29: Deep Work: Ditch Cognitive Junk Food with Cal Newport

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In this podcast I talk with peak performers to reverse engineer their most successful career. Pivots interview experts on what it takes to be agile in a rapidly evolving economy and open the kimono on what happens behind the scenes of my book and business. You can learn to capitalize on risk, fear and uncertainty as the doorways of opportunity. My promise is that you will leave every episode with practical tips, tools and tactics. For show notes from this episode, visit jennyblake Me Podcast.

If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am thrilled to be interviewing Cal Newport today. Cal is a man of many talents. He's a professor of computer science at Georgetown. He was most recently, well, two books ago, the author of so good they can't ignore why skills trump passion in the quest for work you Love. And his latest book is Deep Writing Rules for Focus to Success in a Distracted World. Cal, welcome to the show.

Hi Jenny, thanks for having me.

Your work has been top of mind as I've been working on Pivot and I spent a long time thinking about what is the skill people need in the new economy. It was really important to me to figure that out and at first I thought it was pivotability, like the ability to deal with change and manage it. After reading Deep Work, I felt like, you know, Pivot is more the mindset, but deep work really seems like the skill people are going to need. And if not need, it's the thing that is going to differentiate people. Can you talk a little bit about what deep work is and the difference between deep and shallow work?

Sure. And I think the way you put it is good because it notes this fact that deep work is a base level skill. In some sense. It's this low level, generally applicable skill, very valuable skill on top of which, you can build sort of any number of different professional strategies or approaches to your career. So I think that's a good way of putting it. But yeah, let's define the terms so the listeners know what we're talking about. So I define deep work to be when you focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task, so you give something your full attention, your full concentration. You work for a long time on it without any context switching. So no distractions, no glancing at the phone, no glancing at the inbox. And I contrast that to shallow work, which is anything that's not deep work. So basically work that does not require your full concentration, work that's not taking your skills and pushing to their limits, more sort of logistical type efforts like checking email or checking in on social media or maybe tweaking a website design. Both types of work are important, I think, in a lot of knowledge work situations. For example, shallow work is what keeps you from getting fired. You have to respond to the boss email. But deep work is what actually improves your skills and produces things of value. It's what actually gets you promoted. So my argument is we have undervalued deep work, and I think it should be a tier one skill, something that you can cultivate, something that you can get better at, and something that, if you deploy, can have sort of significant benefits to your professional life.

Your book even goes so far as to say that our deep work skills have atrophied, that because knowledge workers are now falling prey to shallow work and network tools like social media, that our deep work skills are atrophying.

That's what makes this. Yeah, but that's what makes this so interesting to me, is that we have this almost paradox going on. So at the exact point where I think the deep work is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy, which I'm not the only one saying it, the terminology the economists used is that deep work is the killer app of the knowledge economy. I like that formulation. So at the exact time that deep work is becoming more valuable, it's also becoming more rare. People are becoming worse at deep work. People are spending very little time actually doing deep work schedules, and attention is much more fractured. And when people do try to concentrate, they're not very good at it. Their mind has lost its ability to really give intense concentration. So we could curmudgeonly shake our fist and say, this is a bad thing. But I actually prefer to take the more positive stance and say, hey, this is a great opportunity. It's a classical economic mismatch. We have a skill that's getting more valuable at the same time that it's becoming more rare, which is this great sweet spot. That means that if you were one of the few to recognize that and to cultivate the skill, then you're really going to thrive, you're really going to stand out.

One of the ways you say to do that is focus on the wildly important. I love that distinction. How did you come to define what is wildly important for you?

