Episode Highlights

• What do creativity and focus look like on a neurological level?
• Why your ability to focus is more important than your IQ level
• How to maintain your mental hygiene
• What is “deep work”? (Hint: It might just be a modern superpower)
• The current demand for focus and its relationship with our fragmenting technology
• Learn to break your brain’s addiction to stimuli
• “You can choose between being busy or being remarkable. Not both.”
• The benefits of scheduling your entire day
• How much are your phone glances at work really costing you?
• What is a flow state and how difficult is it to achieive?
• Deep work isn’t about getting more work done, it’s about getting the same work done faster
• How much good work can one person complete in a day?
• The ability to focus deeply is a skill and requires practice, not a set amount of time

Useful Links

• Cal Newport’s Site

About Guest

Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. In addition to studying the theoretical foundations of our digital age, Newport also writes about the impact of these technologies on the world of work. His most recent book, Deep Work, argues that focus is the new I.Q. in the modern workplace and that the ability to concentrate without distraction is becoming increasingly valuable. He previously wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You, a book which debunks the long-held belief that “follow your passion” is good advice, and three popular books of unconventional advice for students.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Cal Newport, who is the Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, and he specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms, which I could probably spell if I wasn’t reading it, but I have no idea what that means. And on top of that, you earned your PhD from MIT in 2009 So I am way, way out of my league on this podcast, but at the same time, I am incredibly happy and excited to have you here today, Cal. So, thank you for being here.

Cal Newport: Well, Zack, thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here. I’m also happy to spend the next hour talking about distributed algorithms in detail. So, let’s let’s get out our math textbooks. And now I’m just joking,

Zack Arnold: Shall we? The only question I would have is, what is the distributed algorithm? Because I’m not a math person at all. I’m a creative. I’m one of those crazy creatives that locks themselves in a room for hours, days, weeks at a time, and just wants to get stuff done, and the reason I have you on the show is because you understand that mindset and you understand what it takes to get real deep work done, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today, and where I actually want to start is a quote that you have in your book, Deep Work, that is from Eric Barker, who I’ve actually had on my show previously, and I’ll put a link to the show notes for that interview if anybody wants to listen to it, but his quote is that Deep Work is the superpower of the 21st century, and this is something that I myself have intrinsically believed for years, but now that I’m seeing all the research, I’m finally starting to feel like my weirdness in being in the quote unquote cave for months at a time is validated. So, where I want to start is you talking about your deep work hypothesis and how it applies to the way we do things now in the 21st century.

Cal Newport: I think this is one of the more interesting storylines in our current economy, and it’s almost entirely missed by most discussions, that’s what that’s what catches my attention about. So, the deep work hypothesis is pretty straightforward. It says there’s two forces going on: one, the ability to concentrate intensely without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. What I call deep work is becoming more valuable, but for various reasons that we can get into this, is something that’s becoming increasingly valuable to our economy, especially the knowledge economy. The second force, which is something that we’re all familiar with, and probably all just stipulate is true, is that we are getting worse at concentrating intensely without distraction. That we are, we are entering a period right now where we’re humans are probably worse at sustaining attention and schedule. Are more fragmented than they’ve ever been before in recent human history. So, you put those two forces together, a skill is becoming more valuable at the same time that it’s becoming more scarce. You know, that’s economics 101 that’s supply and demand. You have something that’s becoming more in demand at the same time that the supply is going down, means the price is going to be very high. So, I see that’s this great opportunity right now for the small number of individuals or organizations that explicitly cultivate and focus and prioritize their ability to do deep work, they’re going to get outsized rewards, at least at the moment when deep work is being so sort of overpriced at the moment in our economy.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and we could definitely go much deeper into all of that, but before we do, I just kind of want to step backwards and just explain and define, like, what does it mean when you say deep work, and I’ve heard you say things like shallow work. So, let’s kind of talk about the difference between these two, and how we actually define them.

Cal Newport: Yeah, because the vocabulary here is does a lot of the heavy lifting, just having the terms, because what it tells us is that, especially knowledge work? All work is not made equal. There’s different types of work you can do. So, deep work is that type of work where you are concentrating with your full attention, your full mental energy on a cognitively demanding task. That’s where you’re actually putting your brain to its full power and trying to create something or solve something difficult with your brain. We can call everything else shallow work, so it’s not deep work, it’s shallow work, and that is an important distinction. It means there’s a difference between being really busy if that busyness was spent primarily focusing hard and creating new value on hard things, versus if that busyness was I was bouncing around emails and social media and meetings and powerpoints the whole day. It means work is not just work, there’s two different types of it.

Zack Arnold: Well, it seems to me like I need to get all that stuff done, like I have to be answering my emails and responding to my text messages, and there’s a conversation on Facebook that I should probably be a part of, because somebody tagged me, and oh, there’s this other stuff that I need to get done too, but there’s just, there’s so much of it, and I’m really, really good at multitasking, so I don’t understand why this is such a big deal.

Cal Newport: Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, here’s what I’ll say. Here’s how I’ll come back at that. Is that you need to understand the way I talk about it is that value produced by activities, you have to think about it like a market system. So, if something in that particular activity you’re doing is easy to replicate, then it really, by definition, can’t be creating a lot of value, and therefore can’t really be moving the needle in terms of your position or success within the economy, so answering emails is easy to do. Anyone can do that. Posting on social media is easy to do, anyone can do that. Attending a meeting, putting together PowerPoint slides, bouncing a memo back and forth, if it’s easily replicatable, if it’s something that’s not requiring hard-won training or intense concentration, by definition, it can’t be creating that much value, so I always flip that and say, you know, for a high-level knowledge worker, your day should be built first around the deep work that moves the needle, that produces new value, that makes you better at what you do, and then, you know, in the time that remains, do your best to be as efficient as possible, and fit in as much as the sort of obligatory, hard to avoid shallow work as possible, knowing that you probably won’t do as much as other people, and you might get yelled at a little bit more, but that’s okay, because if you’re producing the deep stuff, you can get away with a lot.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s something that I found as well, is that I will often have colleagues, and this actually just happened very recently, where they kind of brought me in their office, like, “Hey, let’s sit down and chat, and they’re like, “You know, I’ve hear all these things about, like, you have these productivity things, and you have these different systems, and I would love to know what you’re doing, because, like, you’re never here late. Like, why? How is it that you’re always leaving at, like, 7o’clock I don’t get it. And I just kind of explained to them that it really has a lot to do with just managing my time, managing my energy, and managing my attention. Like, there’s not some secret app, and really kind of the closest secret open I have is Trello, which everybody that listens to this knows that I will live and die by Trello, but outside of that, I really don’t have a secret weapon. It’s just that I treat my attention and my focus as an asset and a skill, and it’s something that I’m constantly developing, and it’s like you said, it’s become so increasingly rare that if you have that ability, you stand out amongst so many other people that are lost in the sea of distraction, and you have this, and I’m going to be paraphrasing, perhaps, but one of the most powerful things that I remember reading in your book was saying that you have the choice between being busy or being remarkable, but you can’t have both.

