Digital Declutter: Cal Newport shares how to live a focused life in a noisy world

[Music] my name is Jennifer Breen and I'm the deputy office managing partner of the DC office of Morgan Louis in March our office had the opportunity to hear from author Cal Newport who in addition to being a tenured professor at Georgetown is the author of six books including the New York Times best seller digital minimalism choosing a focus life in a noisy world we at Morgan Lewis pride ourselves in our ability to work cross-office around the world an incredibly agile and highly responsive way we pride ourselves in the delivery of exceptional client service so given this folks might wonder why would a firm like Morgan Lewis who clearly relies upon and embraces technology be interested in learning more about minimizing the use of it for us at Morgan Lewis exceptional client service is not simply working globally across offices and across the world it's not just being highly responsive it's not just embracing technology in a way that allows us to do that at Morgan Lewis exceptional client service is also about creating a meaningful connection and relationship with our clients and our teammates it's about taking time to listen to our clients and understand what their needs are we know that in order to deliver this level of service we also need to thrive ourselves we recently announced m/l well at the program where we work to help our people navigate the opportunities and challenges present in the legal profession and so it was with all of these values in mind our commitment to creating connection to listening to providing thoughtful insightful and strategic advice coupled with our commitment to well-being that we invited Cal Newport to help us bring it all together and to provide us with a reminder that it's not just what we do for our clients but how we do it that matters thank you thank you for having me the theory of distributed systems might sound complicated but I would bet tax laws even more so I was just working on my taxes now it is an honor to be here I think there's actually some really interesting intersections between the type of work I do and what's going on in the legal profession in particular and so I want to talk a little bit about that we'll try not to fall off the stage so that's my that's my goal in my little window here so here's the plan I thought I would back up not starting with the book that just came out but with the book that came out a few years ago so sort of my last book and I want to talk about how that book came to be and then how my current book came to be because they're connected and I think the ideas are connected so I'll tell you how those books came to be and then maybe give you some observations that I have learned after they came out so what am i picking up on the road talking to people about these books I think might be relevant I might also just talk briefly about the book I'm working on now which I haven't actually talked publicly about that much but I think it's going to be relevant to our conversation so I'll throw in a little bit of insight on what I'm working on then I'll try not to spend too much time in these remarks that will leave plenty of time for discussion and questions so that we can aim our aim our conversation where it's most useful to you so in 2016 I published a book called deep work and the core idea behind this book is that this ability to concentrate intensely without distraction so the ability to give something your full focus and do that without distraction was actually becoming increasingly valuable in the knowledge economy as we begin to more automate our outsourcer or replace the lower level of routine tasks the ability to do this sort of intense concentration is becoming more valuable it's how you learn complicated things it's how you produce cognitive output at high levels of quantity and quality so the idea behind that book is this skill is getting more valuable at exactly the same time that it seems to be getting more rare it's getting more rare because of sort of incidental side effects of technological innovation so we were getting worse at concentrating at the same time that the ability to concentrate was becoming more valuable and the effect of this was a classic economic supply and demand right we have something has become in more where at the same time scream more valuable so the price in this metaphor is going to rise and so the premise of that book is that individuals and organizations who actually actually cultivate specifically cultivate this ability and respect the ability to focus without distraction we're going to have a huge competitive advantage in the marketplace I wrote that book I put that out I went on the road to talk about it one of the things I kept hearing from people when I was out there talking about this book is okay maybe we buy this premise about some of these side effects of Technology in the world of work but what about what's happening with technologies in our life outside of work what's happening in our personal lives so I kept getting this message especially as 2016 turned over 2017 I noticed a real uptick in people feeling in increasing unease and what was happening in their life even outside of work on their phones I got into this topic and the dynamics turn out to be those sounding similar quite different than what was happening with workplace technology if we think about in the workplace for example something like email that we now spend a lot of time doing there's some problems with this that we'll get back to no one actually ever designed email purposefully to try to capture more of our attention right no one engineered email with the goal of if I can get people to check this more often I'm going to make more money but in the sphere of our personal relationship with technology technologies like social media or online news or is this interesting dynamic going on or actually a lot of these services were being specifically re-engineered to try to foster overuse to take more of our time and take more of our attention so I was picking up on this vibe and I was trying to understand really what was going on and as I was out there talking to people working on this new book what's happening why are you upset why are you uneasy it seemed to become clear that the problem was not about utility right so the issue was not that people find that what they're doing when they look at their phone is in itself bad a waste of time people actually were getting value out