Yeah, it's kind of a difficult question when they try to figure out what you should put deep work on, what you should be deep working on. You know, at a general level, it should be things that improve your skills, use your skills and produce as much valuable value as you're capable of producing. Making that concrete is actually kind of tricky. And this is something that caught my attention when I've been out there talking about this concept is that people struggle. It's quite regular to hear people struggle in their attempt to understand, okay, well, what should I be focusing on? What type of activity is going to produce the most value? And the fact that most people, or a lot of people at least, don't have a ready answer to that, shows how far we've drifted in our work habits away from actually trying to use our brain at its fullest capacity. Most people, if you actually say, no, what's really valuable and what you do in their day, and they put down their inbox for a second, they say, you know what? I don't really have a ready answer for that. I don't really know where I'm actually doing craft and producing things for value. So it's a hard question to answer, but I think it's worth really trying to understand, really trying to get to an answer. So for me, for example, in my career as a professor, enough reflection turned up that what really mattered was trying to produce the original ideas that could be published in paper that other people cite. And that deep, concentrated, focused effort on that goal, on that activity of having those ideas, writing those ideas by far has the most massive professional returns in my work life, as opposed to anything else I could put attention on. And I think most knowledge jobs have a similar type activity where it's hard. It's going to require a lot of concentration, but the more it's prioritized, sort of the more massive benefits you get.

That's so important to define why do the deep work or what to work on. I was just going to say as you were talking, that for some people, they might want to do deep work but just feel confused about what to work on. And I know I certainly felt that way when I realized big ideas are really important to me. But shoot, I don't know what it is yet. Can you share a little bit of your strategy for, I think you call it productive meditation and coming up with ideas in the first place?

Yeah, it's interesting to get to the point of how do I figure this out in my own life? Something I wanted to add there is that a strategy I found effective and others have found effective is to start looking for examples of those who are in your field but represent where you want to get their lifestyle, their success, their status in the field is something that resonates with you. This is what it means to be the be successful. This is the next step I'm trying to get to and then actually try to understand what is it about what they can do and produce that makes them so valuable. So actually studying people in your field can help give insight into where should I be putting my attention, where I should be working deeply now, bringing it back to productive meditation. So what's productive meditation about? Well, to understand that, we have to step back one step further and say, if there's one idea that I'd like listeners to come away with, beyond the fact that deep work is very valuable, which is something we can dive more into, is the idea that deep work is a skill, not a habit. So people often get this wrong. People often think that the ability to concentrate real intensely is a habit, like flossing their teeth, something they know how to do, but they just really need to put aside more time and do it more often. They're just not doing as much as they should. The reality is that deep work, the ability to concentrate intensely, to push your mind to its limit, is a skill like playing the guitar. It's something that you would not expect yourself to be good at until you've actually practiced it and you've actually taken the time to get better at it. So deep work is a skill, and there's various tactics like productive meditation that I talk about that are all designed to help you cultivate and train an ability to really concentrate intensely. So a lot of people are just not familiar with what it even feels like to be able to do real intense, deep work work. But once you actually have that experience, once you've actually trained your mind to be able to do it, it's hard to go back. It's almost like a drug. The amount you can produce, the clarity of your thinking, the rate of production, the quality of Production. It's almost like having superpower. So those would be the two ideas I really want people to come away with. Deep work is very, very valuable for most knowledge work jobs, and almost no one's doing it. And two, it requires quite a bit of training if you actually want to do it.

Well, that's so fascinating. And it's true. It is like a high. I think anyone who's experienced a flow state from doing deep work and challenging themselves can relate to that feeling of coming up for air after hours and hours saying, oh, wow, that felt really good. And then time warps because you can get so much more done. And what seems like. Or what maybe used to be seemed like it would take much longer. And I mean, you're a great example of that. I love your story of you got rejected for a grant and then committed to some of these practices, not all of which we've talked about yet, but ended up having your most prolific year by far, while having your second child and writing a book. It's incredible.

Yeah, I mean, that's what I really want to emphasize is that deep work is not about. It would be nice to feel a little less distracted. It's instead really talking about large multiplier.

Improvements in productivity and quality. So I actually. The year I wrote this book, I was also really tuning up my deep work habits because partially I was upset about that grant and partially just because I was writing a lot about deep work. So I was thinking about, hey, what are the. How can my habits be better? What can I be doing better? And I doubled my productivity that year as compared to any previous year where I measured productivity by competitive peer review publications. I had twice the number of competitive peer review publications I'd had in any previous years, even with a significant reduction in the amount of work time I actually had available because I had to spend quite a bit of time writing the book. That's an example of the type of results you get out of deep work. Once you really learn this skill, it can really look like to the outside world, almost like a superpower. People say, I don't get it, Cal. How are you able to do this without doing the second shift? Of course you have to work at night after the kids go to bed. That's the only way you can get things done. How are you able to double your output in a year without working past five or what have you? It's because there's such a massive difference between what you do when you can do true, intense deep work, and you prioritize that and Protect that and train that versus a much more scattered, context shifting, distracted approach to work. It's night and day.

