Interview: Deep Work with Cal Newport

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More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Cal Newport again. We connected earlier to discuss his great earlier book so Good They Can't Ignore youe, which is fantastic. If you haven't checked that out yet, check it out.

It's.

And I'm really excited to chat today about his new book called Deep Work. Subtitle Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. It's one of my favorite books, period. I think it's an extraordinarily important subject and I'm excited to explore some of these big ideas. Cal. So thanks for taking the time and thanks for doing the deep work to create this book.

Sure, Brian. Thanks for having me on.

All right, so deep work, I always like to start at the top, tell us what deep, deep work is, and then we'll drill in from there.

Yeah. So I define deep work to be when you're focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task.

Got it. And the book is basically which kind of leads us to the deep work hypothesis. Right. Which you establish in the book and then spend the first half kind of proving it and then the second half showing us how to apply it. Can you tell us what the deep work hypothesis is?

Yeah. This is the foundation on which the whole book is written in. The foundation on which, actually, I live my life. So it's pretty important. And that's the idea that deep work is becoming more valuable in our economy. So it's becoming one of the most valuable skills you can do in our economy at the same time that it's becoming more rare, so people more and more are losing their ability to actually do deep work. So that is a classic economic scarcity scenario. Something is becoming more valuable while it's becoming more rare. And the conclusion of that is if you're one of the few to cultivate a deep work ability, you're going to thrive.

I love it. And let's juxtapose deep work with shallow work. Tell us the difference and tell us where most of us spend our time.

Yeah, it's important because people are not. They're not lazy. So it's not the case that most people just aren't working much, yet at the same time, they're doing less and less deep work and getting worse at deep work. So what are they doing instead? So this is where we have this notion of what I call shallow work, which are tasks that do not require distraction, free focus they tend to be logistical in nature. They tend not to actually apply your hard won skills or create a lot of new value in the world. This includes things such as doing email and meetings, sort of PowerPoint slides and social media optimization and tweaking your website. All of this type of things is shallow work. It's not that there's no value in shallow work, but it does not require distraction, free focus and it's not producing massive amounts of new value. So the reason why we're busier than we've ever been before, yet doing less and less deep work than ever before, is that we're spending more and more of our waking hours dedicated to these shallow work efforts.

This is good. And before we drill into the four rules of deep work and kind of the practice, I want to talk about a couple of more ideas that really struck me reading the book. One was the idea that deep work, you compare it to deliberate practice in a really cool way and just this idea of kind of working out our neurons. Can you walk us through the science of that?

Yeah. There is a lot of connections between, from the world of performance psychology, the notion of deliberate practice and deep work. Deep work is actually a broader notion than deliberate practice, but we can learn a lot about it from the deliberate practice literature. So one of the reasons I really say there's three reasons why I think deep work is becoming more valuable. And one of the reasons is exactly what you just touched on there, which is this notion that deep work is what's required to actually learn hard things. We know now as the simple things, the rote things, are becoming outsourced and automated. The people who are valuable today are those who can really keep up with complicated new information. They can master new computer systems or programming languages, or statistics or mathematics, or the ability to keep up with complicated things is very valuable. That requires deep work. And if you really drill down to the neuron level, we can actually see learning in practice down at the level of the neurons. What's actually going on is to learn something complicated, you have to actually give it undistracted, very intense attention. And what happens is at the neuron level that actually isolates the relevant neural circuits. And when neural circuits are isolated and run again and again, you get a process called myelination, where you actually get essentially it's a protein sheath that's actually spun around the axons of the neurons and makes the circuit actually fire easier. That's what it actually means at the neuron level to learn something. So it's just requires literally the Notion of focus without distraction to learn something. Because if you have lots of unrelated distractions going on, you're looking at Facebook, you have other things in your head. There's too much noise at the neuronal level for you to actually isolate the circuit that you're trying to improve. So when we really dive down in the literature to deliver practice down to the neurons, we see focus without distraction is at the foundation of trying to learn hard new things, which is so valuable. And that's just one of three different reasons why deep work, I think, is very valuable. But that's one of the important ones.

Let's talk about the other two.

