PNTV: Deep Work by Cal Newport (#263)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV Today, another great book, Deep Work by Cal Newport. Deep Work Subtitle Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World Cal also wrote the great book so Good They Can't Ignore youe, which we profiled in one of these episodes. And I interviewed him early last week. And at the end of my interview, I asked all of my authors with whom I chat in these interviews. I said, hey, how can our community learn more about you? Where can they find you? And Cal laughed and he said, you know what? I'm hard to find. And he proceeded to talk about the fact that he's committed to doing deep work. So he never created a Facebook account, he never created a Twitter account, and he's doing deep work. And he said, hey, that's the focus of my next book. I said, that's awesome. Love to check that out. He said, great, we'll get you a copy. Hachette. Thank you for sending it over. I got it maybe 40 hours ago, end of the day, two days ago. I read it yesterday in between interviews with Steven Kotler on the rise of Superman and Dan Coyle on the Talent Code, which Cal talks about and we're going to talk about a little bit today. And then I busted out the Philosopher's Note this morning and here we are. So ton of big ideas I'm excited to explore. I think this is a really, really important topic. Basic idea just to set up deep work vis a vis shallow work. Most of us spend almost all of our time in shallow work. This is constantly responding to the latest and loudest email and push notification for social media or text messages or phone ringing, whatever. Shallow work get about this deep. And he says, well, that's a challenge, because in today's society, what's rewarded is deep work. It's becoming increasingly rare, Cal says, and increasingly valuable to be able to produce deep work that matters, that you can only do when you're actually focused and not distracted by all this other stuff. I completely agree. And I love the way that he sets up the why We Should Care About Deep Work, which is part one of the book. And then part two is how to actually cultivate a deep work practice. I should also say cal got his PhD from MIT in computer science, and he is a professor at Georgetown in Computer science. And he writes with the logical precision and clarity that you would expect from a guy with that background. Very big brain. We joked in our interview that he was going to start busting out algorithms, but he makes it simple and it's powerful. So first big idea is the fact that we need to realize that if you want to develop your skill and do great work, you basically need to give your neurons a workout. Specifically, Cal references Dan Coyle's work, and Dan told us that we need to cultivate myelin. Myelin is basically what insulates our neurons such that electrical impulses can flow more powerfully and more consistently. The way Dan describes it is basically creating broadband in your brain. It's not muscle memory. It's all in your mind. This is how athletes perform so well, right? Anyone who wants to perform at a peak level literally has to train their brain. And you can't do that when you're in Shallowville. It requires intense focus. In the note, I joke about Imagine LeBron James. In my interview with Dan Coyle, Dan shared a story about LeBron James, who was learning how to play inside the inside game with Hakeem Olajuwon. And apparently there's a video on it I haven't seen yet. But LeBron is unbelievably focused, and he's slowing it all down as if he's in seventh grade learning it for the first time. Intensely focused, which Cal tells us is absolutely required if you want to build the myelin that builds your strength and capacity. And it's kind of like going to the gym. If you go to the gym and and you lift Styrofoam weights and you're kind of sort of doing it right, that's not going to get you there. You need to actually lift weights. Well, when you're doing good work, you're doing work that you want to be good. You need to focus. That's your equivalent of weightlifting. And I joked with LeBron to bring it back to that. When he's learning this, he's intensely focused. He's not dribbling the ball, munching on Oreos and taking breaks to go check out. Oh, wow, I got a new email. Got to make sure I get back to that quickly. He knows what's important. He knows what's going to create value in his profession. And he insulates himself from all the distractions so he can go deep. That's what this book is about. Building myelin via deliberate practice. Deep work in our chosen field. This is a really cool idea. The second big idea is attention residue. So Cal talks about the research on attention residue. So almost all of us know at this stage that multitasking a doesn't really exist. You can't actually do two things at once. You just rapidly Split your attention. Go from this to this to this to this, diminishing your performance in both of them, right? So we all know that multitasking isn't the way to roll, but even those of us who go from meeting to meeting to meeting. So let's say you got a 15 minute meeting and then you go do this and you're, you're actually focused on that particular thing. You're not in the meeting, checking your email. You're not multitasking in that sense. But the research has shown that when you split your attention like that and you go from one project to another project to another project to another project, you have something that researchers call attention residue. What you were doing before is still like a residue on your attention. And they've come up with these creative ways to test your performance. And if you're getting your attention split like that, going from thing to thing to thing, you perform less well than someone who goes straight in one thing for a longer period of time. You don't have the attention residue which diminishes performance. It's a really cool idea. And this is the strongest reason to create time blocks. So we talk about time blocks a lot. The one thing