreams? for all of our roles in the early 2000s, now we have an email, you have David Allen saying, "Oh my God, we're so overwhelmed with homework," all we can hope for are these little moments of Zen in the day if we can automate the way we're just checking these widgets at least we can find some cognitive peace.

What happened in those 10 years was the office ofRevolution and now we felt like we had to constantly demonstrate that visible effort, so you know, I think that's where we got to. In the pseudo-productivity plus technology issue, recently my podcast team was in Australia and my producer and close friend here, Rob Moore, ordered all of us to get rid of social media on our phones, except for one guy who published the announcements for our weekly episodes. Um and it was pretty brutal at first and then going back to social media actually turned out to be more challenging, you really experience the friction coming back in the other direction and then you experience the lack of friction and that's where it's scary.

It's very interesting the way the brain can adapt, friction leaves something behind, friction comes back to it, and I think for people listening to this, I bring this up because I think, of course, a lot of people listening know that they have a job that they really need to focus on that they may be having problems with productivity and burnout etc. I think a lot of people use their phone on social media because it fills their life, they know it provides some enrichment, and they're not necessarily committed to specific projects, but I guess through the lens of Cal's new poran lens, let's call it , one could argue that those people almost certainly have untapped creativity, untapped resources within them that, um, they don't know about yet because they're essentially using that energy elsewhere.

Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of people it's plugging the void. You have this void in your life because there is unfulfilled potential. An unsatisfied interest. Living out of alignment with the things that matter to you. the classic kind of social media life catastrophe and before this it was other things, there were other toxic substances or other types of distractions, it's a way for some people to essentially put a screen over that void and it just does it. It's bearable enough to be able to get on with life, and it's true that if you just tear it away you see emptiness and that's really difficult, right?

I mean, because I did this experiment for one of my books. I conducted an experiment with 1600 people. and everyone turned off all their social media for 30 days 30 days 30 days right, these are young people, older people, a whole mix, okay, a whole mix, not just college students. I recruited them from my newsletter readers so they weren't college students and it wasn't a formal investigation, you know, I made the call right, so this is not a random sample, but I made the call and I said here, I'm going to guide you to through this and then I got a lot. of information, so people reported how it went and this was the first thing I heard was that it's very difficult at first, right?

So who are the people who were successful for 30 days versus those who weren't and those who were? It wasn't successful, I tended to just try White Knuckle, it's just like I don't like how much I use social media. I'm just going to stop because it's bad and I don't want to do anything bad. I'm just going to like, you know, wait at the table White Knuckles, they wouldn't last 30 days, the people who were successful took my advice to pursue Alternatives incredibly aggressively in those 30 days, so it's like learning new hobbies and joining to things right away. like it was really structured about your day, um, go back to exercising, learn to knit again, a lot of people were like, oh, I learned about, I forgot how fun libraries were, like you can walk into this building and like everyone The books were free and you were there. just take whatever and it's okay if you don't like the book because you didn't have to pay for it.

I'm going out with friends again. I'm fine every week. I'll let you know that we're going to have drinks with this person every Thursday morning. I'm going on a run with this person, the people who aggressively tried to implement a more positive alternative through self-reflection experimentation, lasted the 30 days and more, so I realized, oh, I see, what's going on here it's you. I have these unmet needs these tools can give you a kind of simulacrum of satisfying them I need I'm a social being I need to be connected with people well I'm texting and I like to make comments on social media, it kind of touches on that a little bit a Just enough so that you don't feel hopelessly alone, but it's not really satisfying. um I have a need to like to see my intentions manifested concretely in the world that humans want to do this right.

You know, posting these things and people are responding is kind of a simulacrum of actually creating, so it's kind of a satisfaction that it's enough that it's not just intolerable, right, um, and what happens is that If you remove that, you actually have to fill those things in the right way, so I'm not going to do that now. Socializing on social media, but I'm doing my best to sacrifice time and attention on behalf of other people. I feel the social void in the right way now. I don't really feel like I need to go back. I am actually building by making my intentions manifest.

I'm learning skills and building things now, this kind of pseudo construction and collective attention economy of social media. I will post this and you will like it. I'll like this, um, no. I already need that to fill that void, so it's like you have to fill the void first, so you know, five years ago I wrote a book that was about reforming this part of your life and a lot of the book had nothing to do with it. With technology. but about rebuilding parts of your life and honestly, on my podcast, one of the big topics we talk about, which is crazy, I'm a technologist and I write about trying to find focus in a world that distracts us.

Call Deep Life, which is just building a meaningful life 101 and it's crazy that my podcast talks about that, but on the other hand it's not because it's the podcast that people turn to when they're fed up with the digital world. and it turns out that if you can't get the anal world to work properly for you, you need something to keep you from staring into that void and then the digital world will do it well enough, it's good enough to keep life tolerable, there are many The discussion today Nowadays about ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, sometimes U minus H minus hyperactivity, many children have a true clinical diagnosis of ADHD, so we want to be very sensitive to the fact that it is a real problem for many people, many adults.

ADHD um, but nowadays people talk about ADHD in the same way that terms like um depression trauma uh gas lighting and um Etc. are discussed in non-clinical territory. People with OCD also use clinically, right, right and um, and I'm not putting down that it's just that. We have a kind of dilution of a deeper understanding of what these things really are and are not. What are your thoughts? I realize you're not a psychiatrist, but what are your thoughts on the idea that many people think that maybe they have real attention problems, they've built those attention problems through neuroplasticity in their system, which means that their system probably worked, the nervous system probably worked pretty well for focusing, but they engaged in enough task switching that the brain circuits involved in cognition were optimized for um, this very distributed cognition, um, as opposed to , um, narrow focused attention, and what are your thoughts about, um, just the amount of stimulant use on college campuses and in adult populations to try to overcome this?

I feel like there are a lot of, um, attempts to use pharmacology to even out the level of distraction to try to make that distraction not seem like a distraction, um, but you know, this is an area that I hear a lot about given the nature of the things that I cover on the podcast, I think a lot of These problems are induced by the phone, right, um and I think the problem, yeah, is unsolvable since you don't need pills, you need a different phone. Relative relationship. My optimistic hypothesis is again this non-clinical difficulty maintaining attention like in your job or if you're a college student or whatever, um, it doesn't necessarily represent some kind of knock on wood like a wholesale natural rewiring like that.

I basically rewired my circuits in my brain to be some sort of distributed switching processor. I think most of this is persisting in that much more malleable area that is affected by moderate behavioral addictions, so we have parts of the brain that are part of these, like feedback reward loops that must be malleable, right. I mean, that's how it's supposed to be. we can have very rapid learning about what's going on in our environment and how we're supposed to respond to it and this is what gets hijacked when you develop these behavioral addictions and that's why it's very quick to change, but that malleability means that I can go back to it. change it, so I think this prompts me to have to keep checking my email or my phone.

Again, you develop a moderate behavioral addiction because of standard reward cues and that's one part of the brain that you can. It's hard, but it's not your entire brain, it's a social media brain now and that's just the brain you have because you're exposed to this. It's a matter of knowing how to get the stimuli out of your life by doing the same type of training. I would do it, ex exposure to boredom, like getting used to the idea of ​​feeling that urge and not actually doing it. You can work blocking apps as if there are things you can do.

This is kind of standard. It is painful. Take two months and then, like you. We're doing better, so I think we have a large stratum of subclinical attention problems that don't represent complete neural rewiring, but are absolutely expected outcomes of working with malleable CU reward circuits in the brain. We can fix them just like we do. you can, if you know that you're, you're gaming too much or compulsively eating junk food or something we don't say, your whole brain turned red from junk food, it's like no, you have this ex, this particular Q cycle. that we need to work on, so maybe I'm being optimistic that you know the brain better, but it would be extraordinary if over a 10-year period your entire brain somehow rewired itself in a way it couldn't.

Maintain more focus I totally agree with that statement unless you are a young person and you grew up in a distracted world and your brain is optimized like the young brain is for the conditions it is in and then I think you have a real problem, yeah, um. which does not mean that it cannot be rescued through the use of tools, protocols, pharmacology, nutrition, good sleep and, if necessary, prescribed medications, because there are cases of prescribed medications in certain cases for ADHD and, as I understand it, , you I know every time people say wait, aren't those drugs just meth, isn't that just speed?

They are amphetamines in most cases and the idea is to increase the deployment of C, certain neuromodulators, the ones I mentioned before, as a means to induce neuroplasticity. that the focus state becomes more of a default state um so I think young people are in trouble. I think we care about young people. I think it's like putting them in some kind of hole, we know. in the visual system if you take an animal or a human and put them in an altered visual environment, the visual system changes and your perception of the visual world becomes inaccurate, and the way I think about this cognitively with respect to attention, analogy would be I think we've been for the last 10 years or so, 10 or 15 years, we've been raising kids in a sort of um House of uh funh house, mirrors that are anything but fun when you're looking at yourself and your legs. shorter than and your torso is long, so everywhere you look you get a distorted perception and trying to navigate the world through that distorted perception is very, very difficult, you can do it, but it's a lot of extra work, that's what Which I feel like we do.

