Episode Highlights

• Creating a philosophy of digital use, not just tips & tricks
• Is there still a healthy place for social media?
• Do you need to digitally declutter or digitally detox?
• How to do a 30-Day declutter
• Maximalist vs. Minimalist view of embracing technology
• The mental health detriments of social media
• How to healthily reintroduce technology into your life
• The designs and intentions of social media companies

Useful Links

• CalNewport.com
• Digital Minimalism Book
• Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
• Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude

About Guest

Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of six books, including Deep Work and So Good They Can’t Ignore You. You won’t find him on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, but you can often find him at home with his family in Washington, DC, or writing essays for his popular website calnewport.com

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Cal Newport, who’s an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He’s also the author of six books, one of my favorites on the planet being Deep Work, and today we’re going to be talking about your newest book, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Cal, I cannot express enough how excited I am to have you back on the show with me.

Cal Newport: Well, Zack, it’s great to be talking with you again.

Zack Arnold: Well, one thing that I want to say before we get started is that Deep Work made a huge, profound impact on me. I was somebody that at one point was very scattered and jumping from one task to another, thinking that productivity was all about multitasking and being as busy as possible, and I love doing deep creative work, but I didn’t really understand how the brain was wired to not be able to do so with all the multitasking. So, once I found deep work, it basically said in however many pages. Oh, this is the manifesto for the perfect way for me to really get important deep work done while still maintaining some semblance of a regular life and having a family. So that was a huge impact on me, and I want to make sure that my audience knows that our previous podcast episode, if somebody wants to look it up, is episode number 35 but I can now say unequivocally, after reading Digital Minimalism, you are now officially my spirit animal.

Cal Newport: Love it, the Cal Newport spirit animal.

Zack Arnold: Yes, so that can be something you can add to your bio. One point is Cal Newport is an accomplished and best-selling author, as well as several people’s spirit animals.

Cal Newport: Exactly, they’re somewhat weak, kind of geekish, focus addicted spirit animal. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: And it’s funny that you say focus addicted, because focus is definitely an addiction that you can get, and it’s a great addiction. It’s also something you have to learn to manage, like any other addiction, but definitely over the last few years I have built all the systems in place and the rituals to pretty much at the snap of a finger get into that deep state of work and be able to get things done that are meaningful, but then kind of turn it off and just kind of check social media or check email or whatever, but I kind of got to a point where it was getting harder for me to get back into that deep state of work even with all of the rituals and the systems, because the pull of the digital world just became so strong, and like so many other people, I was just thinking, oh well, what’s wrong with me? Why do I keep wanting to check this stuff, not realizing that so much of this world was being engineered, but it really didn’t come to my attention until I started doing private coaching, and with probably every single one of my clients, when we would go through and do a baseline assessment, we would first talk about all the negative habits that might contribute to them having less energy or not being able to focus, or whatever it was, and hands down the answer was the same every single time, it’s my smartphone, it’s social media, it’s news sites, it’s email, and I said, “Huh, so this whole thing of just kind of being intentional about focused work might not be enough anymore. Now we need to be more intentional, and this word intentional is going to be really, really big in this interview today, because it’s a big theme in your book, but we have to be more intentional about how we manage the digital world around us without having to just go the nuclear route and turn everything off and delete all of our profiles, so talk to me a little bit about how you came to decide that this was going to be the journey you were going to embark upon, because you made it pretty clear that you have no social media profiles and this is a world you don’t really care about, so why write this book?

Cal Newport: Well, the story you tell was pretty much the story I kept hearing, so I put out deep work, and I was talking to lots of people about it. I was on the road, I was doing a lot of interviews, a lot of people are coming up to me and say essentially what you just noted, which was okay, I buy this premise that in my professional life focus is crucial and it creates more value than the distracted work, I get it, but what about what’s happening with these technologies in our personal lives, and this kept coming up again and again. Something really big is happening. There’s been a shift. People used to be excited about these new technologies in their personal life, then they became self-deprecated, or they would tell jokes like, “Wow, I’m on my phone too much, and then they began to become distressed. But that’s definitely what I was picking up on, and so it was really the readers of Deep Work who brought to my attention this is a problem. Something is happy with these screeds in our personal life that’s making us less happy, just taking time away from the things that’s more valuable, that’s bleeding into our work time, scrambling our brain in such a way that even when we get to the office and we want to go deep, and we respectfully deep. We’re not able to do it, and so they sounded the alarm, and I said, this is a huge issue, perhaps even bigger than the issues of workplace distraction I talked about before, because it affects many more people. And so that set me down my journey to really understand what is going on, what is this crisis of technology in people’s personal life, and what’s the best way to approach it,

Zack Arnold: And one side note, before we go any further, I have a feeling that this could end up being a competition of whose voice can be the most nasally by the end of the episode, because we were both mentioning beforehand that we’re both getting over horrible head colds, so I’m glad that we’re gonna have had this little side battle on the record for all of eternity in the podcast verse.

Cal Newport: I gotta do my best to win this.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, no, well, you may be competitive. I think if we’d recorded it two days ago, I would have won on a landslide. But basically, my core focus for this whole week was I have to feel good enough to do my podcast with Cal, so I have to get more sleep. So hopefully that worked out. But anyway, just a little humor on the side. So I am definitely amongst the group of people that you mentioned in the beginning of the book that were contributing to the world of providing information in the productivity space, and saying, hey, here are some really cool apps you can use to get rid of your news feed on Facebook or LinkedIn, or here’s way to manage Twitter, or you can use the Freedom app to block websites for certain amounts of time, and I realized that was a good start, but it wasn’t enough, and as I started to get your emails about this idea of digital minimalism, it was probably like late 2016 early 2017 maybe it was a little bit later, I don’t remember, but you were starting to talk about this idea of doing full digital detoxes, so to speak, I was like, oh, I wonder if this is an area that Cal is going to go into, and if he is, I’m very intrigued, because I reached the wall personally, just like a lot of other people have, where a lot of the apps and Chrome plugins and all these little things just aren’t enough. So, you talk about this idea of having a full-fledged philosophy of technology use. So, let’s start diving right into the rabbit hole of what digital minimalism really is,

Cal Newport: That you can think about it almost to your digital life, what something like paleo or vegan would be to your health and fitness. So, instead of just being some good intentions or some tips, it’s really a philosophy that is based in your values that you could believe in, that gives you clear instruction about what you should use and what you shouldn’t use in your, in your personal technological life. So, here’s the idea behind this philosophy. Digital minimalism says you should start with what’s important to you, like how do you actually want to spend your time, what are your actual values? Then work backwards from those and say, for each of these, what’s the best way, if any, to use technology to boost this particular value, and then you let your answer to those questions essentially decide the technology that you use your personal life. So, another way to look at it is you basically wipe the slate clean of all the clutter that built up in your life, sort of haphazardly over the last 10 years, and say, I’m going to rebuild this digital life intentionally. I’m only going to put things back in very carefully, and for very specific reasons, just like a woodworker might very carefully build out a toolbox of just exactly the tools that he or she needs for the type of work she does.