Mm. One of the things I love most about you and your work and your philosophy is how bold you are about saying no to things. So there are a couple sections. This is a lot to cover. But you say, embrace boredom, be lazy. The things that I really started cheering for. Quit social media. And you even wrote an article for HBR called A Modest Proposal. Let's quit email altogether. And you're someone who your email is not on your website, you've never been on Facebook or Twitter, and yet you still have a public facing career. Can you talk about.

Why you're so bold on quitting social media and maybe even email, as opposed to just saying, sure, fit it in when you're done with your deep work?

Well, I think the reason I end up sounding controversial or bold is not because I set out to be controversial or bold as the precondition and then look for ideas that fit it. I think it's instead my general approach, which is I like to get down in my sort of geekish mathematician type way, I like to get down the first principles and then once I understand first principles, build back up to what does that imply about how you should live your life? So if you take something like deep work, you get down to the first principles, wow, this is massively valuable. If I do a lot of this, I'm going to do much better and my life's going to be more meaningful. I'm going to produce a bunch more. Then when you build back up from that principle and get to things like social media, you say, well, this doesn't make any sense. I mean, why would I? I mean, social media, I am a bit of a curmudgeon on social media, but really social media are products.

That are sold by private companies for profit companies. And their whole market is to try to get as much of your time and attention as possible so they can learn about you and sell your information to others and sell advertisements to you. That's their business model. There's nothing particularly intrinsically wrong about it. But if you're someone who really values your time and attention, if you're someone who wants to cultivate your ability to think deeply and produce things that are valuable, then you should be very wary about things like social media because these are tools that are designed by very smart people to make that very hard. They have attention. Engineers who specialize using techniques that come from, among other places, Las Vegas casino gambling, specialize in building applications and services that will catch your attention, distract you as much as possible, fracture your time as much as possible, pull your attention away from deeper thinking as much as possible. So to me, I see social media as someone who uses my brain to make a living. Like I think an athlete who uses his or her body to make a living would think about junk food. It's not that Oreos are intrinsically evil, but if you're a marathon professional, marathon runner, you say, I don't want anything to do with any of that food, it's too palatable. I could eat a whole bag if I started going. It goes completely against what I'm trying to do in my professional life. So I see social media as cognitive junk food that has really good marketing. And these for profit companies have convinced a lot of our culture that somehow these aren't just products they're trying to make money on, but are instead somehow at the core of being a civically engaged citizen and that you somehow have to be using these services just to be a part of our society. But if you think past that sort of marketing, you say it's like slot machines or something, right? They're fun, but they're going to distract me too much and take away my money. So I'm just very suspicious of things that are going to take away my time and attention. And typically I just keep a larger threshold. If you can offer me some massive value on things that are important to me, I'll use you as a tool. If you can't, then I'm just not that interested. And so I think that that should be a pretty non controversial stance. I think it would be in almost any other part of our life. But when it comes to the digital attention economy, we have a somewhat warped way of looking at things.

Well, there's so much pressure, it seems like in the media about people standing out and building a platform and so much especially for an author. Publishers are looking at what's the size of your platform and so it does go against the grain. You make a distinction in the book about the any benefit mindset versus the craftsman approach. I would love for you to explain this but that we tend to adopt new social media tools because, oh, it'll do a little something for me, but then it's actually degrading our leisure time and our work day.

