Srini Rao: Cal welcome back to the unmistakable creative for what probably is the fourth or fifth

Cal Newport: time. Yeah. Yes. It's always glad to be back. I get lonely when too much time goes by without having a chance to chat with you. And maybe that's why I write books.

Srini Rao: You can talk to me. That's great because I love your books.

Srini Rao: I'm always happy when you have a new one and I'm always like, oh, when's the next one coming out. So you have a new book out called a world without email, all of which we will get into. But as from previous experience, we're not going to start by talking about that. And I was thinking about where to start with this one, because I've asked you things about your childhood.

Srini Rao: I'd asked you about your parents in previous interviews. So I realized there was one area that I hadn't hit. And this is one that I do want to know about. I know part of the answer to this question, but do you have siblings? If so, what birth order were you and what impact did that end up having on what you've ended up doing with

Cal Newport: your life birth order?

Cal Newport: That's interesting. I have three siblings. I have three, so I'm one of four and I'm the second. So I'm not sure. What does that signify is that a natural skepticism of technology? Is that the the cliche of two out of four? So yeah, I had a whole mess of siblings, I would say, I guess that's one way of thinking about it.

Cal Newport: So what should I be thinking about here? I don't know. So you're wondering if that might've affected being in the middle, basically. What's the.

Srini Rao: There's both. Like looking at what you pick up from older siblings. I think that, to me, the contrast having had only one where I'm the older, when I look at what my parents taught her versus what they taught me.

Srini Rao: It evolved partially because, they were immigrants and I was the experiment in which they were like, we don't know what the hell we're doing in a new country. And she was the one who benefited from all their screw ups on me. So I always wonder about, particularly if you're not the oldest, like what kinds of lessons your parents taught each of you and, how is it the, how the trajectories of your lives

Cal Newport: differed?

Cal Newport: I think one thing for sure, that was probably important is because I had a bunch of siblings and I was relatively low maintenance. So I. I didn't generate acute concerns that needed parental attention. So there's a lot of busy-ness going on of just trying to keep up with my various siblings and various things they needed or various issues they were having.

Cal Newport: And as a result, I had a ton of autonomy, which probably was pretty influential. So I did not have a setup where maybe if you're an only child or there's a helicopter parent what are you working on? What are your grades? What are you? I was basically a free agent. I think they, they vaguely they vaguely knew my grades, but not really.

Cal Newport: There's a couple basic rules. Like you have to do a sport and you have to do an instrument so that you learn a little discipline, but that was basically it by the time I was 16, I had started, my own company was traveling around, had bank accounts, was doing five figure contracts with companies. And they all just vaguely knew what was going on because, I wasn't, I was low maintenance and there's a lot of other things demanding their attention.

Cal Newport: That sense of a time. Which I felt really strongly, growing up as a teenager, that probably it was, I'm going to guess that's very positive. Like I probably explains why, when I get to college, pretty soon I get a book deal or I become, the editor of the humor magazine at the college or that I, cause it just had the sense of, I felt very autonomous.

Cal Newport: I can figure things out. I can be independent. And so maybe there's something there, right? Maybe there's maybe my independent streak in my thinking goes back to the autonomy that I was given, growing. Yeah.

Srini Rao: W what about your siblings? Did they have their careers turned out differently than yours?

Srini Rao: Because the thing that strikes me, that's so funny about this is that, they didn't ask you about your grades or any of this stuff. Yet. I know this from having read your books, you went to MIT, you don't get into MIT by having lousy grades and, Indian parents, that's all they ask you about is your grades mainly that they don't ask about the grades.

Srini Rao: They don't put your report cards on refrigerators when you get straight is all that your only question is, why didn't you get straight A's when you don't.

Cal Newport: Yeah the, I should say, okay, this isn't, this is not really watering it down. I went to MIT for grad school and with the Dartmouth for undergrad.

Cal Newport: But I, my memory is, a couple of things there, and then I'll talk about my siblings, but my memory there is that at some point in early junior high, I figured it out. Colleges start looking at your grades, starting at whatever it was like freshman year or something. Then they're not interested in your grades before high score or whatever it was.

Cal Newport: I learned that and such as very strategically like great. I don't have to think too much about this until I get to high school. And so I had more erratic grades in junior high, I think that my parents had been closely following they might've been worried about it. There could have been some pressure there, but there's a lot going on and I knew it didn't matter.

Cal Newport: And in some sense, like that record wouldn't be captured. I think also I had done well, and this is really dredging up memories. I th you know, we did, we took SATs there's this program where you like, take the sat. I remember that. Yeah. And I had an in middle school as like a, it wasn't recorded anywhere, but I had done well on that.

Cal Newport: And there was those like CTY programs. I don't know if you know about those that Johns Hopkins ran. So I was invited. So they assumed maybe you're smart and, but, all so when I got to high school, I was like, okay, now grades start to matter. And I do think I tried harder, but I was pretty lazy.

Cal Newport: So yeah, it's an interesting, I was like relatively lazy. I didn't take a killer load, but a pretty hard load, but I was a smart guy and I could do pretty well, but again, I'm coming from a public high school where it's, maybe that's in four kids to an Ivy league school in any given year in, that'd be a big deal.

Cal Newport: So there wasn't this huge pressure there. And but I think I was also just interesting. I ran a business and played in a rock band. It was very well read and I think I just came across as an interesting person to the applications. I had good grades, but not the best good sat scores.

Cal Newport: I think. I don't know. Anyways, I'm just, I'm, don't know why I'm dragging this up in this curious, but simply do that to

Srini Rao: people. So don't worry. I just want to know these things cause I'm curious about them.

Cal Newport: I became a serious student at college. That's the whole story behind how to become a straight a student is I went to college and did okay.

Cal Newport: My freshman year. And then I got real serious about, I want better grades. And I that's when I went through this whole, let me experiment with study habits and note-taking, and then transformed into a very good student. So starting the fall of my sophomore year, I became a forest student for the rest of my college experience and graduated Dartmouth with a 3 9, 5, and was ranked like number seven out of a thousand students in the class that all happened in college.

Cal Newport: Like at some point I realized, wait, I'm paying a lot of loans to be here. Okay. I want to get more serious about it, but that, that came a little later. But my siblings are all very smart. Two of them went to the Naval academy and the new school one was on subs and one was working the reactors of aircraft carriers.

Cal Newport: And my brother on subs is now worked for the nuclear regulatory commission, head safety inspector at a nuclear power plant. My sister works at Booz Allen and my other sister came. So it's it's a something going on there. So it's a sharp group of kids, I'd say. Yeah.

Srini Rao: One question about this you become Cal Newport, the author, the guy who writes the book about how to be a straight a student, I'm wondering like your younger siblings, did they take that advice to heart and apply it themselves?

Cal Newport: Oh yeah. I, yes. To some degree. We're closing, we're close in age. So by the time I was writing those books and I think my youngest, I used to talk to my youngest sister. Because obviously my older brother was out of school by the time I wrote those and my younger sister.

Cal Newport: Yeah. I definitely remember my youngest sister, especially when she was in med school. We would talk a lot about it. And I think, during college, a lot of people have a hard relationship with this type of advice sometimes because it's not really what college is about for everyone, but when you get to more professional schools, Things are more transactional, I'm in medical school to learn this because I want to get this residency because I want this job.