of what they were doing on their phone so the sort of counter narrative that we often hear from let's say the social media company is that hey here's an example of someone using social media for something valuable you need to stop complaining this counter narrative didn't really fit what people were reporting which is utility wasn't the issue is really autonomy that's what I kept picking up from people it's not that this was bad in the moment it's the fact that they were doing this more than they knew was useful more than they knew was healthy and to the exclusion of things that they knew would be more important for them or living a satisfying meaningful life so it was the sense that they were beginning to lose control over what they were paying attention to they're trying to lose control over the shape of their lives the sense of being manipulated this is what seems to have been getting people uneasy about the technology in their personal life in recent years I really do mean recent because I've been talking about these issues for a long time and I used to get a lot of pushback so I would go out I would write something talking let's say and saying something negative about social media and you know all hell would break loose the turning point really seemed to come some time near the end of 2016 because right after the election in 2016 the next week I had an append the new york times where I was arguing something negative about social media right I was arguing something about young people probably shouldn't spend as much energy as they think they should trying to cultivate their online brands that's not as important as they think it is and actually maybe skill development is more important than they think it is I got a lot of pushback for that right I mean the New York Times went so far as to actually Commission a response op-ed for the next week so they commissioned someone to write not bad just about why my op-ed was wrong because they're getting such pushback when I go on the radio I was ambushed on Canadian radio where they brought me on from one thing and then said here is an artist to use the social media here's a social media expert and you know here's some of the social media save their life go but then things change so the summer was fast forward to let's say a few months after that you know I had had this talk I had done there's a TEDx talk on quitting social media or it was called quit social media I just gave some reasons why to do it that started going viral so there's like this three or four month period that happened after the presidential election where people went from you know you are crazy for saying anything negative about social media - we love your video about why we should quit social media so there really was a transition that happened right around that period where people begin to change the way they thought about those technologies so this was in the air people were unhappy with what was happening their digital life so what's the solution well one of the things that becomes clear when you research this issue is that tips and tricks and hacks don't seem to be working cultural and technological forces that draw us back to our screen are so powerful it's very hard just to come at it with an idea like turn off your notifications or make your screen grayscale which is a thing I've seen a lot on the road a lot of people make their screen gray sale so it's less it's less appealing or maybe I'm not going to keep the phone in my room we're gonna do a digital Shabbat there's all sorts of these tips and tricks it's very popular I hear it a lot so all of the stuff is out there none of it seems to be making a lasting difference in people's lives because these forces are too strong so if you look even deeper into this issue you see great similarities in the what's happening with people's personal digital lives and what happened with food and fitness in the mid 20th century right so in the mid 20th century we introduced highly processed and highly palatable foods that our bodies weren't used to this led to an obesity epidemic we tried good advice move more eat less eat better we put the food pyramid up in the nurse's office turns out that then I've solved them that's hidden solve the crisis so what seems to be working right well if you think about and everyone has some friend right who's annoyingly healthy I can only fit almost certainly they have some sort of philosophy right something that they buy into that can be the basis of consistent decisions maybe their keto or paleo or vegan or something right something you're tired of hearing about but they're not doing tips they have a philosophy they're all in on and that made the difference well it became clear that this is what we probably needed in our digital life not just tips not just tricks people actually needed a philosophy something that was based in their values and something they could use to make consistent decisions about the role technology plays in their life especially again in their personal life so this book digital minimalism talks about one such philosophy that's gaining steam out there in the culture and the idea behind digital minimalism is that you take this ancient concept of minimalism which goes all the way back to the agents you can draw a through-line from Marcus Aurelius to throw to the voluntary simplicity movement of the 1960s to Mary Kondo today do I now know a lot more about than I ever thought I would need to I get asked about it a lot all of this is minimalism it's an ancient idea and the ancient idea basically says in many affairs of human life you're better off focusing your energy on a small number of things that are really valuable as opposed to the opposite strategy of trying to spread that energy out over lots of things to maybe give you a little bit of value instead of having your closet be completely chock-full of all sorts of things you may one day one aware or have some memory about if you instead clean that out and focus on the small number of things you really like even though you're getting rid of things that might have some value you end up doing better right that's classic minimalism so digital minimalism brings that over to your digital life and in particular what you do outside of work and it says you should focus your attention online on a small number of activities that give you huge wins right big boosts and things that you really care about and then be okay missing out on everything else don't go out there chasing there's