Yeah. So to me, the craftsman approach to selecting tools which I actually learned about from a farmer who lives around here. So farmers are people who have to obviously use tools on the farm to make a living, but they have to be Very selective about what tools they invest in and use, because there's many more tools out there available at the farm supply store than they have capital to buy or time to use. So they have to be pretty wary about what am I going to invest in, what am I not going to invest in? I know a farmer out here outside in the Shenandoah Valley, so not far outside of D.C. where I live. I talked to him about it. I was like, yeah, walk me through how you make these decisions. And it's nuanced. That's what I came away with. He says, yeah, everything has some value. But when I decide whether or not I'm going to use a tool or not, I have to reflect on what are the. The most important things for my farm success. And does this tool bring substantial positive benefits that substantially outweigh its negative benefits for those things that matter most? And that's how the sort of craftsman approach to thinking about tools unfolds. Is this going to give me substantial positive benefits that substantially outweigh the negative benefits on the things that are most important? That's what matters. By contrast, when it comes to digital tools, a lot of people right now use what I call the any benefit mindset, which is where you say, if this tool brings me any potential benefit or if there's any potential thing I might miss out on by not using this tool, that's justification for it to have claim to my time and attention, which I think is the wrong way to think about things. I just wrote about a quote from Seneca on my blog not too long ago, where he, thousands of years ago, made this point that I think is still true today, that, that humans have a way of undervaluing themselves. So if you say, hey, Facebook now costs $5 a month, you would have hundreds of millions of people who would stop using it. They'd say, I'm not going to pay $5 a month for this. I'm not going to pay $5. It's not worth $5 a month. Yet they're willing to dedicate 20, 30 of their hours a month to being on here and curating it. The distraction, the social anxiety. So they're paying all these huge negative personal costs, which they're then valuing less than in this example, Doll.

Much undervalued themselves. Their attention, their time, their autonomy, their ability to create. So my argument for tool selection should be there's no intrinsically bad tools or intrinsically good tools. There's just tools that have a massive positive benefit on your life. And those who don't and you should really stick with only giving your time and attention to those that are in that former category.

I love it. And it's so true that it's cognitive junk food. I just got a new phone, and so I hadn't yet turned off all the notifications and badge icons, and yesterday I was procrastinating. I'm working on the last final round of my book edit, and I found myself clicking around my phone, trying to make all the little badge icon notifications go away. So, like, Twitter had nine and Facebook had 10. And so I just started opening apps, just looking for a little hit of satisfaction that I was, quote, getting something done, and there's just no way. And I actually stopped myself as if, like, I had my hand in the cookie jar. Like. Like, what are you doing? If this is my way to procrastinate, like, go get outside. Go to a yoga class. Go do something meaningful. Don't just click around like a monkey on my phone.

Yeah, well, so, you know, I guess the point we're making is that, you know, it's possible and desirable to have a deeper life, and some people just haven't been presented this option. It's hard. I think that's sort of the moral to your story is it's hard, but it's very possible to construct a life that is significantly deeper. That is, your attention shifts context way less than it probably does right now. It's possible and positive to have a life in which your attention will be on something for a long amount of time and then shift to something else that could be there for a long amount of time where you're not interrupted that much, where you don't constantly have two or three things going through your mind, it is possible to do it. The things they tell you that will go wrong if you try to embrace a deeper lifestyle are overhyped. So I've never had a social media account, but I still have friends.

Are you serious?

I still sell books. I don't have Twitter, but somehow I know what's going on in the news. I know what's happening in the world. So this notion that all these bad things will happen. Yeah, I'm hard to reach on email, yet I still get interesting opportunities and still meet people, and there's still serendipity. So a lot of these bad things that people say will happen if you're not involved with these technologies, I haven't found it to be true, but I have found that the opposite. A deeper life that's built more on being respectful of my Attention and cultivating my ability to apply it is really a satisfying, pretty meaningful way to live. Ginny and I were joking before the podcast began about how I was just coming out of the book publicity phase for my last book. But something I noticed during that phase because it forced me back into a more standard style lifestyle. Just because, as you know, well, the constant information coming in, oh, there's an opportunity, you have to constantly check email. You're always jumping around like it's a very. What would be standard for a lot of people, but a lot more attention fragmented than I'm used to. And I noticed that within about a week of that, I had this background hum of anxiety that just entered the scene and came right up. This sort of constant sort of background hum of anxiety that just sat there as long as I was in this state of constantly switching my attention. And it leads me to wonder how many people out there are suffering from this sort of persistent background level of anxiety, not even realizing that it doesn't have to be there. And that by reclaiming your time and attention, actually you might find that that is not just a property of what it means to be alive, that's something that is being forced. It's your body saying, I'm not happy with this. Your brain saying, this is not a happy way for me to be operating. And that was a big reminder for me going through that busy sort of connected period that there's real sort of physiological consequences and they're not unavoidable. And, you know, there's a way to reduce those beyond just, I think the standard prescriptions of, you know, have another drink or watch an even, even dumber show on Netflix.

