Cal Newport is a computer scientist who also writes about productivity. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
A World Without Email (book): https://amzn.to/3blXyjv
Deep Work (book): https://amzn.to/3c0npMM
Digital Minimalism (book): https://amzn.to/3kJPMmx
Cal's Website: https://www.calnewport.com/
Deep Questions (podcast): https://www.calnewport.com/podcast/

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:15 - Deep work
7:00 - Focus
12:43 - Time blocking
19:38 - Deadlines
29:13 - Do less, do better, know why
31:55 - Clubhouse
45:58 - Burnout
52:25 - Boredom
1:00:10 - Quit social media for 30 days
1:10:04 - Social media
1:35:12 - How email destroyed our productivity at work
1:44:57 - How we fix email
1:51:59 - Over-optimization
1:56:14 - When to use email and when not to
2:03:57 - Podcasting
2:08:33 - Alan Turing proving the impossible
2:12:32 - Fragility of math in the face of randomness
2:21:21 - Neural networks
2:30:06 - What will the P=NP proof look like?
2:33:46 - Is math discovered or invented?
2:37:53 - Book publishing
2:47:59 - Love
2:51:21 - Death
2:54:17 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Cal Newport.

He's a friend and someone who's writing, like his book, Deep Work, for example, has guided how I strive to approach productivity and life in general.

He doesn't use social media, and in his book, Digital Minimalism, he encourages people to find the right amount of social media usage that provides value and joy.

He has a new book out called A World Without Email, where he argues brilliantly, I would say, that email is destroying productivity in companies and in our lives.

And very importantly, he offers solutions.

He is a computer scientist at Georgetown University who practices what he preaches.

To do theoretical computer science at the level that he does it, you really have to live a focused life that minimizes distractions and maximizes hours of deep work.

Lastly, he's a host of an amazing podcast called Deep Questions that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to improve their productive life.

Quick mention of our sponsors, ExpressVPN, Linode Linux virtual machines, Sun Basket meal delivery service, and SimpliSafe home security.

Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that deep work or long periods of deep focused thinking have been something I've been chasing more and more over the past few years.

Deep work is hard, but it's ultimately the thing that makes life so damn amazing.

The ability to create things you're passionate about in a flow state where the distractions of the world just fade away.

Social media, yes, reading the comments, yes, I still read the comments, is a source of joy for me in strict moderation.

Too much takes away the focused mind, and too little, at least I think, takes away all of the fun.

If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, if you can only figure out how to spell that.

And now, here's my conversation with Cal Newport.

So, I mean, it's my term for when you're focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task, which is something we've all done, but we had never really given it a name, necessarily, that was separate from other type of work.

And so I gave it a name and said, let's compare that to other types of efforts you might do while you're working and see that the deep work efforts actually have a huge benefit that we might be underestimating.

What does it mean to work deeply on something?

I had been calling it hard focus in my writing before that.

Well, so the context you would understand, I was in the theory group in CSAIL at MIT, right?

So I was surrounded at the time when I was coming up with these ideas by these professional theoreticians.

And that's like a murderer's row of thinkers there, right?

I mean, it's like Turin Award, Turin Award, MacArthur, Turin Award.

Theoretical computer science, Yeah, yeah.

Doing theoretical computer science and I publish a book.

So I was in this milieu where I was being exposed to people where focus was their tier 1 skill.

Like that's what you would talk about, right?

Like how intensely I can focus, That was the key skill.

It's like your 440 time or something, if you were an athlete.

So, so this is something that people were actually the, the, the theory folks are thinking about.

Like they're openly discussing, like, how do you focus?

I mean, I don't know if they would, you know, quantify it, but focus was the tier 1 skill.

So you would come in, here would be a typical day, you'd come in and Eric Domain would be sitting in front of a whiteboard, right, with a whole group of visitors who had come to work with them.

And maybe they projected like a grid on there because they're working on some graph theory problem.

You go to lunch, you go to the gym, you come back, they're sitting there staring at the same whiteboard.

This is the difference between different disciplines.

Like I often feel for many reasons like a fraud, but I definitely feel like a fraud when I hang out with like either mathematicians or physicists.

It's like, it feels like they're doing the legit work.