Cal Newport: Yeah, and that there’s no, there’s no real prize given for being busy, and that’s why I really love having this different vocabulary. If someone says I’m busy, my immediate reaction is, oh, I’m sorry, but I want to know about if you know, how is your work day going? So, well, how’s the depth going? What did you do today that produced hard value? What did you do today that pushed a hard one skill? Because, again, that’s what moves the needle. No one ever made a fortune being really good at answering email. No one ever made a fortune being really good at Facebook, but there are certainly people who made a fortune doing the hard, deep work required to say build the big distributed systems that run those services. Those are the people who are laughing all the way to the bank, is the people who sit there deeply. The developers, you know, building these complicated systems, not the people who use them all day. So, it’s not all work is made equal. There’s the deep stuff, and then the necessary evil stuff. And once you have that distinction, you never think about being busy in the same way again.

Zack Arnold: Well, let’s talk a little bit more about the actual science and the numbers behind this, because it’s one thing for everybody to say nowadays. Oh, I just feel so overwhelmed, and there’s so much information, and I have so many emails to respond to, but let’s actually dig into some of the research, because you really talk about and illustrate how distracted we have become, and how much time we spend with our electronics, and just immersed in this world of distraction,

Cal Newport: Right? It’s reached a worrisome level, I guess, would be would be the right way to worry about it. Here’s the real issue, especially in the workplace, and it’s something that a lot of people don’t really recognize, which is what research now tells us is that the real cost to your ability to produce things productively with your mind, the real cost comes in the context switch, not the amount of time you spend on distraction, and this has been a shift in our thinking that has some sort of worrisome implication. So we remember back in the late 1990s for example, people are actually trying to do honest to goodness multitasking, so they would sit there with multiple windows open while on their phone and thinking, hey, I can do four things at the same time. Research came along and personal experience told people you’re not really doing those four things at the same time, you’re doing, you’re doing four things, switching back and forth, and doing them all pretty poorly. So people really got that message, and I would say by the time we got to 2004 2005 people stopped trying to literally multitask. And so now you’ll talk to a knowledge worker, they’ll say, you know, I single task, I’m working on this hard thing, I’m trying to, whatever, I’m editing a TV episode, or I’m writing a business strategy memo, and I’m just doing that, that’s the only thing I have open on my window. I’ve learned it, I’m a single tasker, but what they still do are the gist checks, which is maybe every five and 10 minutes, let me just check an inbox, or let me just check my phone, or let me just, just check the social media thing real quick, and they would argue I’m not doing these things the same time, I’m primarily doing this one hard thing. These just checks are just 30 seconds here and there, they really can’t add up to that much time. But what new research tells us is that the context switch from the main thing you’re doing over to an email inbox, over to a phone, over to a social media feed, that context switch has a real cost, so no matter how long you end up glancing at the distraction that just check, you might have 10 to 15 minutes where your cognitive capacity is reduced while your brain clears out what scientists call the attention residue that was left from that context switch. So, what most knowledge workers are doing is they’re doing these gist checks almost constantly, you rarely get more than five to 10 minutes without checking some sort of distraction, that means most knowledge workers are working in a state of sort of persistent reduced cognitive capacity. It’s like a reverse neurotropic, like you’re taking a drug to slow down your brain capacity, and most people don’t even realize that’s the cost of all this really rapid but quick shifts of their attention to these things, pulling at them.

Zack Arnold: All right, the fact that you just called that a reverse nootropic, I’m so stealing that, because that is genius. I love that idea. And I’ve talked about nootropics on past episodes, and if anybody’s like, ‘What the heck is that? It’s basically, you know, herbs and different supplements that will enhance your cognitive function and your focus and your creativity, and I use different types of nootropics on a regular basis, but you are exactly right. When I find myself getting sucked into that world of Facebook or email or keeping my door open and letting people knock out and chat, it is – it’s like a reverse nootropic where the attention is sucked out of my brain, so that’s absolutely genius. And when I had heard the term attention residue, it’s.. it’s almost like I got this image in my mind where it’s like when you’re focused and you’re in something, you just feel like there’s this clean laser beam between you and the work that you’re doing, but you’re right, it’s like there’s this gooey, nasty residue that you can’t get out of your brain when you allow these other things to creep in, and like you said, the just checks.. like, oh yeah, no, I just, oh yeah, here’s this, this text, real quick, I just have to read it, but for anybody that’s actually been in a flow state, like a state of quote unquote being in the zone, you know how that feels drastically different than just working while you have distractions around you, and I think what most people don’t understand is that you can’t just jump in and out of a flow state, so can you talk a little bit about how much time it actually takes to get to a point in your brain where you can call it deep work?

