Cal Newport on Why You're Distracted and Unproductive at Work

[Music] welcome to the carrie new hoff leadership podcast on youtube my name is carrie newhof and my goal is to help you lead like never before so what i do every week is i sit down with world class leaders and church leaders business leaders and i talked to them about what made them who they are and try to have the conversation with them that you would have if you got to sit down for lunch with them or have dinner with them or really got to spend some time with them so we go into the back story and we explore what made them who they are and some of the principles they've learned along the way so if you enjoy this episode i would love for you to like it to subscribe and also to share it with your friends and in the meantime here's today's episode cal so excited to have you on welcome to the podcast well thanks for having me on i'm excited as well so uh i love your work it's had a really positive impact on me um partly coming out of a burnout episode i had 15 years ago and i had to rediscover how to work and find a sustainable pace where i'd love to start is something i found really interesting in deep work which is the whole distinction between shallow work and deep work can you can you kind of explain that because that it just it resonated so deeply for me when i first heard you yeah i mean it it's a simple concept but sometimes just putting vocabulary the simple concepts makes all the difference right so that distinction which was at the core of that book is we can think about our efforts when we're doing knowledge work into two different categories there's deep work which is where you are giving something your full unbroken attention so it's a cognitively demanding task that you're giving your full attention and trying to do as well as you can and then there's everything else which i call shallow work and i don't mean shallow to be pejorative it's just tasks that do not require your full unbroken skilled attention to like answering emails or preparing slides for a talk or something like this and the main argument is that deep work is what really moves the needle whereas shallow work is important and it's what keeps the lights off but deep work is what really produces the new value the stuff that drives most organizations or most teams or most personal growth so you want to make sure that both are getting attention and we're at a time now where accidentally we are really condensing or compressing the time available for deep work and i think that's to our detriment yeah can you give us some examples of uh like you have a lot of content creators here so you have preachers a lot of entrepreneurs ceos management people knowledge workers which is really your your field as well as an academic um but they're they're working in a white collar setting they're working in a knowledge worker setting so what would be an example you gave a couple of shallow work but like what would some deep work be because i agree we we talk on our team all the time in my communication company about you know working on it versus working in it like okay you're actually creating stuff of value rather than just replying but just so people have those categories clear in their head sure well i mean one of the groups i hear from a lot is preachers and what preachers tell me for example is sermon writing is deep work right and of course in the religious context we're used to this notion of the contemplative life and only in that period of silence and contemplation can you hope to have any sort of uh interaction with the divine so the preachers will say okay sermon writing is canonical deep and i'm not giving it the time it needs because i have emails from parishioners i have budget spreadsheets i have all of the logistical overhead of having to build it at a physical plant at a budget and payroll or something like this so this was a classic example of that shallow work is important but you need to answer emails you need to be commutative to to your parishioners but at the same time your surveys require unbroken concentration and it's two different types of activities so that was like that was a classic example that came up a lot actually yeah yeah and having uh preached for uh 25 30 years i can tell you that's a lot of deep work um what would for an average office worker let's say you're a receptionist i mean does a receptionist have deep work an admin assistant person what about a middle manager what would be an example of some deep work for someone in that situation well so i get into this that exact question with those exact examples actually uh in in the new book yeah so i talk about i say okay let's be more nuanced about this and let's talk about uh three different categories of workers and i believe i use the term uh makers so people who are primarily tasked with creating valuable output with their brain so like a computer programmer producing computer code or a writer producing books or a preacher producing sermons uh managers so you're primarily managing teams that among other things people in your team produce value and then just to be needlessly alliterative i called uh support staff minders so you're you're mainly supporting uh you're supporting other people with administrative or her support and i said okay what is the the ideal way to work in each of these situations that is what's the ideal way to take advantage of the way the human brain actually functions in each of these positions and the the thread that connected them all was i would call single focus sequentiality doing one thing at a time giving it the attention it deserves until you're done with it and ready to move on to the next thing that's actually the through line that's going to best take advantage of how the brain works it gets the best results so the the converse to this is if you're doing many things at the same time then while you're working let's say as a as administrative assistant like well um i'm trying to solve this problem but i'm also having to check email and i'm on slack and i'm continually moving back and forth like kind of working on this kind of working on that uh you know for a manager you're you're you're overwhelmed with communication and trying to i've kind of talked to this person this email going back to my inbox or as a maker you're trying to write the server to write the computer code but you keep interrupting yourself in all of those cases from a brain perspective the ideal way to execute is actually no i'm just doing this one thing until i'm done then i can clear that context and say what's next i think i think that is a a general umbrella that includes really long periods of deep work if you're someone who's producing something very cognitively demanding it includes that but also includes these other types of activities as well has anyone who's read digital minimalism which was a great book came out a couple years ago would know um you know you talk about the importance of undistracted work so i want to i want to double click on that for a moment but i heard you say on your podcast which i would highly recommend on i discovered it in researching this and i'm a few episodes in and i'm like man this is so practical like if people are just looking for hacks it's so not hacks because this your work is not about hacks but you know what i mean like practical tips how do you make this work on a tuesday but you said a lot of people use i think it's called the pomodoro technique but basically your minimum allotment of time for undistracted work is is it 30 minutes is that what you're saying like sometimes we have trouble staying focused for five minutes and i think in your new book you say like people are checking email like 120 126 emails a day and they're checking every few minutes and and that kind of thing so what is like a minimum block of like undistracted time that you think is is helpful yeah it's a good question so if we're talking about administrative task if you're blocking off your day which is what i recommend doing i i i talk about this a lot on my podcast this notion of time blocking i think you should actually give every minute of your day a job as opposed to just having a list and an inbox and a meeting schedule and just sort of trying to get through things so if you're going to block off your time i think 30 minutes is the smallest block that is useful because once you get below 30 minutes you're getting too precise it's going to be too hard to try to hit that you don't quite know how long things are going to take so for administrative tasks the very minimum i would put aside 30 minutes at a time so if you're going to check your email have at least 30 minutes for it for a cognitively demanding task i would say at least an hour and the reason why i say at least an hour is that there is a context switching cost so when i switch from doing this over to this demanding task there's going to be a 10 to 15 minute period while my brain is changing what is amplified what it's suppressing and the attention networks are readjusted for this new thing i'm working on until that's done i'm not at full capacity and so if you're only working for 30 minutes on a cogclearly demanding task well only maybe 15 minutes of that are you at full capacity so i tend to say if it's going to be really hard on your brain you need at least an hour so that within that hour you can get at least 45 minutes of rock and rolling at full speed otherwise it's not worth all the overhead of switching your attention yeah i remember reading an article uh years ago in the new york times you can still find it and you you hinted this in some of your books as well but like there is a cost to context switching or to task switching and i remember the new york times said any distractions so i checked my phone right i'm in the middle of of writing an article or writing a talk that i want to deliver at a conference i check my phone i look at the notification it says it's about like there's i think the article said there's a 25 minute reset before your brain is sort of back where it was before what's your take on that what are your thoughts on that kel yeah well i mean hey and it's possible that i wrote that article you may have that may have been you i have i have written about this for the times before to me the context switching cost is the whole ball game it's the biggest misunderstood thing about knowledge work and it's the foundation on a lot of my advice and one of the biggest issues i think we face in office work now the issue is we we mistake that with multitasking so there was this period in the 90s where people were very proud about literally doing multiple things at the same time so i'm on the phone while i'm writing uh i'm answering emails while i'm at a bd and we figured out around the early 2000s the research was pretty clear this doesn't work you can't actually write while you're listening your brain has to try to switch between the two and it doesn't work very well so as we proceeded through the 2000s we all got very proud and said look we don't multitask anymore we do one thing at a time we don't have notifications on we don't keep our email inbox open next to microsoft word while we're writing so we think we