Zack Arnold: So, this philosophy sounds great, and I love the idea in the parallel of you saying, well, it’s like paleo or vegan or whatever, and for anybody listening, I’m not saying you need to eat paleo or vegan. I’m a strict believer that you shouldn’t have one strict dietary philosophy, and I’ve talked about that before, but at the same time, you have to have principles, you have to have standards, and you have to have intention behind whatever the choices are that you make that connect to your greater purpose in whatever the work is that you’re doing, or in this case, we’re not just talking about work, we’re talking more, what’s the quality of life that I want to lead, both professionally and personally. How do I want to show up for my spouse? How do I want to show up for my kids on the weekend? Do I want to be distracted by emails and text messages, and always anxious because of that crazy news story that just came out? Like, I mean, just the news, 20-four hour news cycle alone over the last two years has probably put so many therapists’ children through college like it’s ridiculous, just because the rampant amount of anxiety and everything else. So I want to get into what digital minimalism is. I want to go through all of your principles, but I think it’s really important before we do that for people to understand why this is so necessary, and what having smartphones and 24 access to all these digital technologies really means to us, and what it’s doing to our brain. So, let’s start by talking about what is the problem, and where did it come from.

Cal Newport: Well, this model we have today, where we see things like smartphones as a constant companion, right, that this is something that we’re constantly looking at, it’s a constant source of information. We’re sort of like disaster zone relief coordinators that need to be on the move, looking at things, responding to things, getting breaking news, checking all this information. We’ve just sort of accepted this. So, yeah, this is good for me. This is what I need to do. This didn’t exist five years ago, but yeah, this is what this is what my life is like now. I’m just constantly looking at information, seeing things, responding to things, swiping out things, tapping out things, and a lot of this is very arbitrary, but more important, it could also be prodigious. When I started to hear from people, the people who really started to complain, and I started to hear from them, let’s say in the fall 2016 around that time you noticed me changing what I write about, they weren’t focusing on utility. Be so the issue was not, is this app useful or not, or is this particular service useful or not. What they seemed to care more about was autonomy, that they were using these things more than they knew was useful, more than they do was healthy, to the exclusion of things that they knew were more important. They were starting to feel manipulated, like how they felt and what they believed, and even the access they took were being manipulated somehow by various algorithms with other people’s interest in mind this was all adding up to a sense of almost diminished humanity, so the wrong question to ask is, is Facebook useless? Right, that’s the question that Facebook wants you to ask, because you’ll say, well, no, I guess not, you know, I said notes to my, my mom sometimes, and I saw baby pictures, and they want you, then, to conclude that, okay, that means that you should just use it unrestricted. Stop thinking about it, you know. Full stop. We’ve won the argument, it’s not useless, stop thinking about it. But that’s not the issue people are having. It’s not, is this useless or useful? It’s what’s the overall impact on my quest to live a good life, and a life that I’m proud of. And these things became so invasive, in other words, these companies got so good at fostering compulsive use that they almost overplayed their hand. If people said, “Wait a second, okay, now that I’m up to two to three hours a day of looking at this thing, you’ve got a little bit too far. They pushed it a little bit too hard, they wanted a little bit more value in their stock price, and it got to the point where people said I can’t ignore this anymore. This is taking significant time and attention and emotional energy away from the things that are more important. So, I think the industry almost overplayed their head here, and people got fed up. They said it’s too much. I’m looking at the screen for no real reason at all by free time. There’s got to be a way to get away from this.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I think one of the things that people don’t realize, and this is really one of the hooks that, when I remember social media first coming out, and yes, for my younger listeners, I’m old enough to remember a world without the internet and text messages and cell phones, so I’m practically geriatric at this point, but when these services first came out, I remember everybody thinking, oh my god, this is so amazing, and it’s free, right, this doesn’t cost anything. How does that even make sense? Well, I don’t know, but I don’t have to pay for it. I’m sure they’ve got some way figured out for them to generate enough revenue to keep the site up or the app going, but it’s amazing because it’s free, and I can see pictures of my nieces and nephews growing up over in Pennsylvania, and I’m over here in Los Angeles, and on top of it, my mom was always saying, “You don’t call me enough, so I need to post pictures of my kids on Facebook, but that’s meaningful social connection, so if it’s free, what’s the big deal? But what people don’t realize is that the cost for being on these is your attention, and that turns into money on the other side, so talk a little bit about this idea that you call the race to the bottom of the brain stem.

Cal Newport: If you look at the life cycle of these social media companies, there’s really two phases. So the first phase, which is where they hook most of their users, they’re able to be free because they’re spid the investor’s buddy, so they raise a lot of capital for venture capitalists, that’s what pays the bill, so they could just work on expanding the service. This is often a more consumer user focused period for the social media growth. Like, hey, what’s fun? What do people want to do? Did you get to phase two, which is where those investors say, all right, I’m glad you enjoyed spending my money, but now I want it back, and actually I want 100 times back more than I gave you. So, at this point, the companies have to think, how do we make enough revenue that we could have the big IPO that our investors demand, and this is where we start to see massive shifts in the way that the experience evolves. So, with Facebook, this happened around the time they shifted to mobile. It used to be a relatively static experience, I mean, you would occasionally change your status, or maybe sometimes post something, but if you checked what your friends were up to in the morning, there’d be no reason to check back again the rest of that day. Nothing was going to change, you know. People were at work, and people only change things so often, so this was fun for people. Like, hey, I could see baby pictures occasionally, or look at relationship statuses, but it wasn’t making money for Facebook. So, when they shifted the mobile, they said, we have to find a way to get people to check this compulsively, if we’re going to get the revenue numbers, so give us the big IPO and give us the 100x time return on our investors. We have to have people checking this 80, 100 200 times a day. We need to click this app on the phone. So, how are we going to do this if people aren’t posting information that fast? And that’s where they came up with this idea of social approval indicators. So now you get things like the like button and auto tagging of photos, these things that could send you a constant stream of these little pigs saying, “Hey, someone’s thinking about you, someone liked something you did, someone was looking at something you did. This is also the time where they put sophisticated algorithms behind the news feed, so once you click that app, so you could see if anyone said something nice about you, or clicked like features, which were not in the original Facebook. You’re then going to see articles, not necessarily from your friends, but articles that had been algorithmically optimized to give you an emotional charge, which also is sort of like a reward. If I click this, my border might get busted with something that’s, say, outrageous or really funny. The combination of this. Stream of optimized intermittent rewards completely transform the social media experience from, hey, this is fun to see what my college roommates’ relationship status is into, why am I tapping this thing compulsively when I’m sitting here across the table from a friend already. This thing was supposed to connect me to other people, and yet now I can’t even hold a conversation without sticking to the bathroom, the pull that virtual slot machine lever, so the big social media platforms essentially all made this shift, where they said, How do we go for being something that’s interesting to our users into something that they can’t help but use, and that’s why Facebook became worth $500 billion more than twice Exxon Mobil’s market cap at some point. Extracting attention is a lucrative business, but to extract a lot of it is also a bit of a dirty business.

