Why Am I Working More and Getting Less Done?

0:00Our brain just can't do it. We're like, oh, that's just what work feels like. I'm always vaguely distracted and anxious. It's not what work has to feel like. That's actually a side effect of a way of working that's not really compatible with our brains. Smart girl. Done questions. Why are we working more and getting less done? And should that meeting have been an email? I'm Neymaraza, this is Smarkled on Questions. And today I'm talking to Cal Newport, professor at Georgetown University, expert on how tech shapes our lives and the best selling author of so many books, including Deep Work, Slow Productivity, Digital Minimalism, and my personal favorite at North Star, a world without email. Cal, can you give us a world without email? I tried. It was one of the worst selling of my recent books. I think it's because the bookstore employees were shelving it in the fantasy section and so that people didn't get to it. So look, it hasn't caught on. Alas. I found it really validating because in parts of it, you're discussing the World War II of us Army Chief of Staff, General Marshall, and describing how he took himself offline

1:02and managed to win a World War with a Nobel Prize. But it made my emails feel less important, certainly. Well, I thought that was an amazing story, by the way, that he's running the US military in World War II and the way they used to deal with heart health, you know, the first half of the 20th century was like, well, you really probably shouldn't work past like five or five thirty because you might die. So it was like, great, I will run the war without working past five thirty. I think it's made it work. Yes, the one thing that I hate more than email is this word busy. And I find myself using it all the time and hating myself for it. And I'm curious where it came from because it feels like a status symbol, like a Porsche Cayenne and like a fourth kid being busy. And you're writing and whole theory of work and life does a good job of undressing and disarming the word. Yeah, you know, I think there's multiple sources for why we feel more busy and why we talk about being more busy. We get the personal computer revolution in the 80s and 90s and the email revolution

2:03to late 90s into the 2000s. And so the personal computer made it possible for workers to do more things like the range of possible tasks you could do. Yes, skyrocketed. Once you had a computer on your desk, then the ease with which you could ask someone to do something, skyrocketed once we had network connections on those computers and could email. And so now we had a sort of almost unlimited collection of types of things we could be doing and way more requests coming in for us to do things. What we lacked was any notion of workload management. So knowledge work did not have some notion of you should have X number of active tasks and other tasks are waiting in this holding dock. And we had no notion like this. So people just took on more work. Because it's not like a factory line with quotas and unions and you know, all the caps basically. I think that's exactly right. And so we have a feeling of busyness in the 2000s, like the 21st century that we probably didn't have in like 1970 or in part because we literally have more things on our plate. And then our brain knows this.

3:04So our brain is constantly trying to rip through this file of facts of all these various things we've committed to and it's bouncing what about this, what about this, making sure we don't forget things internally reviewing and re-reviewing. And what does that sensation feel like? This uneasy sense of, oh my God, I have so much to do. So I think we actually literally feel busier because of these technological changes in the office. What I really like about the way you come at this is the way in which you explain how our lives and minds are a bit downstream of technology and then also how we might flip that. This is the second episode of what even is work series which is brought to you by Zoom. And what I really want in this conversation is for you, Cal Newport, to like give us a cheat sheet to people who feel that terrible feeling of anxiety in our mind, how busy we are, how much we have to do, how far behind we are. I feel like I have a to-do list like the length of my legs and I just, I want to help relieve that in people but also be something that they could share

4:05with their colleagues, their teams, their bosses, the CIO, the CEO on like how you could make work better and life better as a result. Well, I mean, there's endless things here that are helpful but if I'm gonna zoom out instead of doing there with your presenting sponsor, if I zoom out, I'd say first I would say, right, it's a relatively new problem and you are right to feel like something is a miss. If you feel anxious, there's too much going on, this is not because you're a complainer, this is not because you just don't want to work. It really is a somewhat unsustainable reality that we've fallen into in this digital age of knowledge. And all the TV shows that are out there, succession the office, British or American, industry, severance, which one is most realistic to our current knowledge work culture, you think? Mm, all right, that's a good question. Which one is most realistic to our knowledge work culture? I mean, I think the office and severance both capture the degree to which there's just a lot

5:06of performing of activity. I think severance has an accidental insight into the world of work that that sort of a nanody that it captures is this notion of in a pseudo productivity logic, you're just doing stuff to be seen and be visible. And it's not too different from pressing the buttons on those terminals, right? Like, you never, they're not sitting down, like they don't even know like, what result am I getting from what I'm doing? Yeah, they're just like, that's what you're not even operators at a switch board, like that has more thought to it. Yeah, or if you're like a novelist or something, you're like, no, this book is what I'm working towards. You know what it is your efforts are moving towards. A lot of knowledge workers are like the characters in severance, like I don't know. I answered a lot of emails, I hopped on calls, I've learned how to do the thing that makes the hand claps float up on Zoom. Like, I guess that's my life. Is that really that different from putting the numbers into the little bins? Like, what do you point to at the end of a week like that to say, here's what I built, or here's the thing I'm almost done constructing

6:06that's gonna have clear and ambiguous value. Once you're disconnected from a clear value, that's a problem. This goes all the way back to Marx talking about the alienation of labor. That was actually psychologically insightful. This idea that when you alienate a human from, this is the thing I produced. It's a psychological state that's very distressing. He was talking about the industrialization of handicraft, but I think it applies in knowledge work actually, just as well. I read your book, A World Without Email, it's like the knowledge work manifesto of our time. Like, what could this look like? But severance is perfect, because it is kind of like the Ben Stiller School for adults who don't know how to work good. So much in my life, not just in work, but everything, is like 60% reactive. If I let my phone be near me, how much of our life should be reactive, how much of our life should be proactive? Like, what's the percentage? Well, I think that question, the way you worded it actually points out a key problem, which, you know, I want to emphasize here, is that we have made that issue of, I feel very reactive, like I'm constantly reacting to things. We've made that an individual issue,

7:08as if you are doing something wrong. You are being too reactive. You should shut off your phone more often. You should have the Tim Ferriss Otto responder that says I only check emails, you know, twice a week. That's not actually the right solution to this. Yeah, that's a way to get fired. It's a way to get fired, and it's not a flaw. Your activity is not a flaw in you. It is an unavoidable feature of the way you're currently collaborating, right? So what causes you to have all of those messages, see them in like Slack or your phone or text messages that require you to respond, right? What are the two sources of that? One of them is overload, okay? Because everything that you've said yes to, this goes back to workload management, but every task or project you've said yes to is going to generate administrative overload, right? Or overhead rather, there's going to be messages, there's going to be meetings, because I agreed to work on this. I'm going to have to talk to people about it. This is why if you have too many things you've agreed to do, it causes problems because that administrative overhead is fixed for each thing you say yes to. It's compressible and it's somewhat out of your control.