had solved the problem but what we weren't counting on was the context switching cost of doing quick checks so you say i'm single tasking because i do not have my email inbox open oh well i'm gonna quickly check it you know just every six minutes or so but i'm not keeping it open i'm only checking it for a minute just because i'm looking for an important email then i go back to what i'm doing you think you're still single tasking but what you don't realize is that 30 second glance at your inbox has just wrecked your ability to think for the next 15 20 maybe 25 minutes because you have exposed your mind to this other these other obligations these open loops messages that you know you need to answer but you can't answer right away and that's lingering there and you have just jumbled all of these attention circuits it's not the the time that you spend on the distraction that matters it's the context shift the cost of the switch and the switch back and so if you look at the statistics that say yeah the average knowledge worker is checking an inbox once every six minutes and we know it takes 10 50 20 minutes to get your attention back that means the average knowledge worker is basically in a persistent state of reduced cognitive capacity we are by accident making ourselves non-trivially dumber and i think this is a a huge scandalous reality about how we work today and we're only now just starting to figure it out yeah and what's interesting uh for anyone who may not be familiar with your work and i would encourage them to definitely dive in as i have over the last few years cal is this is not just like you're making the argument just to make this absolutely clear it's not like well cal that's great but like i don't work that way like i have all these powers and all that you're like no neurologically like brain chemistry research-wise you've got stuff spinning in the background now because you just looked at your phone or you just tried to answer that email or whatever is is this like at the neurological physiological level we're not created to do this we absolutely aren't i mean you can you can study this at the neuroscience level you can also study this at the level of psychology uh the research is unequivocal about this we are not good at quickly switching our attention it takes time and if you're going back and forth it is not a good state to put yourself in yeah you make the argument i think in your new book and and it's a it's a good book it's a big book actually that that requires i'm it's going to be a reread for me uh but it was it was that whole idea of like your your system like if you look at most animals you know if they hear something in the forest they kind of look around and it's a survival thing but you have this metaphor of what was it you know a caveman at a computer or something like that or do you want to explore that a little bit because i thought that was really interesting well i mean i think more generally a lot of the uh ills we have with the way we work today is from these mismatches between our our fundamental nature right and the way that we have somewhat arbitrarily designed how our work actually happens uh so i don't know if this is the the exact analogy you're referencing but there is a a caveman analogy that that's quite relevant which is if you go back to just say early human times and say how would you naturally coordinate right if there's three of you and you're on the savannah and you're you're hunting an antelope or something like that the way we naturally coordinate with small groups focusing on one thing uh is ad hoc and on-demand it's like you go over there i'll come over here watch out for this we just sort of let this thing unfold naturally and the argument i make in the in the new book the one that just came out is that the way we work today with the advent of low friction tools communication tools like emails we've basically taken the way that three of us would have coordinated working on a single task like hunting an antelope and we've scaled that up to whole organizations and dozens and dozens of different objectives so our instincts tell us it's very natural just ad hoc on the man figure things out on the fly i'll shoot you an email you should be at ebal maybe we're on slack we go even faster let's just figure everything out on the fly and again that works great when it's three people working on one thing but when you have 30 people and 30 initiatives it doesn't scale and so we get completely overwhelmed by trying to maintain all of these different conflicting conversations it's too much communication we're constantly contact shifting and our effectiveness drops and we get completely miserable but it's not surprising that we got there because it was just our natural instinct and this new technology allowed us to scale it up the levels that our brain never know never would have assumed was possible back when these networks were being or being evolved back to deep work before we leave it because that could be a whole episode in and of itself but i think you make the argument in deep work that the average person has a capacity of about four hours a day max for like really concentrated effort so if you're writing that talk creating a business plan writing a sermon outlining a series reorganizing the company that cognitively demanding work it's about four hours a day and i would love for you to talk about just why that is a superpower i think you actually call it a superpower and that that is that is so scarce in in the world today what's the benefit uh for leaders who are tempted to say cal you don't understand my world i got you know a thousand people i'm trying to serve i got all these clients i got all this big congregation they're always wanting me i got a big staff like what because i've seen the benefit in my own life but i want to hear it in in your words what would you say the benefit or the superpower of deep work is well there's two big things you get from a broken concentration one you can learn things faster so if you need to learn something that's new or complicated doing it with unbroken concentration is immensely more productive than trying to learn something with more distracted concentration there's a lot of reasons why that's true but we know that in many contexts today the ability to learn new things new systems new ideas new philosophies is crucial for success two you produce higher quality with less total time invested when you're very concentrated versus scattered so if you have to whatever produce a book chapter or write a sermon you can take half as much time to do it if the time you spend on it is actually very concentrated so i mean this is one of these paradoxes is that you assume well if i'm also checking email while i'm working on this hard thing i'm more productive because i'm making progress on these issues in my inbox at the same time that i'm working on this but what you don't factor in is this could take you twice as long three times as long to get that same thing done and even did the quality might be less than if you gave it a broken concentration so those two factors mean you gotta you gotta be pretty careful about preserving unbroken concentration of your workday because it could make a big difference so this could be a total rabbit trail and if it is we'll leave it but it's got me thinking like you make the argument that deep work is so scarce it's there therefore it's so valuable the people who can really bring value to an organization create a coherent thought these days do you think there is a correlation between the rise of shallow work and what we might call the rise of shallow thinking um i've also followed tristan harris's work and so on you know when it comes to social media and the polarized trivialized debate that we have in public do you think shallow thinking and shallow work go together it's an interesting question uh because there's there's sort of two related forces there uh but it's unclear how related right and i've i've i've dealt with both so like in my 2016 book deep work and in my new book world without email i'm looking at the world of work and the impact of technology but in between those two books uh 2019 as you mentioned i published digital minimalism which looks at technologies in our personal life so things like social media things like our phone and they're similar in the sense that they both really fragment our attention and and bring us away from things that are uh more valuable but they're different in the sense that the motive forces behind them are quite varied so if you look at what's happening in the public sphere with our conversation with polarization it's be driven by things like social media you have these companies they're actually intentionally trying to get you to use these things as much as possible to spend as much time as possible on these platforms to make them as engaging as possible in a completely value-agnostic algorithmic-driven way whereas in the world of work the force that's driving us the more distraction uh the force is driving us to to more fragmented attention is tools like email and slack which there's not someone behind these tools who's saying we want people to use email more or we're going to make money if we use email more so actually the dynamics that got us into this world of constant communication email use and work are much more interesting and emergent i basically argue that it was accidental that we ended up in this place where we email all the time whereas in the world of our personal interaction with technology like what we see today is actually the somewhat inevitable result of a intentional business plan right how do we get people looking at this thing as much as possible so we can get as much data and sell them as much ads and it was you know skynet invented the terminator and things got out of control so anyways i'm glad you bring it up because these two magisteria the world of work and the world of technology outside of work in some ways seem very similar but in some ways when you look underneath the covers there's really different in interesting ways different sort of forces going on well and they converge for a lot of leaders on their phones so you know i've been at this a long time 25 years in leadership and like to go back to the 90s which which you know you're younger than i am but to go back to the 90s here was the big debate in pastoral ministry home phone versus work phone like it was land lines it was pre-cell phone you had to be mega wealthy to have a cell phone in the 90s that and it was like oh please call me on my work phone right and of course all those categories are out the window and the challenge with most leaders is true in sales it's true in ministry it's true it's like on this phone and i write about it in my next book like i've got at least 11 inboxes and it follows me all the time and so i want you to speak to the leader who's trying to set up boundaries and and they're like you know my congregants they're trying to reach me 24 7. i look at facebook there's five new messages then i go to instagram there's messages there and they're like hey can you come and you know deal with this and then i open my inbox like we have this fused world right