Zack Arnold: It usually takes around 20 to 30 minutes before you get to a point where all attention residue is gone, your brain has overcome some hurdles, it has sort of powered down the unrelated circuits that aren’t relevant to what you’re working on, and you’re starting to get full capacity, so you have the sort of runway of 20 to 30 minutes, and it’s a hard 20 to 30 minutes, because your brain is likely going to be not completely on board with the plan. Say, wait a second, we’re about to burn a ton of energy, focusing really intensely on this glowing screen, like that’s not something I have a lot of. Experience with an evolutionary pass, it could be a difficult 2030 minute runway, but once you’re past there, now you start, you start firing at all cylinders, and that can be a wonderful experience. And just to put some numbers to it, this is just sort of based on my own research, working with people who really focus on doing focus, who really work on getting rid of just checks and attention residue. The number I would put on it is a factor of two. This seems to pop up a lot when I study people who have measurable, you know, quantitatively measurable high-quality output. They tend to produce at about a factor of two higher than comparable peers, those who focus on long periods of residue-free deep work.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that that number seems to measure up roughly with just my own personal experience as well, where I feel like I mean it might not be half the amount of time that at the office, but I really spend a lot less time at the office than most of my other colleagues, and I’m also doing other things, so really I actually I spent about a season of television, because I added television shows, and I spent an entire season tracking all of my focus time, just to see how much time am I actually working during the day, and what used to take me 12 to 14 hours to get through, I was doing in about six, and the other six hours I was chatting with colleagues, I was taking a walk around the block, I was having lunch, so I really only worked about six hours a day because I was in this hyper focus work state, but before, when I just was doing the just checks and walking out of my room every 20 minutes, because I couldn’t focus and I was procrastinating, it took me 12 to 14 hours to do the same amount of work, so even though I’m n equals one and I’m not some massive study, for me I found that it did just about double my productivity, and I think that one of the most important things to bring out here, at least as far as my philosophy is concerned, and I know some people in the productivity space maybe disagree, I don’t learn how to get into deep focus so I can get more done, I learn how to do it so I can get the same amount of great work done faster, so I can get home to my kids, and that to me is the big benefit, is the amount of energy and presence that you have left over when you focus on focus.

Cal Newport: Yeah, I mean, I don’t work past 530 and not on weekends on my work as a professor, and according to my colleagues, that’s essentially impossible, that that’s impossible, it just, you have to work at night. There’s just no way for that to be possible. But I have a chapter out of my book where I found a few other professors for who it’s true. It absolutely is possible, and it’s just deep work. It’s that factor of two, that factor of two. When you’re working intensely without the distractions, you get that sort of roughly speaking factor of two improvement. And I’m on board with you, even if you wanted to push your work to 12 hours a day of just deep work and really get a lot more done, you can’t even do it. Like, the brain’s not going to allow you that doesn’t have the energy, the resources to work intensely for more than, say, six hours with some breaks throughout a day. So it has this nice governor on it that once you adopt this deep approach to work, where you really prioritize the deep, intense thinking, and and deprioritize the more shallow work. There’s this natural governor that says, yeah, you’re going to get a lot done, you’re getting done less, and you’re going to kind of run out of steam. You can’t do much more than that, even if you wanted to. So, you really have no other option but to go home, be with your kids, or do something else that’s meaningful to you.

Zack Arnold: Now, is there actual science at this point? Because I’ve looked around and I’ve seen competing numbers that actually say here’s what the human brain is capable of, maximum amounts of focus in any given day, is there like a hard number?

Cal Newport: Well, the four to six hours comes from the study of professional musicians and their practice habits. So, when professional musicians are practicing, it’s incredibly intense in terms of focus and concentration, so professional musicians. I, two books ago, I spent time with a professional guitar player documenting what it’s like watching a professional musician practice. It’s very deep, it’s almost painful to watch, but that’s essentially deep work at its highest sort of professional level. And there, it’s well documented that you can’t really get more than four to six hours. Professional musicians tend to do two blocks a day when they’re really practicing each around two hours with a break in between. So, out of that numbers, which comes out of the deliberate practice literature, that’s where we get that’s probably a high upper end, because those are professionals thinking at an elite level. However, when you know a lot of us do deep work, it’s more the energy kind of regulates up and down, so we might start a session and then build up our concentration, and then really concentrate hard, and then sort of let our concentrate kind of come down a little bit, and then take a break, and then come back up again, so it’s, it, you might hear someone like me say, oh, I was doing deep work for eight hours today, but that’s not the same as I was in an intense state of concentration for all eight hours, that’s where we get this four to six hour limit. In theory, you could have a long day of deep work if your energy is regulating up and down, but I mean it’s not something certainly that you could do 1215 hours a day and be at high intensity the whole time.

Zack Arnold: Well, not only that, but you can’t do 12 to 15 hours a day continuously and. And there are certainly people in my industry, and I’m sure your industry, and many others as well, where you have to do these sprints, where you’re like, “Oh my god, this week is just going to be crazy, and I have to tell my wife I’m not even going to be home, and I just do the work, and you might get into those deep work states for longer periods, but you are spent, you are wasted, and if you’re looking at, well, like, do you want a mortgage a month’s worth of productivity just because you want to do more deep work for a short period of time? There are going to be instances where you have no choice based on deadlines, and if you want to keep your job, you have to do it, but for the most part, it’s not a sound long-term strategy to be productive.

Cal Newport: Yeah, exactly right. I mean, you can if you need to pull the all-nighter, because the big cases do the next day, but yeah, as you say, it’s incredibly energy intensive. So, really, the right play here is your day is built around a moderate but high intensive amount of deep work, four to six hours with breaks intensity going up and down, that’s going to out produce almost anyone else in whatever field you have.

Zack Arnold: Well, and one thing that you’ve mentioned more than once that keeps perking on my ears is the idea of systems. I love me some systems, and I think it’s almost ironic that I didn’t end up in some field like, you know, distributed algorithms, because whenever I hear you talk in lay terms about the kind of things that you do and the way you think, I’m like, oh wait, that’s the way that I think, and it’s a very unusual way to think in my industry, but I’m trying to bring these systems to this world, so we’ve talked about deep work, and sounds great, like, okay, I would love to be focused all day, but I’m just not the kind of person that can focus, I’ve got add, I’m distracted all day long, there’s just no way that I can do it, so let’s start talking about how can we actually do this, how can we develop our focus,