Yeah, so the other two. So we have deep work helps you learn complicated things. All right, the other two. The second is deep work is necessary to produce things of high value so that the output you produce when you're in a state of deep work is really your max function. It's at the max of what your current skills and training allows you to do. Whereas work that's done in a state of distraction with more fragmented attention is going to be at a fraction of that quality level. We see this all the time, for example, if you want to isolate it. But if you look at the habits of, say, literary novelists, I think they're a good case study here. Because if you're a literary novelist, the only thing that matters is actually the quality of what you produce. This is very much not a quantity type job. It doesn't matter that you wrote 100,000 words. It doesn't matter that you wrote a book if it's not really good. As literary novelist, your career is sunk. So they care a lot about quality. Not surprisingly, if you look at the work habits of literary novelists, you see that all of their energy goes into protecting themselves from distraction, being able to concentrate more intensely. It's among novelists of the vanguard of deep work. It's where you see things like very elaborate isolated writing sheds and huge rituals. So deep work helps you produce at a very high level of quality. And the third reason is the deep work helps you produce at a very high level of productivity. Your rate of output per time invests is significantly higher when you work in a state of deep work as compared to working with more fragmented attention. One story I tell in the book is of a PhD candidate named. Well, he's also named Brian, but it's not you, but it's another Brian, Brian C. We'll call him. And he was actually, he had to take a job at the university while he was writing his dissertation, he needed some funding. He had to pay the bills. And his first year trying to write his dissertation while also having this job and just trying to find time and do it when he could. He got one chapter done in the whole year. He said, this is not working. So he put into place some deep work rituals, inspired in part about my writing on deep work. So he sort of had a way to really think about it clearly where he took this hour and a half every morning, 5am, 5 to 6.30am for deep, completely undistracted concentration. And he was suddenly producing one chapter every four to five weeks as compared to one thesis chapter per year before. So that's the third reason. Deep work allows you to produce at a massively higher level of productivity. Deep work allows you to produce at a massively higher level of value, your output. And three, it helps you quickly learn complicated, valuable things.

So good. And you have a formula that captures the kind of production rate. High quality work produced equals time spent times intensity of focus. That example of the dissertation is fantastic. Your life, I think, is a fantastic example. You mentioned Adam Grant as well and many others in the book that are super inspiring. Let's talk about Attention Residue. That was another one of my favorite ideas. I had heard it in different concepts, but the way you framed it I thought was so great. Can you tell us about task switching vis a vis attention residue?

Attention residue was a concept coined by a researcher named Sophie Leroy that was actually brought to my attention by Adam Grant, who is this phenomenally successful professor at Wharton. He's my age, whereas I'm an assistant professor, though he's a full professor at Wharton. He's a very successful guy and he uses deep work to produce academic papers at a very high rate, incredibly high rate. And when I was asked about how he did it, he said, you have to read about Attention Residue, Sophie Leroy's research. And the concept's actually very intuitive. If you switch your attention to something and then bring it back to the task at hand, the thing you just looked at briefly leaves a residue on your attention that actually reduces your cognitive capacity by a non trivial factor. So for example, if you glance at your email inbox and you see in there there's some things that need your attention but you can't take care of at the moment, right? You see some emails you know you'll have to get to, and then you switch your attention back to a deeper task, let's say, like writing something for the next 15 to 25 minutes you're going to be doing that task at a much lower rate of cognitive capacity because there's been a residue left on your attention from that quick distraction. And this is one of the key reasons why deep work produces so much more and at such a higher level of value, is that the more you're focusing without distraction, the longer you do it, you clear out all that attention residue. It's like getting all the cobwebs off of the old gearbox. Right. You start to hum along at a much higher cognitive rate.

So good. Well, that high level kind of gives us the framework to drill into. I think you bring the four rules of deep work in the second part of the book. Right? Those are the four chapters in the second part where we take the theory and the hypothesis that you prove from my vantage point in the first part of the book. And then the second is, okay, let's apply that. You have four rules. Can you quickly walk us through those four rules and we can do the same thing and talk about it a little bit more depth on a couple of those?