now and sales people have the same thing right and there are some corporate cultures where it's like my boss emails 24 7 and all weekend long any good um guidance and i know that's a that could be a deep dive of its own for leaders who are living in that world where they're like cal i can't catch a break from like morning till night people are trying to reach me and get my attention and get me to act and i it's it's causing me to burn out well this is the big problem of the time i mean to put some chronology to my thinking on this so it's 2016 is when my book deep work came out and that book was about hey concentration is more important than we realize we've kind of accidentally built these work cultures where we're distracted all the time i don't think we realize how negative that is there's a big competitive advantage if you're one of the few to prioritize focus but part of the feedback to that book was cal this culture of constant communication i always have to be communicating always have to be servicing messages i always have to be servicing slack et cetera it's incredibly deeply entrenched and seemingly impossible to escape and that's what led to the the new book a world without email where i asked a question of why like if it's so damaging why do we work this way and and what can we do about it and my my big point in the new book which gets to your question is that you have to look beneath like habits and tips and etiquette and norms because what really matters is what is the underlying workflow that your organization uses to actually organize work to identify tasks to assign tasks to review tasks and if you don't have an answer to that question then you probably have just implicitly adopted a workflow based on ad hoc unstructured messaging totally i call that the hyperactive hive mind i want to give it a name just like i gave deep working name in that book deep work and the new book i call the new workflow uh the hyperactive hive mind and the big observation is the hyperactive hive mind is the primary way by which your organize your organization actually coordinates you cannot escape tons of messaging you cannot escape the need if you try to back away from messaging it's a problem no one individual can leave this if you try to just throw etiquette at it if you try to say look let's do email free fridays let's try to do no expectation or responses after five these are going to fail because constant communication is the fundamental way that your organization actually grows so my big argument is to solve this problem you have to go deeper and say let's replace the hyperactive hive mind with a different approach to doing our work that doesn't generate so many messages like you gotta you gotta kill the root to get rid of the weed i think a lot of what we've been doing with a lot of inbox hacks and let's have better subject lines let's have better educators we're just kind of cutting out the leaves of this invasive weed and saying why does this thing uh why is this thing not go away we got to actually get down and poison the roots and to me that is the fundamental question of how do we how does information come into our organization how do we organize it how do we assign tasks how do we review tasks uh how does that all happen and can we be doing it better can you define the hyperactive hive mind i thought that was a really fascinating metaphor well so that's my name for the the workflow that says the primary way that work unfolds your organization is through ad hoc unscheduled unstructured messaging so like the three cavemen that were in the savannah hunting the antelope you sort of just figure things out on the fly with messaging whether it's for email or slack or whatever tool you use i'm somewhat agnostic but that is the fundamental way that most organizations organize themselves right now so when i named my book a world without email what i actually meant is a world without the hyperactive hiveline workflow is the primary way of organizing things the whole idea i call it whack-a-mole sometimes where every you know you clear out your inbox and then slack's blowing up and then you get five text messages so it's that kind of like flitting from activity to activity to inbound to inbound that has become work for most people and your argument is because that is the typical workday for most knowledge workers any productive work or deep work tends to get moved into the early morning hours evenings or weekends yeah i mean it's an incredibly inefficient deployment of this what i call attitude capital i mean you have all this latent value in the the brains and attention reserves of the individuals in your organization and you're getting a very low return on this capital if you're doing this constant back and forth communication and people are trying to squeeze uh more productive value production to the morning to the afternoon but the key thing is when you understand it's the underlying workflow that's the problem then you realize that the common reaction people are very frustrated with this way of working but this common reaction is hey if i stopped using email i wouldn't be able to get any work done that's true so long as the underlined workflow that dick takes your work demands that email is the primary way to organize it and so to get past that reaction of just the way i work today requires an email all the time is that we actually have to ask well how do we actually work and there's where i think the huge opportunity is not just at opportunity i mean i think it's the argument i make in the book i think it is inevitable if we look at the history of technology and commerce intersecting at various points throughout uh our economic history that is inevitable that this early like highly improvisational way that we work as digital knowledge workers today it's inevitable that we're going to move past it 10 years from now we're not going to have an inbox with a thousand messages that so it's just our name at company.com and we're doing emails all day we're going to look at that uh as rudimentary as henry ford thought that the way that you know bins was making the original automails automobiles was rudimentary that we are going to get more sophisticated because there's a lot of value being left on the table because we're not making very good advantage of all these attention capital resources we have so i think it's inevitable this is just the story that repeats again and again in the history of technology business that a new technology comes in we deploy it in a sort of flexible convenient improvisational way for a few decades and then we get more sophisticated and so it is inevitable that we're not going to keep working this way it would be very ahistorical and arrogant to think this very first thing we tried in the first 20 years of having computer networks in the office is the best way to work of course it'll change so now the question is are you going to be out ahead of that and reap those benefits or are you going to be trailing behind in some sense maybe pay a punishment for that yeah i'd love to start getting into the reconstruction because you have a pretty long nuanced argument in your book about different principles and processes but um you also quote neil postman a couple times so finally finally finally i read i've been meaning to since college amusing ourselves to death and last summer i read it great book very philosophical and you know dated in the 1980s but still very applicable today in his principles and you quote postman as saying that um you know this isn't just addictive technology is not just addictive email is not just addictive it's ecological what do what do you mean by that what's the distinction there yeah i mean the point he was making is there are certain technologies that when you introduce them to a culture it changes the culture right and we often don't get this we we think about like oh we had the culture we had before plus the new technology but he said that's often not the way it works it's like look at the pretty press he's like if you go back to pre-gutenberg medieval europe and then you go forward to the after the advent of the pretty press he says you don't have medieval europe plus there's printing presses you have a whole different culture and in some sense that's what i'm arguing happened with email like in the year 2000 we did not just have oh it's the 1990s office plus people also had email we had a completely different notion of what it meant to work i mean we become used to this concept back and forth ad-hoc communication but we never did anything like that before and it was the tool itself in some sense just the arrival of the tool the possibilities it opened that transformed the way we worked and this is actually one of the kind of the big semi-controversial arguments in the book is that i'm arguing that no one really actually decided that this is a better way to work there there is no harvard business review case study that is advocating for the hyperactive hi-fi uh you cannot find memos from ceos of big companies saying here's what we're missing we need a lot more we need to be sending a lot more messages we need to be communicated a lot more no one ever decided that was a good idea it was a side effect of bringing email into the offices and i even tell stories of the book i go back and i document the rise of email people brought this into the office strictly to replace existing technologies it was like a better version of the voicemail for internal communication and a better version of the fax machine in fact one of the big things that that enabled the rise of email it's like a little known fact is at the end of the 1980s uh a a giant consortium of aerospace contractors so these like really huge you know northrop grumman style aerospace contractors lobbied to force the big telecommunication companies to put it put in place this standard it's very technical i think was called x.400 but that made it possible for email messages from one company's network to go to another company's network because they wanted to send files back and forth without having to use fax machines or couriers and that kind of unlocked the whole thing because now lots of companies said oh great fax machines are an annoying technology this is much better so email came into the office for prosaic reasons it's a more efficient fax machine it's a more efficient voicemail and in some of these case studies a week later the about the communication of the office is off the charts so just the the ecological impact of the tool being in the office that we just completely changed how we worked no one planned for it and we all kind of looked back and are trying to say oh okay i guess this is what work means now let's let's let's have some etiquette about you know subject lines or how often we batch email checking we were completely unaware for the ecological change that this invasive digital species unexpectedly created well it's interesting you're right because the design rules email is just something that kind of happened it's not like someone said let's get everybody distracted stressed out anxious and on 24 7. nobody sat down but seth godin's been a guest on this podcast i know you're familiar with his work he