Cal Newport: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people say that, and it underscores an important point that I think is often missed, which is people tend to think about focusing as a habit, like brushing their teeth, you know, I know how to focus, but I should just make more time for it, I should probably be doing more of it, the reality is, is that the ability to focus intensely is a skill like playing the guitar. It’s something that if you don’t practice, you’re not going to be good at. And the reason it’s important to get that distinction right is, if you don’t, if you think about focus and deep work like a habit, you can fall into that trap that you were just alluding to there, which is you try it, it’s uncomfortable, not much gets done, and you incorrectly conclude, oh, I’m just bad at focusing, I must just not be a deep work person, I should go back and do my email, but if you correctly understand that deep work is a skill that requires practice, then having these sort of difficult bad experiences early on, you would have the correct response, which is, okay, I’m not very good at this yet, I have some practice ahead of me, okay, I’m not giving up on this. I just realized that I’m really starting from a place where I’m not in very good cognitive shape. So, as you’re saying, this is a skill to develop, and there are ways to get better at it. And what I’ll say briefly is that there’s two main categories, two main categories of effort that help people get better at deep work, the first category has to do with sort of more cognitive fitness in general, lifestyle type changes you can make that just just helps your brain in general be more fit and more capable and more healthy, more ready to do deep work, and then there’s more active type training activities you can do, which are activities that specifically push or expand the intensity that you can reach in your focus, and the duration of intense focus you can make. So, someone who’s serious about deep work really has to do both of these things: a general background cognitive fitness type training, and very sort of specific spot exercises to sort of push forward their ability to focus.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I love this idea of you equating it to an instrument, because nobody would ever pick up a guitar or sit at the piano for the first time in their lives and bang away and be like, “Oh, I’m just not good at the piano. Like, you wouldn’t do that. You would say, “Oh, wow, I’m clearly terrible, and I don’t understand this. What am I going to do? I’m going to take lessons, I’m going to read books, I’m going to develop that skill. But again, like looking at the piano, for example, this is something that I’ve done in and out for years, learning piano just as a hobby, and it’s usually the first thing on my list, from like, all right, this is on my someday list, and I’ll pick away at it, but I have other more important things, so I end up dropping it, and because it’s a skill, I noticed that if I go 1236, months and I haven’t done it, I’ll sit at the piano, it’s almost like it’s confusing again. It’s like, wait, I knew how to do this, but when you look at the way that you would practice, and I might practice a piece, that’s the one type of skill, just playing the music itself, that somebody would listen to. But when you’re learning piano, you also have to do finger exercises, and you have to do scales, because you need to be able to create those neural networks and those skills. So you’re saying that we can do the same thing with our focus.

Cal Newport: Yeah, that’s right. And you know, athletics is another great metaphor, because if you’re going to train for, say, a triathlon, you have to do both things. You have to have your general fitness good. I mean, if you’re, if you’re smoking and eating junk food and not being a lot of sleep outside of your specific triathlon training, you’re not going to be enjoying. General fitness at a high enough level to do that type of event, and then you have the specific training, which is I am running, I’m on the bike today, I’m working on my swimming stroke, so it’s it’s the same thing, you’re going to have general cognitive fitness, you got to get your brain in general shape, and then you’re going to have the specific training.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I love that you actually brought up the lifestyle portion of it, because that’s not an analogy like that applies directly to the world of creative work as well, where if you’re smoking, if you’re not eating well, if you’re not exercising, if you’re treating yourself horribly, that has a lot to do with why you can’t get into states of focus and flow.

Cal Newport: Yeah, and that’s right, and it’s a serious bit of hygiene. We don’t always think about it that way, but mental hygiene is really important if you make a living with your brain, which a lot of us do. I mean, if we lived in a culture where most people made a living through physical acts, like it was sort of like an ancient Sparta type culture, you would think that we would care a lot about our diet, and you know, our sleep and our health habits. Like, well, we all want to be healthy, we make a living with our body, like we’re professional athletes, we care a lot about what we’re eating, and yet most of us are in knowledge work. Most of us listening to this probably make a living using their brain. You focus specifically on your audience on creatives who really, really depend on their brain. That’s the only distinguishing factor they have, and yet don’t think at all about, well, what’s my general mental hygiene? What’s my cognitive fitness? What do I allow in there? How do I treat my brain? How do I deal with it, and that should be a huge, alarming thing, that once you hear it, you should say, wait a second, yeah, this is dangerous, I should think a lot more about how I’m taking care of my brain if I wanted to support me,

Zack Arnold: And that’s the whole genesis of this entire program, is me realizing at a fairly young age when I was dealing with depression and burnout, or like all these mental health issues, because of the way I was treating myself, and I thought, huh, what if I actually treated my brain and my body as an asset the way that a professional athlete does? Would that make any difference? And now you know, 1015 years later, I have a completely different life because of that. So, there’s no question that anybody that listens to this regularly, they know I’ve beaten this drum to death. So, I’m certainly not going to do that anymore. What I want to talk about next is the actual nitty gritty of these two different types of practice, but before I do that, I want to mention briefly, I don’t remember if this is in your book or if this was in another interview that I heard you give, but it’s this idea that people get really overwhelmed and think, oh my god, like six hours a day of focus without email and text messages, like there’s no way I’m going to get that good, but like we talked about earlier, you don’t have to be the best person at focus in the world, you just have to be better than Bob down the hall from you, and the difference is going to be night and day.

Cal Newport: Yeah, and that, that is a key observation, that because in the world of knowledge work, we don’t think yet in terms of sort of deliberate practice optimizing our brain, getting the most out of our, our cognitive instrument, because we don’t think that way. It’s not too hard to get an advantage. This, of course, is completely different in different fields. If you’re in professional music or athletics or professional chess players, places that have well-known competitive structures, people understand this, and they train very intensely, and they work very intensely to try to optimize their performance, but we don’t do this in knowledge work. This distinction was brought home. It’s kind of funny when I, two books ago, I wrote a book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which is where I first sort of broached this idea that you could optimize your brain, you can work really deliberately to improve your skills, and my editor at the time said, I don’t know about this, right? He was resistant, I don’t know about this sort of like deliberate practice that this, this is really going to make a difference. It’s like sort of intense training, and it turned out the perspective he was coming from was that he used to be a professional baseball player, so he had been a professional baseball player, and in baseball, like any professional sport, everyone knows about intense concentration and optimizing, and everyone trains in the same incredibly high-level optimized ways, and so in the end, what makes the difference between who makes it to the major leagues and not is going to be these sort of minor gradations and talent, right? And you know, he never made it to them to the major leagues, and I would tell them, I’d say, you know, Rick, we’re not doing this in knowledge work, though. No one’s training an optimal level, no one’s trying to optimize their brain, right? So, you, you don’t have to be very bonds to get to the top, you just have to be the guy that you know knows how to do some sort of reasonable interval hand eye coordination training. So, in other words, if you’re at all trying to be systematic about improving your skills and applying your brain at its highest level, you will quickly be getting an advantage over your peers, because almost no one else is doing that. They’re so sort of distracted, their cognitive fitness is so bad that you don’t have to be the natural Olympic-caliber athlete in order to be outperforming them on the workplace playing field,

Zack Arnold: Well, now that I know that, and we’re talking about systematic analysis, I’m sitting here thinking I check my email all the time, but I need to, because I need to make sure that I can respond, and I have a Facebook tab open, and I make sure that I get the little bubble that pops up if I get a notification or a tag, and I. Feel like I’m really, really distracted. I want to do deep work. Where do I get started? What do I do?

