YouSaid · the spoken record

Cal Newport

lines on the record: 201
first: 2021-03-05
most recent: 2021-03-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah. And think about this analogy that we have this hunger instinct that junk food short circuits. It's like, oh, we'll satisfy that hyper palatably and it doesn't end up well. Now, think about modern attention engineered digitally mediated entertainment. We have this board of instinct. Oh, we can take care of that with a hyperpalatable alternative. Is that going to lead to a similar problem?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But now I'm going deep on it, and one of my podcast listeners I was talking about on the show, and I was like, well, I kept trying to learn about animals and boredom. And she sent me this cool article from an animal behavioralist journal about what we know about human boredom versus animal boredom. So trying to figure out that puzzle is the wave that's high so I can get through the wave that's low of like, I don't know about this pandemic book launch and And my research is stumbling a little bit because of the pandemic. And so I needed a nice high. So there we go. There's a case study.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're short circuiting all of our wires. So it all comes back to this question well, what would be the ideal? Ideal sort of amount of stuff to do in type of things to do. Like if we wanted to look back at our ancestral environment and say, if I could just build from scratch, how much work I do and what I work on to be as in touch with that as like paleo people are trying to get their diets in touch with that. And so now I'm just, but see, I'm just, it's something I made up.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stones and the hand axes and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick sharp enough that we could throw it as a melee weapon or a distance weapon for hunting mammoth, right? Boredom drives us towards action. So now I'm fascinated by this fundamental action instinct because I have this theory that I'm working on that we're out of sync with it. Just like we got, we have this drive for hunger, but then we introduce junk food and got out of sync with hunger and it makes us really unhealthy. We have this drive towards action, but then we overload ourselves and we have all of these distractions. And then that causes, it's like a cognitive action obesity type things because it short circuits the system that wants us to do things, but we put more things in our plate than we can possibly do. And then we're really frustrated we can't do them.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And think about the other things that are incredibly uncomfortable like hunger or thirst, they serve a really important purpose for a species, right? Like if something is really distressing, there's a reason. Pain is really uncomfortable because we need to worry about getting injured. Thirst is really uncomfortable because we need water to survive. So what's boredom? Why is that uncomfortable? And I've been interested in this notion that boredom is about driving us towards productive action. Like as a species, I mean, think about it. Like what got us to actually...”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, so Deepwork had a superficial idea about boredom, which was, I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom and a very functionalist idea was basically you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule or your mind is going to form a Pavlovian connection between as soon as I feel boredom, I get stimuli. And once it forms that connection, it's never going to tolerate deep work. So there's this very pragmatic treatment of boredom of your mind better be used to the idea that sometimes you don't get stimuli because otherwise you can't write for three hours. Like it's just not going to tolerate it. More recently, what I'm really interested in boredom is it as a fundamental human drive. Because it's incredibly uncomfortable.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did you read the Pale King? It goes deep on board him. It means it's like uncomfortable. It's like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom. The characters in that are just driven to extremes of, I just bought three books on boredom the other day. So I'm really interested in this topic because I was anxious about my book launch happening this week. So I was like, okay, I need something else. So I have this idea for a, I might do as an article first, but as a book, like, okay, I need something cool to be thinking about because I was worried about like I don't have, is the launch going to work, the pandemic, what's going to happen. I don't know if it's going to get to that. So this is exactly what we're talking about. So I went out and I bought a bunch of books and I'm beginning like a whole sort of intellectual exploration.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you have to contrive it, right? If you don't have it, you have to contrive it. I think it's really important. Like, okay, well, this is going bad. So now is the time to start thinking about, I mean, look, I started a podcast during the pandemic. It's like, this is going pretty bad. But you know what? This could be something really interesting.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paper, a couple papers that was trying to work through for a deadline a few weeks ago. And I wasn't sleeping well. And there's some other things going on. And it just knocks out, and I get sick usually is how I know I've pushed myself too far. And so I kind of pulled it back. Now I'm doing this book launch. Then after this book launch, I'm pulling it back again. So I like seasonality for rest and recovery, I think, is crucial at every scale, daily, monthly, you know, and then at the annual scale, an easy summer, for example, I think is like a great idea if that's possible.