Zack Arnold: Well, and I’m glad that you brought up the whole idea about the market cap of companies like Google and Facebook being bigger than a company like Exxon Mobil, because it’s so easy to talk about things like big oil or big business, or whatever, like you can put big in front of anything and make it sound bad, right? Big tobacco, but one of the things that you mentioned in your book is that basically Silicon Valley is now just tobacco farmers and T-shirts, and I don’t think that people really realize the amount invested into making sure that we compulsively check these apps in our phones and on the websites and stay with them and click on links and go down on these rabbit holes. None of that is just something that happens, that’s all by design. Because our attention is literally worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Cal Newport: Yeah, i mean, the way that the theorist and activist Douglas Rushkoff talks about this is essentially for the economy to keep growing, we were running out of resources, there wasn’t much more oil to find, there wasn’t much more land to build on, and so the insight that Silicon Valley had is, okay, where do we have more land to conquer or more resources to exploit people’s brains? Right, attention to people’s heads was was grossly under exploited. I mean, we had TV advertisements and billboards, but most of the time our attention was actually spit out things we cared about, so it’s essentially virtual real estate that could be colonized to create more growth, more stock market growth, more economic growth, and in particular, more fortunes made for the smaller number of investors. So this was essentially a gamble that was made, is the next frontier is going to be between people’s ears, and so it seems like it’s innocent. Oh, kids in a dorm room are messing around with these apps, and isn’t it fun to see these photos? But it’s actually business at the very largest possible scale. I mean, in some sense, the economic growth of the last decade was based on this idea that we could colonize more and more people’s time and attention. So, on the one hand, it worked. We had a 10 year period of continued stock market growth after after the last crash, but on the other hand, because the growth was taking people’s time and attention away, it exhausted the entire world, right? Our entire culture now is exhausted from trying to feed their attention labor into this growth machine, and so now everyone’s just tired, like this is this can’t be sustainable. That the way that we’re going to continue to create new growth in the economy is that I have to spend three hours a day looking at this thing and happy to putting my data in here and being manipulated like this can’t, this can’t be the right answer. And so I mean, I think you’re right to point out that there are really big forces at play here. These things aren’t innocent, and it’s not about you have some bad willpower, your attention is bad, or kids these days lazy. There’s massive economic forces at play, and so we do have to be a little bit wary when we’re assessing what we’re up against, or maybe we should say we should be a little bit realistic when assessing what we’re up against. This is this is not a little simple battle that you spend a little bit too much time doing something frivolous, it’s billions of dollars versus your attention on a Tuesday morning.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and you’ve alluded to, like, this idea of the slot machine effect, and people checking their phone 80 times a day and spending more than three hours, and clearly that must be anecdotal, and you couldn’t possibly be getting that information from, I don’t know, apps that are tracking all of our usage and finding that the numbers are far, far more than any individual might estimate.

Cal Newport: Yeah, in fact, you don’t even need those apps. You could also get it from the investor reports for the social media platforms. I mean, that’s what they brag about, user engagement minutes. Look, they’re up. We’ve gotten them up. Mobile has been great. We’ve tweaked our platform. We’ve increased user engagement minutes. I mean, that’s their barrels of oil metric, is how many minutes on average per user do we have people looking at the screens.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, but at the end of the day, aren’t they changing the world? Like, all anybody needs to do is watch the season one finale of Silicon Valley to truly understand that it’s all about changing the world and bringing people together. So, aren’t we more connected than ever, and more social beings, because of all this amazing technology.

Cal Newport: Yeah, that’s what Zuckerberg says, right? Is that well, we’re just everyone deserves a chance to connect, or this, or that. Well, there’s two major problems with this. One, we see paradoxically that increased social media use tends to make people more lonely, and the reason is, if you’re. See more social media, you let that be a replacement for real-world interactions. Well, it turns out that our brains, which have evolved for hundreds of 1000s of years in a world where there’s no smartphones, doesn’t quite recognize seed alike counter the same way that it recognizes sitting across from another person and looking them in the eye and watching their body language and doing some mirroring back and forth, seeing how they’re talking, adjusting your, your, your toad to batch it. I mean, social interaction in person is a very rich thing that we’ve evolved to crave and to handle in a very sophisticated manner. What we do online is no replacement, so people who are using a lot of social media actually end up, as far as their brains are concerned, a lot less social, and it’s making them lonely. The other fallacy with this idea is that Facebook wants us to believe, and by Facebook, I sort of be social media in general, that there is no actual internet outside of them. So they’ve tried to pitch this story that, like, look, yeah, sure, there’s an internet out there, and you could express yourself and find people, there’s any number of tools and protocols you can use to communicate with people, yeah, all that exists, but you’re too dubbed to figure it out. You have to come into all our walled garden. We have to build our own private internet that you exist within, where we watch every single thing you do and control everything you do, because the real internet out there is too scary for you for you to use. So technologists like me, like computer scientists, people who’ve been around since the beginning of the internet age, say that’s nonsense. We already have a social internet. We had a social internet before these companies came around. There’s no reason to create a second internet that exists just on corporate servers. I’ve never had a social media account. I beat people all the time using the internet. I express myself all the time. I’m exposed to interesting ideas all the time. I don’t have to play within the private walled garden of one or two companies in order to reap the benefits of the social internet.