Cal Newport: Yeah, exactly. So, I’ll give – I’ll give one example thing you can do from both of those two training categories, just to give you a sense of the type of things we’re talking about. So, what you can do on the general cognitive fitness side, one of the most important things you can do is work to try to break your brain’s addiction to stimuli, so this is something that’s very easy to develop in an age of smartphones. This idea that at the slightest hint of boredom you can whip out a phone or open a browser tab and present yourself with some novel stimuli, and therefore alleviate that boredom. I think the last maybe five or six years is almost unprecedented in human history, as the sort of the first period in all of human recorded history, and be before in which you actually have the opportunity to completely eliminate boredom from your life. It sounds good, because boredom is boring. There’s nothing intrinsically great about it. The problem is, is if you do this, you can build up this connection in your brain, where it begins to always expect boredom, means stimulate boredom, mean stimuli. It becomes like a Pavlovian response. When I get bored, I get stimulated. When I get bored, I get stimuli. The problem about that, when it comes time to do deep work, is that deep work is technically speaking boring. You don’t have a lot of stimuli, you’re focused on one thing, so if your brain has this addiction to stimuli, it’s not going to tolerate deep work. So, one of the simplest things you can do to improve your general cognitive fitness is inject more boredom regularly into your life. Not that you have to be bored all the time, but you want, on a semi regular basis, to have the experience of I am standing here in line, I’m bored, I want stimuli, and I’m not going to give myself some. I just going to stand here, I’m going to be bored for the five or 10 minutes, or I’m at the restaurant and my friend gets up to go to the bathroom. You know what, I’m just going to sit here and be bored for a little bit. It seems almost like it’s just being masochistic, but actually, what’s happening here is that you’re retraining your brain. So, your brain says, you know, sometimes when I’m bored I get stimuli, sometimes when I’m bored, I don’t. That’s fine. It doesn’t have this pavlovian response that I always get. Stimuli, you break that addiction to a stimuli when it comes time to do deep work, you’re gonna have a much better foundation on the active training side. You know, one of the, one of the simplest things you can do is an exercise I call productive meditation, which is where you go for a walk, while you’re walking, you try to make progress on a professional problem, just in your head, as in mindfulness meditation. When you notice your attention wandering to something else, you just, you just notice that and bring it back to the problem. It wanders, you notice that and bring it back to the problem. You just walk and think, walk and think, trying to make progress, just your head. It is very, very difficult at first, but like doing pull-ups, if you’re trying to develop your back strength, it really very rapidly improves your ability to sustain concentration. So that’s one example of a passive cognitive fitness thing to do, and one example of a active sort of active concentration training thing you can do.

Zack Arnold: And just to add on to the productive meditation, this is one of the greatest discoveries that I had ever made, and I actually had found this a couple of years ago. So, technically, I’m not stealing it from you, but I am going to totally steal productive meditation, because it’s brilliant. But what I found was that I started taking walks every afternoon, just because I needed to not be sedentary. That was the really big focus of my program when I first started, is everyone that was in my audience that I’m so tired of sitting at my computer for 12 hours, and I said, all right, this is the first most immediate problem, I just want to get people moving. So I started doing, you know, exercise groups and challenge groups, and you know, created an entire online course all about how you can rearrange your environment and change your habits to move more. So I started taking walks every afternoon, but then what I noticed was that it wasn’t just a walk where it was taking a break. I started to get all of these amazing insights as I was walking, and I actually became more focused, and what I started to do was I started to create an intention, and I know this can sound like all airy fairy, and oh, I’m, you know, going to be teaching yoga in the mountains and talking about people, chakras, but really you create this intention before you go for your walk, and that’s where I do a lot of the work for my website and my podcast, is I think all right, I have to outline a blog post, and I’m at the office right now, but I can take a 20 minute walk, and as I’m taking that walk, I will outline the blog post and get into this crazy deep focus state, and what I do is I just dictate my thoughts onto like voice memo or drafts app or whatever it is, so I can collect those thoughts, so I don’t have to keep them in my head, so when the time comes that I actually need to outline it, it’s already done. I just need to dictate what’s in there, and that has become such an incredible training for my brain to very, very quickly get into these focused states.

Cal Newport: Yeah, I mean, professional thinkers do a lot of walking. It’s this idea that’s not, it’s not really that well known, but it’s very, very true. People who think at a high level for a living do a lot of thinking on foot. It’s famous philosophers, mathematicians, theologians, scientists. They walk a lot. There’s nothing really great about sitting for thinking, which is kind of ironic, given the way that we set up our workplaces. So, yeah, you are definitely onto something. So, in addition to even just training your ability to focus, it’s just a good point to keep in mind that walking is this secret hack that lots and lots of elite level thinkers use.

Zack Arnold: When we say elite level, we’re not talking about, like, you know, these professors in the dark areas of Dartmouth or MIT, we’re talking about like Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, Beethoven, Steve Jobs, like these are all people famously known for using walks to get some of their greatest insights, and it’s so funny that that isn’t what inspired me to start everything, it was just my butt hurts and my back hurts and I need to go take a walk and get out of this dark room, but it’s turned into this completely different thing for me, which has been so amazing.

Cal Newport: Yeah, and the fact that we have this sort of industrial model for knowledge work, like we want everyone to come to this building and sit, or even worse, we want everyone to come to this building and sit down on shared tables in a giant open office space. It sort of boggles the mind. It’s like you’re trying to minimize the value or insight that you get out of the human brain, it’s almost laughable once you actually start understanding how the brain works and how you produce value from, because a lot of what we do right now in our culture, especially our knowledge work business cultures, is really naive or counterproductive from the point of view of, hey, we have this expensive piece of equipment called the human brain, how do we get the most value out of it?