I have done it to young people. I'm very concerned about that too, yeah, yeah, and I guess I don't know what your opinion is on this, but do you think that at the university level we've been not explicitly but just implicitly, uh, professors in general, we've been slowly adapting the difficulty of what we're teaching, etc., because maybe there's a reduced cognitive ability to focus, which is like the key skill for this kind of artificial learning thing. I know a complicated job at the university level. I think it would be an interesting experiment to find out whether we have had to implicitly simplify things in order to generally maintain rating distributions where we are normatively comfortable.

I mean, do we see the sign? However, that is my interest. we still see the sign if we look back a generation 20 years ago versus now I don't know for courses of the type that I teach or taught until very recently I still teachbut I was leading the Anatomy of Neurons course and there's a lab module so students dissect brains that hold real human brains um that's real physical contact that can't be recapitulated um um digitally you just can't do it you can try use virtual reality, but it's not the same, I mean, how would you do it?

I like it if you're a neurosurgeon, you learned on a virtual brain and then you do surgery on a real brain. No, no, such a thing should happen. I think my experience with this is perhaps most relevant with respect to social media where I teach neuroscience, yes, and I use a variety of length clips, you know, the actual 902, you know, the seven minutes, the two hour podcast and a half that you know we have, the solo podcast, the podcast is four and a half hours, um, no. I know how many people listen from start to finish, but I think having a variety of different lengths really helps.

And my team told me that I have a Tik Tok account, although I have never logged in there. You know, I think Tik Tok represents. the end of the kind of bubblegum level um information SL entertainment and they really achieved a loop that can handle about 30 to 60 seconds of information in a format that tickles the brain just right to keep swiping, liking, commenting and sharing, yeah , um and me. I don't think that's anything like real understanding or education, yeah, I mean, that's nothing like real understanding or education, yeah, I mean Tik Tok in particular, I think that's something where people What's wrong about Tik Tok is that they think there was a real uh.

Algorithmic innovation, which is not the case, as far as I understand, the machine learning algorithm under Tik Tok is probably like some kind of relatively standard multi-armed band, you know, intermittent feedback reinforcement algorithm, everything they did was to remove all the rest of the noise, so you know if you're Facebook or something like this, you're trying to use algorithms to select things, but you have all these other legacy structures, you also have to try to satisfy that there are friends and you know you want to show them things that your friends like you more than other people and there are groups that you join.

Tik Tok just got rid of all the noise, so we're going to do all we're doing is optimizing watch time for us, we think we don't know, but I think watch time is the main thing they're optimizing, just they want to optimize it, watch time and everything, all these videos, they all just exist as multi-dimensional dots in this kind of semantic cloud and all we're doing is just showing you things and then you swipe something else, swipe something else so that when you undo out of all the noise of a machine learning algorithm I don't have to satisfy that I follow this person on Instagram or that this is my friend, all I have to do is optimize this number, how long did they look before swipe?

It turns out that, oh, it's very easy, if you do it, for a couple of hours you're going to focus on these subregions and this huge multidimensional space of things that just tickle this particular person's brain, you know, and it's very cyber because now I am the Tik Tok user, I am the content creator. I get immediate feedback on what works and what doesn't. Very quickly I find these regions particularly rich in this. kind of a cyber space, so it's like Tik Tok just purified something that was just basic machine learning, but it just purified what we're doing here and that turned out to be enough to create what is probably the most addictive Force that We have seen. in the digital world for a long time so Tik Tok is optimized for dwell time yes that is the right idea because it is not public so we don't know exactly how the algorithm works but people have been studying it like a Skinner box, you know 100. phones and we look at all these accounts looking at the variables, it seems like that's largely what it's optimizing for, I mean, how long did you look before you swipe right and that's all?

I mean, it's not like this was both, which was smart. Tik Tok and also the reason I've been arguing that it has destabilized the entire traditional social media narrative is because the traditional massive social media players of the last decade had this first-mover advantage on these giant real social networks, like Twitter and Facebook. Instagram had these massive networks of people's preferences. I'm following this person and this person I follow, uh, and they could leverage these real social graphs as a great source to produce interesting content, and this was a big breakthrough. Advantage because you can't, it's hard to get 100 million people to use something. now Tik Tok got rid of all that, we don't want a social graph, you as a user don't have to declare anything, you don't have to follow people or say who your friends are, it will just start showing you things. and that was more compelling than you could generate with a social graph, but now there is no first-mover advantage, so as the big social media players follow the Tik Tok model, which is much more dynamic, let's try to select based on algorithms, not who you are. follow or who your friends are, they are much more vulnerable now because Tik Tok could come and do this without having to spend five years getting people to unfriend them and now if someone else could come and do this, I think the most Importantly, the players are giving away their competitive advantage, which is this, uh, social graph IP that no one will replicate again, they are giving away that advantage and now it's a free-for-all playing field with all sources of attention, so don't I do.

I don't know, I think Tik Tok accidentally destabilized the decade of social media that it had been defining until recently. I think what I find so interesting about social media platforms like Tik Tok is that, sure, it makes sense for kids and teens to use them. I grew up on Snapchat, etc., but when I see my peers who you know, we call ourselves adults, people in their 40s and 50s, essentially they like to play children's games or participate through these platforms that are and are not necessarily childish , but just showing that um or rather that their adherence to SL to them just proves that this is tapping into some central neural circuitry that exists in everyone um, so while it might be shaping the young brain a lot, these are adults basically eating food. junk all day. um, which begs the question, you know, I think while there are a lot of different ways to eat and it's not a topic we want to get into right now, lord knows it's a great way to create a lot of content on the social networks that debate what diet to follow. omore carav or vegan Etc. um, the notion of intermittent fasting, um, limiting the part of the day in which one eats to 6 hours, 4 hours, 12 hours, um, is interesting and perhaps has some applicability here, um, what do you think about just not turning on?

The phone may not even turn on Wi-Fi if people are not as disciplined as you are with the laptop or tablet, for the first 2 hours of the day or 4 hours of the day or for a part of the day, something like that . you're taking a social media fast that doesn't last 30 days, you know, which I think for a lot of people is going to evoke a high cortisol release, uh, just the idea, yeah, you know, this is an idea that I've written down. . before you know it, in deep work, I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom, that was the whole idea, so the idea was, um, boredom in itself is not, I think, laudable.

There's a reason it feels distressing when things feel distressing, that's usually an evolutionary thing. sign that something is happening here, but what I was arguing in that chapter was exactly what you're talking about: you should have a few moments every day when you are free of distractions, even though you can access them and want and like them . a little bit each day, 20 minutes each day and then maybe a longer session once a week, like a couple of hours. My argument for that was that it's about breaking a Pavlovian connection in this sense, so if it's every time I get bored, I'm missing. of novel stimuli I get this release from the phone your mind is really going to do that Association of that's what we always do if sometimes you don't it's a different cognitive landscape right, your mind is uh sometimes we have the distraction sometimes we Don't is that so?

That's a much better place to be because now when it's time to focus on something, you know your mind is like it's been here before, like we don't always have the distraction, so you know this is going to come back, right? You know? In early 20th century psychology, there's probably a more neuroscientific way of thinking about this, but it's like breaking out of Pavlovian loops, if sometimes at the end of the day I'm exhausted, it's Instagram time and I'm itchy, but other times Sometimes I'm bored. I'm in line at the pharmacy and I'm not looking at the phone, my brain learns that yes, we don't always do it, so the idea is that you know that if you make boredom more tolerable, then you are much more likely to be successful by doing things that are boring but difficult and I think deep work, for example, is boring only in the clinical sense that there's a lack of novel stimuli, you're just doing the same thing for a long time, so I've always advocated for that. it's like you shouldn't be too uncomfortable with boredom, like, don't go looking for it.

I'm a big believer that boredom is where all creative insight comes from. I think it's a strong evolutionary signal, like leaving this state, but you have to have a certain tolerance. I wonder if we need a different word than boredom. Are you familiar with this notion of Gap effects in learning? These Gap effects are similar to the effects of neural processing during sleep. Focused attention with some agitation triggers neuroplasticity. and learning, but it is during sleep, particularly deep sleep, the rapid eye movement states of deep breathing, perhaps in some forms of meditation that the real rewiring occurs and then there is this literature on Gap effects that have been shown for music for mathematics in many things where If people say they are practicing new scales on the piano, for example, but it could be any skill, and then intermittently a bell tells them that stop and do nothing, the hippocampus, which is involved in memory learning, repeats the action sometimes in reverse.

As it occurs during sleep at a rate perhaps 20 or 30 times faster at the neuronal level, we are not talking about boredom, what we are talking about are pauses during which we are perhaps obtaining accelerated neuroplasticity, the effects of the gap certainly accelerate The learning. I've talked about this on other podcasts, but I'm wondering if this thing you call boredom or not, being in line to do some shopping, yeah, and not taking out your phone while the Checker is, you know, scanning the purchases and just not doing much of nothing, it's quite possible that what we were working on that day or the day before is being processed on the Hippoc campus at an unconscious level at a much faster rate when we look at our phone. would inhibit those Gap effects that are really beneficial, yeah, well, I mean, teachers feel this all the time, at least a lot of the ones I've talked to with peer reviews, so I don't know if you've had this experience, but it's like review an article.