That is absolutely fascinating. And especially to see the contrast. I think anybody can relate who has checked their email from bed where all of a sudden you're just anxious. For me, at least I'm anxious the rest of the morning, even if it's a background hum as you described, where it's not as conscious. So now I really try not to check email even till 10 or 11. I'm like, there's most likely nothing urgent that would need my attention in these golden morning hours.

Yeah. My theory on email is part of the reason why it has such a devastating impact on our health well being and productivity is that we have these social brains. And I really think the way our brain is wired is that, that having five emails in your inbox, your brain sees it the same way as those five people are waiting outside on your front stoop. And every minute that you're not getting back to them. They're out there.

And they're annoyed. Like, come on, open the door, I need to talk to you. And your brain sees it that way. So this feeling of like my inbox is piling up. It's like working at your home and knowing that you have guests arriving and waiting outside your door and that every minute you're ignoring them, they're getting annoyed and pissed off and they're being stuck there. And our brain is wired to say, don't do that. Don't leave people waiting outside. Right. You're going to get kicked out of your clan and get eaten by the saber tooth tiger. So that's my theory at least about why just seeing an inbox can knock off all of these sort of physiological warning signs and alarms.

That's a great theory. It's true. I'll be laying my head down at night thinking about an email that I haven't responded to that's maybe getting now a week and a half old or something. Oh my goodness. Can you walk us through your ideal or your average deep work day? How does it go?

Well, it's a good question because something I emphasize is that if you're going to succeed in having deep work be an important part of your work life, you need some sort of scheduling routine, some sort of routine way you use to make sure deep work shows up in your schedule. If you just, just hope to come across times in your day in which you have a lot of free time and you feel like doing deep work, you're really not going to get much done. That's just not going to happen that much. But I also emphasize that there's multiple different types of scheduling philosophies or routines that I've seen be successful. And I like to emphasize that variety because it's not one size fits all. And I don't like to see someone trying to fit one approach to scheduling deep work to their life and it doesn't work and have them conclude, well, maybe I just can't do deep work. So. So in my own life, for example, I use what I call the journalistic philosophy of scheduling deep work, which is a little bit more ad hoc because I have in my life as a professor, there's a lot more sort of flexibility, but also unpredictability. One week can look very different from the next in terms of what's on my plate. I tend to survey the week ahead and figure out where I'm going to do deep work. And then I claim those times like an appointment or A meeting, and I protect them all the same. It'll be pretty uneven. I might have a day where the entire day is deep work. And those are my favorite types of days. I can go 7 hours without any sort of communication with the outside world, a lot of it spent on foot. That's a great day for me. But then maybe the next day I have to teach and I have some meetings and I'm saying I'm not going to try to fit any deep work into that day. So that's sort of my journalistic approach. There's some other approaches that I've seen being popular, two of them in particular being the rhythmic philosophy, which is you set aside the same time on the same days every week to do your deep work, so you don't even have to think about it. Maybe it's first thing in the morning, maybe it's all day Friday, every Friday. But you just, you have the same times. You always do deep work, and you don't have to think about it. When you get to that time on those days, you do it. Then there's also the bimodal philosophy, which is you do no deep work for a while and then you'll put aside two, three, four days in a row and just binge on deep work completely, like you're on vacation. You can't be reached, no email, you clear all residue out of your mind, you only do deep work, and then you return back to the world of okay, I'm accessible, I'm connected. So there's a lot of different ways to do this. And even within these ways, different days can seem different. So that's a very long answer to your short question.

That's a great answer. I'm actually glad you hit on the different depth philosophies, as you call them. Each person should decide on their own and then run with it.

It depends on your personality. It also depends on your job. It depends on what's the reality of your job and the demands and the schedule demands. So different things will work better for different types of jobs.