a little bit of value here there's a little bit of convenience I don't want to lose that focus on the big wins ignore everything else Marcus Aurelius would tell us that's going to be the better strategy there's a lot of people out there doing it so I heard it in a book I gave a process for how you could actually if you wanted to transform into a minimalist a sort of one-month process ripping the band-aid off pipe process that thousands of people have now done and that's what I'm out there talking about now which is not that there's good technologies or bad technologies but there's good approaches and bad approaches and in your personal life if you're not putting the tools to work the service things you really care about and instead of laying the tools use you you end up in a place that causes lots of problems and I document a lot of those issues that's the book that's out now I'm worried and this is sort of breaking news but the the book I'm working on now so you know don't tell the media is tentatively titled the world without email which is yeah sort of like a business fantasy book I guess I don't know I don't know where they're gonna categorize it I'm gonna put it by jr. Martin or something like this this actually goes back to deep work it's almost like a continuation and so the theory that I'm working out in this book which I think is relevant to a lot of these issues so I'll just give you the basic theory so we have it they refer to the theory I'm working out in this book is that in the world of knowledge work in the age of digital networks we don't yet have a coherent theory about how to best deploy cognitive resources right so if you look in the industrial sector took us a while but we have a lot of really smart theory about if I have these capital resources I have these factories I have these very fancy pieces of equipment where we have a lot of things called business process factoring we know how to look at these resources to figure out what's the best way how do we get the best return out of them right in knowledge work we're not there yet and so what we have is a sort of ad hoc assemblages of workflows and habits many of which just emerge spontaneously and without intention once new technologies were introduced essentially my thesis is when email was introduced into the knowledge work workplace it created drastic changes in how we worked so that we now adopted a workflow where we have the sort of ongoing unstructured conversation all the time we think of this as what work means how else would we do it but it's actually quite arbitrary quite new and I even document in this new book some specific cases and including one at IBM where I found the engineer who was involved with the original email server turned on at IBM in the 1980s so he remembered this is what it was like right before we turned on email at IBM this is what it was like right after and right before they turned on the email server they did a very careful survey of office behavior as they needed to know how big of a mainframe they had the provision so they said let's figure out how much do people communicate how much do people communicate our office great we'll assume they'll all do that on email now let's build a server that can handle all that communication and melt it down within a week the very presence of having email completely changed the way people work before we could sit down and say what's better is it's going to help us produce more values and we're profitable before we could have any of those discussions just the presence of the technology had drastic changes on how IBM functioned and this was without intention without the goal of trying to optimize say some sort of profitability or effectiveness the idea of this new book is I think we are heading to a place in knowledge work where we're going to build more coherent theories of how to actually optimize cognitive resources and it's going to change the way we work and that a lot of the things we do today like constant availability on email might have more to do with adaptability and convenience than it does with let's say maximization of output the key metaphor here being that if we look at the construction of cars the way people built cars before Henry Ford came along was incredibly intuitive incredibly convenient and incredibly adaptive what he did this idea of the assembly line was a huge pain an incredibly inconvenient way to run a factory it had lots of hard edges it was very difficult to get the work right it wasn't at all obvious it wasn't just a natural adaptation of how we did things before but it produced cars 100x faster and so this book is getting at this idea this new book in the world of knowledge work we're gonna start seeing some much more aggressive and bespoke styles of work where we really think about this brain how does the brain produce value what's the impact of things like communication or context which you know these brains way of producing that's going to create real innovations in how we structure organization I don't have the answer yet of how we're gonna restructure the organization's that's the next chapter but this is what I'm working on now so it's actually sort of building out a bigger theory about how you might actually act on some of the ideas from deep work actually out there at the organizational scale so those are the ideas I sort of work with they're all about the unexpected consequences of technology in different parts of our lives and the different strategies we might deploy to actually mitigate the bad impacts and maximize the value that we can get out of the tools what have I learned what are some of the interesting things I've learned you know being out there and talking about some of these books well one thing that caught my attention is there's probably going to be a lot of people have been bringing this up we have to be wary of what type of stratification effects are going to be created if it's true that the economy is now going to be increasingly selecting for these certain types of skills like sustained concentration the ability to do sustained concentration or the ability to have sort of freedom of your attention outside of work it's sort of solitude in time for your brain to recharge a lot of people have been bringing this up and I think it's a really good point that as soon as you start selecting for a sort of new type of skill that's going to become suddenly very valuable in the marketplace it's going to create all sorts of unintentional side effects right