8:08So as you say yes to more and more things, the amount of this fixed administrative overhead this in your life begins to grow until eventually, you're being overwhelmed with messages and meetings that are tied to these things you said yes to. In isolation none of those are bad. Cal, by the way, right now for people who are just listening is like using his hands to go one over the other in a very scary game of Jenga that looks like your email inbox, yes. It's like a terrifying yes, tower of misery, pizza. So that's part of it. So if you're actively working on too many things, you now have to be very reactive. The other source is just inefficient collaboration styles, right? So after we introduced email to the office we emerged, no one decided this, but just emergent was a new collaboration style I call the hyperactive high-fine. Yes. I can just work things out on the fly with back and forth messaging. Well that also drives you to have to be very reactive because in order to participate in these online back and forth conversations you have to be in your inbox because if you're the person who spends three hours away from your inbox that whole back and forth email or slack conversation grinds to a halt

9:10and is a problem for everyone. So all of those issues of my phone dominates my life are downstream from these realities of your work in life. So you're kind of saying like don't turn off the faucet, turn off the boiler or something. That's right. I want to do a lightning round of definitions. A lot of these are terms you've coined or speak a lot about in your work. I would love you to give me the short definition and the antinem of the word. It's like the opposite of the word. Okay, hyperactive high-fine. You just brought that up. That's a collaboration style where you use unscheduled back and forth digital messaging as your main way of collaborating with people. The antinem to that would be having some sort of structured collaboration system where you actually answer when and how do I actually collaborate with people? How do we get people the information they need? How do I get information from people? How do we make progress on products? You have a structure to it, not ad hoc communication. So hyperactive high-fine is kind of like work today. It's like, and I love it because it kind of gives you that sense of like busy bee, like, I don't know. That's what I get visually.

10:11And everyone is kind of connected to everybody. It's just like I can just quickly send the message and you'll get back to me. There's, I mean, there's certain advantages to it. It's basically how small groups collaborate in person. But when you scale it up to an organization with digital tools, it doesn't work with our brain. Things fall apart. OK, pseudo productivity. That is the heuristic that was invented in knowledge work in the mid 20th century or trying to estimate worker productivity. Because we did not have numbers we could compute, like we had in factories, how many model teas are we producing per paid worker hour? The heuristic we used instead was the more visibly active you are, the more productive I assume you will. So pseudo productivity is using visible activity as a proxy for productive effort. Like someone's like slack is always on green, but like that kind of thing, right? Exactly. Before we had digital tools, pseudo productivity was way more harmless. It was put the magazine down at your desk when the boss walks by. It's make sure that you're at work a little bit early

11:11and you stay a little bit late. When you're at the water cooler talking about the baseball game, switch over to talking about a client when the boss walks in, right? So it was kind of harmless back then. But once we got the ability to do digital communication with this incredibly fine granularity, ubiquitously wherever we are, pseudo productivity began to destroy our brains. What about deep work, the title of your book? What is deep work actually? How do you know when you're doing it? Focus on something hard, so something that's using hard one skills and you're doing it without distraction, so that you're not context switching between different things. The opposite of that is shallow work, which is I literally define as anything that is not deep work. So it's not a pejorative, it's just, if it's not deep work, we'll call it shallow work. And it's important in my mind to label the no, there's a difference, not all effort is the same. Deep work efforts and most knowledge work jobs actually tends to be the thing that ultimately moves to needle. That ultimately makes the organization value, whereas shallow work is all about sort of the support things you need to do to keep the lights on. And if you let the shallow crowd out all the deep,

12:12you can feel super busy, you can feel super productive. But you might not actually be moving the needle much on the value that the company is producing. Deep work for me, there are a couple pieces of deep work. That happened before in interview, one of which is where I'm kind of absorbing a lot of information about the person. So in your case, I was like reading a book that I hadn't read before. And then there's like the sitting down to like think about what I'm going to talk about, what are my questions, have like a flow to my architecture of the conversation. I find it so much easier to like sit down and read a book. Then the second I start writing questions, what happens in my mind is, and I think people might relate to this, is like, I'm sitting with this deep work daunting task in front of me. All of a sudden, all the things that were so unsexy to me, all the shallow work, the sending of the invoices, they're like responding to some email, the booking the flight, all of a sudden becomes like shiny and beautiful to me. And I'm on my computer and I'm like, oh, what about American Airlines dot com? What about tie-hack dot com? These are not sponsors, don't worry. But I will find myself just a lured, attracted to these other things,

13:14all of a sudden, when I'm on a screen during deep work. Why is that? Well, deep work is hard and boring. Right. I mean, it requires the burning of cognitive effort in a way that is not necessarily comfortable, especially until you've sort of fallen into a concentration state. And that's because you literally have to do neuronal gardening to get ready to do deep work. You have to inhibit certain... Neuronal gardening? Yeah, you got to inhibit certain semantic networks. You have to excite other types of networks, the mind... You're talking about like literally what's happening, my like neural network of my brain. Literally neural networks in your brain. It takes up to 15 minutes, the fully context shift for an abstract symbolic target. That's not a natural thing for humans to do. And so it takes a lot of effort. And we tend to try to avoid effort if we can. And it's boring in the sense that when you're staring at one thing, there's no novel stimuli. So your mind is often biased towards, I'd rather have novel stimuli. That's more interesting where bias towards it. So it's hard to do. And so you have to set yourself up for success. And that means, for example, locations and rituals probably matter. This is a location I go to just for doing deep work.