I often have this experience where, when I first read it, I feel incredibly frustrated, like I don't quite understand what they're doing here. Math doesn't make much sense to me and often it will be the fact that I come back later, well let me write down what I have so far and your understanding is much better, so there is this feeling that maybe something is processing. I took it very seriously when I was there. uh especially in post stock like when I was at the top of everything I do in my life is produce value with my brain every day.

I would do what I call minute walks because I discovered minute walks while I was a great student. I read it because Charles likes all kinds of things, you know, except the beret, like pretentious gratitude and stuff, but I was really into the book Walden, a really influential book for me, so every day, when I was walking back, I lived on Beacon Hill walking from MIT, so people who know Boston, they're crossing the Longfellow Bridge. I wouldn't say anything more than observation of nature. That's what I'm doing. I'm just, oh, the ice is thinner on the Charles today, like look at this tree or the leaves partially returning.

I think what was happening was right after I had been writing it on the board, uh, I think it was letting things process properly, so I had this explicitly in my routine, uh, a lot of times where I was fine, no. I can think. about work at all, I can't do anythingmore, but you know, I'm thinking about the tree, I'm thinking about the water as if it were some kind of minimal cognitive elevation and I'm wondering if that's what was going on there. That was a very productive period of my life, yeah, I feel like the last five 10 years, thanks in large part to Matt Walker's book Why We Sleep and others' advocacy around sleep.

We have come to understand that sleep is essential. for mental health, physical health and learning, cognitive performance, physical performance, to the point that people now devote immense amounts of attention and resources to trying to get the best sleep possible at night, whereas before it was the "I'll sleep when I'm dead" mentality. to that and I would love to see a world where people don't embrace the notion of boredom per se but rather the notion of gaps or lack of external stimuli entering our eyes and our cognitive system as a means of becoming smarter and more creative.

To improve we just need a language before this and I think that's what you already know, often language is a separator when it comes to health and performance tools and something that I've really strived for is trying to create a language that doesn't be linked to anyone who illustrates what something is for, so maybe it won't be an easy task, Cal, but maybe we'll just have you rename boredom as neural rewiring or epox or something. I will come up with the term in which I write all my writing. the path is based on taking things that people already know intuitively in their gut and giving them a two-word name, just having the language that really matters, like oh, deep work, oh, okay, that's how this activity.

I knew it was important, but I didn't do it. It doesn't have a name or digital minimalism like, oh yeah, I know what that means, like it's a different philosophy, but there's everything, so I have a name related to the gaps that we're talking about, but only for one. Of the other negative effects, so we have the positive effects that you talked about, which are the consolidation of learning and the acceleration of learning, we had one negative effect which was the Pavlovian connection with distraction, the other one that I wrote about before is the deprivation of solitude, so so I'm using a different definition of loneliness than the colloquial one.

Most people think it's something physical. I am simply isolated, but there is a cognitive psychological definition of loneliness that means absence of stimuli created by other humans. Right minds, so I'm not taking in information that comes directly from another human mind. Not having a period with this Solitude, so not having a period in your day when you are free from creative stimuli from other Minds is a deprivation of Solitude and is a real and partial problem. It's a real problem because when we process information from another human brain it's all hands on deck. Deck, right, I mean, we're very social beings, a big part of our brain is dedicated to this, right?

So it's a very cognitively costly activity when I'm trying to understand what another human is saying. I'm simulating his mental state. I'm trying to understand where they fall in this kind of social hierarchy and one of my arguments was, um, when you spend all day. in that state it's exhausting and anxiety-producing and, like until we had smartphones and ubiquitous wireless Internet, the idea that you could banish all the loneliness from your day is ridiculous, it's just impossible, so of course we had many parts of our day where our brain It wasn't like going into fourth gear like the kind of social processing mode, but smartphones make it possible for you to be in that mode all day and one of the things I hypothesize is that part of the Anxiety increases with age. of smartphones is brain exhaustion, so that's another negative effect of the constant.

Now we have two negative effects for the constant stimuli and one positive effect for the absence of the constant stimulus, so I think we are arguing here that not always. be on your device, yes, I agree with one of my favorite neuroscience literatures. I think most people have heard of the so-called critical period stages of development, when the brain is essentially hyperplastic to any input, for better or worse, this is a stage of life called childhood um and then, Of course, people along the number 25 after the age of 25, plasticity is possible requires more effort, tension, etc. and then sleep, um, etc., but we know from really beautiful studies that if you deprive someone of sensory information, um, even for a few hours um and we're not talking about sitting in a completely blackened room um without input, but you basically limit the amount of sensory input in the following period, you have the opportunity for a hyperplastic response to any stimulus and this just makes sense if you understand the basics about signal, noise and the visual system and the brain, you just It means that when there's a lot of stuff going on in the background, it's harder to see the things that matter and the things that the brain should Rewire to a very computer science neuroengineering type perspective, but yeah, I'd love for you to produce a description of Two words about this, it's not boredom-induced plasticity, it's this induced silent hyperplasticity or something like that.

I don't know, maybe you can riff on this together at some point I'm not trying to move into your space, but I have a very practical question and I'd love to have a little more information about the structure of your days, but are you a list maker? Do you wake up in the morning and make lists and cross things off and then decide what the key items are on that list. No, I'm a time blocker, yeah, yeah, so I don't believe in to-do lists much. I like to deal with reality. time available, okay, I have a meeting here, I have to pick up my kids from school, here are the actual hours of the day that are free and where they fall, okay, what do I want to do with that time?

Well, okay, now that I see that there are many intervals in the middle of the day here they are short maybe there I will do many small things not only demanding oh these first 90 minutes of the morning are like the main time that I have uninterrupted, okay , then I'm going to work on writing, so I've been a big believer in this since I was a student, like you give your time a job instead of having a list that's kind of orthogonal to what's actually happening. in your day and then as you go through your day you say what do I want to try to do next, which I think is much less efficient.

I'm going to try your method. I try to structure my days as much as I can. but it never works at all. It works um, do you work late at night? The exception is if I'm writing on Deadline. Sometimes I will like it if I need to write more. I can do a night writing session which I got used to through long experience. I used to write my blog post at night. After my kids went to bed, they are older now and don't go to bed as early, so the only thing I have left that I will do after 5:30 is I will occasionally do like an Evening Writing Block 90 minutes, um, but this is what I call, by the way, this whole philosophy.

I call it schedule productivity and I've been doing it since I was a graduate student. Setting the work schedule, that is my commitment. I work in these hours, um, and then I work. After that, for everything else, it controls even what you decide to bring into your life because you know I can't go beyond a schedule, and it drives you to be more innovative and how you manage your time and schedule yourself. You have to be efficient because you only have these hours here, uh, that's been, you know, a sign for my life since I was in my twenties, set the schedule and don't work outside of those hours.

Now it's your turn to solve anything. you want to do you have to do that job you want to become a teacher find out how to do that job you want to write books while you are a teacher find out how to do that job that you don't have the option to do you just dedicate hours to it and innovate a lot. I think when you have limitations, where do sleep and exercise fit into your schedule? What is your typical bedtime? because I think today we expect people to understand that exercise and cognitive function are inextricably linked, yes, and we will all live longer lives and be more mentally sharp by exercising, yes, so I mean my main job I do it with weights before. -Dinner well and this was an innovation in recent years, it's fantastic psychologically for me, this is a trans, from work to spending time with family after work, so I'll do like 45 50 minutes, uh, gym in the garage, you know, we. built during covid after I finished work before dinner and once you get used to that it also forces you to say I have to finish work because I have to finish this before dinner but then I will also do quite a bit of walking If it's not a school day, so I'm not on campus.

I think a lot on foot. You know, I take my kids to the bus stop, which isn't particularly close in the back, so I'll be walking a lot. but that's when my serious exercise now is always before dinner, so I want to be up, you know, in our room at 10: yeah, and then at that time I don't track, so I have insomnia problems, which actually has been the key factor in a lot of the things I think about, especially with slow productivity, is that I'm very cautious because I can, without any control on my own, I just can't sleep, sometimes I fall asleep or I fall asleep, I fall asleep, yeah, I mean.

I used to do it really badly, not so badly now, but you know, it comes and goes, that really affected my thinking about productivity because it seemed to me that the definition of just chasing it with a bunch of things wasn't really on the table. because if my notion of productivity depended on me, like every day, being able to just work on a bunch of things. I am very busy, I have many commitments. What would happen if I couldn't sleep? I wouldn't be able to do that, so I naturally drifted towards a definition of productivity which was: it doesn't really matter if you work tomorrow, but it's important that, like this month, you work as if you were writing a book, it doesn't matter if you work on your chapter. tomorrow's book in particular, but like this month, you have to spend a lot of time working on it, so it was like an insomnia-friendly definition of productivity had morphed into this idea of ​​slow productivity that takes your time, so it's interesting.