let's say for example just from a personality perspective and this is something that we were discussing a ahead of time when I was getting some feedback from from the group let's say that you're just nicer right maybe you're more conscientious from a personality perspective well in a world in which sort of focused concentration becomes increasingly valuable that suddenly becomes unexpectedly for nonmeritorious reasons a disadvantage because it's the jerks and I see this in academia all the time it's the jerks who are able to say I don't care leave me alone I'm working I'm thinking or whatever right because hey I don't mind if I upset people and if that's the case then what are you going to get well now you're going to get a stratification where the people who can do more of let's say the intense thinking maybe in the short term that produces more value and then their career track has a higher acceleration and now you've unexpectedly concentrated jerks at the head of an organization right these type of this happens in academia all the time for example there's other issues right there's huge benefits I document in this book of being able to actually do the sort of minimalist process on your your life on your devices outside of work just huge benefits to in terms of health and well-being as well as performance in the workplace once you actually get back to work but to actually do this process of minimizing to actually go through one of these type of declutter processes takes a lot of spare time and emotional energy not everyone has it again you're going to create sort of further stratifications the sort of attention elite who can take care of their minds and reap these benefits and then then other people who can so this is something that's come up a lot the road which I think is interesting is that whenever you start selecting for new skills or behaviors that suddenly give a lot of benefits it often brings unexpected stratifications it's something we have to grapple with another thing I've noticed talking about these books is that the idea that often surprises people the most especially when talking about digital minimalism is that agree to which the behavior of looking at your phone all the time especially outside of a work context so unrelated to work but just this this behavior I always have my phone out I'm always looking at things social media news what's going on the degree to which that is actually quite recent and contrived we think of this as being somehow fundamental to the technology of course if you invent something like a smartphone ubiquitous wireless internet this is what we're gonna do we're gonna use it all the time you look at it all the time but that was not in the original plan that's not the original vision for the iPhone for example that's not how people were using the iPhone in 2007 or 2008 or 2009 it's not how people used to use social media which was much more static you would post your friends would post you would occasionally check your friends to see if they had updated their post it's not something you looked at that often so where did this come from where this came from was actually the social media companies in particular Facebook took to lead here when it came time for them to start thinking about their IPO they had to think how are we gonna get the revenue numbers up to where we need it we have to shift out of user acquisition to revenue phase our investors want their hundred X returned how do we get the revenue numbers up and they effectively re-engineered the social media experience so that it was no longer about I post you post I see if you've updated your post no longer about that and it instead became about social approval indicators coming at you an intermittent stream all day long but now when you tap on the app it's not to see if your roommate's friends relationships tab has changed its how many likes that I get since the last time that I touched it don't have any comments on these photos are things being favorited they might week get retweeted so these dynamics of indicators about you indicators that people are thinking about you are proving about you this was added to the services later in the game is what they realize is if they can keep that coming at you and they can keep it intermittent so sometimes when I hit this app oh this thing I posted didn't get much attention sometimes it gets a lot irresistible through the brain and now you have to go back to this again and again and again and the result of that is they got a massive increase in the amount of time that people spent looking at social media so the social media companies essentially retrained us into this constant companion model of you always have to look at your phone it wasn't natural it wasn't fundamental to the technology it was a business plan we'll execute it so when I've been down the road talking about it this is something that often surprises people because they they remember once you start talking about oh you're right that's not how I use this in 2008 the final observation I'll make what have I learned on the road speaking about especially this book most recently journalists hate Twitter in case you're wondering I've spent a lot of time sort of what the mics off in between segments with a lot of different TV and radio journalists and this is something I consistently hear journalists hate Twitter they hate the fact that they have to use it as much as they need to they feel like it's ruining their mind and ruining their lives and they don't seem to realize that for Twitter they absolutely need the journalists to use it that's the core of the value proposition of Twitter you have to have news makers on there you have to have real news being broken and so I don't think the journalists recognize how much leverage they actually probably have over Jack Dorsey and company because they feel trapped and and Twitter feels trapped that they need them so anyway it's interesting aside if you're wondering about all these journalists tweeting all the time they're not happy about discovered ok so that's that's the spiel about what I've been writing recently why I've been writing some things I've noticed about it I think this covers a lot of territory that's probably relevant to the discussions that are happening sort of here at Morgan Lewis and and around the sector in general so at this point I am happy to shift the questions yeah I believe we're gonna do a little moderator Q&A yep all right all right so we're gonna ask a couple questions