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s probably one of the banes of my existence, is that I am hired to do incredibly deep creative work. But what are the people in my office environment do all day long? They send me emails, and then, and I don’t even have my email open anymore, and it drives people crazy, and they really take that as like an affront to, oh, well, you’re just being rude. It’s like, no, I’m trying to do the job that you hired me to do. So, what do they do three minutes after they sent me the email that I didn’t respond to? Hey, did you get my email? It’s like, no, I didn’t, because I have my email closed, because I have a deadline and I have work that I need to get done, and you demand it at a high level, but then that turns people off, and that is one of the biggest complaints, and one of the biggest struggles that people in my audience have is they say I don’t know how to focus because of all the outside distractions in my office. So, what are some suggestions that you have? Because I know in your book you go extensively into the actual architecture of different buildings and how it can either inhibit or help to create a flow state, so in these office environments that we’re thrown into, How do we actually manage our focus and our creative energy?

Cal Newport: The one thing that’s useful is scheduling deep work time on a calendar and treating it like any other meeting or appointment, because this is one thing in which we actually have cultural conventions around that people understand and accept, right? I mean, if you work at an office and you have something scheduled from one to three, and someone you know says, “Hey, can you can you jump on a call at two? You say, “I have a thing from one to three, and I can do it before I can do it after. Or if someone sends you an email, and then they come both of you later, like, “Hey, did you get that email? You’re like, “No, no, I was in a thing from one to three, but now I see it, that we understand that convention, that sometimes you’re booked, sometimes you’re not. So, treating deep work like you would, I’m in a meeting over here, I’m at a doctor’s appointment, and protecting it the same way, and just thinking of time that’s off limits, and obviously I couldn’t be reached during that time. But here’s what I’m available again, that works really well, because we have existing social conventions around sometimes booked and sometimes is not booked. The other thing that I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from my readers has been effective is actually opening up a line of dialog within your organization, and this is kind of a fraught thing to do. I mean, what’s what’s the right way to discuss deep work in an organization where it’s not you complaining, because that doesn’t work. If you say, “Hey, boss, stop emailing me so much, it annoys me, or you schedule too many meetings, and I think they’re worthless. Let me go think. That doesn’t go well. But what does seem to work is just strategy that I mentioned briefly in the book, but there’s a subculture readers who really run with and had good case studies is you have a positive conversation with, you know, your boss, your team members, or essentially say, okay, here’s what deep work is, here’s what you know shallow work is. Both are important to our organization, you know, we need both. What should my ratio of deep to shallow work hours be in a typical work week, you know, of the hours I work in a typical work week. You know, what’s the ratio of deep to non-deep hours? And you have this conversation, you come up with a ratio that makes sense. The number will be different depending on what you do. For someone like you, for example, Zack, it should probably be a very high number. I mean, if you’re doing TV editing, what’s most important is you producing good edited, you know, good edited film within the time, so it probably be a very high number for other people who maybe are more like client or communication focused, might be lower, but whatever, you get a number and then you measure, and then you come back to have a conversation like, hey, I’m falling well short of this, like, what do you think we should do, and this has led, my readers have reported to many. Massive cultural changes in workplace cultures, where they would have sworn ahead of time that there’s no way we’re ever going to change past this culture of, you have to be available, communication is key, you have to be accessible. Cultures that seemed completely entrenched massively changed once you had this sort of mutually agreed upon positive goal that you can measure and that has numbers, so both those things seem to help people sort of break out of work cultures that otherwise nickel and dime their attention to a place of incredibly reduced value.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I definitely want to go deeper into this idea of creating a more positive environment, because there’s actual science that shows that getting into a flow state can actually make you a happier person, but I want to put a pin in that for a second, because I want to dive a little bit deeper into this idea of calendars, because this is another one of those revelations and experiments that I did personally for a couple of years that changed my life, which is rather than just putting on the calendar external meetings with other people that have expectations, you start to set your own expectations, and you schedule every minute of your day on your calendar, and I’ve had people that have kind of like glanced at my calendar when a window was open, and like, you know, I hadn’t hidden it or something, like, oh my god, what is going on with your calendar, what is all that stuff? I’m like, oh, that’s just the tasks that I’m doing today, and the projects, and you know, and they’re just that’s nuts. I’m like, no, actually it’s not. So, let’s talk a little bit more about scheduling your entire day.

Cal Newport: Yeah, I am a huge proponent of this. I do the exact same thing. I schedule out every minute of my day, and you probably get the same pushback I get. People seem to be very worried about having a schedule for all of their time, there’s these sort of vague concerns of like, well, I need to be more flexible or it’s going to squelch my creativity, to which I say, guys, you know, if something changes, I’m sure you have this experience all the time, if something changes, something runs long, or something drops on your plate, it’ll take you four minutes to fix your schedule, you know, adjust your schedule for the rest of the day, it’s not a big deal, what’s this fear of, like, well, if I schedule my day, I might have to change it, like, okay, you might have to change it. It’s not a big deal, but what you get in exchange for actually trying to schedule out what do I want to do today is massively more productivity. And I really think it’s there’s kind of two forces here, and you might have some more from your own experience, but the two forces that that I keep coming across when, when I’m trying to promote and understand why scheduling every minute of my day works really well, is that you know one, it’s just more optimal use of your time when you, when you see the whole chess board ahead of you, and you can move all of the pieces into the optimal configuration, you end up getting a lot more out of that same eight or nine hours than if you’re fine with the fog of war going, and just, what am I going to do next? Maybe, what do I want to do now? So, you have, you’re able to get much more out of your time if you can optimally move things, and what am I going to do things? And two, I think it forces you to confront the reality of how long things actually take, because you know, I put aside this much time for this, and I blew past it, and then I did it again the next day, and I blew past it, and you start to get this much more accurate gut feel for how much time things take, how much energy things really take, and once you actually have that gut feel, your schedules become a lot smarter, you start things at the right time, you, you move things to the time of the day, your energy is right. So, I think this is a massive hack. I really am glad you do the same thing, and I incredibly encourage it for anyone listening. Is that you should try to get to a point where you’re very uncomfortable if you look up and say, I don’t really know what I’m doing next.