Cal Newport: So I do remember that with my youngest sister. I don't think I talked to her much when she was in college about how to study, but when she was in med school, she's yeah, let's do it. Let's just get, does it get tactics? Let's get strategies, let's get after it because it definitely a mindset.

Cal Newport: When you move on to a more professional school and environment, it's much more transactional. I think that makes a

Srini Rao: perfect segue to talking about one thing that I knew, that I will never leave a conversation with you without asking you about it. And that is the state of education today, particularly in light of a pandemic, and I do the fact that we started with college and the fact that you became a great student.

Srini Rao: Cause I think that one thing that I saw, particularly at a place like Berkeley, was that everybody who comes there is basically, at the Heights of their high school class, they're all valedictorians. We think we're really. And then you get there and everybody's a thousand times smarter than you are.

Srini Rao: For me, it was like, the worst grades imaginable. I went from being a straight a student to high school in high school to graduating with a C minus average. And I think part of it was, I never learned how to study, but why is it that you don't think people actually learn this like to actually navigate the dynamics of calls?

Srini Rao: Like what causes that sort of person who basically is, a genius in high school to become an idiot in college? Not that I was a genius in high school or an idiot in college, but I think it might've been if it wasn't outliers, it was the other book, Malcolm David Goliath that, Gladwell wrote.

Srini Rao: We actually talked about a girl who opted to go to brown versus another girl who went to a lesser known school and she thrived. Whereas the girl who had gone to brown, who was this amazing student in high school actually, was very average in college. So why does that happen? One and then two, you're a college professor.

Srini Rao: Who has been teaching in the midst of a pandemic. So what does all of this revealed to you and enter the system at large about what the future of this is going to look like?

Cal Newport: Asked you the question of why students are so bad at being students. I think there's definitely a sort of social developmental aspect of people's college experience that can take precedence over a more professionalized approach.

Cal Newport: And what I'm basing this off of is looking at my book on how to study, because the big audiences for my, how to become a straight a student book are non-traditional students, people who are coming back later in life. I've done a lot of work over the time years with GI bill vets returning and going to school on the GI bill first-generation students who are maybe working at the same time,,people in those contexts, which is different than the standard us path of your 18.

Cal Newport: And you're going to college right after high school. People are coming at it later in life after, whatever serving overseas or working at the same time or having families. They're like, let's get the, let's get to work. So they love it. Give me advice, give me strategies.

Cal Newport: It's the job, actually, this is easier than most jobs I've had before. And they do really well. They do really well. But when you get students that are okay, yeah, of course I'm going to college and I'm 18 and I'm going off to Berkeley after, finishing my high school. There's a lot of other factors at play in that experience is what I've come to, what I've come to learn and like I was talking with my sister, there's a lot of other factors at play.

Cal Newport: You're trying to discover yourself. You're trying to find yourself as an adult. You're trying to find separation from your identity that you had based on your nuclear family household. You care a lot about presentation of self and construction of self, and there's a real concern.

Cal Newport: Professionalization of your habits is will aid that might reflect poorly on you. It might make you seem nerdish, or it's just not at the top of your mind, it's a really interesting dynamic. But I've noticed that a lot, I've noticed that a lot is that students are bad at being students are happy being bad at it.

Cal Newport: So I think that's for sure. And then what's the pandemic doing? I'm still not sure. I, my, what I leaned back on is this notion that we often, and I heard someone say this, so my apologies that I'm not citing the right person, am I heard someone say this earlier in the pandemic, we often overestimate, we overestimate forces a temporary disruption and underestimate the power of inertia.

Cal Newport: And I don't know that one year of highly disruptive higher education, I don't think it's enough to make a giant change. That's my new working hypothesis. I think everyone is just riding off the year as a sufferer year because everything and and actually most schools most schools are are open, are open.

Cal Newport: It depends like where you are. A lot of this is politically based like the regional and political, like how open your school is, or not open much more so than let's say like viral background, but my census there's hundreds and hundreds of years of this model of rough model of education of going to these schools and being there in person and this and that the pandemic is probably not enough to cause a severe rupture in the model.

Cal Newport: So it may see it, a lot of things that grow into really interesting metaphorical truth. Yeah. I guess the,

Srini Rao: the thing that struck me in particular, I'm curious what your perspective is on this as a professor and even my dad is dealing with the same things, he's teaching his classes via zoom.

Srini Rao: And I think the thing that struck me most was when people at Harvard were like, what the hell we're going to pay $50,000 a year, the same tuition to watch somebody, give this lecture on zoom that I could watch for free Encore, Sarah I'm like, how does that, the, when you think, when you see that, does it make you angry?

Srini Rao: You're a professor in the systems that, actually makes this happen in the same time your salary is dependent on those students, isn't it?

Cal Newport: Yeah. Yeah. Especially at a school like Georgetown, which is heavily tuition dependent. Yeah. Yeah, no, I look, there's a long list of things that was very annoying about this year, which has given the university's cover.

Cal Newport: So let's say there had in a counterfactual. There've been some sort of disruption that only affected universities. I think that there would have been more of an impetus for wait a second, what's going on here with the model. But I think that anger, which kind of makes sense wait a second, I'm watching this video on zoom that was prerecorded.

Cal Newport: And MIT has the same class being taught for you can download the video from there. And so why am I watching Cal instead of Eric domain teach algorithms or something like that? I think it was somewhat obfuscated by the fact that every other aspect of people's lives had similar similar frustrations going on.

Cal Newport: And so it might that might've off, you skated some of the disruption. I think it also emphasized the value students place on being mean on campus, being around each other, the activities, the physical location of it. The whole, I really picked this up for my students very strongly. A couple of months was okay.

Cal Newport: By the time we got to the fall, they were fraying. And the thing they were afraid is they had to get out of those houses. They could, they be back in their parents' house to be back in their old bedroom. It felt so restrictive. I think that's where I was starting to see a lot of, mental health impacts.

Cal Newport: And so that is one lesson I learned is that there's this huge value that these 19 year olds and 20 year olds have, if they're so lucky to have this opportunity to say, look, I'm on a 300 year old camp or 200 year old campus with old stone buildings. And we live in the dorm and we have, and we go to pep rallies for the basketball team and those type of things.

Cal Newport: I think we're are playing a really important role in this sort of this, the social development of a lot of these young kids. So that's where I saw the frustrations, the zoom stuff, I think they could you're right. Oh yeah. It's not great. But it was being home and that's what was starting to frame up.

Srini Rao: I think that makes a perfect segue to talking briefly about sort of social media and the role of social media in the pandemic. And, as I was telling you, before we hit record, I think it was probably January where I, had probably, I started at night. I was like on a 90 plus day hiatus, almost no activity on Facebook.

Srini Rao: And then Indian matchmaking came out and my social feed was a hell of a lot more interesting all of a sudden because it wasn't, as I said, just attention, but attention from women and as a single guy, I'm like, oh, this is something that I want to pay attention to. And to be very candid with you, it became a really big distraction for about six weeks.