One of the things that you say we can all benefit from is an evening shutdown ritual. What is that and why does it matter?

So what it is is a notion that you have a fixed time at the end of your workday where you do a review of any sort of open loop. So you make sure any tasks or things that have come in are processed and added to the proper places in your productivity system. However you work, your productivity system, you look at your tasks, you look at your calendar, what's my plan for tomorrow? How does it fit in for my plan for the week? There's nothing that's just floating around in your head. Everything has been put somewhere where you know it'll be handled or you've handled it. And then you shut down and say, okay, I have no open loops. There's nothing my mind has to hold on to. It's all in my system. And then you shut down and until the next morning, there's no work. So there's no work related communication, there's no emails, there's no inbox, there's no taking in information that's related specifically to work, no looking at related websites or anything related to your work. You give your brain the entire evening and night complete, unbroken freedom from the concerns of your professional life. The goal for doing this is that first of all, it's just relaxing. As I said, we have this background humma anxiety. You need some freedom from those chemicals. This helps you get that freedom on a regular basis. But two, I think it actually helps you work better because during that period where you're not actively trying to process work stuff, it gives your brain the ability and the space it needs to process what's going on in your professional life in the background and actually unconsciously start making some progress on your sort of most complex problems you're facing. It also gives you a cognitive recharge so that when you get back to the next day, you have more cognitive energy that you can apply, more focused and actually generate better results. I'm a big believer in work shutdown routines. I've been doing them since I started them when I was writing my dissertation as a graduate student. I was like, I got it clear. That was the first time I was really being overwhelmed in the evening by thinking and this and that and what if this is wrong and this proof doesn't work? And I had to put it in place to get some mental sanity, but I've used it ever since. That's been about eight years now, and I found it has been a major source of sort of recharging as well as refreshing in my life.

I feel similarly, once I went out on my own, which was about five years ago, I just realized that I'm brain dead after about 4pm I won't take coaching calls, I won't schedule anything. And I say to the person, you don't even want me at this hour. It's like my dead zombie zone. And then I'll go to yoga or go meet a friend for coffee, maybe. Being prone to Anxiety helps kind of set some of these habits because I would then stop checking email, even on my phone by 5 or 6pm because it would just make me too anxious and I knew I wasn't going to work or be very productive if I got anxious and suddenly felt the need to respond to things. So just stop checking because I just didn't want it seeping into my evening and then I would have a hard time going to bed and the dominoes fall from there. So I was just so glad you shared that in your book.

Yeah, it works for those of us, like us who are anxiety prone. It's more natural survival.

Exactly.

But it's generally applicable is what we're saying. It's nice. You got to give your brain just remember what that space is actually like.

Yeah. And just experiment. I mean I think anyone can try some of these tactics for a week or two weeks and notice. Do you feel better? Do you feel less stressed the same way that you had it in the reverse of that hum of anxiety coming back and seeing that contrast is so helpful. So then someone can keep what works and ditch what doesn't.

Well, I like this experiment notion. In fact, let me make this concrete. I'll give a couple concrete experiments I think are really suggested to try them out. If you really want to get a sense of what the deep life has to offer versus a shallower life. A few things, a few concrete experiments I would suggest would be the following. One, go onto your calendar right away, look at the next two weeks, have six hours blocked out in each of those two weeks where you are going to have zero distraction and concentrate as hard as you're able to on something cognitively demanding. And I would break it up into no more than three hours at a time. So maybe you take two days, you block off three hours like you have jury duty or a doctor's appointment. You protect that time. During that time you take a hard task and no email, not even a glance. No social media, not even a glance, no website's, not even a glance. And just think hard about it. So in two weeks you'll get a taste or an exposure to what that type of work feels like. So experiment with that. Second, experiment with the work shutdown routine. Just try it for two weeks. If you have to work later, work later, Add an extra hour to the end of the day if that's what you need. But get to a shutdown point and don't touch work and see what that feels like. The third is coming back to what we were talking about with Social media. I have that chapter called quit social media. But what that was actually referring to was the following experiment, which is quit social media for 30 days. Don't tell anyone. Don't delete your accounts, don't deactivate them, just don't use them. And then after 30 days, come back and say, was I really missing something? Was my life worse without having access to this? And did people even notice that I was gone? And so those three experiments, I think if you do over the next few weeks, you'll come away from that with a much more deeper, intuitive understanding of what it is, the type of lifestyle I'm talking about, what it actually feels like, what the actual benefits are, and its feasibility.