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you have a motivational center that's not completely on board, a lot of these kids, like when I'm dealing with MIT kids, they would be, their whole town was shooting off fireworks that they got in. Everyone's hope that they were going there and that they're in three majors. They don't want to let people down, but they're not really interested in being a doctor or whatever. So your motivation is not in the right place. The motivational psychologist would say the locus of control was more towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum. And you have hardship. And you could just fritz out the whole system. And so I would always be very worried about that. So I think about that a lot. I do a lot of multi-phase or multi-scale seasonality. So I'll go hard on something for a while and then for a few weeks go easy. I'll have semesters that are hard and semesters that are easy. I'll take the summer really low. So on multiple scales and in the day I'll go really hard on something, but then have a hard cutoff at five. So like every scale, it's all about rest and recovery because I really want to avoid that. And I do burn out. I burnt out pretty recently. I get minor burnt outs.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like this is due, and the professor gives you an extension, and the professor gives you an incomplete and says, You got it, we're going to fail the course. You have to hand this in. And they can't do it, right? It's like a complete stop on the ability to actually do work. And so I used to counsel students who had that issue. And often it was a combination of, at least my best analysis, is you have just the physical and cognitive difficulties of they're usually under a very hard load, right? They're doing too many majors, too many extracurriculars, just really pushing themselves. And the motivation is not sufficiently intrinsic.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I do worry about it. So when I used to do student writing, like writing about students and student advice, it came up a lot with students at elite schools. And I used to call it deep procrastination, but it was a real, really vivid, very replicatable syndrome where they stopped being able to do schoolwork.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And if you have two things, this has been a big strategy of mine so that what you hope for is off phase, off-phase alignment. Sometimes it's in phase and that's a problem. But off phase alignment's good. So, okay, my research I'm struggling about my book stuff is going well, right? And so when you add those two waves together, like, yeah, we're doing pretty well. And then in other periods like on my writing, I feel like I'm just not getting anywhere. But I've had some good papers. I'm feeling good over there. So having two things that can counteract each other. Now sometimes they fall into sync and then it gets rough. Then when everything, because everything for me is cyclical, you know, good periods, bad periods with all this stuff. Typically, they don't coincide. So it helps compensate. When they do coincide, you get really high highs, like everything's clicking, and then you get these really low lows where your research is not working, your program's not clicking, you feel like you're nowhere with your writing, and then it's a little rougher.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is probably like Soho in the 50s or something too, just because of the exponential growth, give it seven more months. And if you let one invite, be gets two invites, be gets four invites begins. Pretty soon it'll be everyone. And then the rooms in your feet are going to be...”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm doing an event next week for the book launch where it's like Jason Fried and I are talking about email Is using some more like a thousand people who are there to watch virtually, but it's using some sort of traditional webinar. Clubhouse would be a situation where that could just happen informally. Like I jump in, like Jason's there and then someone else jumps in. And yeah, that's interesting.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why are people so? I see a lot of, there's all these articles that seem, I haven't really read them. Why are reporters negative about this?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's more friction, there's more cognitive friction, I guess, involved in listening to smart people versus scrolling through, yeah, there's something there.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's interesting. Okay. So maybe I'll try it. I mean, look, there's no, the things that make me suspicious about other platforms aren't here. So the feed is not full of user-generated content that is going through some sort of algorithmic rating process with all the weird incentives and nudging that does. And you're not producing content that's being harvested to be monetized by another company. I mean, it seems like it's more ephemeral, right? You're here, you're talking. The feed is just actually just showing you here's interesting things happening, right? You're not jockeying in the feed for, look, I'm being clever or something and I'm going to get a light count that goes up and that's going to influence.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have to cultural evolution and try to get a lot of interesting smart people together that run into each other. Well,”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why is it called a social network? It seems like it doesn't have, there's not social links, there's not a feed that's trying to harvest attention. It feels like a”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you're like, okay, let me get precedence. So it's the digital equivalent of when you're in a conversation like a faculty meeting and you sort of make some noises while the other person's finishing and so people realize like, okay, this person wants to talk next, but now it's purely digital. You see a flashing.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wait, I have to ask you about this because I'm invited to do a clubhouse. I don't know what that means. A tech reporter has invited me to do a clubhouse about my new book.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it gets complicated because I wrote a whole book about following your passion being bad advice, which is like the first thing I kind of got infamous for. I wrote that back in 2012. But the argument there is like passion cultivates, right? So what I was pushing back on. Was the myth that the passion for what you do exists full intensity before you start. And then that's what propels you, where actually the reality is as you get better at something, as you gain more autonomy, more skill, and more impact to passion grows along with it. So that when people look back later and say, oh, follow your passion, what they really mean is I'm very passionate about what I do and that's a worthy goal. How you actually cultivate that is much more complicated than just introspection is going to identify.