Zack Arnold: Well, and that’s in my mind, and this is something that I don’t hear from a lot of other productivity experts that have their systems and their apps and their calendars and all these fancy things. In my mind, the number one productivity hack on the planet is confidence. If you know that what you’re supposed to be doing next is the number one most important thing to move you forwards, and you’ve done the work to ensure that you’re confident that’s the case. You don’t procrastinate, you don’t think, “Oh man, should I be doing this? or “Oh, you know what? Oh wait, I got a Facebook message. Oh, thank God, because I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing right now. So you get that distraction. But confidence is the number one productivity hack, and if you force yourself to spend just a little bit of time to carve out and sculpt what your day is going to look like. It does exactly like you said, it gives you a more realistic sense of what can I actually accomplish, and what I was doing, and I’ve been very, very open with my audience that I have dealt with adult ADD since I was diagnosed in my early 20s, but this is what helps me get through it, is understanding this is what my day looks like, but the greatest fear that I hear from people that are creatives is, oh, but you can’t schedule creativity. I just, when it comes, it comes, and I’m like, you talk to some of the best writers in the world, and they say, I write when the inspiration strikes, and it strikes every morning at 9am

Cal Newport: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I had a quote on that. That I’m going to paraphrase it. I think it was David Brooks who said the quote, but he’s like, “You study great, these great creatives, and what you’re surprised is how much that they treat their time like accountants, just structured, systematic. This is when I’m going to do my creative work,

Zack Arnold: And that was one of the cool things that I realized, because I was that guy. I was like, “Oh, you know what, I’m just kind of tired and flaky all day, and I’m just going to check my email and talk to colleagues, but, man, at 8o’clock at night, that’s when I get the spark of inspiration, and then I would work from like eight until one or two in the morning, and it burned me out, but I thought that’s just the way that I am, that’s the way that my brain works, so it’s the only time I can be creative until I started realizing that, oh, if I train this like a skill, like we’ve talked about, I can snap my fingers and bam, the laser sharp focus begins. And yes, it takes, you know, 15 to 20 minutes to really, really get deep into it, but it is almost as simple as snapping your fingers, having it on your calendar, and just doing it. So that’s how I’m able to leave at 7o’clock every single night, is because I know that my creativity is going to hit me about between 10 and 1015 this morning. How do I know? Because I’ve got it on my calendar

Cal Newport: Exactly. Yeah, I mean there’s a confidence when you have this time is protected for just thinking and going through things, and I can trust my schedule, and if you’re just in a bit of a more of a chaos and a bit more of a whirlwind and you’re like I want to try to think deeply or creatively about this problem you have so much of your brain that’s that’s preoccupied because it’s worry like but what else are we supposed to be doing now and what about this thing that’s due tomorrow and what about this email and what if something else just came in and you’re really not getting your full the full cognitive load but on the other hand if you have this smart plan for your day, and it includes, say, two hours in there from nine to 11, or whatever it is. Your brain trusts it, it’s confident this is time I actually can let go of everything else, because there’s a great plan we’re on top of it. So I can spend this two hours really trying to think deeply about whatever is important. You’re going to get a lot more creativity out of it. I want to add a twist or a level upgrade to our sort of shared commitment to daily planning, which is I’m also a huge proponent of weekly planning, where I lay out, and this can take a couple hours, I lay out the vision for all of the days of the week in advance, and it’s not going to be in as much detail as a daily plan, so I’m not talking about what am I going to do at 3o’clock on Friday when I’m sitting there Monday morning. It’s at a rougher level of granularity, but I found moving the chess pieces around, the time chess pieces around at that level of granularity as well, really then starts to unlock things, because you can see, you know, I have this thing due next week and I’m really going to take advantage of Thursday morning to get ahead of that with a little bit on Tuesday afternoon. Now you’re moving the time chess pieces around on the granularity of days, and this is where you really get to this high level of sort of time hacking, where you start to get these beautiful weekly, daily schedule combinations. Only a productivity nerd would look at a schedule and think it’s beautiful, but it really is this sort of these elegant combinations of how things are moved around your week, where you get out of the week on the other end, you were never working late, you made progress on different things, you feel energized and relaxed, and everything got taken care of, everything got moved forward. So I’m going to add that wrinkle to your plan. Consider adding a weekly plan in addition to a daily.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I love that. And I just gave you a giant digital high five on the whole productivity nerd calendar thing, because I will look at a productivityist’s calendar like a screenshot, I’m like, oh, that is just a work of beauty, right there, like that’s just gorgeous. It’s like the Mona Lisa of calendars, and it just.. I will totally admit it’s very, very nerdy, but you know what? I’m able to get home earlier because of it. I have a better relationship with my children because of it. I have a better relationship with my wife because of it, and I saw the opposite side when I wasn’t doing those things, and what it did to the quality of my life, which is what I want to get back to. I said that I put a pin in this, and I want to make sure that I don’t miss it, but it’s this feeling that, oh, well, you know, I don’t want to have to schedule my creativity, and I just want to be able to do it when I do it, and feel the flow, but there is actual science behind how eliminating these distractions and getting into a state of flow can actually neurologically increase your happiness.

Cal Newport: Yeah, this was something that came up so often I had to actually add another chapter to the book that was not in the original proposal. So, there’s now a chapter in the book called I think it’s Deep Work is meaningful. This wasn’t in the original proposal. The original proposal, part one of the book, is about why deep work is valuable, purely from an economic perspective, but I kept coming at from multiple different disciplines the same idea that if you spend more time in a state of deep work, you’re happier, your life feels more satisfying, your life feels more meaningful. And so I ended up saying I have to have a whole chapter on this, and there are a lot of different reasons that come from a lot of different disciplines. From psychology, you can get the work on flow states that you were just mentioning, which is when you’re in a state of deep concentration, you’re more likely to fall into one of these flow states, not all. Always, there’s other types of deep work, like when you’re deliberately trying to build a new skill that’s different than a flow state, and it might feel somewhat uncomfortable, but still satisfying, because you’re pushing a skill, but when you’re actually applying a skill, you can fall into a flow state, which neurologically is incredibly pleasing. It’s very satisfying, you can lose track of time, so someone who’s committed to deep work enters those states quite a bit more, and for other reasons too, that you can get from neuroscience, even from philosophy. I mean, I went all over, and you get again and again this idea that we’re really wired to do deep work, and it comes back to this underlying conclusion, which is when people really commit to what I call the deep life, which is a life where you prioritize intense concentration on things of really high value, and then you try to minimize shallow work through a combination of extreme productivity, like we were just talking about, plus what Greg McEwen would call essentialism, which is actually trying to take as much of unnecessary shallow work as you can off your plate. When you do these two things, which is the deep life, you just really like your work life better, you’re more satisfied, things are more meaningful. Your work out, your life outside of work becomes much better. And so I really, you know, I’m going a long way on a short question, but I think it’s a really important place to end up. It’s this idea that this is not about being a little bit more productive. I mean, a deep life really is a really good life,