and then then we'll think Cal and turn to the audience for some questions so so something that you talked about tonight and then also in your book deep work was about focused concentration and that's actually what brought you to the attention of us here at Morgan Louis so tonight's event sponsored by ml women and when we first looked at your book deep work you talked about multitasking and how that could be detrimental we started thinking about how that breaks out along gender lines and then you were talking about how there are the people that could be you know nicer more receptive more open to you know coaching conversations or maybe there's the the jerks who say go away I'm focusing and then it creates this differential so I'd like to hear from you about how you see these things breaking out along gender lines because you know advancing women in the profession and making sure that there are equal balanced genders in roles of importance in a firm and a partnership role is an important thing to us and so as you're looking at you know how this shakes out how do you see this working from a gender perspective yeah it's a good question with with a lot of aspects so that the brief technical background to this effect of multitasking being bad is I mean essentially at some point in the early 2000s we all agreed that pure multitasking was bad so we don't do the thing anymore where we try to write while talking on the phone well have another app open and we heard the research that oh you're really just switching really quickly between them and you're not really doing any of these things very well so so people stopped the multitasking for the most part and they thought they were single tasking because they were primarily doing one thing at a time right so you have Microsoft Word open you're writing the brief you feel like that's all you're doing except for what we have today are these quick checks which is well every 10 or 15 minutes let me just check the email real fast I don't have it open at the same time I turned off my notifications I'm on top of it but I got check let me just look at the phone real quick right so it feels like we're single tasking but these quick checks it turns out have a major psychological consequence on cognitive performance because when you turn your attention briefly to something else so you turn your attention briefly let's say to an email inbox even maybe just for a minute and then you turn your attention back to the brief you're writing there's a red do left from that swish psychologists call it a tension residue and that can significantly reduce your cognitive performance for a non-trivial amount of time going forward and so most people end up then doing another quick check before that attention residue even wears off and then another quick check and then we put ourselves into a sort of self-imposed state of reduced cognitive performance which is a big deal especially in let's say law where actually the Epsilon's and cognitive performance make a real difference in the product that you're offering okay so that's the background so then what this sets up is a situation in which if you're better - more able to either resist those quick checks but also resist the obligations to generate the necessity that keep up with the email threads you now have a sort of non intrinsic cognitive advantage in other words you're able to think harder and produce better content not because your brain is better trained or it's naturally smarter but because you're avoiding the artificial down-regulation that you get from doing the constant checks and so what we then see is this unexpected side effect where you know if you're more likely to take on more responsibilities if you're more conscientious about responding to people or making sure people have what you need that translates into now I'm doing more quick checks this translates into I'm gonna have this sort of reduced college performance which means it might take longer to complete the same thing for example or maybe the quality level what I produce is a little bit below what I could produce and so now we have to worry about aspects like gendered aspects maneet rate right I mean anywhere we see that there's something that might select for more conscientiousness we're gonna have this unintentional side effect of cognitive work might be take longer or be reduced now there's some traits that it's just let's say you know height in basketball or something we're just being tall is central to being good at basketball and so tall people are gonna be better at basketball but this is not an intrinsic trait this is an accidental side effect the reason why someone who's a jerk is able to produce more is because the structure of the workplace sort of accidentally rewards being a jerk and so if you know and I don't know the research on it but if it's the case that you know men are more likely to be jerks and I think it's a hypothesis that probably has some anecdotal anecdotal backing now that we've changed this world of technology has created this unintentional consequence so the introduction of the ability to do these quick checks has now created without our intention or without us intending to create as created this sort of unneeded and unintentional niceness tax these type of things can actually magnify stratification or inequities over time and so it was very interesting when you brought that point up I get asked about this all the time I get in trouble a lot and this is I take full responsibility for this there's really not that many women for example in deep work and I get asked about this a lot you probably need to fix that for your next book yeah well digital minimalism I think you'll notice is more than 50% because I got this message a lot and it's a very fair criticism and you know there's a couple reasons for it one is there's there's a lot of historical examples so if you go back you know historically our society really did not give women a lot of chances to be 300 years ago to be let's say someone who's participate in a lot of concentrated thinking so that's part of it part of it is just you know I'm a guy so when I was grabbing people from my network to be in the book I just know more guys part of it is I just didn't realize right it didn't catch my attention every female reader read the book immediately recognized I didn't recognize so there's a but maybe it's also maybe it's a reflection of some of the contemporary examples that we're already maybe there's some consequences so anyways