14:14This is a ritual I always do right before I do deep work to kind of help give my brain that space to clear out and focus. So I don't have to feel as much strain once I actually start doing the deep work. It has to be taken seriously. And this is actually one of the problems that we have today in the knowledge work sector is we don't take the reality of the brain seriously. We just see humans as like task executors. And it's like, it's better for you to have more tasks than less. You never have any downtime and just kind of crunch through them. And that's not really the way the brain works. You can't simultaneously say, let's just figure things out on the fly with Slack. Also, by the way, I need you to do these cognitively demanding tasks that are going to produce value for the company. You set up an environment that is directly antagonistic to the primary task you want someone to do. So for whatever reason, when it comes to productivity, we don't think about the brain, which is crazy, because that is the main capital resource and knowledge work is literally the brains. The bodies around the brains are just a vehicle to keep them safe and hands and eyes. You can type what brain is thinking, but the brain is what you're paying for.

15:15And we don't have any curiosity about how that brain works. We just assume, like, I don't know, just answer my email. Well, it's because we don't know, right? I mean, I've had Jeffery Hinton on this podcast and he'd come back for a third one soon, but it's my own trilogy with the Godfather of AI. But of course, AI is, you know, these large language models are modeled after our brain. So all of a sudden, we're talking a lot more about our brains in the context of this AI. And when you were speaking about neural gardening, in my mind, I'm like, wait, how come Claude doesn't? Does Claude do that too? Like, when I'm asking Claude to do something, is it like cheating on me with some small administrative task that it has in its bucket? Or have we just like put blinders on that machine that we cannot, that we don't have in our brains? Oh, yeah. Claude is not doing that. I mean, our brains are way more architecturally diverse than something like a language model. A language model is sort of a fixed-step feed-forward type of network. So the input just works its way through roughly 96 layers and a token comes out on the other side. It's like the opposite of spontaneous or recursive or interesting in my opinion.

16:15But there's a lot we do know about the brain. So much change to the AI. Yes. Well, yeah. Do you ever worry as like a computer science expert or a PhD professor saying mean things about the AI will make the AI come for you? This is a totally smart, well done question moment. No one's in, what AI, I'm worried that a language model is going to come after me? That doesn't make any sense. I guess I've been in the church. Maybe a real world model that like me on the coon is developing or something. Some robots. I do like the model that I think he's working on a better model. Once that technology gets more advanced, then I guess I'll be more careful. This is by the way, like a common idea within the sort of AI safety circles. The rationalist call it Rocco's Basilix. This notion that if you say bad things about AI now, the super teletel today is going to come get you later. And they actually take that seriously. It's an interesting group. They do. Like a bunch of like actually smart computer science people think that robots will come to get them because they said something mean about AI early. This is the rationalist. Yeah. Give Elias a Yucowsky a call and he'll tell you all about Rocco's Basilix. But you don't subscribe. You're unsubscribing from that theory.

17:16No, I think that's a whole other tangent. But I think rationalism has influenced a lot of the major AI companies and has added an unnecessary layer of anxiety and fear on top of what should be like a really interesting technology that we should be dealing with as a normal technology. But we do know things about the brain from psychology that are very relevant. For example, the brain is bad at switching context. If I want to switch from one target to another in symbolic space, so not in the real world, that's easy. If a lion roars, I can boom, full attention, towards where that lion is roaring. In symbolic space, we're not good at switching focus, right? And symbolic space is like the space inside of your mind. Inside your head. OK. So if I am, for example, trying to write questions for a podcast, right? We'll use your example. And then I go and look at an email inbox. Well, when I look at that inbox, my brain begins switching over to the context of these messages because they're probably very salient. There's people on the other end of them. There's stuff that people need. And if I then wrench my attention back to writing the questions,

18:17my brain hasn't finished completely switching to the context of the email inbox. And so then it tries to return to the writing the questions context. And now we've mixed both of those contexts together. Your brain has jumbled. And what does that feel like? Rich and resistance. Just like, I just want to go do something easy. I just want to see stimuli. So we're really bad at. And then you bring a third person to the party. They're like, oh, I'll also go do this other thing because you cannot do either of the first two things. I want to do things that are easy or have novel stimuli that's going to be, this is why, for example, what's like the hardest people often get this wrong? Well, what's one of the hardest cognitive tasks that the average knowledge worker does every day is trying to answer emails sequentially. Because when you go through and think about this, this is really hard. You're like, I'm just going to go through my inbox one by one and start answering messages. Why is that so hard? Because we have executive function, right? And every message is a different context. But we're asking our brain to switch its cognitive context from the world of this first email to the completely unrelated world of the second email, which has a completely unrelated cognitive world

19:19of the third email. And it takes 10 to 50 minutes to really do these switches, but we're giving our brain 30 seconds. Yeah. For me, I feel like it opens up all these loops. It's just like, I read that email and then I'm like, oh, these are the other four things that I didn't do that are related to this email. I should go do that or I should message this person. And it also starts and you flow, then they reply to the email and it's like, oh, my God, I'm so in hyperactive hive mind. It does scatterbrain. So the brain is now in between context. Your cognitive capacity is greatly reduced. Your ability to think clearly is reduced. You feel friction and you're highly distractable. Like do this simple experiment next time you check your inbox. Say, instead of answering these sequentially, I'm going to go grab every message that's on some common theme. Like all of the messages related to podcast scheduling this week. And then I'm going to move them into their own label. And then I'm going to go to just that label or folder. And now I'm only going to answer those emails one after another. It's not going to be hard because you're staying in the same cognitive context. You can boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like you're in it, your mind has to write stuff loaded up. And then you go grab 10 other messages, all connected to the same different thing,

20:19move them over to its own folder, and then work your way through those. You will clean that inbox much easier than if you just went in order of what time they're received. So we, that's like something we know about the brain. It's slow to switch its target of attention. And yet we design our work collaboration styles in such a way that completely tortures us. It ignores that and creates a situation that is impossible. It'd be the same as if we built a factory and we required all the workers to be super stooped over because it made it easier to build a factory and all of everyone's backsgiving that. Is it possible that our brains are different because when you said that, like I feel like I just had more stress? Like I actually don't mind like just functionally going through and responding to my emails, like kind of straight through. But the idea of organizing my emails into, like the way I organize my clothes into seasons or colors or events or whatever, I'm happy to do that. Now this is a good follow up though, right? So the idea is not you're constantly organizing your emails and keeping them divided. No, no, you have one folder called like answer right now.