Srini Rao: And it took a while to get back to it. But that being said, and for a lot of people, this has been their lifeline, during a pandemic, this has been their way to connect with other people. And so as somebody who has been a vocal critic of social media, from deep work up until now what have you discovered about, its role in the midst of a situation where we're all stuck?

Srini Rao: Okay. At home?

Cal Newport: I think the pandemic helped underscore and support the dualistic nature of technology that I talked about in digital minimalism, where I use a chariot driver metaphor from Play-Doh and talked about how you have the ignoble Steed that sort of represents your base instincts.

Cal Newport: And then you have the noble Steed that represents what's good. And the soul is like the chariot driver. That's trying to control these two things. And when it comes to using technology, when deployed intentionally, you can empower the noble Steed when used casually, it super powers, the ignoble Steed, and everything goes off a course.

Cal Newport: And I think people saw this dichotomy very clearly, especially during depending where you live at the strong lockdown phases of the pandemic, because on the one hand there's tools that the social internet. That we're really empowering the noble Steve, the ability to talk with family, the ability to talk with friends, the ability to use video.

Cal Newport: You can actually see the face of family members that you weren't able to see in person, maybe the leveraging of WhatsApp or texting so that you could maybe have more conversation with your family than you might normally. And it would've been very isolating without these technologies. In fact, we probably wouldn't have been able to even do shelter in place orders without these technologies, because it just wouldn't have worked, society would not have function on the other hand, social media, if we're going to get real narrow, let's talk about the giant attention monopoly platforms, Twitter Tech-Talk Instagram for a lot of people. These were a massive negative during the pandemic, especially Twitter. A lot of people fell into a doom scrolling habit.

Cal Newport: I would say Twitter became a giant source of stress and anxiety and anger for a lot of people. You take a pan day. Yeah, mix it up with a contentious presidential election. And you're just on this thing, doom scrolling, and it was just making people angry and it was making people anxious and it was causing, and I think it had a lot of real ramifications for people's mental health.

Cal Newport: I think it probably had around vacations on our response to the pandemic. And so that's, I think that's a perfect example of that dichotomous nature of technology. Say, look, I can deploy some of these tools to connect to people I care about in a way that would be physically hard. Fantastic. But I can also get sucked into YouTube rabbit holes that where I end up as a, QA on chief Dan or doom scrolling up and end up in a fetal position under my desk, that was terrible for people.

Cal Newport: And so I think it just validated that the sort of the nuance of the hypothesis of that. Let

Srini Rao: me, go a little deeper on, on this idea of fame, because the reason I brought up Indian matchmaking in general, with you was, and I thought about emailing you the entire time this was happening saying, Hey, I'm having to deal with a level of attention.

Srini Rao: That's unlike anything that I've dealt with before. And, I get it on the one hand it's flattering on another. It's annoying because I quit all this stuff. You wrote this piece about Bryce Harper, the baseball player, and I very distinctly remember that. When you're dealing with something like this, and I am nowhere near, as famous as a baseball player with a $430 million contract, but what is it that you see play out there that makes that particularly effective or, negative, because I remember even you and I were talking about this where you said, NBA players before the night of a game who tweeted actually scored less points if I remember correctly.

Srini Rao: When you navigate that sort of sudden Flood of attention, like what is that doing? And then more importantly, how the hell do you not let it derail

Cal Newport: you? It's a incredibly powerful force that has been, I don't want to say it's not just that it's been supercharged. It's more like it's been democratized, right?

Cal Newport: So the negative impact of sudden celebrity attention is due to the realities of the delivery mechanisms. If you went back 20 years was very narrowly applied to a very small number of people like a really big movie stars, really big sports stars, social media, as essentially democratize the negative aspects of sudden attention to a much wider group of people.

Cal Newport: Because now you have the delivery mechanisms through which people can actually discuss you and give you attention and directly reach you in this sort of infinitely scalable way. And it's a, it's an issue. It's both a benefit and an issue. Obviously being able to democratize celebrity opens up more opportunities because there's lots of different professional endeavors.

Cal Newport: We're having some. Notoriety as is useful, but it also democratizes the negative aspects of celebrity. And I think it's a real issue. And so I talked to a lot of people in professional sports because they're really worried about this, the impact of this on professional sports performance. That's why, I wrote about Bryce Harper.

Cal Newport: He doesn't do basically any of that. He has like a team that posts some stuff occasionally, but he just doesn't care. Especially once the season gets going, you wouldn't see him on there, engaging with his audience and why, because it's an intensely cognitively demanding endeavor to try to hit a 97 mile per hour fastball out of a park.

Cal Newport: And like every X percent distraction back there in the back of your mind is three batting average points and it matters. And it could matter to your team success or to your success. And so you definitely do see that. And I think people are, you experienced, so you tell me you like it, it's weirdly manipulating of your emotions, right?

Cal Newport: Because it's almost irresistible. There's few things more irresistible than someone,is saying something about. Over here, you can't right. You can't not look at it. And then it gives you these highs, but then these killer lows, and then right. You seek the highs to try to offset the lows, but it's like with a drug addiction, the high stop being able to do that.

Cal Newport: And the low start to pick up. Oh, I

Srini Rao: mean I remember for the first week it was just like, holy shit, who are all these people? And on the flip side of that, it was just like, oh, I'm a single guy, and I, there were things that were said about me that weren't that nice.

Srini Rao: And the other person got a lot of negative attention. It was crazy. And, and I remember even one of the other girls, I was talking to her at the end of the week. I'm like, this is insane. And she had a situation where she had 800 followers on Twitter. And by the end of the week, when that show aired, she had 70,000 or a hundred.

Srini Rao: It was madness. And yeah, you're right. It was this addictive thing where you just couldn't stop for a while. It was like, wow, this is nuts. You add layer on top of that, the fact that there are billions of Indians in the world. And then you add to the top of that. Every one of my parents' friends saw it and descended on my parents, like vultures.

Srini Rao: I had a point where I was like, I can't take this. This is insane. So I said, look, you guys want to set me up with anybody. I'm like, this is my cousin. I'm like, she's the filter. She is the gatekeeper. I will not talk to anybody, but her from this point forward. Yeah. And even then it's taken a long time to get back to some semblance of

Cal Newport: normalcy.

Cal Newport: Yeah. Let me ask you about this because I think you're a really great case study about the reality and the myth. I think a lot of people, especially younger people think what I want is that celebrity, like if I had a lot of followers and a lot of people paying attention to me online, everything good will be built on that.

Cal Newport: But that's often not at all what you should see. So let's consider what, you mainly do in your life, right? You have this business you've been building that is successful, but also highly impactful and puts you in close connection with these people that you serve, who are getting a lot out of you, you have investors that you're serving.

Cal Newport: You're that probably think about how much more significant I'm assuming that probably is in your life, but we don't get that model as much. If you're 19. You're like, no, what I want is the on a Netflix. And they get a lot of followers, but yeah, that's going to get you basically a lot of anxiety and like a few highs where we don't hear the alternative model, which is actually, what's going to be better suited for your human nature is built up something important.

Cal Newport: And I think it's impactful. And I liked the people I work with and I think I'm making a difference in the world. And that has none of the anxieties of is some famous person trolling me or getting mad at me or is my likes, am I being racist? I don't know what ratio would mean, but I think it's a bad thing.