So the sleep issues really influenced the way I thought about work and put me on much longer productivity time scales. I try not to depend on any particular day, being critical in what I do. I don't want the high stress situation. I don't want something like that. I'm going to work 10 hours a day for the next 10 days. We're going to make this deal happen as if I can't operate in that space because I'm worried every time my brain might betray me and I'd like to lose sleep for a couple of days. I think it's really important that you share this because while people's challenges differ, I think a lot of times people listen to the content on my podcast or other podcasts and think, Oh my gosh, I have to get everything ready. just when, in fact, most of the tools and protocols that have been discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast are in response to a particular challenge that I've had or that other people close to me have had and I love this, well, I .

I'm sorry you suffer from insomnia, we have a series on sleep with Matt Walker where he introduces some great tools that we haven't discussed on the podcast yet. I'll just text you and call you. with a short list of them and I hope they help, but since we cover insomnia in some depth, I think it's important for people to realize that they can be very productive with the hours they have and the moments or hours of high clarity focused that they have um even if they're not sleeping well even if they're raising young children um because that's the real world and certainly that's the real world of deadlines and academia but um family and um colds and flu and travel and jet lag. and arguments and all things happy too Vacations, so it sounds like you're really good at fitting your day around what's going on around you, but you have a certain kind of time commitment.

Am I right in assuming that you have at least a period of, say, 60 to 90 minutes of real work, what you would call deep work, let's say at least 5 days a week. I know that might be an understatement, but it seems like that's who I am, that's what I'm getting out of this. That's the goal, so for me, depending on the season, it's how extreme I can get, so the busiest season would be like a teaching semester, but even then I'll make sure it starts with 5 days a week. Deep work and non-teaching days are more than teaching days compared to summer, for example, where everythingWhat I do is mostly deep work, there are no meetings on Mondays and Fridays, all administrative work is, from midday to early afternoon, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Thursday, um, everything else is deep work, you know, just locked in for hours at a time, but I want if I don't have five days, five days to start the day with deep work, I'm not happy, because I mean , I follow. Going back to this is fine because I'm not going to be able to do it. I mean, fortunately, insomnia doesn't bother me, it hasn't bothered me in years, but the threat of it completely shaped the way I think about things and because I know I'm never going to have an Elon Mus type of energy. , like I could take on seven companies and make things happen right.

I just don't have that ability. I've always focused on The Long Game and for me the long game comes from putting in your time for deep work. You know, keep working on the things you do best and get better at it. You know tomorrow doesn't matter, but if you're doing this more. days over the next four months, that's going to matter, you know, and that's why I often think about the productivity of my own life on the scale of decades, what do I want to do when I'm 20? You know, what do I want to do when I'm 30?

Do you know what I want to do when I'm 40? Know? And that helps me. At 30 I had many small children. Yeah, I mean, the amount of time you could spend working in total is a lot less right, but you could. I still think about what I want to do when I'm 30, how do I make that happen let me make sure I'm pushing on those things, then everything else that I can adapt to I can give here and there, you know, it allows you to be very adaptable when you think about what I want to do, you know, for the next 10 years, it also means that you're not on a random Tuesday berating yourself because, for example, why didn't I get three more hours of work and stuff? becomes a meaningless question and what you care about is what happens in the next decade, which is a long game, it's not about, you know, rushing today, it's about I got back to deep work day after day when other people were distracted. by Tik Tok you know like it's GNA whatever it is coming back to what matters again and again years ago I was in a SL battle science competition and one of my tools wasn't really the nicest I would just suggest to the competitor, a great TV series, so I sent you a cable which at the time was great and we want some, they were some, but you know there's something very addictive about those, yeah, Netflix shows.

You know, I mean, they're incredibly addictive. Just by watching the slider for the next episode appear, you can skip the intro, it's like they've dialed it in. Wow, so I suggest to competitors all the time that they don't do it anymore, but, and who knows what role. they played, but I realized how annoying they could be when I started watching Ozark. I found myself waking up in the middle of the night, maybe to go to the bathroom or something, and then I started another episode of Ozark. wild and um, I wonder if one way to reverse engineer productivity or hack our way to productivity would be to think of all the ways you would benevolently deploy distraction for a competitor and then ask yourself which of those you're still participating in? and you think of yourself as in some kind of competition with the highly distracted version of yourself, yes, because I think a task, I think for us today is to try to think for the person listening. this who is not an academic um who is listening about all this distraction that enjoys some social media you know how they can achieve the best version of themselves in terms of productivity but also presence for the family um presence with themselves um Etc and um and if you're not in a competitive environment, um, so maybe it's about setting up different U mental maps of self and then trying to pit them against each other and be the best version, literally.

I think that's interesting, like thinking about what that would be, yeah, what. what I like this idea of ​​thinking about my competitor you know what would really give me an advantage you I'm doing this I I but I would also add here this is like a slower productivity idea um you find out what I really care about you find out what you'd have to do to really show up for that thing and then if you're doing that, give yourself a break on everything else too, you know what I mean, it's like I'm like that with WR if I'm having time to write.

I have to write. I feel very uncomfortable when I'm not writing. I just write articles, books all the time. You know, I'm always writing. If I have time to write, then it's like. Well, the rest of the day, maybe this week was some kind of loss, like the kids were homesick or there was a crisis at college or whatever and I'm just trying to keep that under control and have good productivity habits. and For example, don't hit the switch too much and don't get too distracted, but still have your productivity set target, like finishing at 5:30 every day, uh, and block out the time and try to be reasonable with that time , limit the damage, but if I do.

I'm doing what ultimately really matters. I'm going to be pretty happy with it, so it's like moving the definition of am I happy with what I'm producing away from a quantity metric and this is more, am I adding the quality reps? I know and believe that in weightlifting this would make a lot more sense, right, it's like, there's a certain amount of time under load that each muscle group needs to be in and if I'm doing that, I'm happy if you know how to lift weights, right? TRUE? There's no notion of why I can't, why I didn't exercise five hours plus this or that, so sometimes I try to think of my core intellectual work that way, as if I'm doing deep reps on what matters most to me. , which for me is almost always writing, and then, like the rest, I just want it to be like damage control, like I want to do the other things well and not stress too much about it and you know there are the productivity habits, which are They try to do the things that matter and protect them and then there are habits. that's all about let's not let the other things get out of control um, it's a little easier for me, you're easier on myself when I think about it that way, do you listen to music while you work?

Not well, the data certainly backs it up. not listen to music or if you listen to music listen to music without lyrics yeah you have to train to even get used to it I mean even to get used to music without lyrics you have to get used to it I guess your brain building the filters um some people I've I know they have trained to work with lyrical music, which I think took them a long time, but I met a self-published novelist who likes a million words a year, which is crazy, and he explodes because he has four kids, plays to Metallica with NASCAR headphones and I like how you can write like that.

I think he just trained his mind. He has like a pure auditory filter that's adapted, I guess, or maybe his books aren't like that. well I don't know but I like silence or background noise but even background noise is difficult. I find it difficult to hang out in cafes, for example, I really like the lack of stimuli. Do you use visual blinders? You know, like some people actually. do this, it's like a hoodie and they'll really like to try to tunnel into his vision, which makes a lot of sense from a neuroscience perspective. I mean, your visual world is strongly limited by the narrowness or breadth of your cognitive maps, yes.

I mean, I just have my spaces designed right, so where I write in my library at home, all the interesting windows are behind me and here I am looking at Windows, it's right next to the neighbors and they just usually roll down the blinds when you say this, it makes me want to know, scream that you know so many people who think they have attention deficit problems. They've probably been put in compromised environments that include smartphone apps and things I mean. like there is absolutely no way they can concentrate, in fact maybe the fact that they can concentrate is miraculous given the limitations like trying to run in shackles, yeah I mean look we're used to this.

Physical things, right, if we make an analogy with physical fitness, we are so used to all these details, as if they matter, like what you eat, how you sleep, the details of how you train, when you train and how much we like it. We're so used to this idea that this really matters. We have no intuitions for cognitive development or application. We like to treat our brain. I guess because we associate it so much with a sense of self, it's just this kind of ineffable connection with us as a person we don't think of it as much as an organ as a muscle or something, but we don't have a sophisticated vocabulary at all to think about how you do things with your brain, which is if we are in the work of knowledge, that is the whole game, like the whole game, this brain takes information and adds value to it, alchemical value from things outside the mind and people who alchemize the value from muscles.