Zack Arnold: Oh, so then you remember the days of it being a Saturday afternoon in the middle of summer vacation and saying, hey, I’m going to call my friend Dave, I’m going to see if he’s around, and I’m going to ride my bike over to his house, and we’re going to play.

Cal Newport: Yeah, and I’ll be back that night.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, amazing how that works, isn’t it? Well, I know that you alluded to this idea of people being more lonely and more depressed, but again, that’s not just anecdotal. There are now a lot of studies that are circling around the effects of social media use, and I think one that’s particularly valuable to understand is one of the studies that you talked about specifically when they looked at the first generation of children that were not connected to smartphones and social media, and this gigantic meteoric rise in both anxiety and depression. So, can you go just a little bit deeper into that? And then I want to transition more to the helpful stuff, rather than let’s talk about all the shitty things about social media.

Cal Newport: That’s true. I am being a little bit doo-by-gloom, and so, yeah, we will transition soon, because actually I like a lot of these technologies, and actually think social media can be used in very powerful ways as well.

Zack Arnold: I agree with you completely, which is why I want to make sure people know this isn’t just going to be let’s bash technology and social media, we’re just going to figure out how do we get the best out of it. But I do think it’s really important to talk about the mental health consequences of this new technology. So, let’s just go down that road a bit, and then we’ll transition.

Cal Newport: Yeah, this is one of the more distressing fi deeds, and this is a signal within the research noise that’s only been getting stronger, even since I’ve written the book, which is this notion that, in particular, for what they call Generation Z, or iGen, so the first generation to essentially have access to smartphones starting in their early teenage years, that especially young women in this generation are having unprecedented rises in self-harm and self-harm hospitalizations. So, it’s essentially creating a mental health crisis among this segment of the generation. These are the scariest numbers. Now, researchers tried for a while, as they should, to say we need to look at lots of hypotheses, like yes, there seems to be some timing correlations to social media smartphones, but there’s a lot of other things, right, that could cause a rise in these anxiety, anxiety-related disorders, right, like maybe it has something to do with financial anxiety, there’s a financial crisis, but no, it doesn’t time out right, because this doesn’t start till later than that. It starts with the smartphones arrived, so well, maybe it’s turmoil, like Donald Trump, maybe that you know we have this election, and this adapt, and say, well, that doesn’t quite work, though, because this was before that, like, well, there’s got to be something. So then more recently, people said, well, maybe it’s just made up in the sense that we talk more about mental health issues, so maybe just young people are more comfortable describing themselves as having mental health issues, so maybe we don’t have to worry about it. But then they looked at the actual hospitalization records, all right. So, how many people are actually attempting suicide and go to the hospital, and that rose just as fast as the self-report. And so now everything seems to be converging that it is, it is social media on cell phones or on smartphones that exposing teenagers to something so powerful, when their minds are still developing, when they’re still trying to figure out their social station, and they’re still very vulnerable, to expose them to something like these tools is causing havoc, and so I think. The way I see this literature is, there’s essentially a growing mental health crisis, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, in three or four years, the idea that you would give a smartphone to a 14 year old is, we see it the same way as, say, I give cigarettes to a 14 year old. I think, because this data is so distressing, that that’s actually a cultural change that’s coming sooner rather than later.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, it’s funny that it probably was 10 or 15 years ago. I was about the time I moved out to Los Angeles, so maybe 15 years ago I used to make the joke that cell phones were the new cigarettes, and people just thought I was crazy. They’re like, “Are you nuts? Like, it’s so great, like I can have conversations in my car, and it was just when text messaging started to come out. They’re like, “I can reach people quicker, and I don’t always have to be running to my computer to get my email, and like, you don’t understand, like the idea that number one, we’re putting this radiation emitting device up to our brains, and as a side note, they are starting to find some research that it is actually causing tumors and other things and whatnot, but I’m not going to go into all that, but I think that it’s going to go far beyond just this electrical device emitting something, it’s going to be much more about the mental health detriments, but I’ve been saying for years that cell phones are the new cigarettes, and everybody laughs at me, and I’m like, “Just wait, it’s coming. And I think that now that we’re seeing the mental health problems that are being caused by it, it’s going to be far greater and far more impactful than any kind of physical effects that we might be saying, through some of the research to the actual brain, or whatever it is, like people getting, becoming impotent because they have their phones in their pocket all day long, whatever it is, and I’m not saying I’m a love eight and I don’t have a phone, like I have an iPhone eight and I use it, but I’m also much more intentional about how I use it, where I put it, how often I use it during the day, I measure my usage, and this is something that we alluded to a little bit earlier, but I want to make sure people also know that I have an episode with a guy named Kevin Holesh, who you also mentioned in your book, who’s the creator of the Moment app, so people want to learn more about how they can track their usage, in addition to just the tools that the iPhone creates, which is kind of like the fox guarding the hen house. You can go to episode 38 but I want to stop with all the doom and gloom, and how horrible phones are, and social media is just going to make everybody, you know, kill themselves, and we’re going to have the next civil war, because Donald Trump is on Facebook all the time, and Twitter, and like all this noise, right? We’re going to put all that to rest, and I want to start talking about the principles of digital minimalism, because telling people here are five simple hacks to use your smartphone just isn’t going to cut it anymore, and like you said, we need a philosophy. So, let’s talk about the principles of your program, digital minimalism.

Cal Newport: Right. Well, at the high level, I think the key principle when you’re thinking about digital minimalism is you have to build your digital life up from scratch with a purpose. We built this up mainly haphazardly up to now. The first 10 years of widespread smartphone use was an exuberant time, because the technology was new, and that’s fine. When a technology is new, it’s fun to experiment. The digital minimalist says, “Okay, enough with that, clear it out, clear the decks, get rid of all the apps, get rid of all the services, and they let me very carefully, and with great intention, only add back in the big width, and so this is the fundamental idea of minimalism. In any aspect of your life, is focusing your energy on a small number of very high value things will almost always leave you better off than trying to spread that energy over many more things that give you smaller value. Less is more, it’s an ancient principle, and it applies as much to the digital tools in your personal life as it can to any other area in which this axiom has been deployed.