guys, he wrote the one thing. Jay Papasan and Gary Keller talk about the fact that time blocks are the number one power tool for time management. Cal has a formula. He says productivity, like high quality work, is a function of time invested times intensity of focus. So if you want to create at a really high quality and a high volume, you, you need to combine putting a lot of time into it and intensely focusing. One great way to do that is via time blocks. Not oh, I did this and then I did that and then I did this and I did that and I did this and I did that. That's shallow. You're not going to do a ton of great work when you split up the same amount of time. Let's say this is 9 to 12, right? Or even 9 to 11 or whatever, right? Time blocks. Intense focus over an extended period of time leads to extraordinary results. Just as a personal example, one of the things that I've done, I didn't realize I was doing it quite explicitly until I read this work on attention residue. I read the book, I then immediately create a PDF so there's not a gap. Now I do some other things sometimes, but in a big sense, I'm going from one thing to the next. I'm going from one part of the same book to the next part. Once I have the PDF, then I create a Time block where right before this, I recorded the MP3 of the Philosopher's Note. Then I'm recording this TV episode, right? And then I immediately go into creating micro classes on my favorite big ideas. So I have a time block and I don't fracture my attention and have attention residue. So it allows me to create at a much higher level than I would if I was splintering my time like this. There's no way I would go from one part of this phase to checking my email or whatever. And this is why we all know this. We've all experienced this where you kind of get into it and then you want to get into another project, but you're kind of thinking about what you just looked at. You just looked at your email and it's taken up 2 or 5 or 10 or even 20% of your attention. And you can't give your best here. So keep that in mind. Create time blocks and do deep work that matters. And get a ton more in a shorter period of time, which is another theme that Cal comes back to. Higher quality work. Shorter period of time equals a good equation. Routines, our third big idea. Cal makes the point. So again, there's the why you should think about this. Then there's the how to go about doing it. He has four rules. We're going to talk about the first rule of working deeply. You need to create routines you can't have the intention of. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. I want to do less shallow work and more deep work. You need to actually structure your life with routines and rituals to make that more likely to occur. And he talks about the fact that all great creators had routines. They didn't do it haphazardly. They didn't just hope that inspiration would strike. They created the routine such that it consistently showed up and they did deep work. He has four different ways that we can do this that are awesome. See if I can remember them. One, the monastery approach. Two, the bimodal approach. I'll tell you in detail about these. Three, the rhythmic approach. And four, the journalistic approach. So if we go through those four, the monastery approach to creating routines is kind of the most extreme. It's what I love to do. Monastery Think of a monk who just detaches themselves from the Matrix. They didn't even check email. They're not involved online much. Right. Or at all. And they just go to work. I call it hermit mode. Right. You just can't get in touch with me. I turn on my phone once a week only because my wife wants me to Whenever we're hanging out, just my son and I taking adventures, that's monk mode, hermit mode. Now, a lot of people can't do that. It's extraordinarily powerful if you can do it. But he realizes, hey, you got to find your own style. Not everyone's going to do that. The second mode is called bimodal, which basically takes some of the benefit of the monk mode, but you also live kind of a normal life. He uses Carl Jung as an example. Carl Jung was a therapist in Zurich, but he also had a retreat house that he would go to where he was a monk. No distractions at all. He would write, but then he'd go back and he had this bimodal approach to doing deep work. That's the second possible alternative, right? The third one is what Cal calls rhythmic. In rhythmic, it's kind of like Jerry Seinfeld's write a joke every day. If you've heard of that. Don't break the chain, right? Where Jerry Seinfeld gave the advice, reportedly, that the way to become a good comedian is to write a joke every day. Create a rhythm, create a streak. And you got your calendar and you X off a day and another day and another day, and you don't want to break the streak. You have a rhythm of creativity. That's one way to do deep work. You create a rhythm. It might be at different times during the day, but you don't break your streak. That's the third. The fourth way to do it is journalistic. Now, the journalistic idea is basically like a journalist who needs to write on deadline, right? They've got a story that broke. They got to deliver quickly. They got to know how to go into deep work like that. They don't do it on a hermit basis, and they don't do the rhythmic per se. They just do it on demand, right? This is what Cal says is his preferred or kind of main dominant way to do his deep work. He schedules his days opportunistically. When he has time, he creates chunks and he does great work consistently, and he keeps track of it, which he talks about in the book. Those are our four ways. Super quick overview. Obviously, check out the book for more. But we've got to find our rhythm, what our personal style is, and then commit to creating those rituals. Fourth big idea is an awesome one. It's one thing to say, hey, quit distracting yourself in Shallowville, right? That's not that inspiring, though. That's an avoidance behavior. Quit doing that. What you really