21:20When it comes time to do your emails, you're like, okay, I'm gonna right now grab 10 emails that are similar, put them in that folder, answer them. Now I'm gonna go back to my inbox, grab 10 more emails that are similar, put them in that folder, answer them one by one. So it's just on demand, you're trying to answer like emails all at once as opposed to going back and forth. Our brain just can't do it. It's exhausting. It cannot switch context. We just normalize it now. We're like, oh, that's just what work feels like. I'm always like vaguely distracted and anxious. It's not what work has to feel like. That's actually a side effect of a way of working that's not really compatible with our brains. Yeah, and I've heard you talk about like cognitive KPIs because the idea is like this, this kind of context switching is actually costing my mind mental energy and making my mind weaker with time. So we gotta like work out our mind, like we work out our bodies. We'll get to that later. But is there actually a value in how fast you respond? Even in a remote work context, I do think that people trust more than people they see frequently. In a world of like constant communications, you feel like the person who's responding to you

22:22is more reliable somehow. So are we wrong about that? Are those bad indicators? They're indicators that make sense in the context of pseudo productivity. So so long as this is the main way that we think about productivity, which is just visible activity is the sign of usefulness, then the logic of that system is the more you're seeing the better. Now this is partially why pseudo productivity has become unbearable in an age of mobile network computation because now every moment of your life wherever you are, you have a device with you that allows you to somehow be visibly active. You can respond to another email message, you can respond to a slack right away. And so it puts all the pressure on the individual of just be super responsive. You can actually do this at all moments of your life and it will make you seem more productive by the logics of pseudo productivity. The flip side of it is that it makes people miserable and also makes it basically impossible to get anywhere near your capacity for doing original cognitive work. So this is why I think pseudo productivity

23:23has been a problem is that within its logics, a lot of the things that are making people burnt out or keeping them away from doing their best work are they make sense? It's completely logical. Because the system is designed in a way that rewards the behaviors that are annoying for me but good for the system. Therefore we will all keep on driving towards this in this crazy coordination problem. And this is what often confuses business leaders when I talk to them because when I come to them and I'm talking about email and focus and et cetera, to what they're used to as someone coming in and saying, hey, this thing is making people miserable, because it's also making you more money and it's all a conflict between the worker and the management, that's not the situation here. The pseudo productivity actually produces less profit. It's a bad way to run a business and it makes people miserable. So you fix one, you're fixing both types of things. It's actually everyone is suffering under this regime and that's often confusing for people at first. I was like, I'm on everyone's side here. This is gonna make your bottom line better and it's gonna make your employers happier. Both of that's true.

24:24I've heard you say this theory that there is not we overvalue the pseudo work. You know, there's no value to it, but there is like a real cost to the other thing. There's a real cost to being a bottleneck and everybody does not like a bottleneck. One of my fears when I'm off doing deep work and I like usually I put my phone far away from me. I'm like in my zone, I try to do it with pen and paper as much as possible. I don't turn on my laptop more than a couple times a week if I can avoid it. Then I'm like, I do feel this lurking. I'm not a people-placer but I'm like, oh, I wonder who's gonna hate me at the end of this like eight hours? Yeah. Well, I mean, this is why in my book, wrote without email, for example. No, we're in there against the advice that says, check your inbox list off it. Yeah. Only check twice a day. Put up a not a responder. What matters is just your focus or this or that. All the solutions in that book, and I'm super clear about this is you have to first replace the hyperactive hive mind with something that doesn't demand

25:25so much unscatholic communication. That's the ultimate solution. And I think that's why we've been stuck in solving this solution is because we often try to approach it as an individual. So the whole system of pseudo productivity hooked up to the hyperactive hive mind is running at our company. And then we say, okay, you as an individual, just stop checking your email so much. Like that's impossible. We set up a whole system that's built around ad hoc back and forth communication that grinds to a halt if I bring myself out of it. So no one person can fix it. The mathematical term is a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. We're stuck at this point where no one person can make a unilateral change to make their situation better. Because if you're the only person changing, you're gonna be a bottleneck and your situation gets worse. So you actually the only way to get out of one of these Nash equilibrium is to change the structure of the system itself. So this has been a big part of my argument. It's like, I don't care too much about advice for individuals about, hey, it's bad to be distracted. I wanna say it's bad to be distracted. How do we change the underlying collaboration and business system so we don't have to be so distracted?

26:25Yes, don't say check your inbox less often. You have to change it so that there's nothing there for you to see even if you do. That's the ultimate solution. I'm not much of an agency girl. Like I sometimes feel all the agency stuff aligns or core structural global issues. And we're like, just fix yourself and the world will be great. And I'm like, no, this world is hard. And does something to your mind that you talk to these executives who presumably ask you to advise them on how to run less hyperactive, high-mindy work cultures, correct? Are they like CEOs or they CTOs? Like who are you talking to? I've done everything. Yeah, so I've seen sweet stuff. Small group in a conference room, one-on-one, thousand people in a room. So what is the number one thing executives get wrong about work culture? They think it's about norms. They think, oh, we just have bad norms. And if we can just promulgate new norms, everything will be better. Like the most common solution I heard, especially around the time I was working on a world without email, was executives would just say, I just think we have this bad norm

27:27that expects people to respond quickly. So why don't we just promulgate a new norm that says, hey, don't expect a response, right away. Like, it might be a few hours before responses. And I'd be like, the reason why people are checking their inbox all the time, it's not because of some cultural norm that they don't want to violate. It's because decisions are being made with back and forth ad hoc conversations. And there's 10 messages that have to get back and forth before the end of the day. And it's only going to happen if I'm checking my inbox every two minutes so that I can see the next message right after it arrives. It's a consequence of your work process, not of some sort of norm. So I think it's often seen as like, it's norms and individual behaviors are off. And if we could just change the norms, people would fix their individual behaviors. And it's a systems problem. And that is by the way why I think it's so hard to solve. Is that this is why I haven't had a lot of success quite frankly, is that changing the entire way that your work functions is incredibly messy, complicated, expensive and annoying. And that's what stops it from happening. And we've seen this in other technological business revolution, the continuous motion assembly line,