Yeah. So I have four big ideas for how to cultivate a deep work habit. And just to clarify what I mean by cultivate, it's really two things. One, it's actually improving your ability to focus, increasing the depth and intensity of your concentration, plus the actual logistical challenge of making time consistently in your schedule to do the deep work. I think you need both of those things in order to actually cultivate a deeper work habit and to take advantage of the deep work hypothesis. So I had four big ideas. I call them rules. The first was work deeply. And this is about the idea that you actually have to, you know, how you actually tackle your deep work when you do deep work, that matters. Right? You need to actually give some care to this type of work. You need to protect it and give it what it needs to succeed. The second rule is embrace boredom. And this really captures this idea that deep work is a skill. It's a skill, not a habit. It's like playing the guitar, not flossing your teeth. It's something you can't just choose to do. You have to train. And so this rule is all about, you need to go out there and train your ability to focus and resist distraction. You can't just expect that you'll be able to do it even if you have the time for it. The third rule is quit social media. And this is really about if you're going to take your attention and ability to focus seriously, going through your life and cleaning house, really making a statement that I am going to really set up my life in a way that really prioritizes concentration focus as a tier one skill. I argue for most professionals over the age of say 21, that's probably going to mean that you quit things like Facebook. And then the final rule is drain the shallows. And that's where it's really about how do you reduce and then control what remains of all the shallow obligations that permeates most people's knowledge, work, professional life. We can't get rid of the non deep work, but how can you keep it controlled and minimized enough that you're left with enough time to do serious deep work and really make a difference. So I think if you can handle do those four things, you can really have a deeper, much more fulfilling life.

This is so good. And I'm smiling here because I just love the precision with which you communicate these ideas so logically. I didn't mention in the introduction cal got his PhD from MIT and he's now assistant professor. He humbly let us know at Georgetown in Computer science. So it's just fun for me just to step back for a moment and converse with you, to feel the quality of your attention in your mind and the fact that you are practicing this not just via the book, but just your dynamic is inspiring in itself. Okay, so I want to go back through that. Quitting social media very quickly. The reason I heard about this book was that in our last interview on so Good They Can't Ignore youe, I asked Cal, as I do all of our guests, how can people find you? And Cal laughed and said they can't. I'm not on social media. So good. And then the working deeply as a skill. I love the juxtaposition of skill versus habit. So it's, it's a skill like learning how to play the guitar vis a vis a habit like flossing. That's super cool.

I was going to say. I think that's in particular important to keep in mind because especially now in such an age of distraction, people can be rudely awakened when they put aside their time. Okay, I've cleared out this whole day. Now I'm really going to hammer and understand this concept or do this deep thing and they're completely unable to do it. When they get there, their attention wanders. It's terrible. It's anxiety provoking. People are often surprised how hard it is to do deep work. It's really something that does have to be trained. But man, the benefits. I have to tell you, and I'll just say briefly A piece I ended up adding onto the first part of my book, even though it's not directly connected to the deep work hypothesis, is that it turns out that a life dedicated to deep work is just so satisfying. We have all of this different evidence for why this is true, but the summary is the more deep work you do, the more meaningful and satisfying your life is. It's a skill that's worth training because it just builds for much, much more fulfilling professional life.

Yeah. And it's in my own experience as I create more and more deep work in my life, it's fascinating to see those days where I really either created the space or had the space. And it's always the first, actually. There's just that depth of accomplishment, the sense of flow and the creation of meaning. That's fantastic. So rule number one, work deeply, build the skill. Let's talk about some of the routines, why routine is so important, why we need to ritualize deep work. And then I'd also like to talk about. You had four different depth philosophies that I thought were awesome to help people figure out what works for them. Can you give us the high level on all that?

Yeah. So how do you actually approach deep work in your working life? So one thing you have to decide is what's going to be your philosophy for how you integrate deep work into your working life. And I think it's important to recognize that there's different philosophies that work better for different types of work. I point out four in the book, mainly just to give a sense of the variety of different approaches you can take. So the four I talk about in the book is you have at one extreme the monastic approach, which is essentially I eliminate all shallow work or as much shallow work as possible for my life and just do deep work. This is appropriate for sort of a small number of professions. I think full time writers can get away with this. There's certain academic, senior academic thinkers who can get away with this. A lot of people can. Then we have. You can also look at the rhythmic philosophy to deep work, which is very common, which is you are going to do deep work at the same time for the same duration every day or every week. This is where you see people say every morning at 5am to 6am I do it, or every Friday I take the whole Friday off to do it. That's another way of integrating it into your life. The bimodal method is another common way. That's where you have two different modes. Some days you're doing shallow work you're doing your normal thing, and then you have periods of one to three days where all you're doing is deep work. And then you go back, are just doing shallow work. So you have this clear separation. And then finally there's the journalistic philosophy, which is where you find time or you can find time and you switch in a deep work mode when you can. Some days you might have a few hours. This day, none this day, you have a couple hours in the morning. So that's a more flexible approach. The bigger idea there being that there's different ways to try to integrate deep work into your already probably busy schedule. Now, the other thing you mentioned was with routine and ritual, that's another big idea from that first rule, which is if you have some sort of routine or ritual built around your deep work, you go to the same place, you do the same thing, you do the same, you have some rules for how you actually do the deep work. So be it. I go to this quiet riding cabin in the woods on one extreme or on the other, I put a do not disturb sign on my office door, I clean the desk and I lower the lights. Having some sort of routine and ritual. You get the same cup of coffee, you go for a walk, you listen to the same song. Helps you switch into the deep work mindset so you can jump right into the deep work and not have to expend too much willpower to try to get that going. So you need to think carefully about how you integrate deep work into your life. There's different options. And then if you have routine and ritual built around your deep work sessions, you'll get a lot more out of them.