I'm a relief pitcher. Baseball. I know my whole job is to take certain muscles in my kinetic chain and use them to move a ball really fast and if I'm really careful with this, I can have a multi-million dollar deal for us. Those who do this with our brains don't have any of these intuitions, it's like you know you have to work hard, you know, and we're on our phones all day. I mean, this has to be the physical equivalent if you had an endurance athlete who smoked all the time like this is crazy, as this directly counteracts complexities like what is the actual activity that matters for value production, but with cognitive things we don't have intuition like this, yeah, when I was a junior professor, this was in San Diego, not Stanford, my girlfriend at the time she told me, she said you're like a professional athlete, that was before that I got the job, and she told me, and you're trying to go from the minor leagues to the major leagues, go from a you know, uh, you know, like the second string of a starter, yeah, it's like you have to deal with what you're doing like a professional athlete with their game, like prioritizing sleep, prioritizing food, prioritizing time, prioritizing, you know, and we, as you point out, we don't do that with the mind, we tend to cognitive things, we tend to assume that we just flip a switch and like focus time, and I think that's partly because there are certain things, like social media, like a great movie, like certain social interactions that can immediately and completely tap into our attention, yeah, unlike a marathon or where I'm sure I could probably finish the 26 miles or whatever 26.2 3 I forget what it is, um, if I had to do it right now to save my life, but it's not like I could just flip a switch and I think that's the kind of warning here is that the kid who loves video games can definitely concentrate, yeah, give them a video game that they like and boom, they're focused, so it seems like there's a problem when they can't , but they know they can correct things, it's obvious when you say it, but I think it's worth pointing out that these things need attention, they need work, yes, which means it starts with Vocabulary starts with intention, starts with examples , you know, I mean, there should be a book on how to think that we give to everyone, learn and learn well, yeah, how to use your brain, like the user manual, you know, that would be very useful.

User manual useful and I think that in elite cognitive professions this is passed down as a tradition and people discover it well. I mean, this was like my experience training at MIT in the theory group was you know everything was focused on getting the most. outside your mind and that's why it is transmitted from person to person, it was also in the culture, it was in the way people acted, but most places that do cognitive work don't have these cultures, yes, but Here it is the upside, though here's the silver lining, right, if you're one of the few who care, it's a big plus right now, it's a big part of my success.

I don't think it has the most power. brain, but I like it, I care a lot about trying to get the most out of it, like pushing it to the limits, like the reps I can, I can actually RPM, I can really get the most out of it, you know, so that's a plus. as you meet someone who is listening to this, you start to worry about your brain, how it works, how you want to take care of it, what you want to get out of it, you start to worry about this, um, you will get advantages compared to the person. right next to you, suddenly in your office or you know in your graduate program it's going to be like what's happening here, yeah, you know, a little superpower and sometimes there's a little social cost up front, yeah, when I did the change from being a let's just call it from a non-serious student to a serious student in theuniversity um and I was coming from behind.

I had to put in a lot more hours and partying was something that happened quite rarely. I still did it, but it was isolating, I actually experienced it. alone in a studio apartment, I mean, it's isolation, you're going to miss out on certain things, there are some deprivations, but eventually you end up in a position to do a lot more with your life, yes of course, what do you want? said a moment ago also reminds me of David goggin the David goggin no, no introduction needed um he's been quoted as saying you know nowadays it's easy to be exceptional because a lot of people just get distracted and waste time so you put a 20 % more effort. to be more focused or to uh towards your fitness program and you're going to outperform a lot of people, yeah, so it's not that hard to speed up, it just takes some practices that are socially challenging to implement.

It's funny, I had the same experience as you, I was a college student, yeah, because I cared. I couldn't wait to finish college and I liked doing things with my brain. I wanted to be a writer. I want to be an academic, but you know, that takes a while. There was a lot of work and I really cared a lot, so I was a frat brother for a day and I went to the first meeting where they were doing, you know, the pledge or whatever and I remember just not for Me and and I walked away Like No I'm going to go because this is going to distract me like hangovers and this and that and you know, I want to focus on writing I want to learn how to do this, it's pretty isolating Yeah, um, and I know some people who were in the Greek system who benefited from it too. enormously from that.

I wasn't one of them, um, but I definitely resonate with that, so not everyone, yeah, I'm saying not everyone has to be. as intense as you and I were, but worrying about your brain gives you a lot of options and if you're trying to catch up, there's almost always a social cost associated with it, but eventually you get joined by a lot of other people and you find that other nerds who have been, there are a lot of nerds, the others, the other nerds, misfits and people who, um, who are they, you know, looking for something, uh, they come around you if you find them, uh, I'm interested in this concept of exhaustion, yeah, um, we.

I hear about burnout um we associate it with too much adrenaline lack of sleep tired and connected um feeling of disconnection the poet David White has a beautiful poem um I forgot the title about burnout where it says I think the cure for burnout is sincerity um And I always like it to be a little more abstract than the kind of stuff we're talking about today, but I like that because there's something about sincerity, really leaning into something with a true desire to be there and explore it regardless. how hard is that, the opposite extreme of burnout, yeah, well, I mean, I think burnout, if we think about knowledge work, like people with office jobs, my diagnosis there, it's not exactly the amount of work What influences is the type of work. because I think what's happening, what's really been upsetting people in these jobs is that workloads are increasing, in part because communication is low friction and we always want to demonstrate activity because of pseudo productivity and People always ask us to do things. we say yes, everything we say yes comes with administrative overhead, i.e. talking about the thing but not actually doing it, it's like engagement emails, it's engagement meetings, um, because our workloads are older, what happens next is more and more. of our time has to serve these administrative expenses because everything we say yes brings with it its own overhead, adds up and adds on, so now we spend more and more of our day talking about work and not actually doing the work and then doing it.

Even worse, it's not that all of these overheads are lumped together, but that they are spread throughout the day, so it also puts you in that state of constant distraction, which makes it difficult to get work done, which I think is burning out people. people. Now in this state where they say I spend most of the day talking about work, sending emails, attending meetings, there is very little time left to make progress on the work and then the workload becomes bigger and bigger. , this alone is upsetting. right, it feels like you're in some sort of unnihilistic experiment like what is this?

Why do I have six hours of meetings? Do you have to make up time in the morning and afternoon, perhaps after your kids go to bed, to try to make progress? So now you also have a direct problem with the amount of work, so you work longer hours, there is a loss of energy, but I think that psychological part of this can't make sense, like I'm checking email once every two minutes and spend six hours on Zoom, like doing very little real high-value work like this can't be the right way to work, that's what I do.

I think the burnout epidemic right now comes from the psychological component. We all know this is stupid, but no one says the Emperor is naked. We all know that the amount of email meetings I'm doing is a big waste. my salary like this is a highly trained brain like I can write these reports or this code or create these trading strategies but we are all accepting this so I think the absurdity of the current situation is creating so much burnout as it is just that we also have that adding these extra hours in there, as a direct addition to the amount of work, is almost analogous to taking professional athletes or would be professional athletes and asking them to do a bunch of other physical work so they don't show up. cool for the game and little micro injuries and distracted and um and no one admits that this doesn't make sense and everyone gets injured and no one talks about it so it's absurd that it drove people crazy and it's driving people crazy.

But it is very difficult because certain things like smartphones are very useful in the hospital ward. It means that doctors can communicate, nurses communicate much faster now, parents and children can communicate who is going to pick up to the kids, no, you got stuck in traffic, you go down this alternate route on Google Maps and it goes on and on, so it's all interwoven with things that that's also highly adaptive, it makes it difficult, yeah, you know, it's almost as if the work of being a selective filter is half the work of trying to download the cognitive systems that would allow you to do deep work, yeah, well, in the workplace it's even harder than that. true, because part of the problem is email and slack, but let's just say digital communication.

I spent a lot of time studying that closely from the point of view of a technical critic, the introduction of digital communication in the workplace and the problem is the reason we are checking this all the time is not a de-optimization of individual habits it's not oh, you should check this less frequently what happened is that when we introduced low friction digital communication in the office there was this emerging consensus that said great, let's just use ad hoc messaging advertising as our main way of collaborating, we can just solve things on the fly, I can be like Andrew, what's going on with whatever, and you can respond to me and I can send it back, this was very convenient, the activation cost was low and that's how we started collaborating on work .

Now what happens is that as workloads increase, we now have a lot of things going on at the same time, they're all generating these asynchronous back and forth conversations, most of them have some kind of time sensitivity. So if I send you an email and tell you what's going on with the guest coming in later today, we have to resolve this before today, um, so now it's not just these messages going back and forth with all these different threads. But I have to keep an eye on my inbox to make sure the gap isn't too big.

This isn't a failure of habit. It's not a moral failure. It's necessitated by the fact that all of these back-and-forth conversations have to happen. keep moving forward so it's hard then if you're in this system to get yourself out because this is the way we're collaborating it's these asynchronous messages back and forth and I can't disconnect from that without slowing things down from a standpoint game theory mathematician. I see that it is a suboptimal Nash equilibrium, it is not the right place, it is not the right way to execute this, the utility value of this configuration is low, but no individual can implement a different strategy that will have a higher value, we are trapped in her. right, now it's very difficult for a person to just say, I want to check my email less frequently, because it's systematically built into this overactive hive mind workflow and the only way to break free from the suboptimal setup is to basically have the organization In itself it seems like a really high cost change in the rules of the game.

This is how we collaborate. Now we no longer use email freely. Instead, we will use this system. Here you go, it's a very expensive top-down procedure to release. We're moving away from suboptimality so much like the world of work, which is part of the reason this is such a difficult problem to solve. I tried to write a book about this recently and it was very difficult to gain traction because it is not easy to solve this as if no individual can move. get out of this and you have to put a lot of energy as an organization to try to change this, so in a sense email is a more insu problem than social media on the phone because at least here this is my commitment to this and I could have these moderate behavioral addictions but it could make differences here in my company oh this is much worse this is like a systemic problem it is an emerging deterministic work impact in a cultural social economic system that was completely dynamic and going in some way We really didn't expect it, so it's a really difficult situation sometimes, especially in the work world, how do we get out of this constant distraction?