28:29productivity miracle. Why didn't we use it earlier? Because it was a nightmare for Ford to try to get that runny. Like it was really long. How long did that take for Ford to set up an assembly line? And then how long would it take for Google to have a world with less email? Well, first of all, I had a, you know, and he pushed this through because he had control of that. For but huge capital expenditure, they had to build a lot of machinery that did not exist. Right. So there's a lot of we have to build these, you know, a drill press with 12 bits so that we can do this all at one time. They had to hire a lot more people, engineers to build these things more supervisors to try to keep things working. And then I don't have exact timeline on it, but it was actually very difficult to try to get the timing right so that you could have continuous motion. Because if one station is too slow, the whole assembly line doesn't work. So it was a costly annoying transition where things got worse before it got better. That's what we would need a knowledge work. And, you know, it's hard to find someone to step up to the plate to try that outside of like small teams,

29:30which there's all sorts of innovation going on. If you're like making me think that CTO is in the office, you should just like turn off email and then only turn it on like once an hour. Like basically become like a postmaster. I mean, like email even says like at postmaster.jorgetown.edu, whatever, like get that person, that postmaster technical wizard to just like send it every hour. Yeah, I mean, I like that idea. Another idea is office hours, right? So you can have a simple rule then. If I get an email message that can be answered with a single message, right, here's a question I have the answer. Or can you see me the file and I have the file? That's a great use of email, right? A synchronous communication. I will respond to that when I get around to it by sending one message in a response. If I get a message, however, that's going to require more than one message in response, we have to interact. I say, I'm done my next office hours. My phone's on, my office door's open. We'll take three minutes. We'll work it out real time. Or I'll go to your office hours. People say, wait a second. I don't want to put aside an hour for office hours because if I count the literal minutes I'm spending writing these emails, it's only 20 minutes.

30:31But the 20 minutes that you're literally writing the emails is not the problem. The 200 inbox checks that was the problems. There's so many ways that you help people get time back. The most clarifying to me was in one of your blog posts you wrote something like a one hour meeting. It's not a one hour meeting. If there are six people at that meeting, it's a six hour meeting. And that to me was mind blowing to think about every time I have a 15 minute meeting with four people, that's an hour of time. And I think better than the word busy, the word I've started using right now is over-subscribed. I'm not busy, I'm over-subscribed. And I've got to start unsubscribing. You are a default no guy, right? Yeah. But you said yes to, but I don't believe you, Cal, because I wrote two ones. And you said yes to do my podcast. Yeah, so that's quota based, right? So, so knows are more complicated than simply, just say no as default, right? Because the issue is there are certain activities. This is what gets people. There are certain activities where you say, I don't want to turn that off completely. Like actually, these are an important part of my job. However, I get many more asked to do these activities

31:35than I can reasonably handle. So what do you do in that circumstance is you have quotas. That is you have some sort of heuristic or rule that keeps a reasonable rhythm of those things in your life, but prevents it from getting out of control. So like if you're an academic, for example, you might say, I need to peer review papers. That's part of my job. But I get so many requests to peer review papers, I could spend all my time doing this, which doesn't make sense. So I'll do one paper per month. And if I've already hit my quota for that month, then I'll say, I'm sorry, I've already hit my quota for this month, so I can't say yes to additional ones. I'm this way with podcasts. It's important for me. I do a lot of podcast interviews. It's a big part of my outreach. But I only typically record my rule is typically one other person podcast per week. Okay. And so if I'm like, oh, like you have a very good podcast towards San Alambe, and I was like, great, this is a week I have a slot. Let's do it. Now if someone else was like, hey, can I record this week? I was like, no, this week's already full. So if Oprah came to you after what you had said, yes to me, would you have said yes to Oprah? I might have said yes to Oprah. And then what do you have canceled on me to meet your quota?

32:36No, probably not. I want to cancel on you. That wouldn't be great. You don't have to be so, you don't have to be so rigid about it. So dogmatic. A lot of people use stress as a governor, right? They say, when I get so overwhelmed that I'm palpably stressed out, I'm then going to slam the door and use that as psychological cover for the social capital cost. They say no to everybody for a while. And then I recharge and then I overload myself again. I don't think that type of yo-yo scheduling, as I call it, sometimes I don't think that's that healthy. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. Who's actually able to keep on top of all of their work threads? This is the sponsor dumb question brought to you by Zoom. Studies suggest we spend something like a quarter to more than half of our work time on correspondence, meeting, calls, emails, chats, do not forget the chats. But conversations that matter may happen in hallways or a quick call that you took on the way to the airport. If you're capturing only the scheduled stuff, you're still missing half the story. Enter Zoom phone and mineouts. Zoom phone is a separate line that lives on the phone you already carry. Meanwhile, mineouts captures the conversation, generates

33:38an AI transcript, pulls out action items, and keep points. And everything lives in your mineouts tab, searchable, and ready to reference. So that thing you forgot that was mentioned in that call that interrupted your very important family day but was important enough to call about is documented, findable, and shareable. Because great conversations happen everywhere. And if the only ones you're capturing are the ones on your calendar, you're losing context every single day. And let's be honest, we don't have more time to waste catching up. So get more done and get your time back with Zoom. Learn more at zoom.com. Or if you don't make these decisions at your workplace, tell the tech whiz or the CIO or the CTO or the CEO, or whoever is gonna get you mineouts and Zoom phone. You do not have social media outside of YouTube, right? How many hours do you estimate that not having social media gives you back for deep work, deep life, whatever? Massive, massive. Because like you have to keep in mind, the minutes looking at social media, for example, that's not the right metric. The right metric is minutes spent in a state

34:41of redirected or muddled, cognitive state because you've recently looked at social media rates. It's the context window buffer. Yeah, the context window buffer, right? So like, I think there's a lot of people, who might actually have almost every one of their working hours reduced. Yeah. Because of sort of looking at my phone on, I said my regular basis throughout the day. And that's what I care about because I make a living not just in general working on projects, but typically incredibly competitive, cognitively demanding projects, right? Books, elite publication articles, academic theorems that I'm trying to prove or whatever. And you have to be at the absolute highest level of your thinking ability, just to play the game. And so reduced cognitive capacity to me is terrified. But you don't have an estimate and numbers at all. Like because I think the mathematical formula is probably like number of times you check, times number of things you check, plus the time it takes across checking those things to get your mind back to you. Yeah, there was an analysis I saw once. It wasn't on social media,