Zack Arnold: And that’s the reason I wanted to bring it up, because I am not a productivityist, or whatever the word is. I’m not into the productivity space because I want to maximize my output during my day. There are people that are just trying to get more done in the same amount of time and be as productive as humanly possible. That’s not interesting to me. What I want to do is get the same amount of work done at a higher level in less time, and I myself have found that by using these strategies I do just feel happier, I feel more content, and enjoy the work more, as opposed to constantly feel like I have to just forge through and get through the work, and like just dig and dig, and oh, I just, I just got to make it through, and there are so many people in my industry that just feel like they’re constantly pushing that boulder up the mountain because they never have enough time, energy, or attention to get all of the work done that’s forced upon us, and yes, the working conditions and the amount of hours that are expected and the amount of work put on us is unrealistic, but before just saying, ‘Hey, stop giving me so much work, or ‘Hey, this is ridiculous, these hours you expect start to put some expectations on yourself about how you’re going to conduct yourself and do your work once you’ve done that. If you still can’t keep up, then there’s a much larger problem.

Cal Newport: Yeah, and you know there’s a, there’s a twist in here to add as well, which is, and this was essentially the theme of a book I published in 2012 called So Good They Can’t ignore you, where the observation was, if you study people who love what they do for a living, often what you find when you, when you get their actual story is that they developed a rare and valuable skill, something that was sort of unambiguously valued by the marketplace, and then they use that skill as their, their bargaining chip or their leverage, and once they had that skill, which gave them standing in the marketplace, I can do this thing really well. Not a lot of people can. It’s really valuable. They could completely reshape what their working life was like in ways that made it immensely more sort of passion-producing and satisfying. So, there’s this sort of also hidden bonus to a deep life, which is when you’re focusing a non-trivial portion of your time on intense deep concentration on things that are valuable. Not only will that help you, of course, get your valuable work done faster, and therefore leave you more flexibility for other things, it also makes you better. And as you get better, you get this bargaining chip, and as you get this bargaining chip, you can actually change a lot of things about your work that you might not like, and so, so there’s all these different forces that go into making a deep life something that is going to pay a lot of dividends, sort of the immediate benefit of reducing the time necessary to do your work, the immediate benefit of deep work being more satisfaction producing, the immediate benefit of once you start doing essentialism, extreme productivity on top of your shallow work, it stops taking over your life, and then the longer term benefit of if you’re focusing deeply on things that are valuable, you are going to gain more and more control over your career, and three or four years from now you might be in a position to dictate, you know, here’s when I work, here’s how I work, here’s what I work on, and why, in a way that really explodes the satisfaction you get, so there’s a lot of different threads here that all weave together to life gets much better when it gets deeper.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I could not agree more with any of that. And I know that our time is limited, but I have one more thing that I wanted to bring up, which to me was even a revelation reading your book that I haven’t even tried yet. We’ve talked about, well, we want to get away from distractions and we want to put time on our calendar and we want to make sure that we’re doing deep undistracted work, but this new thing that came up that was like literally mind blown for me was the shutdown ritual. You got to talk about the shutdown ritual, because this is awesome.

Cal Newport: Yeah, so if you, if you subscribe to this deep life type approach, you work is something that you have scheduled, you’ve scheduled your time, you’ve scaled the shallow work, it has a lot of periods where deep work to produce a lot about. You, in a small amount of time, if you want your brain to then recharge, if you want to reap the benefits of being more productive and be more intense, you have to shut down your work day, and when you shut it down, be shut down. You cannot limp from the work day into the evening, where you’re kind of with your family, and you’re kind of on email, and you’re going to do your second shift a little bit after the kids go to bed. And so, to help do that, I advocate actually having a specific routine you do at the end of each work day that ends with some sort of mantra that you tell yourself to indicate, okay, now work is shut down. In my shutdown routine, I do my final checks and my plan on my calendar, my inbox, I put my mind at ease. There’s not an open loop here, there’s not something hanging. We have a plan, we’re on track, we’re okay, we’re okay to shut down, and then I shut it down for the day, and your brain learns when that ritual happens, it can let go of work, and that really allows your brain to unwind, to relax, and to recharge, do some background processing, and be ready for the next day when you get there.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and this is the one that I need to work on myself. This is the biggest problem I’ve always had, being a self-proclaimed workaholic, and talking extensively about this on the podcast, writing about it in blogs. The stopping is the hard part for me. Once I learned how to do this, it got so exciting and so invigorating that slowing down and stopping it has always been my challenge. And I never really had a definitive strategy until now. So, as soon as I had read that in the book, I’m like, this is what’s going to fix my shutdown problem. So, I’m going to be implementing the shutdown ritual and starting to set much harder and fast rules about my evenings, and have no doubt that that’s going to change the quality of my sleep, the quality of how I feel when I wake up, and actually being able to get more done rather than less, just even though I may have lost an hour or two at night, so I’m super excited, just for myself, selfishly, to have found that, but also to share it with my audience. And on that note, I don’t want to take up any more of your time, because we’re both into productivity, and I’m sure that your block says that, hey, in two minutes I’m supposed to be doing something else. So I want to be very respectful of that. And thank you so much for coming on the show, but I want to make sure that people can learn more about you and find your books. Where should they go?

Cal Newport: Well, you can find my books anywhere you buy books. Also, I have a website, Cal newport.com where I blog about all of these ideas. I’ve been doing that for about a decade, so there’s a big archive there. If you want to jump into my thinking or sample my thinking, the one place you can’t find me is on social media as someone who really takes my brain and my ability to produce value with my brain seriously. I’ve never had a social media account, so we’ll have to, we’ll have to just leave it at, you can find my blog at that website.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I may end up stealing that idea because I disdain social media and always felt like it was a necessary evil to what I do, but I’m now starting to rethink that. So, by the time this publishes, people are like, “Wait, why aren’t you on social media anymore? Well, you can blame this guy. So,

Cal Newport: Quit, Zack, quit.

Zack Arnold: On that note, this has been fantastic, and I greatly, greatly appreciate your time, and your attention, and your focus for the last hour.

Cal Newport: Great, thank you, Zack.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Jakin Rintelman. Special thanks to Krystle Penhall and Sarah Furie for helping to spread the love!

The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).