made the argument that when he was at yahoo and he resurrected this on his podcast recently he was trying to he made an argument he lost that was that email should not be free that it's almost like a postage stamp that you should you should um you know charge someone i have to pay to read your email and then you become much more selective about what emails you read and he said hey that didn't work it's probably not going to work in the future but it's an interesting model but you make the argument too that because all of this technology is free it gets hyper used and you get that instant access any thoughts on that on on the design stage because i find that fascinating because here we are reaping the benefit of all that or the curse of all that and uh i'm just curious about what you think the impact of free technology is in the midst of this yeah weird things happen when you reduce friction down to just about zero i mean engineers know this if if you don't have any friction things spiral out of control the same thing seems to happen with email so one of the stories i liked from the book is there was this study that these researchers from uc irvine did where they went to a company uh said like an east coast research forum and they said we're going to take a group of people a group of employees of your company and we're going to take them off email for a week that we're not gonna prep for it we're not we just we just want to see what happens like it's really it was it was an interesting experiment because usually uh these business orthographies have been observing how people use email right they said let's see what happens what goes wrong if you take it away it's like a classic experiment knock out this jeed see what happens to the fruit fly right so i was talking to the researcher about this experiment and she told me a story that wasn't in the paper and there was a scientist who was one of these subjects in the study and he had been very annoyed because part of his work is he had to set up this laboratory every week for experiments they did at this company and his boss would email him and interrupt them all i need this what about this what about this like all of these sort of like questions and tasks and it was really annoying because it's hard to set up the lab and it it really distracted him but it made it take a lot longer so when this guy was off email the scientist was off email for one week because he was part of this study he told the lead researcher oh my boss stopped bothering me you know so when i was setting up the lab my boss wasn't bothering me but what made the story interesting is that the boss's office was two doors down so literally the boss could just walk nine feet down the hallway and be like hey bob like can you do whatever so it is it was slightly more friction without email it was still not a lot of friction right down the hallway he was right there you can go bother but just that slight bit of friction when you took away email all of those requests went away wow and i think that is a great example of when you bring the friction down to nothing i can basically just shoot off a message whatever get it get this thing off my mind there's no social capital cost i don't have to see your face i don't have to interrupt you i could just do it the the system runs out of control just like with physical system so i i think seth is absolutely right with that analysis is that when you went from making communication easier like okay a telephone is much easier than having to write you a letter when you went from easier to free i think they spiraled out of control you spend a good chunk of of time in the book talking about the industrial revolution and particularly the invention of the assembly line henry ford sort of that whole idea and then you you link that to trello as kind of a modern knowledge workers equivalent and i'd love for you to unpack that for people because there's some principles there moving to the solution side that i thought were really helpful yeah well so so i go back to the assembly line a lot and to be clear it's not that i think there's anything specific about the industrial assembly line that we should do elsewhere i mean the assembly light is very specific to industrial manufacturing it was actually quite detrimental to the workers what i care about is the the overall process engineering mindset so what's important about the assembly line is that henry ford's big idea was the most convenient and flexible way to do something is not necessarily the most effective way to do it and so you could think about the processes and actually say let's experiment and re-engineer these processes to try to find ways that we get a better return on our capital that's a huge leap in thinking but it's what i think we need in the knowledge sector so if you go back again to henry ford they were building cars before the assembly line using what was called the craft method and just like the hyperactive hive by today in knowledge work it was very convenient and obvious and flexible they would just put the chassis up on saw horses you would have a team working on a car if you wanted to scale up your factory you'd have more teams and more cars so it's the exact same way that that you know bids created the first automobile just scaled up in the most natural possible way well okay if one team could build one car we'll have 15 teams building 15 cars it was very natural very flexible ford said okay i get that but maybe there's more effective ways to build cars and so he began this long series of experiments that ended up with the continuous motion assembly line the whole point though is that all of these experiments and where he ended up with was much less convenient much less flexible much less obvious it created a lot of exceptions you know if you didn't get it just right the whole assembly line could stop you had to hire more managers you had to invest more money i'm sure everyone hated it at the time like why are we doing this this is like why we have to spin we're building these these uh these chains and these conveyor belts it's so hard why would we do this but it was 10 to 100 x more productive at producing cars and so i think the hyperactive hive bite is the craft method that's the obvious way to do it like let's just it's one tool we all know it is very simple let's all gather around a proverbial sawhorses and work on the cars it's natural let's just rock and roll but what's natural what's obvious what's flexible it's not always the best way to do it so when you see more sophisticated approaches of organizing knowledge work like using something like trello where for each project we have a board that we all share we could see all the tasks we can see their statuses communication happens on the board not through emails you're in one context at a time you begin to get intimations of henry ford's assembly line hey more overhead yes could bad things happen yes could something be missed yes could the whole assembly light come to a halt because you didn't quite calibrate it yet right yes but we're producing model t is 100x faster than we were before and so to me that's an incredibly important lesson to remember when looking at the way we work today in the knowledge space so i want to give you a real life example which would be my little company so having been i was a pastor for 20 years a lead pastor in the last five years done this communications company pretty much full time and i lived in the space of managing by email which was frustrating exhausting so a couple years ago my team made a plan where we said we are no longer using email for internal communication so the only time you're allowed to use email is if it's outside client somebody who isn't on our staff so if my podcast producer for example says hey what about this thing he can jump in on email and i'll loop in a couple staff but it's kind of like not cool for team members to email each other we did introduce slack um and and slack isn't quite as voluminous as email is and uh and basically the expectation was you you have to respond the same business day not right away same business day just just get back to somebody and then we have weekly meetings where we just kind of park everything for the weekly meeting because most stuff as you point out covey said it's it's important but it's not urgent like you can really wait until tuesday or thursday and then if it's conflicted or super difficult um or or complicated then we absolutely default to video and we do this we just have a face-to-face communication so because sometimes you know your 10 slack messages later you still haven't figured out we also realized getting ready for this show this podcast this episode and reading your book that we're probably using we also use asana for task management we're probably it probably functions way more like trello than we realize and we could be creating boards and spreadsheets that are even more efficient than slack so um i'd love for you just kind of pick that little we call it the workflow triage system it's definitely reduced friction in our company it means we can work on it not in it all the time but i'm sure we can get better so any thoughts on that or uh what's good what could be improved well first of all i love that general principle that email is good as a means of delivered information email is good as a means of delivering files but it is not great as the primary tool for which internal coordination happens yeah so just as a general heuristic for thinking about rebuilding your company i think you're on the right track there you do not want internal coordination to occur as just back and forth messages that all fall into the same sort of undifferentiated inbox i i think i think that is great uh the way i would just put substructure around the way you're thinking is that you take your company and say if we're reflective about it there's certain processes we do there's a process for uh like podcast episode production there's a process for marketing there's a process for whatever consulting engagements or whatever it is like whether you call that or not there's these different processes that produce things that are useful to the company once you name them you can then ask for each how does the information flow work for this process and how do we want it to work is there a more effective way to build this process and by effective i think typically in knowledge work what you want to try to minimize is the number of context shifts required to actually produce valuable output out of this process slack to asana would be a contact shift yeah or if it was the way that like this podcast episode gets produced is there's a dozen back and forth emails that's a dozen context shifts that you're inducing there's a dozen times someone's going to have to stop what they're doing and look at that email so then you might prioritize alternative processes that maybe you have you know the same overall time spent or even more time spent at like a weekly meeting but it prevents back and forth emails uh in between that would be more effective and so like what are the case studies in the book for example i i talked about a media company that produces they like videos that go out