35:41but it was of email use by a company called RescueTime. But they did an analysis I thought was really smart. They bucketed the day into buckets. And I forgot what the duration was, like 10 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever. And then they marked each bucket if there was any email check in that bucket. So the idea was like, if you look to your inbox within the sort of 10 minute window, that whole 10 minute window is like basically shot, right? Or reduced cognitive capacity. So then there are like how much time in someone's average day do they have of non-contaminated buckets? So time in which they aren't really approximate to having done an email check. And it was like 45 minutes. Then there's a secondary cost here for things like social media, which really worries me, which is the cognitive fitness cost. So it was moved beyond the direct distractions. Another way to think about social media is like cognitive junk food, ultra-processed food of the brain or something like this. So if you're constantly consuming that and let's say like it's after work, it's like I'm not working. I'm just, I'm consuming it at home

36:42while I'm watching TV instead of reading a book, it weakens your mind. So like your ability, just like you get cognitive obesity in some sense, your ability to maintain your focus on things that aren't like a constant sequence of highly salient distractions, right? That capability to minishes. And then when you're like, I want to read a book, I want to think hard about a business strategy. Your brain has become out of shape. I was like, I can't tolerate that, right? So that you also have this long-term cognitive fitness cost. You could also think about it as, even if you're a sigewist during the work day. I don't look at social media in the work day, but then you veg out all evening. It's always like a background that you're always looking at. It's like saying, I'm really healthy during the day, but I eat six sleeves of Oreos every night. It's going to catch up to you, right? It's not helping. We need cognitive ozempic. That's what's going to happen as a society. I mean, actually it exists. It's called Adderall, don't do it. Adderall, this is not the thing, but yes. I mean, is there any good data out there for what all this is doing to our brain health? And we're not doctors, neither myself, nor yourself,

37:44though you could put one on a flight, I guess, and do you have a PhD? But is there anyone doing studies around, there's this rise of everyone I feel like is diagnosed with ADHD? There's memory issues. Is there any proof that all this social media is facilitating some of these things? Yeah, I mean, I think there's endless studies that will look at more narrowly, particular technology use as impact on the brain. So you can measure all sorts of proximate negative cognitive impacts. It could be, okay, looking at short form video, we can measure these various things, like, oh, though, if you look at short form video this much, then your ability to x, y, and z to focus to this to that all goes down measurably, right? Or we'll do paid controlled experiments where we'll pay you to not use social media or randomly assigning people to use or not use groups so that it's on bias and look at what are the actual effects that has over this sort of window of time. We have endless studies that show, yeah, there's these direct negative cognitive correlations to a lot of these behaviors, that it's a reasonable extrapolation, and be like, oh, okay, so then if I do all these things

38:44all the time, it can't possibly be good for me. But I think the biggest studies are subjective, right? Sometimes it's just the obvious things that everyone realizes when you hear hoofbeats as horses nod zebras and it's things such as people saying, I can't read as much as I used to be able to. I can't keep my focus on a television show. I used to love going to the movies and now I find it intolerable to try to keep my attention focused on it. I'm having a harder time with more sophisticated arguments. I sort of like fall out of it. We ignore that sometimes because we're such a data-driven culture, but to me, that's the first place to start, right? If people are subjectively saying, my cognitive life is impoverished and I can just directly see it's connected to this, we don't necessarily need a good aerobar on a line plot before we say, I think that's a problem. You recently had a podcast episode a few weeks ago that was around this idea of cognitive KPIs, like cognitive exercise you could do. So where are three things people can do if they feel that could help them get their neurological

39:46gardening, their mind up to fitness? Oh, yeah. I mean, you can completely train your mind. I talked about timed reading challenges. You sort of pick up an article that's somewhat sophisticated and see how long can I read it? Maybe I'll do it 10 or 15 minutes at first without feeling like unbearable distraction and then try to increase that over time. Productive meditation is another thing I've talked about where you go for a walk and try to make progress on a problem just in your mind. And you keep bringing your attention back to it when it wanders. And you try to increase the duration of time. You can do that. You try to set challenges for writing. Is writing is calisthenics for the brain? Is the pull-ups of the brain is incredibly difficult and incredibly enriching to your ability to produce original thought, to put your knowledge into action. So saying forget, Jin AI, I'm writing this email. I'm writing this report. Yeah, it's hard. I want it to be hard. Just like pull-ups are hard, but that's what makes me stronger. But cognitive fitness is my big thing, right? I mean, I think this will be the new revolution of this decade that's coming up right now is going to be, oh, I see just like we learned about physical health. Mattered in the mid 20th century,

40:47as we head towards the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, we're like, oh, cognitive health matters as well. Totally. We have to take it seriously. I want to be cognitively jacked without cognitive isemic. And I think that one of the interesting hacks about wellness culture has been the corporatization of it where all of a sudden, somebody did some reports or made some charts that made CEOs realize that if I have a more healthy fit workforce, that's going to bring down my health insurance cost or whatever it was that matter to their bottom line. And all of a sudden, like offices were giving you gym memberships, et cetera. And so I hope that your work actually translates into a cognitive fitness imperative for executives to help workers because so much of type or active hive mind, it would be great if like our employers were to help people get that back. I'm with you on that. And I think it's coming. Sometimes I'll work like three in the morning. And I, it's so funny because I don't have an office job, but something that you wrote resonated with me. I think it was in your book, Deep Work.