Zack Arnold: So, what’s the first step then? Because I’m actually going through this process right now, where sometime I don’t remember when it was last year, but I’ve had this moment more than once, where I just say I’m done, I’m getting rid of Facebook. I’m canceling my Twitter account. I just cannot handle this crap anymore. And then that gut feeling creeps up, of like, yeah, but I know that it does have some use. There are times when I’ve posted a picture of my kids and I heard from somebody I haven’t heard from in five years, and we saw each other – like, totally worth it. And I also know that for putting out content for my podcast and my website, I have found a lot of people in the real world because of the virtual content that I put out there, so I always have to stop myself, but like we’ve been talking about, it’s not just, well, maybe I just need to get another plug in, instead I need an actual philosophy. So let’s talk about the first step of digital minimalism, which is this idea of the digital decluttering.

Cal Newport: Yeah, so the declutter is basically the rip the band aid off approach if you want to make this transition fast and effectively into minimalism. So, what I suggest with this is that you actually take 30 days, then you say for this 30 days I’m not going to use optional technologies in my personal life, the stuff that I don’t absolutely need, the stuff that if I remove it, it’s not going to cause some sort of major hardship, you know, everything is optional, say 30 days of stepping away from it, but the key is this is not a detox, right, I don’t like this idea that well, if I just take a break and then return to everything I’m doing, it’ll somehow be okay, if there’s a problem that makes you what. Take a break in the first place. You have to solve the underlying problem. So, during these 30 days, you do two things: one, you actually do the self-reflection required now that you have the space to figure out what do I actually care about, how do I want to spend my time. There’s any number of things I could do in my life that might be enjoyable, but what do I want to do? What are the best things for me? What do I want to focus on? So, you get back in touch with that, you also begin to rediscover the type of non-digital analog activities that service these values that used to give us lots of meaning. Once the 30 days is over, you don’t rush back and add back what you had before. You instead go through a much more intentional process, where if something comes up and you’re thinking, maybe I should have this back, you know, I met someone all this once, or this might help my business, or something like that. You go through a question period where you say, okay, is this the best way to use technology to aid one of these things that I really value? If the answer is no, you say that I’m not going to do it, I’ll find something better. And if the answer is yes, you say, okay, I let this back to my life, but before I do, I’m now going to put rules around it. How and when do I use it on what type of devices under what type of circumstances? So, almost certainly, for example, if a particular social media platform came back into your life, it’s not gonna be on your phone. You say I’m gonna use it on my laptop, I could use it three times a week, I gotta have this particular plugin that blocks the worst aspects of it, you actually care about the how and why, not just the what. So that’s digital minimalism. You wipe the slate clean, you figure out what matters, and you only let back in the big wins, the things that are going to really, really boost the stuff that you really care about. And you could be confident in missing out on the other things, because the underlying of mathematics and minimalism is pretty clear, which is doubly doubt on the things that really, really matter will almost always leave you better off that tried to take some of that energy and spread it out about things that only give you small bits.

Zack Arnold: Okay. Well, let me walk through a real-life example of how I’ve been implementing this, and then you can tell me if there are ways to tweak and improve, and I know that there are, but I think it’s going to help beyond the philosophical for somebody to really see how I’m applying it, and how they could possibly apply it. So, an example for me would be that multiple times I’ve said, I just Facebook drives me crazy, I can’t deal with this, I’m going to cancel my account. But then I didn’t, of course, like I already talked about, and now I’ve developed a much more intentional use of Facebook, and it still needs to be tweaked. So, maybe you can help me tweak it, but I said, number one, I hate the newsfeed, like we’ve talked about. The news feed is just a digital slot machine. So, on my browser, I have installed plugins to make sure that the news feed is non-existent. However, Facebook has the feature where you can create these lists, so I have a list that’s called family. So, if I do want a news feed that just includes my family or people that I consider very close or real-life friends, so it’s there’s maybe 30 people in this list total. I do have a news feed, but it’s only their posts, and it’s usually really short. It’s probably what a news feed on Facebook looked like in 2008 where it takes me five minutes to read it, I leave a couple of comments, and then I’m done. The problem was that nobody has been able to design something that sticks for mobile, so I used to have Facebook on my phone, but every time I’d be like, oh, you know what, just for my business I need to check and see if there are any comments or questions about this blog post or podcast or whatever it is, and 30 minutes later I’ve been skating through a news feed. How do they do that, right? So I finally said, done, Facebook app deleted, messenger app deleted. These are things that I can now check, like for example, I’ll check it right before I get into a state of deep work, like 1030 in the morning. I give it about five minutes in the afternoon, I’ll make sure that I don’t have any comments that I need to answer in several groups that I manage or on blog posts, and that’s it. But my next step is that I’ve been looking at Twitter and thinking to myself, are there any real uses that I have for Twitter, and I can’t come up with one, but I still find myself using it, not nearly as much as I used to, but I still find myself on there, and usually, and that actually usually isn’t correct, I would say 99% of the time I’m angrier when I’m done with Twitter, so my feeling is the only option there is I just need to get it out of my life completely.