Cal Newport: Whatever, am I being a tech talk on a clubhouse or something like that, all that negativity you don't have that when it's, I'm slowly building sometimes call this quiet productivity, I'm slowly building something that matters is deeply.

Srini Rao: I always started like when people would ask me about it, I said, look to me, this is an inflection point.

Srini Rao: I don't want to be known for this. I want to be known for unmistakable creative. I, that to me is far more meaningful than, a brief moment on TV. Yeah.

Cal Newport: And it's not. Yeah. And to be really widely known, I don't know, look, here's some, here's my experience. I'm not at all famous.

Cal Newport: But I guess I'm well known enough that unlike a semi-regularly based spaces, I might be recognized right. Someone on the street. But I don't have any social media. So I, it, to me, that's it's just surprising and foreign. I just have no idea, are people happy about me? Mad about me not thinking about me.

Cal Newport: I'm just really not plugged in to any of that. And I have to say it's like incredibly freeing, because my sense is I'm probably known enough that if I was on social media, it would be a really large cognitive footprint. The emotional footprint of that existence would probably right now be a major sock of mental cycles.

Cal Newport: And there's not very happy right now. It's I don't know. Maybe everyone hates me. Everybody loves me. Everyone's ignoring me idol. No. But not knowing has been, yeah.

Srini Rao: It's funny because your name has come up numerous times on the podcast, when I was talking to NIR Eyal and I think I remember sending you that conversation and he was like, yeah, near her some more optimistic than I am about this.

Srini Rao: And I remember thinking, I'm like, man, I get the two of you together here to battle it out. But that being said, I think that what you just said makes a perfect segue to talking about this entire concept of a world without email. So what prompted your desire to even write a book and like a world of that email sounds like a dream come true at this point.

Cal Newport: Or a fantasy, they're going to, they're going to shelve it in the fantasy section at Barnes and noble. I've actually been working on that book since 2016. So right after deep work, I began laying the groundwork. It took me about four or five years to pull together all the threads. I put it on pause wrote digital minimalism came back to it, kept working on it.

Cal Newport: So it's more of an Opus style book. And basically I wrote deep work came out in 2016. And there's this really urgent follow-up question to me about that book, which is why really is it so hard for us to find time to do deep work? If you remember in that original book, I didn't talk much about the causes.

Cal Newport: I was like, yeah, I've already emailed too much or this or that, but let's just talk about the value of focus and how to train yourself to focus and why it's important. And the feedback was, wait a second. I don't think you realize how impossible it is to do this. And so I really got interested in this question.

Cal Newport: Why is it so hard? Like why are companies so consistently set up in such a way that it's very difficult to actually do the thing that hired you to do, then you use your brain and produce value. And it was a massive story, right? That's what I discovered. I needed five years to write it because there are so many different threads that were wrapped up tightly, that when you pulled on them, there was this huge, magnificent story that explained why do we work this way?

Cal Newport: Why is it so bad? What the future is going to hold? It just seemed really grand. And so this book is deep work opened up that rabbit hole and I fell down that thing for awhile. Wow.

Srini Rao: You open the book by saying that the underlying value of constant electronic communication that defines modern work is never questioned as this would be hopelessly reactionary and nostalgic like pinning foot pining for the last days of horse transport or the romance of candlelight.

Srini Rao: And you're, you make a pretty strong criticism of why email has been actually, detrimental to, to knowledge work and, having read the book, having, spent a lot of time, applying your concepts. I happen to agree with a lot of it, but I think let's start with how we actually got here in the first place.

Srini Rao: Because I know that you talk about the reduction in productivity that email causes, and I think that's obvious to most of us, we're not, unaware of that. But I, part of it is knowing what to do with it, but look, let's just start there with these two concepts of email reduces productivity and email makes us.

Cal Newport: Yeah. I don't think people recognize the degree to which it's reducing productivity. So if you go down into the research, I talk to these researchers, read all the papers, really went deep on what happens when we have to check email all the time and actually that's the right place to start. Do we check email all the time?

Cal Newport: So I gathered all the data we have on that. And the answer is a hundred percent definitively. Yes. And it's been getting more and more with each year. The number I like the site is in this one, very large study. Once every six minutes was how often knowledge workers are checking their email.

Cal Newport: And if you have slack in your company, that becomes shorter, right? So it's constant. That's about as close as you can get the constant, especially when you recognize that number includes things like lunch hours or meetings where maybe you can't be checking your email. So that means you're checking it even much more frequently in the times that you're actually able to write.

Cal Newport: So we check it all the time. It's constant checking the damage of that to our brains and our happiness and our satisfaction is massive. The human brain cannot do that context. When we look at an inbox and we see hundreds of messages, most of which we cannot resolve in the moment, right? These are issues that are being brought to us by other people.

Cal Newport: People we know that we can't solve right now, the question's too big. It's ambiguous. I'm just checking my inbox because I'm in the middle of a conversation, Trini and I are going back and forth about whatever scheduling on podcast. I'm just checking that, but I'm seeing all these other messages.

Cal Newport: And then you turn your attention back to what you were doing. Having exposed yourself to all of these unresolved tasks that are waiting there and connected to people who need things from you and your brain goes haywire because when it sees all these messages, it begins the process of, okay, we have to switch our context.

Cal Newport: We have to begin suppressing these networks and amplifying these networks to get ready, to deal with these new things. And halfway through that process, you bring your attention back to the thing you're writing or the code you're trying to type up or whatever it is. And your brain is now in a cognitive capacity or fee of crossed wires and a boarded context shifts that makes it incredibly hard to.

Cal Newport: It also exhausts us. I think a lot of people have that experience of where they're there. You're checking email a bunch while you're trying to do something. And at some point you just get so fatigued, you just give up and I'm like, I'm just going to stay on my inbox. It's not a failure. Will you literally tired out your mind?

Cal Newport: You tired out your mind with all that context, shifting it, can't do it anymore. And it's done actually trying to do something productive thinking. And then you layer in this other reality that this mode of communication where you pile up messages faster than you can keep up completely conflicts with our deep social wiring and makes us feel very anxious.

Cal Newport: God, there's all these people who need me and I'm not responding to him and it's getting worse and worse every minute that I'm not looking at my inbox. That is a worst case scenario from the perspective of taking these deep social networks deep in our brain and trying to design a way of communicating that is going to get us very upset.

Cal Newport: And so we have this background hum of anxiety, because there's a conflict between this fundamental way of communicating and fundamentally how our brains.

Srini Rao: It's funny you say that because I remember, I think it was like 2014, sometime, March, April, right before planning our event. There was one day where I, and I think this was pretty, this was definitely prior to deep work where I literally must've checked my email a hundred times a day.

Srini Rao: And my anxiety at the end of that day was off the charts. And I think I was waiting for some response from a potential sponsor. And then, years later I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to go snowboard all day. And I've noticed this over and over again. I can literally go a day and a half without looking at my email once and nothing bad happens.