Awesome. I love it. Last question. I'm so curious to know your Harvard Business Review article, Modest Proposal for Quitting Email. What was the reaction to that? I can imagine that it stirred up a lot among people.

It's interesting. Yeah, email is a topic that I'm interested in right now. It's something that I'm thinking a lot about because, well, here's my pitch.

My pitch is tools aren't passive. We like to think about tools as being passive, something that we deploy to make our life easier on our terms. So we think about email as, oh, okay, that's a technology that I use in ways that I think will make my life better. It just makes certain things easier. But we know from almost a century's worth of media criticism, going all the way back to Lewis Mumford in the 20s and through McLuhan and through more modern thinkers, that tools have a very active impact on our life and on our culture. Just the presence of a tool existing can change the way that we live our lives, and not in any sort of directed or positive sense, just somewhat arbitrarily. And so my argument is that when email came along as a technology in the 1990s, it had a massive change on how people worked. It pushed them towards a type of work that I call the hyperactive hive mind, which is work requires just constant communication between everyone. And we just sort of figure things out and make progress in an ad hoc manner on the fly through all this constant communication. Email introduced that way of working. Even if you had the same job in 1980 that you have today, in 2015, what your day looks like, what work means to you, would be significantly, significantly different in 2015, largely because email has changed the way we actually work. And I like to emphasize the point that this hyperactive hive mind approach to work that email helped introduce was not created with a goal in mind. It wasn't created to make us better at our work. It wasn't designed by anyone. It was just emergent. Just an emergent reaction to this technology argument is it doesn't take much research to unveil that this is a terribly unproductive way to work. It also makes people miserable. If you were to sit down to design what would be one of the worst possible workflows I could imagine, to make knowledge workers unproductive and miserable, this would be what you came up with. And so I'm arguing we have to replace it. It's time to sit down and say, knowledge work has been around for a while. We actually have to figure out how should we work and proactively design how do we get the most value and sustainability out of people's brains? And I don't think we can do it with email as we know it around. I think as long as we live in a world where every employee has an email address that's their nameompany.com and everything can come to that email address, and there's this one inbox and there's very little processes beyond just, we'll figure it out with conversations through email.

Once that exists, once that email address exists, it's going to be very hard to get away from the hyperactive hive mind. That's where we're going to devolve to. That's where we're going to default to. No amount of little rules like write better emails, email free Fridays, don't cc. It's not going to work as long as we have this frictionless mode of communication attached to individuals. Not the projects, not the products, and not the ideas. But to individuals. All of those things will fail. As we've seen in the last 15 years, those attempts always fail. And we're going to devolve back to this really bad way of working. So my proposal in the Harvard Business Review article was, I don't see how we can get away from this disastrous workflow without just getting rid of email as we know it. We have to just rip out the weed by the root. Just say we're going to start by getting rid of individual email addresses. Step one, step two. Then we're going to have to figure out how the hell are we going to do our work now. And answering that question would force individuals and organizations to actually do the thinking that they should have done in the first place, which is, all right, what do you actually do for us? How do you produce value for us? What would be the best way for you to work, if our goal is to have you produce as much value as possible and be as happy as possible doing it so that you don't leave and go somewhere else. And I think it would lead to a world in which there would be a lot more diversity in what people's work days look like. There'd be a lot more sort of logistical overhead. So certain things would be a lot more complicated and annoying, but that's okay. I mean, that's the same thing we saw in the industrial age. Assembly lines were very annoying, they were expensive, they're complicated, they, they require a lot of management, but they produce a hell of a lot more cars than trying to build cars the old way. So we have to put up with that. And I think people's workflows would be much more satisfying. You'd produce more value. You would be designing your workday around what do I do best and how do I do it at a really high rate and quality. So that's the vision I'm starting to push. So of course the natural reaction to the Harvard Business Review article was that might be good, but.