I don't have specific data on that particular effect but those type of effects are the things we have to be thinking about so as a women you know obviously thinking about multitasking and something that we sometimes pride ourselves in how can we women but even men who get caught up in this you know multitasking or you know quick checks how can we use the guidelines and digital minimalism or your framework to really take the step back and get focused so are there some tips and techniques I know that you said that there's some approaches that you have you know written about so yeah so so how do we deal with the quick Chek problem I think is a really is a real good question right and so there's there's individual responses and then there are systemic response that's right and so deep work in some sense gets into the individual responses and the new book I'm working on is thinking about some of the systemic responses so what can you do as an individual if you can't actually change let's say the culture of your work but you want to reduce the impact let's say quick checks on email or so what can we do about it well so some of the things I talk about in deep work is actually scheduling the time when you're doing the concentrated work so this is something that you treat and protect like any other meeting or appointment on your calendar we have I think infrastructure in place for recognizing meetings and appointments our time when you can't be reached and it's socially acceptable so that's something I see I also see a lot of sort of ritualization or scheduling philosophies around deep work so this is this is common among people that are thinking it was like high performance concentrators is that they have certain times they do their deep work they keep it regular they have rituals they do surrounding the deep work sessions and so their mind can very quickly shift into that mode you know now I'm doing deep work they also change their email habits so what they try to do is systematize anything that can be systematized so instead of letting things unfold as an unstructured back and forth conversation they're more likely to say ok here's the project at hand that's maybe going to require a lot of things to go back and forth let's put a little bit more thought upfront about how we're going to interact how we're going to exchange information so that we don't have to have this ongoing conversation because ongoing conversation requires that you constantly check to see ok it's now my turn to respond now it's their time to respond so you see a lot of system systemization on the system-wide levels by system-wide I mean how we actually run our organizations they're the innovations I think are in the early stages but where we're going to see a lot of work so I I think on the system-wide level we're trying to see moves away from this notion that we work everything out with unstructured ongoing conversation and towards a much more let's say transport and structured way of actually moving around information and responsibilities and so a place where you see a lot of these type of innovations right now it's actually a software development because software development is cognitive programming let's say like law is depends on a lot of deep concentration but it's also really close to manufacturing because we have this notion of a product it's being produced so they're pulling a lot of interesting ideas in from the manufacturing sector so we see something happening in the software development space for example is to rise of agile methodologies where in essence what they're doing is taking obligations and tasks and project statuses out of people's inboxes so it's not just the collective work being done exist sort of scattered among a lot of different inboxes as messages and they're trying to make it clear and transparent they use these physical boards where who's working on what is actually up there and what the status is and they synchronize the communication teams at certain times during the day they do the meetings they're often standing so that no one will pontificate too long they get there they synchronize who needs what from who who's working on what you need this at this time they update the board and they go back to work right so there's these innovations that are happening at the system's level too that keep us away from just doing the sort of constant unstructured conversation and so ultimately I think as long as the workflows are built around we just talk in an unstructured way to figure things out it's going to be hard to completely eliminate the impact of quick checks but there's things we can do as individuals to try to push those away or control them and I think ultimately we can change the way we run our organization so that having to do this and that all the time becomes sort of something that's no longer at the core of what we do something that you are talking about about spending time focused you know blocking off time on your calendar in digital minimalism you spend some time talking about solitude and the value of solitude and you point to Abraham Lincoln or Raymond Catledge who's a was a potential little tapped to be Supreme Court nominee to replace Kennedy in 2016 and so they you spend some time talking about their approaches to solitude how how does that play into the legal profession how do we utilize that sort of approach and remember we are not ever gonna give up our phones I mean when you think about our clients and for a lot of us it's not really about you know checking social media to see the likes it's to make sure that if we need to be reached we can be reached at any point so that you know if there's an emergency there our clients know that we're here so how do we look for ways to work in solitude yes so there's there's really two different things going on here so we have what Abraham Lincoln was doing we have what Ray Catholic was doing and so what Ray Catholic does and you start from what I understand from the lawyers I've talked to who have sat before his bar part of what they respect about him is that he still gets deep involved in the drafts of opinions decisions for example instead of having clerks that's the word right at the core of how he works as he has this barn on this property on his property near I guess he lives near Ann Arbor Michigan that's near the the court where he works he has this barn that has no internet and so when he needs to do hard legal thinking he goes to this barn and the way he describes it is when I'm