Cal Newport Part 1

Srini Rao: Cal welcome back to the unmistakable creative for what probably is the fourth or fifth

Cal Newport: time. Yeah. Yes. It's always glad to be back. I get lonely when too much time goes by without having a chance to chat with you. And maybe that's why I write books.

Srini Rao: You can talk to me. That's great because I love your books.

Srini Rao: I'm always happy when you have a new one and I'm always like, oh, when's the next one coming out. So you have a new book out called a world without email, all of which we will get into. But as from previous experience, we're not going to start by talking about that. And I was thinking about where to start with this one, because I've asked you things about your childhood.

Srini Rao: I'd asked you about your parents in previous interviews. So I realized there was one area that I hadn't hit. And this is one that I do want to know about. I know part of the answer to this question, but do you have siblings? If so, what birth order were you and what impact did that end up having on what you've ended up doing with

Cal Newport: your life birth order?

Cal Newport: That's interesting. I have three siblings. I have three, so I'm one of four and I'm the second. So I'm not sure. What does that signify is that a natural skepticism of technology? Is that the the cliche of two out of four? So yeah, I had a whole mess of siblings, I would say, I guess that's one way of thinking about it.

Cal Newport: So what should I be thinking about here? I don't know. So you're wondering if that might've affected being in the middle, basically. What's the.

Srini Rao: There's both. Like looking at what you pick up from older siblings. I think that, to me, the contrast having had only one where I'm the older, when I look at what my parents taught her versus what they taught me.

Srini Rao: It evolved partially because, they were immigrants and I was the experiment in which they were like, we don't know what the hell we're doing in a new country. And she was the one who benefited from all their screw ups on me. So I always wonder about, particularly if you're not the oldest, like what kinds of lessons your parents taught each of you and, how is it the, how the trajectories of your lives

Cal Newport: differed?

Cal Newport: I think one thing for sure, that was probably important is because I had a bunch of siblings and I was relatively low maintenance. So I. I didn't generate acute concerns that needed parental attention. So there's a lot of busy-ness going on of just trying to keep up with my various siblings and various things they needed or various issues they were having.

Cal Newport: And as a result, I had a ton of autonomy, which probably was pretty influential. So I did not have a setup where maybe if you're an only child or there's a helicopter parent what are you working on? What are your grades? What are you? I was basically a free agent. I think they, they vaguely they vaguely knew my grades, but not really.

Cal Newport: There's a couple basic rules. Like you have to do a sport and you have to do an instrument so that you learn a little discipline, but that was basically it by the time I was 16, I had started, my own company was traveling around, had bank accounts, was doing five figure contracts with companies. And they all just vaguely knew what was going on because, I wasn't, I was low maintenance and there's a lot of other things demanding their attention.

Cal Newport: That sense of a time. Which I felt really strongly, growing up as a teenager, that probably it was, I'm going to guess that's very positive. Like I probably explains why, when I get to college, pretty soon I get a book deal or I become, the editor of the humor magazine at the college or that I, cause it just had the sense of, I felt very autonomous.

Cal Newport: I can figure things out. I can be independent. And so maybe there's something there, right? Maybe there's maybe my independent streak in my thinking goes back to the autonomy that I was given, growing. Yeah.

Srini Rao: W what about your siblings? Did they have their careers turned out differently than yours?

Srini Rao: Because the thing that strikes me, that's so funny about this is that, they didn't ask you about your grades or any of this stuff. Yet. I know this from having read your books, you went to MIT, you don't get into MIT by having lousy grades and, Indian parents, that's all they ask you about is your grades mainly that they don't ask about the grades.

Srini Rao: They don't put your report cards on refrigerators when you get straight is all that your only question is, why didn't you get straight A's when you don't.

Cal Newport: Yeah the, I should say, okay, this isn't, this is not really watering it down. I went to MIT for grad school and with the Dartmouth for undergrad.

Cal Newport: But I, my memory is, a couple of things there, and then I'll talk about my siblings, but my memory there is that at some point in early junior high, I figured it out. Colleges start looking at your grades, starting at whatever it was like freshman year or something. Then they're not interested in your grades before high score or whatever it was.

Cal Newport: I learned that and such as very strategically like great. I don't have to think too much about this until I get to high school. And so I had more erratic grades in junior high, I think that my parents had been closely following they might've been worried about it. There could have been some pressure there, but there's a lot going on and I knew it didn't matter.

Cal Newport: And in some sense, like that record wouldn't be captured. I think also I had done well, and this is really dredging up memories. I th you know, we did, we took SATs there's this program where you like, take the sat. I remember that. Yeah. And I had an in middle school as like a, it wasn't recorded anywhere, but I had done well on that.

Cal Newport: And there was those like CTY programs. I don't know if you know about those that Johns Hopkins ran. So I was invited. So they assumed maybe you're smart and, but, all so when I got to high school, I was like, okay, now grades start to matter. And I do think I tried harder, but I was pretty lazy.

Cal Newport: So yeah, it's an interesting, I was like relatively lazy. I didn't take a killer load, but a pretty hard load, but I was a smart guy and I could do pretty well, but again, I'm coming from a public high school where it's, maybe that's in four kids to an Ivy league school in any given year in, that'd be a big deal.

Cal Newport: So there wasn't this huge pressure there. And but I think I was also just interesting. I ran a business and played in a rock band. It was very well read and I think I just came across as an interesting person to the applications. I had good grades, but not the best good sat scores.

Cal Newport: I think. I don't know. Anyways, I'm just, I'm, don't know why I'm dragging this up in this curious, but simply do that to

Srini Rao: people. So don't worry. I just want to know these things cause I'm curious about them.

Cal Newport: I became a serious student at college. That's the whole story behind how to become a straight a student is I went to college and did okay.

Cal Newport: My freshman year. And then I got real serious about, I want better grades. And I that's when I went through this whole, let me experiment with study habits and note-taking, and then transformed into a very good student. So starting the fall of my sophomore year, I became a forest student for the rest of my college experience and graduated Dartmouth with a 3 9, 5, and was ranked like number seven out of a thousand students in the class that all happened in college.

Cal Newport: Like at some point I realized, wait, I'm paying a lot of loans to be here. Okay. I want to get more serious about it, but that, that came a little later. But my siblings are all very smart. Two of them went to the Naval academy and the new school one was on subs and one was working the reactors of aircraft carriers.

Cal Newport: And my brother on subs is now worked for the nuclear regulatory commission, head safety inspector at a nuclear power plant. My sister works at Booz Allen and my other sister came. So it's it's a something going on there. So it's a sharp group of kids, I'd say. Yeah.

Srini Rao: One question about this you become Cal Newport, the author, the guy who writes the book about how to be a straight a student, I'm wondering like your younger siblings, did they take that advice to heart and apply it themselves?

Cal Newport: Oh yeah. I, yes. To some degree. We're closing, we're close in age. So by the time I was writing those books and I think my youngest, I used to talk to my youngest sister. Because obviously my older brother was out of school by the time I wrote those and my younger sister.

Cal Newport: Yeah. I definitely remember my youngest sister, especially when she was in med school. We would talk a lot about it. And I think, during college, a lot of people have a hard relationship with this type of advice sometimes because it's not really what college is about for everyone, but when you get to more professional schools, Things are more transactional, I'm in medical school to learn this because I want to get this residency because I want this job.