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. Unexpected. Yeah. Yeah. So, how do you balance those two things? And so, what I try to throw at it is this motto of do less, do better, know why, right? Do less, do better, know why. It used to be the motto of my website years ago. So do a few things, but like an interesting array, right? So I was doing MIT stuff, but I was also writing. So a couple things, they were interesting. Have a couple bets placed on a couple different numbers on the roulette table, but not too many things. And then really try to do those things really well and see where it goes. Like with my writing, I just spent years and years and years just training. I was like, I want to be a better writer, I want to be a better writer. I started writing student books when I was a student. I really wanted to write hardcover idea books. I started training. I would use like New Yorker articles to train myself. I'd break them down and then I'd get commissions with much smaller magazines and practice the skills. And it took forever until, you know, but now today, like I actually get a write for the New Yorker, but it took like a decade. So a small number of things tried to do them really well. And then the know why is have a connection to some sort of value. Like in general, I think this is.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it enforces a lot of timetables, though it has a huge kids have a huge productivity hit those. You got to weigh it. But, okay, here's the complicated thing, though. Like you could think about in your own life starting the podcast as one of these just cool opportunities that you put on yourself, right? I could have been talking to you at MIT four years ago and be like, don't do that. Your research is going well. But then everyone who watches you is like, okay, this podcast is the direction that's taking you is like a couple years from now. It'll be something really monumental that it's going to probably lead to, right? There'll be some really, it just feels like your life is going somewhere.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My job was easy, so that when I became a professor, and now all of that's paying off because I have a ton of kids. So now I don't really have a choice. That's what's probably keeping me away from cool things I just don't have time to do them. And then after a while, people, you know, stop bothering.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, see, I started doing that early because I got married early. I didn't have a real job as a grad student, but my wife had a real job. And so I just figured I should do my work when she's at work. Because, you know, hey, when work's over, she'll be home and I don't want to be on campus or whatever. And so real early on, I just got in that habit of this is when you end work. And then when I was a postdoc, which is kind of an easy job, right? I put artificial. I was like, I want to train I was like, when I'm a professor, it's going to be busier because there's demands that professors have beyond research. And so as a postdoc, I added artificial large, time-consuming things into the middle of my day. I'd basically exercise for two hours in the middle of the day and do all this productive meditation and stuff like this while still maintaining the nine to five. So it's like, okay, I want to get really good at putting artificial constraints on so that I stay. I didn't want to get flabby.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's the chaos right now? Like, I've seen your video about your routine. It seemed very structured and deep. In fact, I was really envious of it. So what's the chaos now that's not in that video?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On some sort of intimation there that's correct. And so, what I try to build my life around is regularly thinking hard about stuff that's interesting. Just like if you get a fitness habit going, you feel off when you don't do it. I try to get that cognitive habit. So it's like, I got to, I mean, look, I have my bag here somewhere, I have my notebook in it because I was thinking on the Uber ride over, I was like, you know, I could get some, I'm working on this new proof and it just, so you train yourself. You train yourself to appreciate certain things. And then over time, the hope is it accretes.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can agree, by the way, having David Goggins yell at you is probably the top productivity technique. I think we'd all get a lot more done if he was yelling, but see, I don't like that. So I will try to get things done early. I like having flex. I also don't like the idea of this has to get done today, right? Like it's due at midnight and we've got a lot to do. And it's the night before because then I get in my head about, well, what if I get sick? Or like, what if, you know, what if I don't get a bad night's sleep and I can't think clearly? So I like to have the flex. So I'm all process. And that's like the philosophical aspect of that book, deep work, is that there's something very human and deep about just wrangling with the world of ideas. I mean, Aristotle talked about this. If you go back and read the ethics, he's trying to understand the meaning of life. And he eventually ends up ultimately at the human capacity to contemplate deeply. It's kind of like a teleological argument. It's the things that only humans can do and therefore it must be somehow connected to our ends. And he said, ultimately, that's where we found his meaning. But, you know, he's touched.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got these two hours put aside for writing. That's what I'm supposed to be doing. I have a break scheduled over here. I don't have to fight with myself. And maybe at a larger scale, deadlines give you a similar sort of effect. I know this is what I'm supposed to be working on because it's due.