every single day and i talked about how they they had a whole system put together that required essentially no back and forth communication they had the spreadsheet that had the current status of each video and the various people involved would just check it on the spreadsheet and when the status had changed to something that was relevant for them there's pretty clear expectations like okay now it's in my my uh court to whatever do the edits move the video over here then i'll change the status on the spreadsheet that okay now it's ready for being pushed out to the platform so the people who do that take it and so like they had taken a media production process it got rid of all the back and forth communication uh it was all driven by they had a process that like really clear steps and a really clear indicator of what step it was currently in so you know once you have things processes what you try to optimize processes for minimizing back and forth communication it leads to a lot of innovations that allows everything to get done without you individually having to feel like there's this constant unstructured deluge of messages you're trying to keep up with no i found that i took that directly to my team when i read that in the book you gave me were kind enough to give me an advanced copy of a world without email and when i read that because it was so simple i think it was like a google spreadsheet or something like that or an excel spreadsheet and it was funny because i remember we did that process with a west coast firm that does our marketing when we were doing a sales funnel and it was literally a spreadsheet and then it said you know edited or ready for publication or ready for filming and you would just change the status inside the document so it's not even an expensive software solution but what it meant is it wasn't 17 emails back and forth like have you edited that yet okay when will you be done thursday thursday morning thursday afternoon like that 17 chain reply all email that drives everybody crazy well yeah it's an easy change but it's one that you wouldn't make unless you realize the game here is trying to minimize back and forth right if what you're trying to do is just keep things convenient and flexible you would say well why bother with that like i could just email you you know so the hyperactive highlight is always easier and it's always more flexible i you know i interviewed this uh this researcher in the book who was in the 80s and the 90s was at the forefront of how do we use new computer technology and computer networks to try to make things more productive and everyone was trying to build these very complex i.t systems you know for all if you have a podcast production that we're going to have like this custom-built network application she said all that research ended when email came along because everyone realized like well we could just get everything done with this one tool you learn how to email people you learn how to attach things to it you learn how to do cc's and and you can basically do any process it just so it's always more convenient it's always more flexible so the key thing in your discussion there is shifting the goal posts from what's going to be easiest to what is actually going to make us most effective and by effectively we make the most use of this resource that we call attitude capital and those are two different things you mentioned trello i used i think a beta version of trello a few years ago and we moved to asana um any thoughts like are you talking a lot of people use base camp etc so are you saying like a project management system like that can reduce a lot of friction and can you elaborate on that a little bit yeah i think all of these are good options i mean like asada tends to be more popular in like software development type worlds because it has a lot of hooks into the specifics of agile project management philosophies trello has a lower learning curve base cap has more features but all of these can be much better than the hyperactive high by because what you're what you start to do is a you structure what needs to be done b you make it transparent so the whole team could see it uh c you take information out of this big pile that's your inbox and you move it into the context where it's relevant so like here is the site for this project all of the information for this project is on this site that alone is so much better than all the information you need for this project is spread out among messages over 28 boxes like it's buried by the way with information about 20 other projects you know uh so all of that makes it much better when you move information into these type of project management type tools also uh it's much easier to synchronize and coordinate because now we can all just get together and look at the trello board or the asada board or the uh base cap site and we could just have a quick check in like okay i could see who's working on what what do we need to change who needs what let's go and that is so much more efficient than having all those decisions made over 20 different back and forth ad hoc email conversations throughout the day so it seems like sometimes i have stock in trello because i push that particular example a lot but i really think uh as you said like a shared google document could go really far away i mean before the pandemic i mean just what you could do with a white board that everyone sees could go a really long way so yeah it's not about having just the right tool it's about optimizing the right thing yeah so is that what's underneath the process principle or the protocol principle do you want to unpack some of those ideas in a world without email yeah so so there's these three principles uh that have to do with with how you get rid of the hype by so the process principle is really hitting that overall point that you need to identify and optimize processes right this is what ford did when you built the assembly line you have to have that mindset we have processes we have today but we have to optimize them you have to get to that mindset knowledge work has not done a lot of that but it needs to the protocol principle is a principle that could help you do that and that talks in particular about if there's certain types of communication that happens commonly putting in the effort up front to build and optimize protocol even if it's more of a paid the beginning uh can minimize the the sort of overall impact on people's brains so so it's often worth kind of building like we talked about with the spreadsheet and you change the status and then when i see that i know it's my turn to pick it up that's more of a pain up front that just said email me when you're ready but when you put that effort in up front you get back dividends over time because it's it's every day less context shifting and so every day you're getting a little bit more out of that attention capital and then the final principle i i had for optimizing processes is talking about specialization and in general i think that we get a better return on attitude capital where people do less things but they do the things they do better there's been a shift over the last 20 years towards making people more generalist people do more things and they do all of them worse and i do not think that's the right equilibrium if you want to get the biggest return so i'm kind of calling for one of the things i see is a return for example of more support more separation of frontline value production from backend logistical support people with less on their plate but more accountability that the things they do they do really well i'm just convinced that that is a configuration in which you get the most value out of your resources and people are the happiest you know it's funny i i did had a corporate coach last year who coached me and another mentor who really spoke to me and they've scaled companies and both would say specialization is a key to scale because when you're small operation small church small company small business you want a generalist oh you can do this and you can do that but they said if you really want to make that pivot particularly in a high growth environment you have to specialize and the older i get the more i realize actually i'm only really good at a couple things i can interview people i can write and i can talk and that's about it i'm a communicator so you would see the same thing like specialization well it's sometimes it's counterintuitive at first because it specialization seems like it's more expensive right because you need more people right but it could in the end be way more profitable one of my favorite studies from the book was to study back from the the late 1980s where this economist from georgia tech was studying these fortune 500 companies that were firing their support staff because what happened as the 80s with the 90s we got personal computers and things like word processors and uh you didn't have to have support staff like a lot of the logistical tasks in corporate america became just easy enough with personal computers that it's possible for an executive to do that whereas before it's like i don't know how to type i don't have a type or whatever right uh so a lot of companies said great we could fire the assistants we could fire the typing pool we could fire the support staff and we'll save a lot of money because that's salary we don't have to pay and so so crutched the numbers i mean she said yeah that's true but all of that work shifted onto the plate of the executive so now the executives cannot do as much of the frontline value production as they could before so what you need you need more executives they get the same amount of work done the problem is executives have higher salaries than the support staff so he crotches all the numbers and said okay in the end to produce the same stuff your salary cost ended up 20 higher wow so it felt like you were saving money by firing the support staff but you weren't taking into account the cognitive cost of putting that work we just treat people's brains like these infinite black boxes just hey whatever you throw at them they'll do and that's not there's there's a psychological reality to it so i think that effect he called this the diminishment of intellectual specialization i think it's a crucial factor so specializing it feels more expensive you're like but you know i could have you also do this and also do this i don't want to have to hire another person or i don't i was just doing an interview with a print reporter who talked about how he got a lot of pushback from his peers because he started hiring someone to do his transcription of his interviews because they're like but you you could do that and you would save the money but he's like yeah but if i do that that's i can't write as many articles and like in the end i'm not going to be as as successful i think that plays a huge role letting people do less but do it better specializing maybe it's more people maybe it's more muddy at first but your your growth and your value production and your success as an organization will almost certainly far outweigh what you had to outlay to support that specialization so i want you to pick a paint a picture if you can