Yeah, that's awesome. This is one of my favorite sections in the book. And just articulating, well, what is the philosophy or kind of a hybrid of philosophies that we want to engage in as we ritualize and routineize everything that we're doing. So check that out. Everyone listening. I'm the monastic, by the way. My mode is hermit mode. You gave me even more permission to own it because it's tough to really. I find it requires a certain level of courage to really be that clear and unequivocal of this is what I'm committed to and this is what's important. And the time of email response is going to wait or this level of communication is just going to go down significantly. So I found a lot of. I already gave myself permission, but I found a lot of confirmation in a very logical, compelling way.

And I can tell your audience that he does walk this walk, you say, well, he does these interviews, for example. But I'll tell you, if you go to schedule an interview with Brian, you see, I guess, is it one day a week you do for the interview?

Exactly.

You can see it's not, hey, let me know when you can do the interview. He protects the time. That's the true sign of a deep worker. Those type of things, you really are. You value and protect your time. You don't let your schedule be fragmented. So I was impressed by your interview scheduling process.

Well, I appreciate that because you were looking back in the mirror, because that was influenced by you. I had Monday, Wednesday, Friday as my clear. This is when I do a certain type of deep work days. But I had more flexibility of, hey, Tuesdays and Thursdays. And I realized, you know what? I love the interviews, but it created a level of chaos to my weeks when I splintered it that way. So, again, thank you for the kind words and thank you for the inspiration to narrow that down even more now. I think it's like three hours on Thursday.

Yeah. I think the important point is I'm assuming that the people you're interviewing don't care. Right. I mean, it's not causing a net. We have this idea sometimes that it's really important that I'm available and that if I'm not, people will be upset if I don't update my Facebook, my fans will be upset if I don't give my interview subjects a lot of different options. They'll be upset. But you've probably found no one notices, and yet you're getting this massive benefit. The downsides we think about are often really exaggerated in our head, and it causes us to create this fragmentation, shallowness in our life that we really don't have to have.

Yeah, this is. Again, I appreciate that. And it's exactly the case. And no one cares, you know, whether we schedule an interview in two weeks or two months. These are all really busy people. And of course, I caveat it with, if those times don't happen to work, let me know. You know, I'm not a tough guy about it. Right. I've had very few people who said, that just doesn't work. And what's exciting here is that this perfectly leads us to the next big idea. I wanted to hear your thoughts on, which is it's a lot easier to remove the distractions when you've identified something that's wildly important. So I want to hear your thoughts on that. I'll just share briefly mine. What's wildly important for me is serving our members. And I've decided exactly how I'm going to do that. And anything that gets in the way of that is now a distraction, because I've had that definition of wildly important. But can you talk to us about why it's so important to identify what is so important?

Yeah, I actually grabbed that concept from the columnist David Brooks when he wrote a column about distraction. And he said, yeah, we do have a lot of distraction. But I think the real problem, I'm paraphrasing here, the problem is because we don't have. Most people don't have something they feel importantly enough about to resist the distraction. Just to say I want to be less distracted for the sake of being less distraction is an uphill battle. But to say I want to be focused because this thing I'm focusing on is important to me. We're wired for that. We're wired for that. And you'll find that this habit of distraction that you were really worried about is not so hard to tame if you're doing so in the service of something that you really feel is important. Deep work that's really using your skills to do something that's important is incredibly satisfying. And I think you'll find once you're working on something important, working deeply on it, that's when you get into, like, my quit social media type territory. Because suddenly all these other things that seem so important to our culture just seem like they're in the way. And it's not that hard anymore to say, I don't want to spend time on that. I don't want to spend time on that either. So there's a huge shift that happens when you start to prioritize depth on something that's a real priority.