Cal Newport: Yeah, I mean, if you’re, if you were a digital biddable list, you know, right, we would say when you’re considering, should I, you would do it from scratch, should I use Twitter? I would ask you, what’s the thing you really value for which Twitter is the best way to use technology to support it, and it sounds like you would not have an answer there, that there’d be no credible case that you have a deep value for which Twitter is the best way to use technology to serve that value. If that’s the case, you would say, well, of course, that’s not coming into my life, which is very different than the maximalist mindset, which is what most people do, which is, is there any value or benefit, if there’s any value or benefit, man, I better let this in. Right, that’s the maximalist mindset. It sees if there’s some value or benefit, and you’re not using something, you think about it like I’m losing that value or I’m losing that benefit, like you’re leaving money on the ground and walking away from it, right. That’s the maximalist mindset, but people as far back as sit. Aca, Aristotle, Thoreau, I mean, everyone has come back to the same conclusion that that maximalist mindset is a trap. It is a trap. You are going to end up worse off. You have to go back to what do I really care about and focus just on that. So, the minimalist mindset will say, yeah, you walk away from Twitter. I mean, if and when you could come up with something where Twitter is by far the best way to use technology to help it, it shouldn’t be in your life, and the setup you have for Facebook. I have to say, is very common among the types of setups that minimalists end up with when they end up bringing platforms like that back into their life. They figured out pretty quickly that, oh, these companies put all their energy in the mobile, so if I need Facebook in my life, because maybe Facebook groups, for example, is crucial for something that I do, just stay away from mobile. Is already 90 90% of the problem solved, because that’s where all their energy is. That’s where all those slot machine mechanics are. That’s how they pay their bills, right? It’s mobile. You go to the desktop, like, who uses the desktop, so they don’t care as much. And so now, at the desktop, you could do like you’re talking about, have these nice plug-ins. They’re not trying to, they’re not trying to evade them, because they don’t care. Almost no one uses the desktop. Use the list, just go right to the groups, bookmark the events page. If you may use Facebook for events, there’s all these hacks I talk about in the book, that if you do need to deploy these social networks, that’s how you do it. You end up with a setup very similar to the type of thing you’re talking about, not on your phone, the thing’s blocked, somebody teach it into how you’ve configured it, and probably some sort of schedule of how you use it.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think at this point, after reading the book, and after our conversation today, like, the this nagging need to get rid of Twitter has always been like, yeah, but it took me years, like, I’ve, you know, I don’t have a lot of followers, but I have like six or 7000 followers or something, I don’t even keep track anymore, and there’s that maximalist mindset of yeah, and it’s also the sunk cost fallacy, right? It’s like, yeah, but I spent all that time to build that following, and you know, build all these systems to promote my contents, and all this and that, but like I said, when I look at the value it’s providing me today, maybe not monetary value, or if I go on to Google Analytics, and you know, could do a real breakdown of the amount of traffic it’s generated, or the amount of revenue that that traffic has generated for me. At the end of the day, there’s no amount that’s going to come up that’s going to say, “Oh yeah, it’s worth all the aggravation that I get to 15 minutes a day, that it constantly makes me angry, right? Yeah, so I feel like at this point Twitter has just got to go. So, I would assume by the time that this comes out, and by the way, this is going to come out about the time that your book releases, february 5. Everybody, go buy it. So, I gave you a nice little shameless plug there. Most likely, I’m not gonna have a Twitter account anymore, because I’m just kind of done with Twitter. Actually, I had my final moment this morning where I was just like, why, why, why am I doing this right? But when it comes to the other social media platforms, I do see tremendous value in a few of the activities I do on Facebook, so I think for me the final tweak is I need to be intentional about the times, because I do still, even though I don’t, I don’t get sucked into the newsfeed, I never find myself on Facebook for 30 minutes at a time, and then all of a sudden I’m like, oh, where did the time go, that doesn’t happen, but I still find it’s a little bit more like, oh, I’m sitting around for 10 minutes waiting for notes from my boss, yeah, let me just see if I’ve got any comments on Facebook. Yeah, to me it’s still a problem. So, I think it needs to be more. I’m going to be checking Facebook comments and managing groups 930 to 9:45am every day, or three days a week. Like, I think if I just narrow it down to that level of granularity, then I’m going to be fine.

Cal Newport: See, that’s very important. So, that’s where matching the how and when to your actual values is so crucial, so you have Facebook groups that sound like they’re very important, right? That I don’t know exactly what happens on it, but that it’s a very sounds like it’s very useful way to use technology to help something that you care about. So that’s good, and that’s a good value, but when you’re checking Facebook when you’re bored for 10 minutes, well that surveyed another value, which is the value of I like to be entertained. So, if entertainment is important to you, if you do the minimalist calculus, there’s no way you’re going to decide that Facebook is the best way to entertain yourself using technology, right? Because you know that it’s actually like a very low quality source of entertainment. There’s much better ways to actually fill your free time or to distract yourself when you have a little bit of leisure, so the minimalist analysis would say, “Oh yeah, you can’t let the fact that you need those groups to support something you care about be the Trojan horse, in which you now allow Twitter to be the low-quality way you use technology to entertain yourself, right? How you’re using it matters more than just what the particular technology is, so the minimalist analysis would say yes, 930 to 945 in the boarding, or one hour every other day, that’s the way to do it, because that’s what you need to get that big value that the groups are serving you in a way that keeps the cost benefit ratio in your advantage, use a tool like Freedom or something like this to block it all the other times, so that you take it off the table as a source of entertainment, because it just doesn’t pass muster there. I mean, I haven’t spent a lot of time on Facebook, but I think I can say with confidence that if you’re looking for the optimal way to fill your leisure time, it can’t possibly be looking at a Facebook newsfeed.

Zack Arnold: Yes, and I would agree with that wholeheartedly, and that actually is the perfect. Perfect segue into the next thing that I wanted to talk about, which is we spent all this time thinking about how these things serve a specific purpose in the maximalist versus the minimalist philosophy, but I think the most important thing that people just don’t think about is the fact that because of all this technology and having the apps and the fact that we’re standing in line at the grocery store, and oh my god, I’ve been bored for seven seconds. Therefore, I must pull up my phone to see if somebody has responded to this comment or given me a like, or whatever it is. We have forgotten how to be bored. We’ve forgotten how to allow our mind to reach that state of creative thought where we’re just thinking about things randomly. And there’s a guy named Harris that you talk about in your book, and this of all the comments that stood out, and trust me, when I got your book, I was like, “Oh, you know what, I’m going to dog gear some pages and you know highlight and underline. I basically destroyed the copy that you sent me, because there’s so much good stuff. I mean, it’s a mess, but one of the things that stood out the most was that Harris, the guy that you talked about, is that he didn’t know what to do with himself once his general access to the world of connected screens was removed, and I think it’s that underlying fear of I don’t really know what to do with myself, therefore what I’m doing with my life if I don’t have these things to distract me, and I want to talk a little bit about this thing called the default network in the brain. This was first brought to my attention in the book Bored and Brilliance. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that book.

Cal Newport: Sure, yeah. Okay.

Zack Arnold: Oh, great. Well, she’s on the literally the top of my list of people I want to get on the podcast, so maybe afterwards you can send her a quick email and give me a quick nudge, nudge, wink, wink, because I would love to talk about her concept of Bored and Brilliant, which is that we just don’t really understand how to be creative and be bored anymore, so talk a little bit about how the removal of these screens has gotten it to this point where we’ve, we just don’t understand how to be creative or how to think anymore, or how to activate this default social network as well.