41:49People's work is squeezed, and you're really doing the hard work. You're spending your whole day in the hyperactive hive mind during work hours. And then it's in your early morning and your late evening that you can really do work. Yeah. Well, we know that from Microsoft data, right? Because Microsoft collects this data annually from their Microsoft 365 productivity apps, which millions of people use, and they put out this work index report every year. And one of the things in the most recent reports, like they're first of all the average workers now checking a communication tool or a meeting tool once every two minutes on average, right? So it's constant, but they said there are some times in which we see people like logged into the productivity, they call it apps like working in the word without also looking at teams or outlook or other types of meetings after. And like when is those times? They're like it's the weekends, early morning, late night. And so like what they've observed in the data is when do we actually see people sitting down and just working without distraction? It's outside of work hours. But then that way, like a four day work week or like Eric Yuan from Zoom has famously said,

42:51he's looking forward to a three day work week. Those would be good because it would give us more quote unquote weekends to do deep work. Yeah, well, this is why I think we should just codify this into the actual day, right? Like I wrote this Atlantic piece a couple years ago where I said, look, we should consider hybrid attention models where it's hybrid work. Two days a week you're at home, three days you're at the office, but we say the two days at home, no meetings, no email. And like those are the days where you just know all day long, you just locked in trying to make progress. And then the other days, you're like, yeah, I'm coordinating with people, I'm talking to people, I'm having meetings, like you can integrate this into the work day itself. This is what I would measure is like, look, if you can't get three or four hours of uninterrupted time during the day, that's an indictment about how we're running our company. We have to fix that. As opposed to, let's just have people do work late at night or on the weekends. And then you get these weird inequities because of that because not everyone can do that. Maybe people have families or taking care of someone. So then you begin to sort of like reverse selection where it's like, well, the people who are able to do that

43:52are the only ones you can really get enough work done to actually move up. I spoke at a law firm once about deep work and it was a major law firm here in DC. It's a reading group internally of just women lawyers. And they were talking about these accidental inequities, but they said, for example, there's a group of men that just they don't care about being jerks, right? So they're like more likely to be like, no, forget you, I'm working on something, I'm just not going to answer. And they said, because of that, they do more deep work. If they can do more deep work, they move ahead. And then we end up with a partner core that is like accidentally biased towards people that are actually sort of actively anti-social. And then that's a problem for the firm because you actually have the mid-thin throat so the people that had moved up and that's not who you want representing the firms. Okay, I want to end with a few lightning rounds. We talked a lot about meetings, like reverse meetings where people come in and do office hours with you. We talked about meeting quotas, so like having quotas in your life, we didn't talk about meeting tariffs, but I do think it would be good to like ask your annoying colleague who keeps asking for a meeting to put money in a jar like a curse jar when you're young.

44:54We talked a little bit about emails. I wonder if this is insane or genius. Marking 4,000 unread emails, read, and then moving on with your life, like declaring email bankruptcy. No, that's completely reasonable. Reasonable? Well, what else are you gonna do? Are you gonna go through and cognitively contact shift 4,000 times? That's not reasonable. If something's critical, so we'll get back to you again. Yeah, I'm completely on board with that. Okay, I work late at night. Is it fine for me to send emails at one in the morning to my team or should I be scheduling those? I think it's fine as long as you're clear, like, hey, I'm just seeing this, you know, no obligation of immediate response. I think it's implied if it's one in the morning. Yeah, you're not expecting immediate response. What about team email? Like, why shouldn't it just be like, team at smarkeldomquestions.com and then whoever gets it first can handle it, like a lifeboat, like last and first out, kind of factory approach to work. Well, it's arbitrary that we ended up with an email convention where it's a person's name at the company.com, just just followed

45:55because early emails were on time shared computer systems where it was you were actually leaving text files and other people's user accounts and people's users accounts were tied to their name. But I actually think there's a problem with email addresses being associated with a name because you imagine another person on the other side getting the message. And when you imagine a specific other person getting that message, your expectations really increase. Like, why is this person has my message? Why are they ignoring me? This is a slight, this is an issue, right? So one of the big solutions is, no, no, no, no, we should have more email addresses not associated with people, you know, clients at company.com. And that's where clients send email messages, you know, a team name at company.com, people's expectations for like responses, et cetera, completely moderates when they no longer imagined that they're communicating to a specific other human on the other side. Okay, I love that. I think then people will just start texting. I mean, I actually have a theory of email, which is the email is no longer email. Email has become snail mail. It is like a junk mail inbox with some useful information

46:57in it, like your tax records, whatever is coming through. Text is now email. If you are sending me a voice note, you were like my boyfriend or my boss, and I don't have a boss, calling has become the new text. But I think actually we've just shifted over to like more and more like immediate urgent workflows. Is that fair? It's a, it's a, it's a combination of the two things we've talked about. We've got the hyperactive, high-min plus no workload management, right? So I have many things that all require coordination. Therefore, the faster I can make progress on whatever specific thing is in front of me, the more I'll feel like I can juggle these sort of things. So I want the fastest possible medium that has the fastest possible response times expectations. Okay, the last thing we're going to do is a paddle round. If you had the time to context switch, we would do this together, but I'm going to try to do this myself. So is like a kind of, should it be a meeting? Gonna be green, or should it be an email? It's going to be red. Okay. There's going to be difficult, but I'm also not a big fan of single-purpose meetings.

47:59I think it's a giant time waste, but okay. I know. You don't like single-purpose meetings. Yeah. Do you like reverse office hours? And do you like? Reverse office hours or like, doctrinated means for teams? Yeah. Like we're going to get together as a team and we're going to, we have a whole list of things that people have built up over the last few days of things we need to deal with. And we're going to go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like go through those all together, secretness one by one. So like, sinks, like a kind of like daily standup, right? Yeah. This shouldn't be a meeting or an email. Your boss wants to give you positive feedback on a document. Email. Should be an email. Yeah. It's something that requires no response or a single message or response. Email. Okay. Great. Feedback on your personality. Oh, in person. In person. It's very difficult to convey new lots of emotions or intention through linguistic text. We're not very good at that anymore. So in person, voice communication has way more nuance or at the very least on the phone. You're on deadline and one decision needs to be made