Because when you talk closer in computer science, you get to programming or like machine learning, like the experimental machine learning or like just the engineering version of it, it feels like you're gone so far away from what's required to solve something fundamental about this universe.

It feels like you're just cheating your way into some trick to figure out how to solve a problem in this 1 particular case.

I'd be interested to hear what you think about that because programming doesn't always feel like you need to think deeply, to work deeply.

Especially if you're coming up with original algorithmic designs, I think it's a great example of deep work.

I mean, yeah, the hardcore theoreticians, they push it to an extreme.

I mean, I think it's like knowing that athletic endeavor is good and then hanging out with an Olympic athlete, like, oh, I see that's what it is.

Now, for the grad students like me, we're not anywhere near that level, but the faculty, the faculty in that group, these were the cognitive Olympic athletes.

But coding, I think, is a classic example of deep work because I got this problem I want to solve.

I have all of these tools and I have to combine them somehow creatively and on the fly.

But so basically, I had been exposed to that.

So I was used to this notion when I was in grad school and I was writing my blog, I'd write about hard focus.

Then I published this book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which came out in 2012.

And that book had this notion of skill being really important for career satisfaction, that it's not just following your passion.

You have to actually really get good at something and then you use that skills as leverage.

And there's this big follow-up question to that book of, okay, well, how do I get really good at this?

And then I look back to my grad school experience.

I was like, huh, there's this focus thing that we used to do.

I wonder how generally applicable that is into the knowledge sector.

And so as I started thinking about it, it became clear there's this interesting storyline that emerged that, okay, actually undistracted concentration is not just important for esoteric theoreticians, it's important here, it's important here, it's important here.

And that involved into the deep work hypothesis, which is across the whole knowledge work sector, focus is very important, and we've accidentally created circumstances where we just don't do a lot of it.

So focus is the sort of prerequisite for basically, you say knowledge work, but basically any kind of skill acquisition, any kind of major effort in this world.

Yeah, so a key aspect of focus is not just that you're concentrating hard on something, but you do it without distraction.

So a big theme of my work is that context shifting kills the human capacity to think.

So if I change what I'm paying attention to to something different, really, even if it's brief, and then try to bring it back to the main thing I'm doing, that causes a huge cognitive pileup that makes it very hard to think clearly.

So even if you think, okay, look, I'm writing this code or I'm writing this essay, and I'm not multitasking and all my windows are closed and I have no notifications on But every 5 or 6 minutes, you quickly check like an inbox or your phone that initiates a context shift in your brain, right?

We're going to start to suppress some neural networks.

We're going to try to amplify some others.

Actually, there's a sort of neurological cascade that happens.

You rip yourself away from that halfway through and go back to what you're doing.

And now it's trying to switch back to the original thing, even though it's also in your brains in the process of switching to these emails and trying to understand those contexts.

And as a result, your ability to think clearly just goes really down.

I mean, you do this long enough, you get midday and you're like, okay, I can't think anymore.

Is there some kind of perfect number of minutes, would you say?

So we're talking about focusing on a particular task for 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, is it possible to kind of context switch while maintaining deep focus every 20 minutes or so?

So if you're thinking of like this, again, maybe it's a selfish kind of perspective, but if you think about programming, you know, you're focused on a particular design of a little bit, maybe a small scale on a particular function or large scale on a system, And then the shift of focus happens like this, which is like, wait a minute, is there a library that can achieve this little task or something like that?

And so you have to now, it is a kind of contact switch because as opposed to thinking about the particular problem, you now have switched thinking about consuming and integrating knowledge that's out there that can plug into your solution to a particular problem.

It definitely feels like a contact switch.

So should you be setting it aside always and really trying to, as much as possible, go deep and stay there for a really long period of time?

Well, I mean, I think if you're looking up a library that's relevant to what you're doing, that's probably okay.

And I don't know that I would count that as a full context shift because the semantic networks involved are relatively similar, right?

You're thinking about this type of solution, you're thinking about coding, you're thinking about this type of functions, where you're really going to get hit is if you switch your context to something that's different.

And if there's unresolved obligation, so really, the worst possible thing you could do would be to look at like an email inbox, right?

Because here's 20 emails, I can't answer most of these right now.

Like the context of these emails, like, okay, there's a grant funding issue or something like this, is very different than the coding I'm doing.