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a clear motivational signal, but in the short, you do get an effect like that in time blocking. I think the strong effect you get by saying this is the exact time I'm going to work on this is that you don't have the debate with yourself every three minutes about Should I take a break now? This is a big issue with just saying, I'm going to go right. I'm going to write for a while, and that's it because your mind is saying, well, obviously, we're going to take some breaks, right? We're not just going to write forever. And so why not right now? You have to be like, well, not right now. Let's go a little bit longer, five minutes later. Why don't we always take a break now? Like we should probably look at the internet. Now you have to constantly have this battle. On the other hand, if you're in a time block schedule.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or a cold start. Whenever I feel like I'm in a stage now, I submitted a few papers recently. So now we're sort of. Starting something up from cold, and it takes way too long to get going because it's very hard to get the motivation to schedule a time when it's not, yeah, we're in it. Like here's where we are. We feel like something's about to give here. We need the very early stages where it's just I don't know. I'm going to read hard papers and it's going to be hard to understand them. And I'm going to have no idea how to make progress. It's not motivating.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be okay getting yelled at a lot because I feel you if you're rolling yeah Well, that's what it is for me. Like with writing, I think writing is so hard in a certain way that you don't really get on a roll in some sense. Like it's just difficult, but working on proofs, it's very hard to pull yourself away from a proof if you start to get some traction. You've been at it for a couple hours, then you feel the pins and tumblers starting to click together and progress is being made. It's really hard to pull away from that. So I'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if I have to change that plan, that's fine. The state I want to be is basically at any point in the day, I've thought about what time remains and gave it some thought for what to do. Because I'll do the same thing, even though I have a lot more meetings and other types of things I have to do in my various jobs. And I basically prioritize the deep work and they get yelled at a lot. So that's kind of my strategy is like just be okay.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, there's magic to the intention. There's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities, right? So I'm often juggling multiple jobs, essentially. There's academic stuff. There's teaching stuff. There's book stuff. There's the business surrounding my book stuff. But I'm of your same mindset. If a deep work session is going well, just rock and roll and let it go on. So one of the big keys of time block, at least the way I do it. So I even sell this planner to help people time block. It has many columns because the discipline is, oh, if your initial schedule changes, you just move over one next time you get a chance, you move over one column, and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining. So in other words, there's no bonus for I made a schedule and I stuck with it. It's not like you get a prize for it, right? Like for me, the prize is I have an intentional plan for my time.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I do quarterly, weekly, daily planning. So at the semester or quarterly level, I have a big picture vision for what I'm trying to get done during the fall, let's say, or during the winter. There's a deadline coming out for academic papers at the end of the season. Here's what I'm working on. I want to have this many chapters done of a book, something like this. The big picture vision of what you want to get done. Then weekly, you look at that and then you look at your week and you put together a plan for like, okay, what am I going to, what's my week going to look like? What do I need to do? How am I going to make progress on these things? Maybe I need to do an hour every morning or I see that Monday is my only really empty day. So that's going to be the day that I really need to nail on writing or something like this. And then every day, you look at your weekly plan and see only block off the actual hours. So you do that three scales, the quarterly down to weekly down to daily.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm a big plan of saying here's the time, here's the time available. Let me make a plan for it. So I have a meeting here, I have an appointment here, here's what's left, what do I actually want to do with it? So in this half hour, I'm going to work on this. For this 90 minute block, I'm going to work on that. And during this hour, I'm going to try to fit this in. And then actually I have this half hour gap between two meetings. So why don't I take advantage of that to go run five errands? I can kind of batch those together. But blocking out in advance, this is what I want to do with the time available. I mean, I find that's much more effective. Now, once you're doing this, once you're in a disciplined time blocking, it's much easier to actually see this is where I want, for example, the deep work. And I can get a handle on the other things that need to happen and find better places to fit them so I can prioritize this. And you're going to get a lot more of that done than if it's just going through your day and saying, what's next?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I'm a big fan of time blocking, right? So if you're facing your workday, don't allow your inbox or a to-do list to sort of drive you. Don't just come into your day and think, what do I want to do next?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both can be killers if what you're trying to do. So I would recommend at least an hour at a time because it could take up to 20 minutes to completely clear out the residue from whatever it was you were thinking about before. So if you're coding for 30 minutes, you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes of actual sort of peak lex going on there, right? So an hour at least you get a good 40, 45 minutes plus. I'm partial to 90 minutes as a really good chunk. You can get a lot done. But just before you get exhausted, you can sort of pull back a little bit.