That's why I wrote some deep work and thought, why don't people just? Do this, that's why they don't do this just because it's not that easy to get this time back, well it's like when I was a grad student at Postto and I focused on eating pretty well, I mean just clean food, and people she spoke. less about it at that time I was also very committed to exercise since I was 16 um people were less committed to it in academia at that time now I think it's common for people like me I go to my yoga class. doing my zone 2 cardio I go to the gym, you know, men and women do this, you know, I remember having like sneaking to the gym like, um and um, you know you felt a little weird if you were the one who brought your lunch to you know, the pizza lunch.

There is nothing wrong with pizza. I love pizza, but I was trying to eat well. I've done it for a long time. I feel better when I do it and I'm grateful I did it, but you. get some weird looks like oh you have an eating disorder or something that's what people would say so yeah um now people would probably look and oh that looks better than pizza people are starting to understand so I think there has to be a culture change, yeah, um, and I think there's been a cultural change around food and exercise, certainly, food, meditation, sleeping, um, I think people are a lot more accepting and actually encouraging their workers. and coworkers, um, to take good care of themselves to function better. more, yes, I think this will be the next revolution and it will be a revolution that will be unlocked, we are talking on a scale of like a trillion dollars of pounds sterling when we do knowledge work and we have this revolution.

I call her that. Cognitive revolution Let's take very seriously how our workers' brains work. These are our number one assets. We don't want to be too mechanistic about this, but what is our main capital asset? If we're a knowledge work organization, we have some buildings, but it's really These brains that we have as work contracts with these brains that create value, let's get serious about how brains actually work and as soon as we do that we'll say, "Oh my God, "These brains check email once every two minutes." What a disaster it is if I had a car factory and we spent 20 million dollars on one of those German robots that put cars in the doors or whatever and we just didn't take care of it and it was like rusting and the doors and the production process fell off. .

It was falling like this it's crazy we have to take care of this team just when we have the Cognitive Revolution the type of Cognitive Revolution of Capital and knowledge work I think it's going to unlock a trillion dollar GDP I think that's how unproductive we are if we simply We think in pure, raw terms of brains thatthey produce things that are worth money, as if we are super deterministic and a little inhuman about it. A lot is being lost because we are in the suboptimal Nash equilibrium, everyone emails everyone. all the time everyone is idle all the time, when we finally have to overcome the revolution, it will be a massive economic hit and you know AI could play a role in this, because maybe AI, once it has planning capabilities , it will go.

To be able to take on the burden of some of this back-and-forth planning, I think it's easier to get there with cultural changes. I don't think we have to wait to build a chat GPT with email limit capability to do this as you could solve this. Tomorrow this is both cultural and tool-based, but I think it will be a big revolution when we get there. I like the assembly line in manufacturing, which was like a 10x improvement in productivity metrics when we discovered continuous motion assembly. The line with interchangeable parts was huge, it created this productivity engine.

I'm using economic productivity now, you know, dollars per worker, the economic miracle that emerged from this process based on industrial innovations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The money generated by that, the wealth generated by that was the basis of the modern West, as the entire world as we know it, was built. There are these huge latent potentials, um, and right now I don't think we're there with the brain and I think. It's going to be a big revolution, it's just difficult, true, it's not an easy revolution to start, but I think it will change entire industries in a way that will be difficult to even imagine, yes, and I think that while there are people who, either by lack family or other limitations or simply having more energy and requiring less sleep, because these people exist out there, yes, there will always be these people who can try harder than others. in the sense that they can come in earlier and stay later, and that trying to be them is not a good idea, that we should all optimize for our best balance between productivity, deep work, and work-life balance due to lack of a better term uh when I was a graduate student um I was really committed to My My Craft and I remember hearing about a student who is now a professor, a very accomplished endocrinologist um I'll just give him a name because he did this Which is that he You don't know me, but I heard about this guy who had been in the department, Randy Nelson, and everyone said he used to work 100 hours a week, yeah, so I said, "Okay, great, I'm going to start logging my working hours in silence I'm going to do 102 hours and I ended up with the flu and an autoimmune condition I literally had an autoimmune condition I've never had one since then I stopped working as much I started working quote unquote smarter along the lines of Many of the things that you're saying here, although I didn't implement or know all of these tools at the time and of course the autoimmune thing went away, it was a pretty minor thing, I never had it again, but you can destroy yourself just by working more.

Yes, even if it's deep work so the solution isn't necessarily more, it's like with exercise. I guess that's obvious, but I thought I'd share that anecdote because Randy Nelson taught me what I'm capable of and what I'm capable of. I'm not able to yeah, well, the other thing that also happens by the way is not only who is able to work harder to get these advantages, but there are also other unpredictable inequalities. I once spoke to a law firm years ago about deep work and they were uh. invited by a group, actually it was a group of female lawyers who had a reading group and they said that part of what was happening at this law firm is that people who were unpleasant, like kind of brusque and idiotic, were asked that they did less of what they would call non-promotable activities or you can organize this or whatever, which meant they had more time to do deep work, which meant they would do better and get promoted faster and then what was happening was that you had accidentally built a system.

That said, let's make sure we have a fast track for our most unpleasant employees to get to the partnership level, where you actually have to be pretty nice because your customer acquisition is really dependent on partners and so they accidentally let you know that you pushed towards this. Inequity and these types of inequities happen all the time when we leave it to chance and okay, so who's doing less work? Well I'm just like I'm Gruff and people don't like me or I have something to do at home, that means I don't have the same time to do this and you end up pushing people down these paths that maybe aren't who they really are.

You want to select because you are selecting things that are not related to their actual underlying talent or how much they can actually produce, so I'm with you on that, yes, it's a complex problem but manageable anyway. I'm interested in your thoughts on remote work vs. in-person work and the hybrid model, yes I recently heard about a hybrid model, a friend who owns a big record company here in Los Angeles said they require one in-person day a week unless I'm on sick leave they require one day home a week and then the other day is at your discretion yeah it's an interesting model but in a five day a week model yeah I mean my proposals.

I've thought about this a lot, it's okay if you're going to do hybrid work, and I proposed this in an Atlantic article recently that created some positive and negative ways. I thought this is the way you should do it, synchronize the schedule, here are home days, here are office days, but for everyone, for everyone, it's okay or have some. of these schedules, but as groups of people who work together, have the same schedule but then set the rule at home: no meeting days, no email, that's the way to make the most of hybrid work when we're in the office. meetings and we can talk about work and we're at home, we're just working and we can do it without distractions and we can stay deep and really figure things out.

I think it would really make a big difference in the overload issue. I think it would be much more sustainable remote work, so I covered remote work a lot as this was first emerging at the beginning of the pandemic. There I convinced myself that I was doing this twice-monthly column for the New Yorker back then, that was just Watching the pandemic transform work, I came up with the idea that remote work can be great, but it's difficult and it can't just be doing the work that you were doing in person, but doing it at home and we have zoom and We'll figure it out like you're going to be completely remote, we have to rethink what work means for that, and there are a lot of differences that have to have, it needs to be a lot more structured, it probably should be, you're working on fewer things, it's very clear what you're working on, the collaboration is a lot more defined and a lot less. frequent, you probably need to free yourself from this kind of hyperactive hive, my dance where we just email each other all day and in Zoom meetings all day, I think you need to reconstitute what a remote work job is before you work and We know this in part because software developers before the pandemic were one of the only knowledge sectors that had a really successful track record with remote work, which is the only sector within knowledge work where we had large companies completely remote , they did it because they had really structured their jobs around these agile workload management systems, where okay, this is when we talk about work, here is how long it takes, this is how we assign the new work, work on one thing at a time, run until it's done, they had this whole structure around them. work that then it didn't really matter if you were in the office or not, so the less structured the work, the more free for everyone, the more you need us to be in the office, so I'm a big fan of full work. -remote work time, but I think those jobs have to look very different than a standard 2019 job, yes, I've always done a hybrid of remote work, I used to take Wednesday mornings home from the lab, yes, but It's crazy nowadays because especially during the pandemic, but even now I mean you can spend all day in your pajamas and working and I love this idea of ​​not, um, email and limiting texting and social media while you are at home working to make the most of it.

Yeah, is there any data, maybe from the pandemic era or before or beyond about Zoom and things like that in terms of how they improve or decrease or maybe have no effect on productivity like Zoom specifically and meetings in the ones we just met on Zoom? all the time for a while that was a bigger problem, I mean, there's data that says, for example, a hybrid meeting, some people are online, some people aren't, these are less effective meetings, no, they don't work as well, um . but I think the biggest problem with zoom was the amount and part of that was just the technology involved, so if we're in the office together and I have something relatively quick to talk to you about, I can grab you. and we can talk about this and then the footprint will be five minutes, that's not just five minutes, it's five well-allocated minutes because I'm probably going to use the social cues of your open doors or you're going to get coffee anyway, in the era From zoom, instead, we would say, well, we should schedule a meeting properly because you know we need to talk about this, but if you think about a standard online calendar, it's hard to have a meeting that's less than 30 minutes.