want to do is discover what you're just fired up about what is the wildly awesome opportunity in your life. What goal could you achieve in the next six to 12 months that's challenging yet feasible that you're really fired up about it will have a huge positive impact in your life. What is it? Identify that. Get wildly excited about it, right? This is awesome. Then you commit to that. You see what you're going to need to do to get there and then you crowd out with your enthusiasm all the distractions. You're so excited about your goal and so motivated that you move all these no's out. That's a much more effective strategy than saying, oh, I'm going to eliminate all these distractions. Let it be crowded out by your passion for doing something great. It's the fourth big idea. The fifth big idea is shut down complete. Cal talks about the fact that we need to create containers for our creativity. And he's amazing. He doesn't work past 5 o' clock or 5:30 or something like that and he doesn't work on weekends. He. Yet somehow he creates way more than a lot of his peers. He's a young untenured professor that's a pressure filled occupation. And he references kind of juxtapose another professor who complains about how oh you need to work so hard and I'm just. My whole life is kind of taken up by all these shallow things and blah blah, blah blah blah. And Cal says look, when you get serious about stuff like this and you commit to being super productive efficiently, you need to do things like. And one of the ways to do that is to create limits where you're just done. And he has a great idea of shut down complete, end your day. So for him it's at 5 or 5:30. I do something similar. Well, I'll finish his story and I'll share mine. He goes through his little routine. At the end of the day he checks his email one last time and he makes sure nothing urgent is sitting in there. He addresses anything urgent, right? And then he looks at what he wanted to get done today that he didn't, what tomorrow's going to look like and what he can push into tomorrow, right? And then he's complete, shuts down his computer and he says to himself, shut down complete. Very ritualistically done. Not going to think about it anymore until tomorrow morning. He's going to go enjoy his family and he's going to give himself the rest that he needs in order to perform at a high level. So this is what we talk about, making waves Oscillate on, off. And one of the best ways to do that is to end your day at a certain time. I mentioned that earlier in the day when I was reading this book, I interviewed Steven Kotler and Dan Coyle. They both referenced this exact idea. Steven Kotler said being in flow, his thing is about the rise of Superman and the science of flow. Optimal human experience. He says that's expensive. It's hard work to perform at a high level, to give a ton of energy to your craft. And the only way you can do that sustainably is, is to honor the rest phase. You got to know how to shut down. Jim Lore said we need to train recovery. It's as important as anything else. Shut down complete is a way to train recovery, so you're consistent. Right? Dan Coyle said the same thing. He said that when he was a journalist, he wrote a story on the world's fastest men. And he laughed because he said these guys, when they weren't racing and being the fastest men in the world, they were sleeping, they were napping all the time. They were professional nappers. It's the same thing. If you go that hard, you need to recover. And that applies physically and mentally. If you go hard mentally and you're creating time blocks of deep work and you can't do that more than really three to four hours a day, if you're really doing it, you need to recover. Shut down complete. For me, it's digital sunset. The sun goes down. Check in on the day. See what I did that I'm excited about and proud of, what, what I might not have gotten to, what's on the list for tomorrow. And then boom, turn it off, it's done. Turn off the wifi. No temptation. Digital sunset. I'm done. I'm going to recover. Have a great night of sleep and wake up tomorrow with great energy and hit it again. So I had the joke that I need to add in some communication, NASA style to Houston. Houston, we're shutting down. 3, 2, 1. Shut down complete. So get in the habit of that. Quit letting your work leak into every aspect of your life. You're just going to do shallow work if you do that. That is a quick, passionate look at this great book. Shut down complete. Get excited about something in your life. Let that crowd out the shallow work routines. We talked about four different ones. Go through those, think about which one is yours. Obviously, check out the book for more depth and then attention residue. This is a really cool idea. Don't multitask, obviously, but also don't hop from thing to thing to thing. Give yourself time blocks for deep work and then myelin. Know that when you do this intense focus, you are building your myelin in powerful ways and that's inspiring. So there you go. Deep work. Cal Newport. Hope you enjoyed and if you enjoyed this, I think you'll really love the book and get as much out of it as I did. Look forward to sharing more. Thank you Cal. Have an awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. A lot of people don't know all the stuff I do beyond these free videos I share on YouTube, so I thought I'd do a quick video to give you an overview of our membership program that you can get access to and get a ton of other stuff. So here's a quick look. 10 bucks a month Join the Optimal Living Membership Program. You get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes on some of the best Optimal living books out there. Old school Classics, Positive Psychology, Modern Stuff, Mindful Peak Performance, purpose neuroscience, wealth, etc. What you may not know is that in addition to the PNTV episodes, I create PDFs on all these great books. So six page PDFs. Let's take a look at one of them. 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