in that barn my IQ goes up by 20 points but it's actually relative because of what's happening is by going to the barn he's avoiding the drop of 20 points you get from having the the constant attention switching so this is something common you see is finding we could call it like professional solitude so a place to go when you're working on something that's particularly cognitively demanding that is physically devoid of the distractions and that allows you to do a sort of hyper focus to produce a lot of work what Lincoln was doing as well which I think is important it was finding time away from the inputs time away from work so that he could spend more time with his own thoughts let his mind not just recharge but generate sort of new insights and sort of creative insights and so Lincoln used to leave the White House in the evening and go to the old soldiers home which still stands is right now outside a Petworth but at the time this was sort of the countryside outside of DC and he would go there to get away from the Krum of the height at the White House and all the noise he could be there it was kind of quiet it was up in the heights and he would go there a lot he spent a lot of time up there even though it was dangerous right I mean he was shot at more than once by Confederate sharpshooters on the horse ride from the White House up to the old soldiers home but he went there because he needed to get away from the busyness to have time alone with his own thoughts and so if you go there today and talk let's say with the executive director of the nonprofit that maintains the house on the site which I did and working on the book she talks about this is where she grappled with the hard moral questions of the Civil War it's where he grappled with the questions of what to do with the Emancipation Proclamation it's probably where he grappled with what ended up being the text of the Gettysburg Address right so it was a place that he could go to be away from constant quick checks and be alone with his own thoughts and so one of the things I talk about digital minimalism as we all need that we all need regular time free from input from other minds which was this was actually a catholics definition so i mean of course he made it very structured as opposed to poetic but he said solitude is freedom from input from other minds that we need it and because when we get this freedom from input of other minds not only can we recharge but swear we have insights that are professional so we have personal insights it's where we develop in our character have have an epiphany about what's important or not important in our life and having access to this all the time one of the the unintentional consequences of that is that it made it possible for the first time in human history to banish all solitude from your life and it's causing effects and it's causing anxiety and it's causing a sort of a stunting of development and creative insight so solitude is something that we have to think about is a very important almost like vitamin that we need regular doses of both the professional and personal context the last question I'm gonna ask and I wrap up with rock paper scissors so I'm gonna challenge you to that no actually no I'm just gonna ask you to talk a little bit about rock paper scissors because in your book you talk about how there is actually which I did not know this a rock paper scissors championship and it actually gets aired on ESPN so must be a 9 ok yeah but I liked as I read this I liked what you had to say about the championship rock-paper-scissor player because I really think that that is it really could embody the champion lawyer at Morgan Louis you said a strong player integrates a rich stream of information about their opponent's body language and recent plays to help approximate their opponent's mental state and therefore make a guess about the next play so it struck me that if that comes up in everything that we do even if we are not a lawyer that has an opponent even if we're not a lawyer who is doing a deal who we're a lawyer that is sitting before a client thinking about how we can best serve them how we can have them hire us we're working with teammates to figure out how we can bring our ideas together so having that reading information about body language understanding their mental state and making a guess about what somebody's next play is it's very important but you say that our use of technology may erode this ability and so I would like you to just end with talking about how that happens and what we can do to make sure that it doesn't yeah well I mean this was this really interesting sort of random observation that there used to be these professional rock-paper-scissor leagues and the same people would do well consistently which if you think about it it doesn't really make sense because you think about rock-paper-scissor it should be random right I mean if you're if you're doing it well it should be random you have a 1 & 2 chance of winning if they're also being random it should essentially be like a coin flipping championship except you look at the standings and they used to have standings the same people would be near the top so they were consistently winning which is kind of crazy so I found video of these matches and they actually ESPN would put a boxing ring they made an actual boxing ring and then they had a podium in the middle and the two guys would come in and they'd be dressed like me right so they'd be in like khakis or something like they would climb over the ropes and they would come in there to this podium and they had like round signs and they would play rock-paper-scissors it was crazy but some people were really really good at it and they could consistently win and so if you look into it it's because they are honing this capability that we all have which is very uniquely human which is the incredibly powerful social processing computers that we have in our brains we're very very good at this very delicate act of taking in an incredibly rich stream of information about people and so body language tone of voice micro movements in facial muscles we do something called limbic consonants where we actually think about how you're talking and then we start to match some of the rhythm and the pacing of what you're talking to build a connection stronger we have this whole center of our brain that does what's called mentalizing which is I'm now going to build in my brain a mental model of you so that in my brain I can actually sort