Cal Newport: So I do remember that with my youngest sister. I don't think I talked to her much when she was in college about how to study, but when she was in med school, she's yeah, let's do it. Let's just get, does it get tactics? Let's get strategies, let's get after it because it definitely a mindset.

Cal Newport: When you move on to a more professional school and environment, it's much more transactional. I think that makes a

Srini Rao: perfect segue to talking about one thing that I knew, that I will never leave a conversation with you without asking you about it. And that is the state of education today, particularly in light of a pandemic, and I do the fact that we started with college and the fact that you became a great student.

Srini Rao: Cause I think that one thing that I saw, particularly at a place like Berkeley, was that everybody who comes there is basically, at the Heights of their high school class, they're all valedictorians. We think we're really. And then you get there and everybody's a thousand times smarter than you are.

Srini Rao: For me, it was like, the worst grades imaginable. I went from being a straight a student to high school in high school to graduating with a C minus average. And I think part of it was, I never learned how to study, but why is it that you don't think people actually learn this like to actually navigate the dynamics of calls?

Srini Rao: Like what causes that sort of person who basically is, a genius in high school to become an idiot in college? Not that I was a genius in high school or an idiot in college, but I think it might've been if it wasn't outliers, it was the other book, Malcolm David Goliath that, Gladwell wrote.

Srini Rao: We actually talked about a girl who opted to go to brown versus another girl who went to a lesser known school and she thrived. Whereas the girl who had gone to brown, who was this amazing student in high school actually, was very average in college. So why does that happen? One and then two, you're a college professor.

Srini Rao: Who has been teaching in the midst of a pandemic. So what does all of this revealed to you and enter the system at large about what the future of this is going to look like?

Cal Newport: Asked you the question of why students are so bad at being students. I think there's definitely a sort of social developmental aspect of people's college experience that can take precedence over a more professionalized approach.

Cal Newport: And what I'm basing this off of is looking at my book on how to study, because the big audiences for my, how to become a straight a student book are non-traditional students, people who are coming back later in life. I've done a lot of work over the time years with GI bill vets returning and going to school on the GI bill first-generation students who are maybe working at the same time,,people in those contexts, which is different than the standard us path of your 18.

Cal Newport: And you're going to college right after high school. People are coming at it later in life after, whatever serving overseas or working at the same time or having families. They're like, let's get the, let's get to work. So they love it. Give me advice, give me strategies.

Cal Newport: It's the job, actually, this is easier than most jobs I've had before. And they do really well. They do really well. But when you get students that are okay, yeah, of course I'm going to college and I'm 18 and I'm going off to Berkeley after, finishing my high school. There's a lot of other factors at play in that experience is what I've come to, what I've come to learn and like I was talking with my sister, there's a lot of other factors at play.

Cal Newport: You're trying to discover yourself. You're trying to find yourself as an adult. You're trying to find separation from your identity that you had based on your nuclear family household. You care a lot about presentation of self and construction of self, and there's a real concern.

Cal Newport: Professionalization of your habits is will aid that might reflect poorly on you. It might make you seem nerdish, or it's just not at the top of your mind, it's a really interesting dynamic. But I've noticed that a lot, I've noticed that a lot is that students are bad at being students are happy being bad at it.

Cal Newport: So I think that's for sure. And then what's the pandemic doing? I'm still not sure. I, my, what I leaned back on is this notion that we often, and I heard someone say this, so my apologies that I'm not citing the right person, am I heard someone say this earlier in the pandemic, we often overestimate, we overestimate forces a temporary disruption and underestimate the power of inertia.

Cal Newport: And I don't know that one year of highly disruptive higher education, I don't think it's enough to make a giant change. That's my new working hypothesis. I think everyone is just riding off the year as a sufferer year because everything and and actually most schools most schools are are open, are open.

Cal Newport: It depends like where you are. A lot of this is politically based like the regional and political, like how open your school is, or not open much more so than let's say like viral background, but my census there's hundreds and hundreds of years of this model of rough model of education of going to these schools and being there in person and this and that the pandemic is probably not enough to cause a severe rupture in the model.

Cal Newport: So it may see it, a lot of things that grow into really interesting metaphorical truth. Yeah. I guess the,

Srini Rao: the thing that struck me in particular, I'm curious what your perspective is on this as a professor and even my dad is dealing with the same things, he's teaching his classes via zoom.

Srini Rao: And I think the thing that struck me most was when people at Harvard were like, what the hell we're going to pay $50,000 a year, the same tuition to watch somebody, give this lecture on zoom that I could watch for free Encore, Sarah I'm like, how does that, the, when you think, when you see that, does it make you angry?

Srini Rao: You're a professor in the systems that, actually makes this happen in the same time your salary is dependent on those students, isn't it?

Cal Newport: Yeah. Yeah. Especially at a school like Georgetown, which is heavily tuition dependent. Yeah. Yeah, no, I look, there's a long list of things that was very annoying about this year, which has given the university's cover.

Cal Newport: So let's say there had in a counterfactual. There've been some sort of disruption that only affected universities. I think that there would have been more of an impetus for wait a second, what's going on here with the model. But I think that anger, which kind of makes sense wait a second, I'm watching this video on zoom that was prerecorded.

Cal Newport: And MIT has the same class being taught for you can download the video from there. And so why am I watching Cal instead of Eric domain teach algorithms or something like that? I think it was somewhat obfuscated by the fact that every other aspect of people's lives had similar similar frustrations going on.

Cal Newport: And so it might that might've off, you skated some of the disruption. I think it also emphasized the value students place on being mean on campus, being around each other, the activities, the physical location of it. The whole, I really picked this up for my students very strongly. A couple of months was okay.

Cal Newport: By the time we got to the fall, they were fraying. And the thing they were afraid is they had to get out of those houses. They could, they be back in their parents' house to be back in their old bedroom. It felt so restrictive. I think that's where I was starting to see a lot of, mental health impacts.

Cal Newport: And so that is one lesson I learned is that there's this huge value that these 19 year olds and 20 year olds have, if they're so lucky to have this opportunity to say, look, I'm on a 300 year old camp or 200 year old campus with old stone buildings. And we live in the dorm and we have, and we go to pep rallies for the basketball team and those type of things.

Cal Newport: I think we're are playing a really important role in this sort of this, the social development of a lot of these young kids. So that's where I saw the frustrations, the zoom stuff, I think they could you're right. Oh yeah. It's not great. But it was being home and that's what was starting to frame up.

Srini Rao: I think that makes a perfect segue to talking briefly about sort of social media and the role of social media in the pandemic. And, as I was telling you, before we hit record, I think it was probably January where I, had probably, I started at night. I was like on a 90 plus day hiatus, almost no activity on Facebook.

Srini Rao: And then Indian matchmaking came out and my social feed was a hell of a lot more interesting all of a sudden because it wasn't, as I said, just attention, but attention from women and as a single guy, I'm like, oh, this is something that I want to pay attention to. And to be very candid with you, it became a really big distraction for about six weeks.