So it's like, someone needs something from me and I'm gonna try to pull my attention back.

The second worst would be something that's emotionally arousing.

So if you're like, let me just glance over at Twitter, I'm sure it's nice and calm and peaceful over there, right?

That could be devastating because you're going to expose yourself to something that's emotionally arousing.

That's going to completely mess up the cognitive plateau there.

And then when you come back to, okay, let me try to code again, It's really difficult.

So it's both the information and the emotion.

Yeah, both can be killers if what you're trying to do.

So I would recommend at least an hour at a time.

Because it could take up to 20 minutes to completely clear out the residue from whatever it was you were thinking about before.

If you're coding for 30 minutes, you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes of actual peak lacks going on there.

An hour at least you get a good 40, 45 minutes plus.

I'm partial to 90 minutes as a really good chunk.

But just before you get exhausted, you can sort of.

you know, people can read about in your book, deep work, but, and I know this has been out for a long time and people are probably familiar with many of the concepts, but it's still pretty profound and it has stayed with me for a long time.

There's something about adding the terms to it that actually solidifies the concepts.

And Just for me, sort of as a comment, there's, it's a struggle and it's very difficult to maintain focus for a prolonged period of time.

But the days on which I'm able to accomplish several hours of that kind of work, I'm happy.

And then I can be, I'm less of a dick to other people in my life afterwards.

And I find the opposite when I don't do that kind of thing.

Like I feel like I didn't accomplish anything and there's this stress that then the negative emotion builds up to where you're no longer able to sort of enjoy the hell out of this amazing life.

So in that sense, deep work has been a source of a lot of happiness.

I'd love to ask you, how do you, again, you cover this in the book, but how do you integrate deep work into your life?

What are different scheduling strategies that you would recommend, just at a high level?

Well, I mean, I'm a big fan of time blocking.

So if you're facing your workday, don't allow your inbox or to-do list to sort of drive you.

Don't just come into your day and think what do I want to do next?

I mean, I'm a big plan is saying here's the time.

So I have a meeting here of an appointment here.

Here's what's left what I actually want to do with it.

So in this half hour, I'm going to work on this.

For this 90 minute block, I'm going to work on that.

And during this hour, I'm going to try to fit this in and then actually have this half hour gap between 2 meetings.

So why don't I take advantage of that to go run 5 errands, I can kind of batch those together.

But blocking out in advance, this is what I want to do with the time available.

I mean, I find that's much more effective.

Now, once you're doing this, once you're in a discipline of time blocking, it's much easier to actually see this is where I want, for example, to deep work.

And I can get a handle on the other things that need to happen and find better places to fit them so I can prioritize this.

And you're going to get a lot more of that done than if it's just going through your day and saying what's next.

I schedule every single day kind of thing.

So it's like try to in the morning to try to have a plan.

Yeah, so I do a quarterly, weekly, daily planning.

So at the semester or quarterly level, I have a big picture vision for what I'm trying to get done, you know, during the fall, let's say, or during the winter.

Like I want to, these are, there's a deadline coming up for academic papers at the end of the season.

I want to have this many chapters done of a book, something like this.

Like you have the, the big picture vision of what you want to get done, then weekly, you look at that.

And then you look at your week, and you put together a plan for like, okay, what am I gonna, what's my week gonna look like?

How am I gonna make progress on these things?

Maybe, Maybe I need to do an hour every morning, or I see that Monday is my only really empty day, so that's going to be the day that I really need to nail on writing or something like this.

And then every day, you look at your weekly plan and see if you can block off the actual hours.

So you do that 3 scales, the quarterly down to weekly down to daily.

And we're talking about actual times of day versus, so the alternative is what I end up doing a lot, and I'm not sure it's the best way to do it, is scheduling the duration of time.

This is called the luxury when you don't have any meetings.

All other academics are jealous of you, by the way.

I find those are, That's 1 of the worst tragedies of the pandemic is both the opportunity to, well, okay, the positive thing is to have more time with your family, you know, sort of reconnect in many ways.

Be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel and all those kinds of things.

The negative is, actually both those things are also sources of the negative.

But the negative is like, it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings because they're so easy to schedule.