Cal Newport: Well, this is one of the interesting things I didn’t know a lot about, but I found when I was researching this book, which is how important it is to spend time load with your own thoughts, and so I call this solitude, because I’m stealing a definition of solitude that comes from a great book I want to recommend, called Lead Yourself First, which is really about solitude in great moments of leadership, and how important it is, but the definition of solitude that comes from this book is it has nothing to do with are you physically isolated, are you near people, are not near people. The definition they use, which I think is the right one, is that solitude is freedom from inputs from other minds. So, if you’re, if you’re thinking about an input from another mind, so you’re hearing something or reading something or looking at something on a screen, you’re not in a state of solitude. Solitude is just you and your thoughts, not your thoughts reacting to someone else’s thoughts. And the point that became clear from, I would say, two dozen different sources, ranging from philosophy to neuroscience to psychology to literature, everywhere you look, you see the same point historically added modern times, that the solitude is crucial. It’s crucial for a lot of things. It’s crucial for creativity, that you actually have to sit there and process thoughts, both consciously, but also in the background. If you ever hope to get to reconfigurations, that’s going to give you a spark of something new. It’s crucial for self-reflection and insight. Right? I mean, if you want to develop as a person, understand yourself, understand what you want to be, what your potential is. There’s no shortcut to just thinking what’s going on. How do I feel about this? Just you alone with your thoughts. If you want to make progress on a professional problem, you can get all of the inputs you want and listen to all the podcasts to read all the books, but until you put in the hours of the thinking about all those inputs, just letting them slosh around, trying them on for size, try to make sense of them. Until you do that, you’re not going to get the insights. So, time alone with just your own thoughts. That’s when your brain actually does its made work. And when it’s in a mode of receiving inputs, it can’t be doing that work. It’s like a computer, where the CPU can be involved in, let’s say, processing the disk drive, like reading the input, or the CPU could be computing, but it can’t be both, right? If you want to get useful things out of that computer, you got to give it time to actually process the data. It can’t just use all this power on trying to read it data, and so solitude is crucial for all of these things. But it was never something that people worried a lot about, because in everyday life, until recently, of course, you’re going to have solitude all the time, right? I just.. there’s so many instances in day-to-day life where it was just you alone with your thoughts, you’re on the subway, and you don’t have a book with you, you’re waiting in line, you’re in the bathroom, you’re, you know, in a hymn you don’t like at church, and just lots of time, or like, what can I do? It’s just be.. it’s just be in my thoughts. That has changed recently. So the miracle of innovation that gave us ubiquitous high-speed wireless internet that could be accessed through a small piece of metal and plastic that could fit in your pocket and run for hours with a super computer inside of it. This miracle of technology made it possible for the first time in human history to actually banish all solitude from your life. It is now possible for the first. Have a human history to never have a moment in a typical day where you’re just alone with your thoughts, and so, because of this, it can be really scary when you try to introduce this type of solitude back, but once you get used to it, it’s an incredibly useful and insightful and fulfilling source of all of these good things, and so I’ve become a real solitude advocate after doing the research for this book, is go places without the phone, be bored, be with your thoughts, be outside, be walking with no other inputs except for you and your thoughts. Maybe you don’t like it, maybe it’s boring, maybe sometimes you have epiphanies, but don’t underestimate just how crucial it is to have just a situation where it’s just you at just your braid, that’s all.

Zack Arnold: And this is a trap that I fell into as well, a few years ago, where for probably the first 10 ish years of my career I was so crazy hyper focused on just climbing the ranks and getting noticed and working on bigger projects and getting a higher weekly rates and working on things that went from an indie film that my family was going to see, because I forced them to, versus 27 million people are going to see this thing that I’m working on on my computer right now, all of which I achieved, but then I realized there’s got to be something more, because this is creating all kinds of repercussions that are negative to my health, to my mental wellbeing, to my weight. I just had kids, so I said, you know what, I’m going to start researching a little bit, just about how can I lose a little bit weight, or why am I so tired all the time, and I was introduced to the world of podcasts and the blogosphere, and my world just opened up, which is actually what started this whole endeavor of me doing these things myself, so I could bring that to my community, but the trap that I fell into was every second of the day I was either listening to a podcast, I was reading a blog post, whatever it was, I always had inputs, and at the end of the day, I would feel a sense of anxiety that there was all this stuff that I was learning, but there was so much more that I must be missing out on. But wait a second, I just learned about diet yesterday, I’m learning about exercise today, and then I’ve got this podcast queued for tomorrow to learn about sleep, then I’m going to learn about productivity. When the hell am I actually doing any of this, not implementing anything, and I’m not even thinking about what’s going to make the most sense for me. So I finally just went on a complete moratorium, which is similar to what we’re talking about with social media and all these other things, and I said no podcasts, I’m not listening to podcasts, I’m not listening to audio books, I’m listening to nothing, and I just force myself, and I have a fairly long commute, and I have on several jobs over the last few years. I would just drive with no music, nothing, and all of a sudden I started getting all these fantastic epiphanies, and then I started taking walking breaks in the afternoon, and again all these ideas started to flood in, and I didn’t listen to a podcast on the Bluetooth speaker while I was taking a shower, and it’s like this whole new world opened up, and I was like, ‘Holy crap, I’m actually kind of smart, and I have ideas. Where has this been all these years? And it was because there was so much input that I never allowed my brain to process it.

Cal Newport: Yeah, I mean, some of the most creative people, the people you probably admire the most, they spend a crazy amount of time thinking we leave that out sometimes. I don’t think we talk enough about it. I try to in my writing, but just type thinking, what does that mean? Let me just think about it. What do I think about that? Okay, I’m just born. If you read, let’s say, Mason Curry’s book, Daily Rituals, which talks about the rituals of creative, creative people and artists throughout that book is walking, in particular log walks, walking here, walking there, 10 miles of walking today. Everyone’s out there walking, and these are all stories from before you had smartphones, so walking bit, it was just you and your thoughts, it’s not coincidental. So I’m with you on that. Yeah, that anxiety, I get that too. And now I think about it, as that’s by Braid Caplay, need that’s like by Braid saying we haven’t got oxygen in a while. What are you doing? Like, okay, the input processing sitters have been going all day long. You’ve got to give the rest of us a chance to breathe. This isn’t right. It’s that that low-grade background hub of anxiety. Most people are used to it, but it’s really artificial for the most part, and it’s something that doesn’t have to be there.