of you know pick an office environment a church environment but just let's say it's a smaller business or a midsize organization what does a day look like if you're not playing whack-a-mole with slack or your inbox all day long like what what might that look like in a practical term for knowledge worker i mean imagine a day in which maybe you look at your inbox once and if you forgot to do it it wouldn't be a big deal that's that's where i think a lot of people could get i'll give a specific example there's a small like a dozen person uh tech company that i profiled in the book and they had they had got through all the standard hi-fi issues they were huge email people that slack came along and so they became huge slack people and it it became completely overwhelming to the point where it burped out two of their engineers who quit and the co-founder says enough is enough uh i'm not gonna work this way i don't care if the company goes under we're not running this on email we're not right writing down slack we're gonna have to figure out how else to do it and they shifted to a model where they had project management software they had a morty check it and an afternoon check it i mean all the information who's working on what all the knowledge so is that like a video an in-person check-in or was it like inside the project management tool uh it was a mix so they uh it was outside the product management tool some people be in the office and the people who worked would join via video right so uh yeah so if if they had all been to the office it would have been in the same room but so it's like a stand-up meeting a 15-minute stand-up meeting or so they would do stand-ups like you see at software and they do what in the board need right okay who's working on what who needs what what happened to the thing you're gonna do yesterday uh good work and then people just worked on those things until they have to do that they checked it again it all logged they were updating the product management system and they were putting notes in there and updating the status and moving things along they check it again in the afternoon and that was it and i actually had the ceo i had him on the phone i mean this was years ago when i first interviewed him i said open up your inbox like go through it now i'm just curious like what's in your email inbox right now and he's like okay i haven't seen it yet today he was going through it and he was using it like you would have used a mailbox 20 years ago it's like yeah okay here our account it is sending us you know uh an invoice and here is a bid from a contractor uh yeah it was it was like nothing urgent no work it was the stuff you would get in your mailbox without the it could be going to your mailbox i just thought it was fantastic that they they mainly just worked and they coordinated a very uh condensed way they had very structured environments to keep track of information and the email inbox was like oh here's an announcement about we're going to have a you know boxer day as a vacation day this year another example like i talked about a marketing firm there where they had a trello board for every project and the workflow there was you were like i got to work on this project now you go to that trello board all the information is there you see what needs to be done you make progress you update the board like i'm done working on this product now great now let me go to a board for another project you know and like that's where all the interaction happened so that's what we're talking about a world in which you're not talking about your work all the time and your email inbox really seems like it used to be in the old days when you go to your mailbox at your office you know and be like oh let's see what letters i got today yeah this is so timely for us i mean coincidentally one of our goals our wildly important goals for dx framework was to improve our systems we've had double triple digit growth the last five years in a row some of the people are new and it is duct tape and band-aids for our systems in that context and so much of what you are describing is exactly what we're trying to tackle you are you actually proposing a world without email where there is no carrie kerrynewhof.com or calnewport.com or are because i mean we connected for this interview over email i emailed you off your website that kind of thing like are you saying it's a world without email or it's just like where it's like the post office box from the mailbox from 20 years ago yeah exactly the actual title would be a world without the hyperactive hybrid workflow that doesn't quite roll out publisher didn't go for that i think no yeah i think email is a perfectly fine protocol for good uh delivering information delivery files it's great i'm a computer scientist i think it's a great protocol the thing i i dislike is the idea that we can organize and coordinate and do all of our business all of our collaboration with ad hoc and supervise back and forth messaging so yeah right away the introduction of the book i say okay here's what the hyperactive highlight workflow this whole book is about evaluating this workflow that's part one spoiler alert it does not come off looking very good and then part two is how do you what are the principles for movie beyond it so i love email as a tool uh i just don't think it should be the foundation of how all collaboration occurs and you make the argument it probably will lead to a shorter work week as well for a lot of people is that correct did i read that right yeah there's a ton of overhead because of all this context switching it's an incredibly inefficient way to actually use our cognitive resources to the point where i actually think this is a problem that knowledge workers especially creative knowledge workers are not worried enough about when it comes to ai we are so inefficient at working because of the hyperactive hybrid workflow is that one of the things we should be worried about is that when ai comes in and reduces that burden so one of the huge under the radar investments in workplace ai right now is basically to take the hyperactive high by coordination off your plate so you could have like the dream is you will have your equivalent of a chief of staff like leo mcgarry in the west wing but it's an ai agent and it talks to everyone else's ai agent it just tells you like hey here's what you should work on here's the materials go right ai is going in that direction to allow human brains to do the things that human brains do best which seems great except for we're so inefficient right now that if that happens too fast it is going to drastically reduce the number of paid employees required to get the same amount of work done and what's going to happen what's going to happen when you come into a law firm and say oh when you're not billing emails in every six minutes we could service the same number of clients with you know half of the first year associates well if you're the partner it's like great we're going to hire half as many first-year associates because that's way more profits for us or our ad agency or needs half of the creative executives because they're they get twice as much done it could actually be a problem so it's not that ai can automate creative work but we're so inefficient right now that if it makes it more efficient there's going to be this gap period where we're going to lose the need for all of this cognitive capacity i think eventually the economy will reconfigure and find uses for all this highly skilled creative capacity but that could be that could be a really rocky transition so in other words i think we're so inefficient right now that we should be worried about we should worry what will happen if we become if we rip off these inefficiencies there might be long bread lines of you know lawyers and ad executives and professors once we once we get so so efficient any uh this is a little hoppy of mine just barely studying ai but i'm fascinated by the dialogue do you have an approximate time frame of when you think technology like that and i know it's a million dollar question if you knew you'd know but like is this five years down the road ten years down the road any any thought on that yeah no it's a really good question ai it's interesting because it it's not continuous it tends to have these discontinuous jumps right and we've seen a few of those happen recently so we've seen the discontinuous jump in semantic understanding of spoken speech so a lot of this was driven by things like uh siri and alexa we're putting these devices in tens of millions of people's hope so they could have all of this data and practice trying to understand what people are saying interpret speech and interpret the attention behind speech i used to you know i took a course on this when i was a grad student at mit not that long ago and the world is completely different today what happens today is magic right so we we have these discontinuous jumps so it's a little bit hard to predict uh but there is a ton of money like the reason why there's so much money in for example alexa or google hope is not just that oh this is a big market everyone will have one of these in their home it's because if we could get to the point where we really understand when you talk to me not just the words you're saying but what you want oh you want me to turn up the volume you want me to do whatever that's really the killer app for workplace chief of staff style assisted ai like oh i understand what kerry wants i know now i could i could talk to another ai we could very officially we could very officially figure it out there's a ton of money in it like there's a lot of money in the watson project at ibm right now that not everyone really knows about that is uh going into monitoring workplace communication and try to figure out like what's going on here and how can i help i i profile a company called x dot ai in the book that all the thing they were trying to do was just schedule meetings you talk to this ai bot it'll schedule the meeting with you and they put like six or seven million dollars into this over like a period of a year uh just to try to get so there's a lot of money going into these things and by the way it was the ceo of that company who told me like no no the goal is not to get that really good at understanding you and schedule your meeting the goal is to get my xl.a bot to talk to your aix hotbot and then neither of us have to think about the meetings at all they figure out that we need a media they schedule it on our behalf right so i think five to ten year window wow by the 10-year window based on the jumps we've had recently we're going to start to see potentially a fundamental change uh fundamental change in the office well and you are a computer scientist that's your training that's that's what you teach do you and i know do you have a dystopian or a utopian version of ai in the future it is it is a fascinating widely debated subject yeah i go back and forth so i'm not sure so i'm not confident in my answer like i think for example the workplace that the the intersection of the workplace of technology is something that a i'm somewhat known for it depends on the speed so you know i think if we