And there's nothing more draining to me intellectually, philosophically, just my spirit is destroyed by even a 10 minute Zoom meeting.

Every Zoom meeting is, I have an existential crisis.

Oh, so when you don't have meetings, there's a luxury to really allow for certain things if they need to, like the important things, like deep work sessions to last way longer than you maybe planned for.

I mean, that's my goal is to try to schedule.

The goal is to schedule, to sit and focus for a particular task for an hour and hope I can keep going.

And do you find that this is at all an okay way to go?

And the time blocking is just something you have to do to actually be an adult and operate in this real world?

Or is there some magic to the time blocking?

Well, I mean, there's magic to the intention.

There's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities, right?

So I'm often juggling multiple jobs, essentially.

academic stuff, there's teaching stuff, there's book stuff, there's the business surrounding my book stuff.

If a deep work session is going well, you just rock and roll and let it let it go on.

So like 1 of the big keys of time block, at least the way I do it.

So I even, you know, sell this planner to help people time block.

It has many columns because the discipline is, oh, if your initial schedule changes, you just move over 1 next time you get a chance to move over 1 column, and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining.

So in other words, there's not, there's no bonus for I made a schedule and I stuck with it.

Like there's actually, it's not like you get a prize for it, right?

Like for me, the prize is I have an intentional plan for my time.

And if I have to change that plan, that's fine.

Like the state I want to be is basically at any point in the day, I've thought about what time remains and, and gave it some thought for what to do, because I'll do the same thing, even though I have a lot more meetings and other types of things I have to do in my various jobs and I basically prioritize the deep work and they get yelled at a lot.

So that's kind of my strategy is like just be okay, just be okay getting yelled at a lot because I feel you if you're rolling.

I think it's writing so hard in a certain way that it's you don't really get on a roll in some sense.

Like it's just difficult but working on proofs.

It's very hard to pull yourself away from a proof if you start to get some traction.

Just you've been at it for a couple hours, then you feel the pins and tumblers starting to click together and progress is being made.

So I'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.

Of course, there is also a positive effect to pulling yourself out of it when things are going great because then you're kind of excited to resume as opposed to stopping on a dead end.

There's an extra force of procrastination that comes with if you stop on a dead end to return to the task.

I'm on a stage now, I submitted a few papers recently.

So now we're sort of starting something up from cold.

And it takes way too long to get going because it's very hard to get the motivation to schedule a time when it's not, yeah, we're in it.

We're in the very early stages where it's just, I don't know.

I'm going to read hard papers, and it's going to be hard to understand them.

And I'm going to have no idea how to make progress.

Can we, okay, so this is like a therapy session.

Is Why, it seems like I only get stuff done that has deadlines.

And so 1 of the implied powerful things about time blocking is there's a kind of deadline, or there's an artificial or real sense of urgency.

Do you think it's possible to get anything done in this world without deadlines?

Well, I mean, it's a clear motivational signal, but in the short term, you do get an effect like that in time blocking.

I think the strong effect you get by saying, this is the exact time I'm going to work on this, is that you don't have the debate with yourself every 3 minutes about, should I take a break now?

Right, like this is the big issue with just saying, you know, I'm going to go write.

I'm going to write for a while and that's it, because your mind is saying, well, obviously we're going to take some breaks, right?

You have to be like, well, not right now.

Like we should probably look at the internet.

Now you have to constantly have this battle.

On the other hand, if you're in a time block schedule, like I've got these 2 hours put aside for writing.

I have a break scheduled over here, I don't have to fight with myself, right?

And maybe at a larger scale, deadlines give you a similar sort of effect.

I know this is what I'm supposed to be working on because it's due.

Perhaps, but we had described as much healthier sort of giving yourself over, and you talk about this in your email book, is the process.

I mean, in general, you talk about it all over, is creating a process and then giving yourself over to the process.

But then you have to be strict with yourself.

Yeah, but what are the deadlines you're talking about?

So like with papers, like what's the main type of deadline work?

Well, so papers definitely, but publications like say this podcast, I have to publish this podcast early next week, 1, because your book is coming out.

But the other is I have to fly to Vegas on Thursday to run 40 miles with David Goggins.

And so I want this podcast, this conversation we're doing now to be out of my life.

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Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media | Lex Fridman Podcast #166