I mean, you just have to drag it, you know? I mean, 30 minutes is like the shortest default meeting, so we're taking a lot of informal meetings back and forth and inflating the time. I think that was part of it, so we had that too. a lot of Zoom is happening, if it were I only do one meeting a week now it's on Zoom it used to be in person we all used to be on Zoom we used to all be in person that's not a big deal maybe it's a little less effective meeting but that's okay , is good enough, but if so, I have 4 times as many meetings as before due to the inherent inefficiencies of having to go to Virtual Pre-Scheduled for basically all collaboration, which could be a big problem, based on the data I saw from Microsoft.

The last data I saw was a 22% increase in these meetings from 20120 until now and it's not a number, it's not like it peaked and then started going down again once we moved to hybrid, it's just high and is still increasing. Well, it's a lot of time that it just disappeared and we kind of pretend it didn't, but it's a lot of time that we're not actively working on things and just talking about work or talking about other things while we're talking about work. I think it's a real problem Is there a list of the top three things that if you had a magic wand you would see everyone do every day do you know if you had it if you had three wishes?

Yes, who would be the workers who improve creativity at work? focused work I mean, I think you and I clearly agree that there is not only great value in terms of productivity, yes, but a great degree of life enrichment, like a deep level of enrichment in terms of happiness, feelings of well-being with time for connectivity with others lessons about deep work that can be exported to time with others where we are truly present, etc., there is much to gain from engaging in deep work and similar things that you have written about in your various books, um and Talk on your podcast, you know?

Are there three firsts? Yes, yes, yes, so if I do three, I would say: Okay, first of all, with your workload, simulate something like a pull system instead of a push system, and what I mean by that is. when you keep track of what you're working on, have the top of that list, which is where I'm actively working on these things, and keep that top of your list to like two or three things, everything else is in the bottom. of the list is to work next and is in an ordered queue, so when you finish something you're working on, you pull something new to take the place of the list next, so what am I trying to do with that advice? is to reduce all this administrative overhead because now, even if you can't escape, you have to say yes to these things because it's the way your organization works the things that are waiting to work on Q, you said you don't have meetings about that.

I don't send emails about that. I wait until I'm actively working on it and I only actively work on three things at a time. Now I'm going to finish those things very quickly because I don't havepass the cookie and eat a little they are not fasting it just simplifies the problem, yes, and as a consequence I think it improves behavior in general, although the clinical trials point to some mixed results with that last statement again. I don't want the nutritionist to chase me, the point is the time blocking and the and the and the the thick black lines of yes no the binary yes no like um eat no eat or single confirmation email communicate no communicate in a given block of time I think that that's really um what it's about honors the uh the power of those kinds of neural calculations, okay, and there's another hidden advantage of time blocking is the visually distinct blocks, so what I do, for example, is I put a doubly thick line around the deep work blocks, focusing not only on deep work, but also deep work. things that I really care about, just this gives you a visual record of how much deep work I'm doing right, like it's this diagnosis.

I use a paper time block planner, so you flip through those pages and just look for dark blocks. You see, if I see that I don't have many dark blocks, I say this is all my work, as if all my life I have been trained in a laboratory to think a lot about things and write things down, why don't I have many? dark blocks you get this feedback mechanism, so there are all these bonuses when you start doing this kind of planning before you tell us about number three. I've often fantasized about a web-based program that seems to work against the grain of much of what you're talking about, but come back to this, the MIT Observer Whiteboard stuff you talked about at the beginning, which I often longed for, okay, I need write today.

I need to write a book or I'm going to prepare a podcast. I'm going to show some pop-ups of other people who are also doing deep work and we actually won't communicate if we do that or if music comes out of the microphone or someone coughs, that will be considered a distraction. but does anyone want to join me for some deep work? Yeah, where we don't communicate and I've often thought that I would just pay someone to be there, yeah, to just sit there and, um, but I haven't, there are several companies. that does this, okay, yeah, it's interesting where you are, are you online, or in person, just with other people doing deep work, so a Deep Work Club, the challenge is synchronizing schedules because maybe you want to do this with someone in the east. coast and they may not be doing deep work at the same time and a recording is not the same because then you know they're not actually watching, but there's something really to it, especially for home workers or people like me who work often in isolation students do this well thesis boot camps I don't know if you had this experience but Georgetown does this a lot of universities do this uh okay everyone working on their thesis we'll all get together and we were going to work on it together because they often had me come talk about these things early in my career, it was just a group of grad students who would come to the same space and work for about 90 minutes and then I would have liked a speaker to come or have lunch and 90 to the cohesion of the group of everyone working deeply at the same time.

Writers retreats are the same way we all go to the same house in the middle of nowhere, um, so we're all just. Let's encourage each other to write because that's all anyone does here, yeah, so peer pressure. I'm with you. I was wondering if I would ever need it. You know, putting a big extension on my house, that's what I should do. Well, pay. I'll give myself money and I'll sit there on Zoom and do deep work with you. This is my secret plan. I would pay money. I would pay money to do deep work in parallel with you with a virtual window.

There's Cal in his office doing I think there's something nice about having some knowledge of who people are, you know, hey, log in today, yeah, yeah, okay, let's get to it, set the timer and go, and then you know them, you know, working in the academic library. libraries, why do people do that well? Everyone there is working right now. Yes, I now firmly believe that there really is something catchy about that number three. Okay, I have a closing ritual that clearly demarcates the end of the work from the beginning. at night after work and the closing ritual so you have to close the open loops properly so you have to make sure this is like a review type period and let me look at my inbox and see my plan let me look. in my you know my time block and my calendar, um, really make sure that there's nothing urgent that needs to be addressed that I haven't done and that there's nothing that's in my head that I don't want to forget and that's not written down in somewhere. like take care of all of that correctly, so you go through all of these things and understand what I'm going to do tomorrow you don't have to build your whole plan for tomorrow you make sense of it um and then you need some kind of demonstration What you do to indicate that you finished the routine correctly just so my long-time newsletter readers know, I used to have a phrase that would say schedule the entire shutdown as a crazy phrase, right, that's not how normal people talk, now I have a planner. that has like a check box that says close completely next to it, the reason why it's a demonstrative anchor is that it's then used for cognitive behavioral therapy because at first people have a hard time closing work.

I mean, I made this up because I had It was really hard to stop working on my thesis. What if this test doesn't work and blah blah blah? So what you do is when you receive closure after reflecting. Hey, what's up with our work? doing the right thing we forget this or that instead of reflecting well it's like I don't think we're okay let me think about my schedule tomorrow what is my plan you instead can just say um I said that crazy phrase or I checked that box I wouldn't have said that sentence unless I had gone over everything and made sure I had a good plan and didn't miss anything and that it was okay to close the job because of that.

I'm not going to get involved in your musings. I said, I miss it, let's get back to what we're doing, it's like cognitive behavioral therapy that after about a month you're actually able to disconnect from work effortlessly and do everything you know, all the other important things without having constant ruminations. about work, which gives your mind a real break to do other things, so I want to say this is more mental health and productivity, but for me it was fundamental, I mean, I can actually remember when I came up with this, you know exactly. where I was in my graduate student career and there were too many ideas and concerns that were just floating around and once I did this, you know, it took me a few weeks and then I could close it and move on and do other things.

Yes, the paraassociative nature of the brain can make it really problematic. If you are thinking about work at the table, you begin to associate the table with work. I mean, when Matt Walker came here to do this six-part series that's coming out soon. to be released um and we were talking about insomnia, he said one of the main problems with insomnia is that people who have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep often stay in bed when they can't sleep and then the bed becomes associated with challenges with sleep as you know, hence the recommendation that virtually all sleep coaches and sleep scientists recommend that people, actually, if they can't sleep for about 20 minutes of effort, get up, get out of bed and go somewhere else until they feel sleepy. enough to go back and try to fall asleep on the couch somewhere else, yes, I put that as a note to you, but this seems incredibly important also for enriching relationships with spouses, children, and people around you.

In life, I mean, the problem is the first thing we ask people when they walk in the door, it's usually how was work today, yeah, how was work, what are you doing today, yeah, tell me about your school day. , tell me about your work, maybe we need to think of better questions, yeah, like there's something interesting we could do or something I read about unrelated work, yeah, no, I think I think it makes a big difference, and again , there are all these meta benefits to these things, so one of the meta benefits to all of this is that they are also all very structured, you'll start. to build a reputation as someone who is very careful with how they manage themselves with their time, for example, if you're doing multi-scale planning and certainly if you're doing that, you know that load management people Pull-based work environment is going to start to think that this is someone who thinks a lot about how they managed their work day and how things happen, this gives you enormous room for maneuver, yes, because we believe that what our colleagues want from us it's accessibility, but really the reason they want accessibility is because they're not clear about what you know.