That's awesome. It's awesome. And saying yes to something allows saying no to be that much easier. I actually want to go back for just a moment. I shared the fact that I embraced the hermit mode. You share in the book what you embrace, but you're a professor at Georgetown. Tell us what depth philosophy you use in order to engage in your deep work consistently.

I'm primarily journalistic, or I have been primarily journalistic, which means, see, I'm a big proponent of weekly planning. So sort of as I lay out my week, I lay out my deep work time. So it's going to look different from week to week. So unlike the rhythmic method, where it's like, no, no, it's always this morning at this time, or unlike the bimodal method, where it's multiple days in a row of being monastic and then multiple days after that of being shallow. It looks different each week. That being said, I found myself drifting even since I've written the book, towards more of a hybrid of that and arithmetic type method. I'm using scheduling tools like you use for scheduling your podcast to try to clear out whole days. And it starts the same days each week so that they can be days completely dedicated to depth. I'm spending more time, for example, in those days outside and in the woods, which I think actually for me opens up deeper thinking on certain types of problems. So I would describe myself now as a mix between journalistic, I.e. each week can look different, but starting to mix with rhythmic. These different weeks are actually starting to become more and more similar. So I think if you talk to me in six months, I'd probably have even a much clearer story to tell here. I think what's important though is I think about. I think that's what's important. You identify what makes sense for me for scheduling deep work as opposed to just trying to jerry rig someone else's approach onto your life. Because that's probably not going to work.

That's awesome. You think about it, then you test it. Hey, did this work or did it not? And just keep at it and iterate incrementally getting a little bit better. Cal and I joke too, that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, for me, I block out my calendar, literally. I put deep work as a recurring thing in my day. And I have different kind of pockets of time that I classify as deep work. So that might be helpful for you as well. One other idea I want to hear your thoughts on. We've got another hard stop with Cal today. He's got office hours in a few minutes. This inspired me deeply as well. Cal also has. I forget how many kids you have. Is it two now or it's still one?

Two.

Two young kids. I have one young little guy. And this idea of shutdown complete, where this ability, commitment to and ability to cultivate the skill to work deeply, allows us to get more done in less time so we can actually spend time engaged. And your shutdown complete is just awesome. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah. I'm a big proponent of work shutdown routines, which is a notion of when you're done with your scheduled work for the day, you have a routine you do to clear things out of your head. So usually for me, that means you make sure that any sort of tasks you've captured have been put into Your systems that you've checked, your calendar, you've checked your weekly plan, you know what's going on the next day, there's nothing hanging that needs to be addressed. And then you have some sort of actual phrase you say, such as, okay, schedule, shutdown complete, which indicates to you there's nothing hanging. I've looked at everything. We're not on the hook for something tonight. I am now done with work. And it allows you to actually have this sort of mental clarity to release work and be clear for the rest of the night. I mean, not only is that incredibly relaxing, it really gives you the type of recharge you need. If you're going to be doing serious deep work most days you have to give your mind time to recharge. And this really goes a long way towards getting there.

Right on. I agree completely, cal. Appreciate you. Calnewport.com you will not find Cal on social media. We didn't talk about that in depth, but I think your own wife demonstrates it perfectly. But that's the best place for people to keep up with your blogging you're doing. Is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Calnewport.com you find out about the book and my blog and what I'm up to.

Right on. So I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Deep Work. Find it wherever you buy books and engage in it. It's truly life transformative. And again, thanks for taking the time, Cal. Look forward to connecting on your next book.

Yeah, thanks, Brian. I mean, if I just had to summarize what I've learned over the past four or five years, it's, you know, take a life where you, you work deeply on a small number of things that matter and the stuff that's not directly helping that you release. So it's you're working deeply or you're relaxing. It's a craftsman style lifestyle. It produces huge value, it's hugely satisfying. I can't recommend it enough. So the end with the quote that ends the book from Winifred Gallagher is. Any way you look at it, a deep life is the best life you can live. So hopefully I've convinced you of the same.

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