49:01like a big decision, like the budget for a big event. In person, synchronous. Okay. Phone call or meeting or office stop I, yeah. Okay. So that's going to be a meeting. What if it's like two small decisions? Do they, does the other person have the ability to just give you the answer? Yeah. It's like the, no it's used to sound when you're a kid. Like, do you like me? Yes, no, maybe. Yeah. If it could be answered in one, the message that can be responded to in a single message, email is fantastic for that. Okay. What about scheduling? Miss my least favorite kind of email. You and I had this exchange when we met scheduling something over email system. So not a meeting or an email? Probably not. I think scheduling can be really wasteful. I mean, I know we're supposed to be in a world in which, you know, AIs about to kill humanity and take all the jobs. Will there be a period before it? If it gets that powerful, can't there be a period that solves the schedule issue? Yeah. Can we just get to that period first for a while? They have that like Zoom as a scheduler or all these things, right? I'm still waiting for my AI chief of staff can communicate with your AI chief of staff

50:03and find a meeting time that worked and actually reflects our relevant constraints. I totally want that. In 2022, Casey Newton and Cara Sousher and I did something at Manning's and SF and I said, like, I know everyone in my generation is going to be so anti-AI, but I'm going to be pro AI because I am like rooting for the mortal combat between my name, AI and like United AI. No offense to United who's never going to be a sponsor on podcasts, but. Yeah, but they're going to build a really good AI. That's a problem. It's going to be your AI. Never going to KO my, I know it's going to KO my AI. Okay. If you want to hire somebody, meeting or email. Meeting. Meeting. Okay. If you want to fire somebody. Meeting. Meeting. This podcast, meeting or email. Like what we're our conversation now? Yeah. Meeting. Good. Okay. Great. I think it's a good idea to have people like people having protocols for how they take emails when they do meetings, quotas, et cetera. I went to a guy who was like a CEO founder and he had an SOPs for his office environment where he would send people like this in memo.

51:03And he gave it to me of like how he communicated. I remember it was like, I never send positive emails. So like if you hear, if you don't hear from me, it's good. But if you hear from me, it's like a problem. Do you think we should have these kinds of documents in the workplace and in our personal lives? Well, I think it's good to have internal and external protocols. I mean partially protocols are how you replace a hyperactive hive mind. You're like, oh, we agree on this is the protocol we use for this type of work and this type of work. And that's how you eventually move away from a lot of emails. Internal protocols are fine. Don't tell people about them. That seems to be the key. Like you can have these internal rules. You don't have to explain them. Yeah. I thought it was kind of a way to much. I told him it was a bit strange that he had sent it to me. And then I never heard from him. So our relationship is going great because he said, if you don't hear from me, it's going great. Well, he sounds like every engineer I know from computer science grad school. Kellingpert, this has been fascinating. I want to bring you back at some point to talk about all things. You have a new book coming out called Deep Life, which I imagine is going to be around this cognitive. Is it right? Is it going to have a piece of it? It's interesting.

52:03It's called The Deep Life, going to march. No, it's actually going to, it's about the mechanics of how you make intentional changes to your life. It's opposed to the content of what should be in your life. I don't know. I can't tell you that. I don't actually go about making control of their life and making this something meaningful to them, whatever that means to them. I like that. So it's sort of like a computer scientist tackling the issue of building an interesting life. Okay, I love it. Well, I mean, you have a very productive life. I don't know, you've written eight books. You have amazing newsletter. You have a podcast. Your podcast is called Deep Questions. The most famous book, I think, is called Deep Work. The next one is called Deep Life, Out in March. And for everything else, there's Shalala Life, which is yet to be published, but I'm sure it would also be a busseller these days and times. In every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions, Kyle asking my guests who are so smart about their topic area, everything, a dumb question that they have that they haven't asked their phone or out loud yet. Something they don't know the answer to. Oh my God, there's so many things.

53:03There's so many things I don't know the answer to. Okay, the last dumb thing I just did a search on is, and I will tell you, it took me a long time to figure this out, even though I'm an MIT train computer scientist. I was trying to figure out how to take a window on an iPad and resize it. That was it. I needed to take like the browser window on my iPad and kind of shrink it a little bit so that I could bring it up on my screen. It didn't matter. It took me a long time to figure out. I tried asking chat CPT. It did not have the right answer. I googled and found the Apple dev community. That's not a brilliant question for a computer scientist to be asking, but it was actually, you know, I finally figured it out. In the moments like those, I'm always grateful for the person who made the 18-minute YouTube video. And then the fact that search can tell you it's that minute four. You don't need to watch the whole 17 minutes to learn how to resize the iPad window. I love that question. Library of Alexandria of our time. Exactly. I love that. The Library of Alexandria of our time is YouTube videos.

54:04That's so scary. When I asked Jeffrey Hinton this question, he said, it's how the brain works. So that's the question that he just like that keeps him up. And he wonders if like, yeah, in his lifetime we'll know much more than we know now. Oh, I know. And he's built some interesting, you know, you talk to him. But like, he thinks large language models with back propagation is like, it's not how the brain works. And he has all these other cool systems. The problem is, there's often a difference between like what system better matches the brain and like what system actually gets results. Yeah. And what systems people will pay for? There's that too. All right. They're all different things. Thank you so much, Calonia Port. I will see you soon. Thank you very much for coming on. It's my golden questions. My pleasure. Hi. I wasn't just gassing up Calonia Port. I really, really like the way he is thinking about these challenges structurally and in terms of our own individual agency when it comes to work and how we do it. I've interviewed a lot of CEOs, a lot of founders. As noted, I've also dated some. I think the best leaders of our time are going to be people who understand that the value of the workplace

55:08is getting a little bit lost in this hyperactive hive mind. It's not that the communication isn't valuable. In fact, the communication is really valuable. But how do you capture it? How do you consolidate it? How do you do it in times that don't, you know, distress the ultimate like deep work output potential? And the truth is like when the world is fraughty, when the stock market's booming, when companies are doing well, these questions seem like the world is going to be a little bit of all these questions seem like, oh, nice to have. But at the end of the day, it is a really bottom line decision. And it's also like a health decision. I'm 100% serious about this idea of cognitive health. Anyways, that's it for episode two of the What Even As Work series brought to you by Zoom. We're going to be back with two more What Even As Work episodes in October. I need some time to think about it. This episode was produced with Chino Zaki, Melissa Lee Gibson, Suncheon Niggum. It was shot in the amazing Wonder Studios in Manhattan with Desta Wunderad. It was engineered by Jamie Van Corp, mixed by Fernando Arruda. I'm your host, name Araza. And I'll see you next time for an all new, smart girl, Tom Questions.