Srini Rao: And it took a while to get back to it. But that being said, and for a lot of people, this has been their lifeline, during a pandemic, this has been their way to connect with other people. And so as somebody who has been a vocal critic of social media, from deep work up until now what have you discovered about, its role in the midst of a situation where we're all stuck?

Srini Rao: Okay. At home?

Cal Newport: I think the pandemic helped underscore and support the dualistic nature of technology that I talked about in digital minimalism, where I use a chariot driver metaphor from Play-Doh and talked about how you have the ignoble Steed that sort of represents your base instincts.

Cal Newport: And then you have the noble Steed that represents what's good. And the soul is like the chariot driver. That's trying to control these two things. And when it comes to using technology, when deployed intentionally, you can empower the noble Steed when used casually, it super powers, the ignoble Steed, and everything goes off a course.

Cal Newport: And I think people saw this dichotomy very clearly, especially during depending where you live at the strong lockdown phases of the pandemic, because on the one hand there's tools that the social internet. That we're really empowering the noble Steve, the ability to talk with family, the ability to talk with friends, the ability to use video.

Cal Newport: You can actually see the face of family members that you weren't able to see in person, maybe the leveraging of WhatsApp or texting so that you could maybe have more conversation with your family than you might normally. And it would've been very isolating without these technologies. In fact, we probably wouldn't have been able to even do shelter in place orders without these technologies, because it just wouldn't have worked, society would not have function on the other hand, social media, if we're going to get real narrow, let's talk about the giant attention monopoly platforms, Twitter Tech-Talk Instagram for a lot of people. These were a massive negative during the pandemic, especially Twitter. A lot of people fell into a doom scrolling habit.

Cal Newport: I would say Twitter became a giant source of stress and anxiety and anger for a lot of people. You take a pan day. Yeah, mix it up with a contentious presidential election. And you're just on this thing, doom scrolling, and it was just making people angry and it was making people anxious and it was causing, and I think it had a lot of real ramifications for people's mental health.

Cal Newport: I think it probably had around vacations on our response to the pandemic. And so that's, I think that's a perfect example of that dichotomous nature of technology. Say, look, I can deploy some of these tools to connect to people I care about in a way that would be physically hard. Fantastic. But I can also get sucked into YouTube rabbit holes that where I end up as a, QA on chief Dan or doom scrolling up and end up in a fetal position under my desk, that was terrible for people.

Cal Newport: And so I think it just validated that the sort of the nuance of the hypothesis of that. Let

Srini Rao: me, go a little deeper on, on this idea of fame, because the reason I brought up Indian matchmaking in general, with you was, and I thought about emailing you the entire time this was happening saying, Hey, I'm having to deal with a level of attention.

Srini Rao: That's unlike anything that I've dealt with before. And, I get it on the one hand it's flattering on another. It's annoying because I quit all this stuff. You wrote this piece about Bryce Harper, the baseball player, and I very distinctly remember that. When you're dealing with something like this, and I am nowhere near, as famous as a baseball player with a $430 million contract, but what is it that you see play out there that makes that particularly effective or, negative, because I remember even you and I were talking about this where you said, NBA players before the night of a game who tweeted actually scored less points if I remember correctly.

Srini Rao: When you navigate that sort of sudden Flood of attention, like what is that doing? And then more importantly, how the hell do you not let it derail

Cal Newport: you? It's a incredibly powerful force that has been, I don't want to say it's not just that it's been supercharged. It's more like it's been democratized, right?

Cal Newport: So the negative impact of sudden celebrity attention is due to the realities of the delivery mechanisms. If you went back 20 years was very narrowly applied to a very small number of people like a really big movie stars, really big sports stars, social media, as essentially democratize the negative aspects of sudden attention to a much wider group of people.

Cal Newport: Because now you have the delivery mechanisms through which people can actually discuss you and give you attention and directly reach you in this sort of infinitely scalable way. And it's a, it's an issue. It's both a benefit and an issue. Obviously being able to democratize celebrity opens up more opportunities because there's lots of different professional endeavors.

Cal Newport: We're having some. Notoriety as is useful, but it also democratizes the negative aspects of celebrity. And I think it's a real issue. And so I talked to a lot of people in professional sports because they're really worried about this, the impact of this on professional sports performance. That's why, I wrote about Bryce Harper.

Cal Newport: He doesn't do basically any of that. He has like a team that posts some stuff occasionally, but he just doesn't care. Especially once the season gets going, you wouldn't see him on there, engaging with his audience and why, because it's an intensely cognitively demanding endeavor to try to hit a 97 mile per hour fastball out of a park.

Cal Newport: And like every X percent distraction back there in the back of your mind is three batting average points and it matters. And it could matter to your team success or to your success. And so you definitely do see that. And I think people are, you experienced, so you tell me you like it, it's weirdly manipulating of your emotions, right?

Cal Newport: Because it's almost irresistible. There's few things more irresistible than someone,is saying something about. Over here, you can't right. You can't not look at it. And then it gives you these highs, but then these killer lows, and then right. You seek the highs to try to offset the lows, but it's like with a drug addiction, the high stop being able to do that.

Cal Newport: And the low start to pick up. Oh, I

Srini Rao: mean I remember for the first week it was just like, holy shit, who are all these people? And on the flip side of that, it was just like, oh, I'm a single guy, and I, there were things that were said about me that weren't that nice.

Srini Rao: And the other person got a lot of negative attention. It was crazy. And, and I remember even one of the other girls, I was talking to her at the end of the week. I'm like, this is insane. And she had a situation where she had 800 followers on Twitter. And by the end of the week, when that show aired, she had 70,000 or a hundred.

Srini Rao: It was madness. And yeah, you're right. It was this addictive thing where you just couldn't stop for a while. It was like, wow, this is nuts. You add layer on top of that, the fact that there are billions of Indians in the world. And then you add to the top of that. Every one of my parents' friends saw it and descended on my parents, like vultures.

Srini Rao: I had a point where I was like, I can't take this. This is insane. So I said, look, you guys want to set me up with anybody. I'm like, this is my cousin. I'm like, she's the filter. She is the gatekeeper. I will not talk to anybody, but her from this point forward. Yeah. And even then it's taken a long time to get back to some semblance of

Cal Newport: normalcy.

Cal Newport: Yeah. Let me ask you about this because I think you're a really great case study about the reality and the myth. I think a lot of people, especially younger people think what I want is that celebrity, like if I had a lot of followers and a lot of people paying attention to me online, everything good will be built on that.

Cal Newport: But that's often not at all what you should see. So let's consider what, you mainly do in your life, right? You have this business you've been building that is successful, but also highly impactful and puts you in close connection with these people that you serve, who are getting a lot out of you, you have investors that you're serving.

Cal Newport: You're that probably think about how much more significant I'm assuming that probably is in your life, but we don't get that model as much. If you're 19. You're like, no, what I want is the on a Netflix. And they get a lot of followers, but yeah, that's going to get you basically a lot of anxiety and like a few highs where we don't hear the alternative model, which is actually, what's going to be better suited for your human nature is built up something important.

Cal Newport: And I think it's impactful. And I liked the people I work with and I think I'm making a difference in the world. And that has none of the anxieties of is some famous person trolling me or getting mad at me or is my likes, am I being racist? I don't know what ratio would mean, but I think it's a bad thing.