Let's do this. Let's remember to do this? Am I going to have to continue bothering you? You know what happens if I really don't think you're acting right? I just wish you would do this right away. or answer me right away because I'm going to have to worry about this until I hear from you that you made it as if accessibility was born from a lack of trust or a lack of clarity, so if you have the reputation of someone they really have to act together, they can, for example, lean towards closure. I don't email at all and people don't think you're being lazy or not up to date with work.

Andrew has the performance of him along with these things. I trust him when you show him something like this workload management system like here's where the queue is like he can't get to this yet like okay that's reasonable like they get their act together so there's this The meta benefit of starting to be a little more structured about your time and your cognitive work is that people will give you more flexibility to work, the better your work, you will know the resources you have as your reputation grows and your autonomy. It grows, yes, and of course, as your reputation grows, you get attacked more and it probably takes a little more discipline to enforce these things, but I always remind myself and other people that you know the reason why That people want access to you is presumably the consequences of the deep work you did, yes, no, but people love meetings, OMG I won't do brainstorming meetings anymore unless it's with my close team, It's like you can propose a contract to me and we can reverse engineer the idea, you know? um, but it just doesn't work to meet with people and kind of brainstorm, but I don't know what that's like.

I think maybe people are taking their own lack of structure and um, projecting it onto other people as a form. to fill the time, yes, it's p productivity and this is what I have as a visible activity, so we can have meetings, let's talk, participate in calls like that, it all feels useful when ultimately it's not like I'm with you in that. Remember that the reason everyone wants to talk to me is because no, I'm so good at brainstorming meetings. You know, people like this are great, like Andrew, great at brainstorming meetings, so that's why you want to bother.

No, it's because you were very good at brainstorming meetings. podcasting that you were doing like the deep and then that brings with it that the better you are at what you do best, the more the world will conspire to take away your time to work on it, as if the teachers knew better than before you were 10 years old. Big universities are pretty good at preaching to professors. The only thing that will matter is your research, but they throw a lot of other things at you at that point. It depends on the school. I would say Georgetown is very good at this.

From our perspective, it's a waste of resources to hire you and not get tenure, so we want to try to protect you from them keeping service requirements low, for example, and just focusing on, you know. focus on your research because that's what is going to matter, at least the professors know it well, like there is a clear process like the tenure process, most people don't understand tenure, they think it's like getting promoted in a job and there are all these different ways you can impress your boss, it's nothing like that, I mean, it's these confidential letters from leading academics in your field that do nothing but brutally evaluate your research on how good Cal is. , who are two people better than him on the market right now. that they are like two people, he is a little better than you would make him tenure at your university, what university could he get tenure at?

I mean, the only thing that matters is yeah, the quality of the research, um, so you kind of have to rediscover what that is if you don'tyou're a teacher like, ultimately, this is what I do best for my company, so let me do that, let me do that really well, there's also an aspect, by the way, if you do something profound really well that doesn't attract as much work as If what you do is you're really good at responding to people's things and putting out fires, it's like you don't want to get too caught up in that game unless that's the game you want to play, you know if you get it. stuck in the game how I differentiate myself is that I respond immediately no matter whenever I make your life easier you're playing the game and making other people's lives easier and that's what they're going to ask you to do but yeah Instead you play the game of I'm competent with this, I'll respond to emails, and I'm not going to be pathological, but what you really care about is this code over production or these reports. in production are really second to none, so you're not going to get a lot of the little things, okay, do that, then you know that's what we want, that's what we want you to work on, so what is it? its research equivalent is probably a really key question for a lot of people: how are social engagements addressed through work?

I don't know if anyone does that, um, and social commitments with family, as you know, because obviously those things are important too, yeah, they're on your schedule, well, you know, I treat work hours differently than not being on the work schedule, so my work. The schedule is this time block plan, part of a multi-scale plan, really dialed in, like when I'm working, I'm working fine, but then when I'm not working, I'm much more LAX, you know, so I don't make time. Block planning my weekends or my evenings, uh, work closure is clear, it gives you more flexibility, so I like, okay, what do we want to do?

We're going to see people do things with family. I like to be flexible and not too flexible. planned outside of the work day, but then during the work day itself, you know it's much more machine-like, so you're quite, not LAX, but you're a little more relaxed in social engagements and interaction with the children, but at work. or when you are working at home or in the office are you obese yes, I am like a black box in the work day like when I am when I am working like I disappear nice yes and then when I'm done, I'm around, but I like my family and friends , and they've learned, if you text me during the work day, I'm not part of that game, I'll just reply.

People know it may have been four hours since I saw my phone, which is like Lex Fredman, yeah, and people often ask to get in touch with Lex and, you know, I made that connection for some people, but I always point you out . I know Lex will have long periods of time where we don't connect and then we are close friends, we spend a lot of time in person texting on the phone, but I understand that if I text Lex he may not hear back his for four years. or five days and everything is fine, yeah, you know, it's just that he actually tells me that he's good, it's like that scene at the end of Goodwill Hunting where he says: I just want to show up at your house, know that you're not there and he gets there and smiles his friend is gone he knows it went in the direction of his heart you're saying if you start getting a lot of similar memes from lex via text that's not going to happen you're going to know what it is going on Lex, that's never going to happen What struggle, what struggle are you having in your life right now?

I'm a big believer in the telephone. I'm old school. I pick up the phone. I make a call. We will communicate. a call sometimes FaceTime um we text one or two things it's often very quick yeah very quick and I have other friends in the podcast space for whom it's the same thing it's just that the phone is a great tool, yeah, and you know, come in and then come back to it, there's not a lot of chatter, I like it, I always like the text, it's like a great logistical tool, you know, wait, what restaurant are you at, oh, ya You know, okay, I'll see you there or you're free to talk.

I love text as a logistical tool, but you're right as a conversational tool. Yeah, it's not for me either. Do you take vacations where you are purely on vacation, so just with family or maybe even alone or with your spouse? there's nothing digital, eh, yeah, digital is not a problem for me on vacation, but my wife won't let me not bring something to work on on vacation because, since I became a monster, I get it, your brain understands it. needs, yes, when we had little. kids I tried well and I thought okay that's right I'm not going to think about anything like this and I would just turn into a case of anxiety so what I've learned is to bring up something that's very deep and not urgent um like the concept of a book, I'm trying to do a job or an academic paper that I was trying to figure out or I like something new and I need like 90 minutes a day to walk on the beach and think and I have to have a notebook I have it with me here I have to have a notebook with me so I can capture notes and get them out of my head during the holidays and now we have a happy medium as I work a little each day no email I don't get any emails no deep work thinking uh I'm a lot happier is an itch that you have to scratch yeah, if I'm not writing or thinking it's because I get cognitively anxious, I get anxious, you know I'm on I've been now I'm talking to you now but I've been traveling doing some podcasts and things like that and I'm out of my cognitive comfort zone here because I'm not vlogging like At the beginning of this trip, I was on a New York and Atlantic deadline, like traveling all the time, you know, California time, until 5: 00 a.m. m., as you know, and I'm done with it now and I'm really cognitively like I just feel bad right now, you know I'm not working, I'm not thinking, I love it, Cal.

For me, this has been a great honor . I mean, I should have said this at the beginning of the episode, but I've been like that. I was a fan for a long time, long before we met or communicated, I started reading your books and I would say that you and Tim Ferris are the people who, early in my academic career, had such a profound influence on my approach to work. . and it required me to do things, um, against the grain of the people around me and very quickly I saw that I was progressing much faster than I would have otherwise, yes, and I never considered it a competitive endeavor with others, but and um.

You just continue to produce valuable information, practical tools that you know in book after book after book and obviously they require some structure and some restrictions, but also some progress towards action elements and I love these top three that you gave us. about forward momentum, multi-scale planning and closing ritual and all the others that you presented and I think the main takeaway for me today is that yes, you have developed all of these tools, but you also use them and it is not lost on me that You also have a burgeoning career as a computer scientist, so you're not just someone who talks and I'm not disparaging anyone else in the information sphere here like you only talk about habits or you only talk about protocols, you do these things and the you implement in the context of your work life, your creative life, your family life and your relationship with yourself and you exercise and um and I think all of that comes together to be an amazing example of what is possible if we introduce a little bit of understanding to it. about how we function as a being and if we implement some of these tools in the user manual that you came up with, so I just want to say on behalf of myself and everyone who is listening and watching, you know, thank you very much, this is incredibly valuable information , regardless of what one is doing in life and certainly I will implement this three step system and have the book that I would always like to read books after I have guests.

I'm going to read the book and make some posts about what I experience as a result, so thank you very much. I would pay a substantial amount of money to do it. deep work sessions with you on the screen, but I won't put that on you. I'm just going to bite off and do these things, so thank you very much for being a pioneer. in space and for such a clear communicator, we all owe you a debt of gratitude, oh thank you Andrew, well, and for the rest of us teachers who also make podcasts, we owe you a debt of gratitude because you are showing us what really is. possible so it's been great meeting you it's been fantastic too well thank you we won't see each other on social media but we'll have a meal at some point soon thanks for joining me for today's discussion with Dr.

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