My job still needs email. Or we could solve this if we're just a little bit. Everyone is always just one small email habit a week away from solving all the problems. If we just recognize that you shouldn't use email for X and don't use ccs and some, then we'd all be fine. And it's been 20 years now. That's not going to work. So that's my revolution right now is anti email, anti email for the benefit of trying to make everyone's work better and more meaningful. So again, another long answer to a reasonable short question.

I love it. Well, once again, also saying the little hacks and tweaks are not going to work anymore. We've tried that and I feel that way. I feel totally overwhelmed by email constantly. I'm never caught up, nor can I control what comes in. And I think that's the crux of why it's an issue, because we don't get to say who emails. I mean, you provide a ton of tips actually in your book, but at the end of the day, it's just this reactive thing and it creates the same amount of stress, if not more. I've tried so many hacks. You know, I love templates, hacks, systems, tools, all of it. I've tried everything and it is still the biggest bottleneck and source of stress that I have.

One of my favorite stories, this is something I heard after the book but because it's relevant to you is that I read about Patrick Flynn, who runs a very successful website, very successful podcast, very successful blog, but he's a media entrepreneur and he wrote and did a podcast about his email problem. The same problem. There's so much email coming in. If you run as you know, if you run an online media presence, you get a lot of email. And his solution was he hired a very high profile priced executive assistant, someone who used to work with C level executives that could help him just keep on top of all this email that's coming in. And then not long after reading about that, I was on Brett McKay, who also runs a big the Art of Manliness. So it's also one of these large online media platforms. It's a blog, it's a website, it's a podcast, it's also very popular. And we were talking about this problem and he said, I had the same problem. I'll tell you how I solved. I took the email address off my website and replaced it with a PO Box address.

And he said, if you have something you think you want to talk to me or have something I should know about, send it to my mailing address. And nothing bad happened. His readership didn't go down, his blog traffic didn't go down, his podcast listens didn't go down. And he goes like once a week or so he goes to his P.O. box and he gets not a lot, but people who really want to get in touch with him send him a letter and he likes them. They're usually kind of nice letters.

And opportunities kind of come in through there. He just took that huge, massive anxiety time sink out of his life and just excised it. What I like about that story is that it highlights that we get stuck in thinking these are all things we have to do. And our best hope is that maybe we can be a little bit more productive at it and maybe hire an executive assistant to help us. But if we step back and say, what is it that I'm really trying to do? What's the most valuable thing I produce? And if this is not really helping that, and in fact it's hurting it, why can't I just drastically remove it? What actually happens if I just really intensely prioritize the things that really matter? And I think we have so much more flexibility and give out there in terms of shaping a deep life in a deep organization than we realize. And as we come to this recognition that you have a lot more levers to pull and a lot more knobs to turn than you thought was possible. Things get really exciting and life can actually get a lot more meaningful, a lot more productive completely.

There's exponential return then, and that's what's so meaningful. You said early in the show that deep work is hard. You're not saying it's easy, it's a skill. It takes practice and discipline. But the reward is really sweet. I mean, it does feel for me. There's no better feeling than having produced a piece of deep work. And you quote Tim Ferriss at the end of the book. You say develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. You're not saying that there's going to be no effect, but a lot of small bad things are kind of not as big of a deal as we make them seem to be.

Yeah. And so a deep life really is. It really is a good life. And it is hard, but it's possible. And it might require some radical changes, but it's going to make you professionally way more successful and it's going to make you personally way more meaningful, way more satisfied with life. So I'm definitely a zealot for depth. So I do appreciate you giving me the chance to. To come spread my crazy theories.

I love them all. Cal, thank you so, so much for all the incredible deep work you do. Not just with this book, with all of your work. I love your blog. Where can people find you if they want to check out more of your work?

Well, calnewport.com is where my blog is, so I write about all these ideas there. So if you want a gentle introduction to my weirdness, that's probably the right place to start.

Awesome. Awesome, Cal. Thank you so much for being here and everyone, I hope you enjoy enjoyed this interview as much as I did.

Thanks, Ginny.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. To learn more and get in touch, visit Jennyblake Me where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind, body and and business. Or find me on Twitter at Jenny Underscore Blake. And remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.