we have these highly efficient chief of staffs faster that we know what to do with there will be a period of disruption i'm also optimistic though where i think that the the economy will find ways to redeploy this cognitive capital and long term that could be more positive like there's a lot of areas of life in which the the scarcity of our own cognitive capital scarcity of our own time and attention is a real impediment so if you could free up a lot of uh like highly creative highly trade cognitive capital that could that could be redeployed i mean even just thinking about uh students at an underserved school to be able to have more cognitive capital could come out and be like we could uh work with you uh with like tutoring to want to want to hitch it or we could you know there's a there's a lot of potentially socially beneficial redeployments of this capital i just don't know how buppy that's going to be but the one thing i'm sure of is we're using way too many people now to produce stuff in the knowledge economy that we're going to need whatever the period is 10 years from now 50 or 20 years from now just because of the huge inefficient inefficiencies of the of the hive mind we saw the same thing of course in industrial uh industrial technological advancement it took a lot of people to build stuff we build stuff with a lot less people now because of technology uh those people now we've had to redeploy and a lot of that got redeployed into our current knowledge economy actually over time is very disruptive when it happened we're gonna have the same thing happen with knowledge work i mean we don't need as many people as we have right now to match our current level of production but we're just so inefficient that's where we are well and often expansion staff expansion hiring can be i remember i was on a consulting thing a couple years ago and they're like we need more staff we need more staff as an outsider looking in i'm like no no you've got plenty cal uh yeah if you have a couple more uh minutes just a couple of quicker questions for you uh i run a 100 digital company so like and and i think the post pandemic world is going to be hybrid companies digital companies virtual organizations as well as some people with uh you know totally in-person staff but you know there's a massive acceleration going on in that field right now as we speak any are there any particular rules that you would have in mind for virtual or hybrid companies where you don't have everybody in the office well so i went deep on this topic after i'd finished writing this book i did this big piece for the new yorker uh earlier in the in the covet pandemic to to look at remote work the history of work what's going to happen as we shift more companies to more remote work and one of the big conclusions that came away is that when you move completely remote some of the issues of the hyperactive hybrid get amplified so the the urgency and the benefits of having more structured work both become more important the more remote that you actually shift oh wow this is why for example the the the one industry the knowledge sector in general that really doesn't have much trouble be completely remote in fact even before the pandemic there was giant companies that had huge remote teams with software development and why is software development easily able to make that jump to remote is they have very structured workflows they use these agile project management methodologies their work is already very structured so if you shift remote it could handle that very well the companies that are having the most trouble are those that were way ad hoc just like let's rock and roll let's fly i'll grab you in the office listed emails and we kind of just like make things work that just flies off the rails when everything becomes completely remote and everything gets abstracted to just these these uh toneless emails that get sent back and forth and so that's been my big message is that the way to adjust to the remote economy is to get more processes in place you've got to structure your work you've got to get your systems in place remote work can be very very effective if you have these structures and processes that you're evolving as a team over time trying to optimize things like context shifts every transparency a task assignment try to specialize all of these things so i think a world without email became a lot more relevant after we had this sudden acceleration of what was probably an inevitable move towards more remote work but as we accelerate that the type of principles that talk about that book i think are more relevant than they've ever been we'll link to that piece for the new yorker and the show notes too for for leaders and and what i what i found too is that sometimes and i just love your take on this but running a digital company and running remote work that sometimes that inefficiency is a bid for attention and human connection in other words i just want to talk to someone because i've been stuck in my office all day home alone and what we've discovered is it's much better to jump on a zoom call and actually just have a water cooler moment or build in some extra time into our weekly or maybe that daily stand up that you talk about which i'm toying with like in other words make the connection about connection but the work about work thoughts on that i think that's right yeah i think it's i think it's better to be clear about what you're trying to do as opposed to sort of informally or implicitly try to achieve goals another example of this that that became kind of clear during the pandymic is that uh there was inequities in people's time availability because of the disruption of let's say if you had kids right and like their school was closed out or this or that a lot of companies instead of directly addressing this which you would do if you had transparency a task assignment you could see who was working on what if you were specializing like this is a reality we have to adjust for it instead they're like well everything is so informal at ad hoc with the the hyperactive hive mind we'll just pretend like it's okay and the people who have much less time will just use the obfuscation of the hive mind to kind of just performatively seem like they're more busy and and send a lot of emails but not really be doing as much work and that kind of ad hoc improvisational response to this issue is not best right i think it's always better just to have clarity here's who's doing work and why here's what you do okay we have to adjust this because of x uh if we if we're lonely then let's find the best possible way for us to connect if uh you can't do as much work right now instead of you pretending like you can and why don't we reduce what's on your plate or whatever it is i think clarity is better and when you apply these principles to have smarter workflows smarter processes i think you're absolutely right you could address these problems straight on yeah i know you got a whole section of the book on this but just to avoid answering this in the comments a lot of people listening going kel that's awesome you know but you're kind of a professor you work for yourself you're at the top of the food chain carrie you've always been the senior leader i'm not like my boss he's on 24 7 we're in a bad culture i'm expected to be there what what would you say to those who are sort of trapped in the middle who are like i'm 100 on board but i don't make the decisions right because there's different constituencies here and i would add that actually professors are not as authors as you would think we have uh i wrote an article that got me in trouble a little bit at my university for the chronicle of higher education that was called is email making professor stupid let's just say that that led to a lunch with the deed you know what i mean but it's a good point there's different constituencies for this message i try to be clear about that in the book you have let's think like executives that you control a team or a whole company and you you have autonomy you have entrepreneurs like it's your own thing it's a you're a solopreneur it's a very small company that you control and then you have employees right if you're an employee and you don't really have control over your workplace culture and you're trying to slip copies of this book into you know your boss's backpack but that's only gonna do so much you might not be able to deploy everything but there's a lot you could still deploy and what i recommend to people is well look at your personal processes like here's all the different things i deal with in work and let your inbox be the guide it's your answering emails be like what process is this email associated with what process is this email associated with and you focus on the parts of that process you can control and do the same thing let's structure them let's try to optimize to reduce the amount of back and forth emails i have to sid let's specialize where i can like maybe i could adjust my portfolio i mean i talk about this in the book you could try to make a trade to gain more autonomy over how you work typically if you're an employee you're going to have to offer up accountability it exchanged so i get into that that particular stage like i've got to do less i get to specialize but you're going to hold me more accountable which could be scary right but there's things you can do but i but by identifying and optimizing your personal processes you'd be surprised by how much impact you could have so yes you can't control the emails that come in but if those emails come in you put them into a process that's going to reduce the amount of back and forth you need to do with this person even if they don't know that you have this process even if you're not telling them about it even if you're not having sort of annoyed autoresponders even if it's just it seems like he's suggesting some more stuff in here you could significantly control and reduce what comes into your inbox by just having it apply the same principles the best you can so really it could be as simple as like someone sends you an email it's like hey uh thoughts on the client and you're like okay here's the right process i'm just gonna kind of explain this on my email uh not in an over-top way but like yeah this is great we should talk about it here's what we're gonna do if i do it on friday i'll have my thoughts in a a document in the shared dropbox we have you could then review it let's have a meeting on the books for monday morning we'll then make our final decision about what should go into the draft here are four times that are available you just email back which one you want to do and we'll rock and roll like you're essentially bringing them into your process without saying let me preach to you about a world without email we need to have processes it used to be too much emails they don't care like great that's less emails i have to say so it's a great question uh there is a lot you could do as my answer there's a lot you could do by just optimizing the processes that you control even if the people around you are sort of frustratedly not on board this almost moves more into digital minimalism territory and again i highly recommend