of test your reaction to different things I might say so that I know what's probably going to be the right thing to say our brains do this type of thing that's what rock-paper-scissor players are playing with they're actually mentalizing their opponent and trying to figure out what are they going to do next and what are they going to think I'm gonna do next then what am I going to do next on top of that what they actually do is like in that clip I watched what happened is is if I remember it right the one guy came in and he said alright let's roll and then they they did the throw down and what the commentator is told later was that the reason he said let's roll for example was to implicitly plant the idea of a rock the opponent's mind right because that's gonna fire up that semantic network and now he's slightly biased maybe towards playing the rock except for he also knew that the other player would probably figure out that play so if the other player figures out that play he's gonna be expecting me to do paper so he's gonna do scissors but then the original player was figuring that out so the guy who said let's roll played a rock and crushed the scissors of the other guy that's rock paper scissors at that level there they're trying to figure out what what everyone's going to do so how does this come back to phone well I have an app idea for you rock paper scissors ah you it randomizes your choice you'll have to worry about it so why did that care well it came up because I was talking to psychologists to try to understand why for example we are finding these studies that said increased social media use was making people more lonely seem paradoxical social media is social and if I'm spending more time connecting people if I'm finding new ways to connect to people adding more you know this should make me more social what seems to be going on is that this brain that has involved an ancestral environment where it knows nothing about text and there's nothing about emojis and there's nothing about like icons but knows everything about a person in front of me in this incredibly rich stream of information and this sort of subtle dance we do back and forth to interact and there's everything about that when you replace this with comments on like a Facebook post or an Instagram post or heading light or just sending a text message not a fair trade so this complex social computer in our brain doesn't think about this as socializing at all and so when people are doing this all day there's maybe the frontal cortex is saying I'm so social I mean look at snapchat streaker there's a teenage thing but I can look at my snapchat streak it's been 15 days or look at how many people I've been texting or I've been on Instagram a lot and I've been commenting on a lot of things you say I must be social so why do I feel lonely it's because the deeper evolutionary part of our brain that the part that the the RPS players really polish and make really high-performance thinks you haven't talked to anyone at all it's doing that more lonely and you end up feeling more disconnected and so we have this tension and it's particularly pronounced in very young people so very young people people who enter their early adolescence with full access to social media and smartphones are essentially missing this really difficult training camp period you're learning how to do all these things you're trying to learn how to read social dynamics where you learn about you know can I go to this party what's my social standing let me read the faces in the room that awkward conversations you know all of this is like boot camp for trying to get all these systems up and running and so that you're very good at doing the subtle dance which is sort of analog human interaction and so we're seeing this issue with young people in particular that they missed that training and then they go out into the workplace and have a very hard time with something like sitting down and getting a client on the phone or sitting down with the boss and having a face-to-face conversation because there's a bit of training that's lost and even those of us who have had this training it can atrophy you know we do this too much we become more unhappy we become more lonely maybe begin to lose these sort of subtle skills is probably crucial in law to read what's the subtle thing going on when you no longer go out with your friends and try to say hey like I think Joe I can see this the way he's kind of looking maybe he's secretly upset about me you take that out of life start to lose that ability and so this this interesting trend that's going on here that psychologists have really been trying to hone in on which is our digital existence is not sort of interchangeable version of our physical existence you can't just seamlessly move back and forth or mix and match in two ways that the early cyber utopians thought we could do or would doesn't matter whether it's on here and here it's all the kind of the same so this just opens up options there are real differences and what we do in person is crucial to our happiness it's also crucial to a lot of professional fields and it's very different than what we do on here and so we should be very wary about taking this and starting to mess with it using apps that you know a 19 year old thought up in a dorm room right because what we do here is millions of years in the making and it's a very subtle system and it's something that our brains care a lot about social dynamics and so when you start to put some sand into that system say well why don't we just kind of replace some of that with clicking on a thumb or like a face that's making some sort of weird expression and it shows up in the text message we shouldn't be surprised if that starts to cause some problems it's just too complicated of a machinery for us to be somewhat lied about in terms of replacing it with with online or digital interactions and so that's the long path I drew that was invented so that I could watch a lot of rock-paper-scissors videos and have it seem productive thank you so much for sharing this with us we have really enjoyed hearing from you tonight we're really looking forward to your next book hopefully you'll make some time to come see us when it comes out so thank you very much you

Channel: Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP

Views: 21,884

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Id: EqAayvCxo2Q

Length: 48min 30sec (2910 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019