Zack Arnold: Well, and the funny thing is, too, like any other stimuli, I mean, it’s funny, this analogy just came up to my mind, so I may completely be wrong, but it’s kind of like wearing a watch, like if you have a watch that’s on fairly tight, at first it feels a little bit tight, and then you go for a couple hours, you forget that you’re wearing a watch, it’s not even there, because your brain says that stimuli I don’t need to pay attention to anymore, there’s way much more than I need to process, then all of a sudden you take it off, you’re like, ah, oh man, like my arm is all red, and this really hurts, and I feel like anxiety is the same way, where once you’ve done this digital declutter and whatever the stimulus is that you’re getting all the time that’s creating this anxiety, you don’t realize it’s there until you’ve removed it, and then all of a sudden you’re like, oh my god, how did I not live like this before? And I never ever want to go back to feeling this way, and that’s kind of how I felt when I started to get rid of all this over stimuli that I was getting, and I used to be somebody that spent a lot of time on Facebook and on social media, and that was a really big part of me trying to get the word out about the work that I was doing, and I finally said. There are better ways to do this, and I’m getting more quality interaction in other ways, but now the feeling is like I get a general pit in my stomach if I think about, oh, now I have to go on Facebook, as opposed to that feeling of, oh, I don’t have it available to me, or I haven’t gotten my fixed. It’s the opposite, it’s like, oh crap, now I have to go on Facebook for 15 minutes, and that to me is a much better anxiety,

Cal Newport: Yeah. And I think, I think our, our instincts tell us this, right? If we, if we trust our instincts, we kind of know this is all true. I mean, I talked about a deep work, this blacksmith, Rick Furr, who specializes in ancient methods for building sores, predominantly. He works up near one of the Great Lakes in a bar. He often has the doors open because his forges are very hot, and I had a chance to talk with him, and I’ve also seen some documentary specials about it. I write about how you watch this guy, and it just resonates, right? Like, what is it about him? It just, you watch me, like, I don’t know what it is, I have no interest in swords, but something about him resonates, and what, what it is, when you look closer, is like this guy knows what he’s about. He has this craft that he’s been holding. It’s very, he takes it very seriously. He works on these projects that are meaningful for him. He’ll spend all day just working on this one thing. He’ll occasionally emerge from this to do a kind of cool special project, like I came across because he did a Nova special, where he’s like, we’re going to try to recreate this sort of extra strong Viking sword, so he emerged to do that Nova special, but for the most part, that says he’s not on social media, he’s not, he’s not doing all these things, he’s just in this sort of beautiful location, honing his skills, creating beautiful things, and something about that resonates to almost anyone who sees it, and it’s because I think we know deep down, we know what we really want to do. We want to, we want to be there for friends and family. We want to be a part of our community. We want to do something important and impactful that basically applies taking skills and use those skills to create valuable things. And we want a lot of time with our thoughts to just enjoy life and beautiful things, like instinctually we know that’s what makes a good life good. And yet we look up and say, I’ve been looking at a rectangle all day. I’ve been, I’ve been getting cortisol level up because someone who I don’t know who they are is saying something mean in 240 characters on this Twitter screen that I’m, you know, swiping this just three inch rectangle of light, or something like that, that’s so unnatural, and our instincts know it, and I think we know deep down that we need to be more like the blacksmith, figure out what we’re about, use tech as tools, just like he has the various hammers and ad mills that he uses to great effect, use it as tools, right? When you find a piece of tech that gives you a big win, go for it, right, like this is great, it’s a great tool, it’s helping me do this type of thing, but you put it back in the toolbox after you’ve used it. I mean, if you saw a blacksmith walking around with this, his favorite, whatever, metal chisel, and he had it everywhere, and he was always using it, and he was always talking about it, and whenever he was born, he started chiseling trees, or this or that. You say, ‘Buddy, I think you’re using that tool a little bit too much. Why don’t you let that go back to where it’s useful? That’s where we are. Right, tech should be a tool that we deploy when we get a big win from it, that it goes back to the toolbox. Like, what matters is the project, the thing we’re actually trying to build, which, in this case, is a life well lived.

Zack Arnold: Well, I, if, hey, if I had written this thing in advance, word for word, and said this is the perfect podcast, I don’t think I could have summed it up or finished it better than you just did, and I’m guessing you’ve probably had some practice. You’ve probably done a podcast or two, but that was fantastic. I really think that’s what it’s all about. For anybody that is listening today, that’s looking for me on Twitter, it’s gone. I’m getting rid of it after this podcast. Twitter’s gone. Why don’t you tell all of our listeners where they can find you on social media? It’s not going to take long.

Cal Newport: Yeah, nowhere. I will say, I discovered there’s fake Cal Newport Twitter accounts, so beware.

Zack Arnold: Well, you know, you should be, you should be very inspired by that. The fact that somebody is willing to take the time to actually take your name and say, ‘I’m gonna make a Twitter account out of this, that means you’ve made it, right?

Cal Newport: Yeah, I guess, except for when you’re going around telling people that you don’t use social media, it’s kind of less useful.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, that’s probably true. That does make sense. Well, I want to make sure that somebody listening can find you, find your work, and also find this book. So, you are on the internet, you’re just not on social media. So, how can people find you and make sure that they get this book, so they can really implement this idea of digital minimalism into their life?

Cal Newport: Oh, yeah, I mean, I love the internet. I just don’t like these big social media companies, so Cal newport.com I own my own server. I’ve been blogging over there for over a decade, so if you go to Cal newport.com you get to see the old school internet at its finest. You have a decade’s worth of blog posts and information about my books and whatever other information I want to put up there, and whatever format I want to use, and I owed it all, and no one’s making a dive off of if you go and use that site, no one’s going to be watching you, no one’s taking your data. It’s like 19 2008 never ended. So, calnewport.com you can find everything you need to know about me at my books.

Zack Arnold: Well, that is awesome. I really, really appreciate your time today. I’m looking at the notes that I put in. To Evernote to prepare for our interview, and I got through about 10% of them, and I knew that would be the case, because the stuff that you write is so robust and so useful that it takes a tremendous amount of time to really get the most out of it. So, like I said, deep work is my manifesto, and now digital minimalism has made you my spirit animal, so I’m going to implement as much of this as I can, and really rework my social media usage, and also my relationship to news, which is something we didn’t even talk about, but that’s a huge thing that’s in the book as well. So, somebody listening is saying, “I don’t have a relationship with social media, but the news cycle is killing me, jump into the book. That isn’t something we had a chance to talk about, but I greatly appreciate your time, your energy, and your attention, and for being here with me today. Thank you so much.

Cal Newport: Well, thank you, Zack. I enjoyed it.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Elyse Rintelman. 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).