your books um but you know you have a lot of people listening right now everybody's online more post-pandemic like churches got catapulted a decade and businesses did i know my favorite restaurants are all hyper online now and so we're all a little more attached to our devices but you quite famously like give real minimalist footprints on social media but you've also emerged as so and and there's people listening who are trying to build online companies right it's like i'm going to be an influencer online i'm going to be whatever but here you are you've written numerous best-selling books you um have a national profile have a voice that people seek out and you've done it kind of without much of a social media digital imprint uh like you got a website and that kind of thing can you can you talk about that dynamic yeah i mean i i've never had a social media account yeah i thought that was true so they're all fake if if you think you're following cal you're not fake ones yeah oh yeah there's weird yeah that's a whole other thing there's there's multiple caldeport twitter accounts with my picture uh i have no idea because i wondered if that was you and i'm like i don't think that's cal like no uh yeah i mean a lot of them are sort of suspiciously uh russian bodish asking for money yeah a little bit without what you'd expect uh yeah so i've never had a social media account uh i do have a blog email newsletter which i've had forever and i love you know i have this great audience it's not huge like if i was on instagram or something like this but it's people who come to caldeport.com which is on a server in michigan uh you know i control it and i email people and i have a podcast i love podcasts because they're uh i feel like it's very distributed i control it there's not a small number of companies that are in charge of it it's just on a you know podcast you just put it on a server and anyone can access it through any service they want to access it right i've never had a social media footprint my strategy has been uh this was the title of a book i wrote in 2012 was just try to be so good you can't be ignored right you know i just i want to produce good stuff and i think hard about it i write about it and i i have a couple ways of reaching people about it that i like you know i mean i like my blog and email newsletter list because i get my arms around it like some of the people who comment on my blog have been doing so for a decade you know i know them it's interesting it's like my friends you know and in the long run that worked you know and so like if if i've been putting a lot of energy into twitter i could probably get a lot of followers and maybe it would have helped like the last book i wrote maybe have more sales right up front or something like this but the the impact on my cognitive resources is such that is instead of publishing my seventh book right now maybe i'd just be on by fifth yeah or you know something people don't understand about books is like oh if you have a really big twitter account then maybe you could add an extra 5 000 sales to your first week which you know could matter with the the best seller list but it's nothing if you're trying to sell a million copies of your book uh that's a drop in the bucket and how do you sell a billion copies of the book it's the producy just the right book for the right time it's just the the luck slash craft uh so yeah i'm a big believer the whole point of that book digital minimalism by the way is not that like social media is bad or other technologies are good it's just that people should be way more intentional why am i using this technology is there a really good reason and if so what rules should i place around this so that i could get that benefit while avoiding all of the other harm so it's like if you need to use social media because like whatever your ministry uses facebook groups as a way to organize uh xyz great but if that's why you need it then it should be on your phone you shouldn't be looking at your news feed it should be on your computer you should log on to your desktop once a week to update that group you know once you know why you're using technology you can optimize how you use it and the thesis of that book is what you're trying to optimize how you use technology for this purpose not that you get this huge shift in the benefit the cost ratio that goes decidedly in your advantage well and i don't know whether this was intentional or maybe it's just a misreading but having read uh most of your books including be so good you can't ignore it be yeah whatever whatever that title is uh steve martin quote um anyway i noticed a shift in a world without email where it felt almost as philosophical as practical that there was a real there was a real narrative that was developing like i put that on my list of books to re-read when i get the physical copy in my hand and i wonder if that is a cumulative benefit of years of deep work uh yeah i think for sure i've been i've been thinking hard about technology and culture for many years trying to produce the best possible writing on it also i would say there was a shift right around deep work where i began to find conciliates with my academic work and my writing so if you go up to so good they can't ignore you the books i wrote before them it was i had my academic career where i was a computer scientist and then i also wrote books and they were almost like two separate things but with deep work there began to be this conciliates right where i began to focus more on technology and its impact on our culture and it made a lot of sense that as a computer scientist that i might also be writing for a public-facing audience about the impact of these these technologies on our culture that that that started to that sort of makes sense especially after i got tenure which typically opens you up for uh bigger thinking so that i began thinking about this much more through an academic frame and so i really wrapped up the intensity of thought the thought leaders i was around the back and forth i began doing more what i would say like high-end writing for like the new york times the new yorker and wired like writing for places that were really demanding uh the quality of your ideas and that melding between my academic and writing persona and just years and years of thinking is i think you're absolutely right i'm glad you noticed that is i feel as if i'm increasing the sophistication i'm really trying to lay out uh intellectual or philosophical frameworks for understanding technology and culture because i think it's so much turmoil that's going on right now there's a lot of new exciting philosophy actually being forged i want to be a part of that it's very encouraging what would you say from your approach that you've outlined in your book what's the like just cal as the human being you know you go home what is the benefit of having that kind of cognitive clarity and the lack of continual distraction and buzzing phones like what would you say at this point this is the thing i'm getting the most joy of out of right well i mean my overall philosophy i sometimes call the deep life and i talk a lot i talk about a lot of my podcast which was unexpected right i mean i i had launched the podcast uh early in the pandemic but the idea was it's i'm gonna answer questions for my readers and i thought it would be almost entirely pragmatic right like okay like the type of stuff we were talking about like hey uh you know i want to i want to update my process i want to reduce email i want to get more deep work et cetera and i just found myself pretty quickly kind of pulled by my listeners and by my own interest laid out these philosophies for uh how to live and articulating my underlying philosophy because i think there was a real hunger for this as people went through resets to read the pandemic about what's important what's not how do i want to live my life i think a lot of people are going through that and so i articulated my underlying philosophy is what i call the deep life which is you identify the different areas of your life that are important to you um like i i do these alliterative buckets when i talk about my own like craft community contemplation which captures theological philosophical ethical concerns uh constitution like your health your fitness here's the things to report to the areas and then for each what you're trying to do is basically get that signal to noise ratio up i want to put my time on things that are really important and valuable and meaningful in each of these buckets and minimize the time i spend on everything else like i only have so much time and attention so i want to make sure that in each of the buckets that are important to me it's going the big wins and i just think that is a foundation for a resilient meaningful satisfied life and there's just not a ton of room for doom scrolling on twitter or like being up to your your neck and slack 12 hours a day like suddenly that type of behavior says i don't see what bucket that shows up as like one of the most valuable ways for me applied my time so this this this notion of depth i've really extrapolated it out of just the world of work and being like this is my philosophy for sort of all areas of life focus on what matters don't waste too much time on what doesn't man you have been so generous with your time it feels like uh that's a that's a good springboard into a whole other conversation for perhaps another time but yeah listening to your podcast i'm gonna go back and and backless and i got a few episodes because i discovered it researching for today but it feels like there's almost another book there you know the deep life and and we didn't even get into making or craft something that i'm you know was challenged in in your previous reading so you you're not on social but they can find you at uh where online and then uh we'll talk about the book and thank you cal yeah well uh so calduport.com is where you can learn about the books and that's where my my weekly newsletter is housed and then the podcast is called deep questions so you know you can get that wherever you fi podcast and that's about it when it comes to trying to find me online uh cal you've been so generous and this has been so helpful thank you so much well thank you it was my pleasure well i hope today's episode was helpful to you you can always get more by subscribing to my channel i also have a lot more content over at careynuhof.com for leaders in business and leaders in churches and you can get transcripts of this episode there and so much more plus some other stuff i do for leaders so head on over there to discover more at careynewhoff.com and in the meantime i really hope our time together today has helped you lead like never before

Channel: Carey Nieuwhof

Views: 8,436

Keywords: Carey Nieuwhof, Carey Nieuwhof podcast, Carey Nieuwhof leadership podcast, Carey Nieuwhof blog, Carey Nieuwhof content, Carey Nieuwhof YouTube, leadership talks, videos about work productivity, Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism, A World Without Email, Productivity hacks, Cal Newport podcast

Id: d7K_ufzJtiA

Length: 81min 29sec (4889 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021