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because here's 20 emails. I can't answer most of these right now. They're completely different. Like the context of these emails, like, okay, there's a grant funding issue or something like this is very different than the coding I'm doing. And I'm leaving it unresolved. So someone needs something from me and I'm going to try to pull my attention back. The second worst would be something that's emotionally arousing. So if you're like, let me just glance over at Twitter. I'm sure it's nice and calm and peaceful over there, right? That can be devastating because you're going to expose yourself to something that's emotionally arousing. That's going to completely mess up the cognitive plateau there. And then when you come back to, okay, let me try to code again, it's really difficult.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I think if you're looking up a library that's relevant to what you're doing, that's probably okay. And I don't know that I would count that as a full context shift because the semantic networks involved are relatively similar. You're thinking about this type of solution. You're thinking about coding. You're thinking about this type of functions. Where you're really going to get hit is if you switch your context to something that's different. And if there's unresolved obligations. So really the worst possible thing you could do would be to look at like an email inbox.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing, even though it's also in your brain's in the process of switching to these emails and trying to understand those contexts. And as a result, your ability to think clearly just goes really down. It's fatiguing too. I mean, you do this long enough, you get midday, and you're like, okay, I can't think anymore. You've exhausted yourself.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so a key aspect of focus is not just that you're concentrating hard on something, but you do it without distraction. So a big theme of my work is that context shifting kills the human capacity to think. So if I change what I'm paying attention to to something different, really even if it's brief and then try to bring it back to the main thing I'm doing, that causes a huge cognitive pile-up that makes it very hard to think clearly. So even if you think, okay, look, I'm writing this code or I'm writing this essay and I'm not multitasking and all windows are closed and I have no notifications on, but every five or six minutes you quickly check like an inbox or your phone, that initiates a contact shift in your brain, right? We're going to start to suppress some neural networks. We're going to try to amplify some others. It's a pretty complicated process, actually. There's a sort of neurological cascade that happens. You rip yourself away from that halfway through and go back to what you're doing. And I was trying to switch back to the original.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I look back to my grad school experience. I was like, huh, there's this focus thing that we used to do. I wonder how generally applicable that is into the knowledge sector. And so as I started thinking about it, it became clear there's this interesting storyline that emerged that, okay, actually, undistracted concentration is not just important for esoteric theoreticians. It's important here and important here and support and here. And that involved into the deep work hypothesis, which is across the whole knowledge work sector. Focus is very important and we've accidentally created circumstances where we just don't do a lot of it.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The faculty in that group, these were the cognitive Olympic athletes. But Cody, I think, is a classic example of deep work because I got this problem I want to solve. I have all of these tools and I have to combine them somehow creatively and on the fly. So basically I had been exposed to that. So I was used to this notion when I was in grad school and I was writing my blog, I'd write about hard focus. That was the term I used. Then I published this book so good they can't ignore you, which came out in 2012. So like right as I began as a professor. And that book had this notion of skill being really important for career satisfaction that it's not just following your passion. You have to actually really get good at something and then you use that skills as leverage. And there's this big follow-up question to that book of, okay, well, how do I get really good at this?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure, code does, right? I mean, especially if you're coming up with original algorithmic designs, I think it's a great example of Deepwork. I mean, yeah, the hardcore theoreticians, they push it to an extreme. I mean, I think it's like knowing that athletic endeavor is good and then hanging out with Olympic athlete, like, oh, I see that's what it is. Now, for the grad students like me, we're not anywhere near that level, but the faculty.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I don't know if they would quantify it, but focus was the tier one skill. So you would come in. Here would be a typical day. You'd come in and Eric Domain would be sitting in front of a whiteboard with a whole group of visitors who had come to work with him. And maybe that projected like a grid on there because they're working on some graph theory problem. You go to lunch, you go to the gym, you come back, they're sitting there staring at the same white orb, right? Like that's the tier one skill.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theoretical computer science, yeah, yeah. So I'm in the theory group, right? Doing theoretical computer science. And I publish a book. So, you know, so I was in this milieu where I was being exposed to people where focus was their tier one skill. Like that's what you would talk about, right? Like how intensely I can focus. That was the key skill. It was like your 440 time or something if you were an athlete, right?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had been calling it hard focus in my writing before that. So the context you would understand, I was in the theory group in CSAL at MIT, right? So I was surrounded at the time when I was coming up with these ideas by these professional theoreticians. And that's like a murderer's row of thinkers there, right? I mean, it's like Turing Award, Turing Award, MacArthur, Turing Award. I mean, you know the crew, right”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source