Cal Newport: Whatever, am I being a tech talk on a clubhouse or something like that, all that negativity you don't have that when it's, I'm slowly building sometimes call this quiet productivity, I'm slowly building something that matters is deeply.

Srini Rao: I always started like when people would ask me about it, I said, look to me, this is an inflection point.

Srini Rao: I don't want to be known for this. I want to be known for unmistakable creative. I, that to me is far more meaningful than, a brief moment on TV. Yeah.

Cal Newport: And it's not. Yeah. And to be really widely known, I don't know, look, here's some, here's my experience. I'm not at all famous.

Cal Newport: But I guess I'm well known enough that unlike a semi-regularly based spaces, I might be recognized right. Someone on the street. But I don't have any social media. So I, it, to me, that's it's just surprising and foreign. I just have no idea, are people happy about me? Mad about me not thinking about me.

Cal Newport: I'm just really not plugged in to any of that. And I have to say it's like incredibly freeing, because my sense is I'm probably known enough that if I was on social media, it would be a really large cognitive footprint. The emotional footprint of that existence would probably right now be a major sock of mental cycles.

Cal Newport: And there's not very happy right now. It's I don't know. Maybe everyone hates me. Everybody loves me. Everyone's ignoring me idol. No. But not knowing has been, yeah.

Srini Rao: It's funny because your name has come up numerous times on the podcast, when I was talking to NIR Eyal and I think I remember sending you that conversation and he was like, yeah, near her some more optimistic than I am about this.

Srini Rao: And I remember thinking, I'm like, man, I get the two of you together here to battle it out. But that being said, I think that what you just said makes a perfect segue to talking about this entire concept of a world without email. So what prompted your desire to even write a book and like a world of that email sounds like a dream come true at this point.

Cal Newport: Or a fantasy, they're going to, they're going to shelve it in the fantasy section at Barnes and noble. I've actually been working on that book since 2016. So right after deep work, I began laying the groundwork. It took me about four or five years to pull together all the threads. I put it on pause wrote digital minimalism came back to it, kept working on it.

Cal Newport: So it's more of an Opus style book. And basically I wrote deep work came out in 2016. And there's this really urgent follow-up question to me about that book, which is why really is it so hard for us to find time to do deep work? If you remember in that original book, I didn't talk much about the causes.

Cal Newport: I was like, yeah, I've already emailed too much or this or that, but let's just talk about the value of focus and how to train yourself to focus and why it's important. And the feedback was, wait a second. I don't think you realize how impossible it is to do this. And so I really got interested in this question.

Cal Newport: Why is it so hard? Like why are companies so consistently set up in such a way that it's very difficult to actually do the thing that hired you to do, then you use your brain and produce value. And it was a massive story, right? That's what I discovered. I needed five years to write it because there are so many different threads that were wrapped up tightly, that when you pulled on them, there was this huge, magnificent story that explained why do we work this way?

Cal Newport: Why is it so bad? What the future is going to hold? It just seemed really grand. And so this book is deep work opened up that rabbit hole and I fell down that thing for awhile. Wow.

Srini Rao: You open the book by saying that the underlying value of constant electronic communication that defines modern work is never questioned as this would be hopelessly reactionary and nostalgic like pinning foot pining for the last days of horse transport or the romance of candlelight.

Srini Rao: And you're, you make a pretty strong criticism of why email has been actually, detrimental to, to knowledge work and, having read the book, having, spent a lot of time, applying your concepts. I happen to agree with a lot of it, but I think let's start with how we actually got here in the first place.

Srini Rao: Because I know that you talk about the reduction in productivity that email causes, and I think that's obvious to most of us, we're not, unaware of that. But I, part of it is knowing what to do with it, but look, let's just start there with these two concepts of email reduces productivity and email makes us.

Cal Newport: Yeah. I don't think people recognize the degree to which it's reducing productivity. So if you go down into the research, I talk to these researchers, read all the papers, really went deep on what happens when we have to check email all the time and actually that's the right place to start. Do we check email all the time?

Cal Newport: So I gathered all the data we have on that. And the answer is a hundred percent definitively. Yes. And it's been getting more and more with each year. The number I like the site is in this one, very large study. Once every six minutes was how often knowledge workers are checking their email.

Cal Newport: And if you have slack in your company, that becomes shorter, right? So it's constant. That's about as close as you can get the constant, especially when you recognize that number includes things like lunch hours or meetings where maybe you can't be checking your email. So that means you're checking it even much more frequently in the times that you're actually able to write.

Cal Newport: So we check it all the time. It's constant checking the damage of that to our brains and our happiness and our satisfaction is massive. The human brain cannot do that context. When we look at an inbox and we see hundreds of messages, most of which we cannot resolve in the moment, right? These are issues that are being brought to us by other people.

Cal Newport: People we know that we can't solve right now, the question's too big. It's ambiguous. I'm just checking my inbox because I'm in the middle of a conversation, Trini and I are going back and forth about whatever scheduling on podcast. I'm just checking that, but I'm seeing all these other messages.

Cal Newport: And then you turn your attention back to what you were doing. Having exposed yourself to all of these unresolved tasks that are waiting there and connected to people who need things from you and your brain goes haywire because when it sees all these messages, it begins the process of, okay, we have to switch our context.

Cal Newport: We have to begin suppressing these networks and amplifying these networks to get ready, to deal with these new things. And halfway through that process, you bring your attention back to the thing you're writing or the code you're trying to type up or whatever it is. And your brain is now in a cognitive capacity or fee of crossed wires and a boarded context shifts that makes it incredibly hard to.

Cal Newport: It also exhausts us. I think a lot of people have that experience of where they're there. You're checking email a bunch while you're trying to do something. And at some point you just get so fatigued, you just give up and I'm like, I'm just going to stay on my inbox. It's not a failure. Will you literally tired out your mind?

Cal Newport: You tired out your mind with all that context, shifting it, can't do it anymore. And it's done actually trying to do something productive thinking. And then you layer in this other reality that this mode of communication where you pile up messages faster than you can keep up completely conflicts with our deep social wiring and makes us feel very anxious.

Cal Newport: God, there's all these people who need me and I'm not responding to him and it's getting worse and worse every minute that I'm not looking at my inbox. That is a worst case scenario from the perspective of taking these deep social networks deep in our brain and trying to design a way of communicating that is going to get us very upset.

Cal Newport: And so we have this background hum of anxiety, because there's a conflict between this fundamental way of communicating and fundamentally how our brains.

Srini Rao: It's funny you say that because I remember, I think it was like 2014, sometime, March, April, right before planning our event. There was one day where I, and I think this was pretty, this was definitely prior to deep work where I literally must've checked my email a hundred times a day.

Srini Rao: And my anxiety at the end of that day was off the charts. And I think I was waiting for some response from a potential sponsor. And then, years later I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to go snowboard all day. And I've noticed this over and over again. I can literally go a day and a half without looking at my email once and nothing bad happens.

Cal Newport Part 2

Srini Rao: And, often, only good things happen. And I don't end up wasting a lot of time. Which always is talking to me. I always joke that, unless you're the president of the United States, you have no reason to be checking email multiple times a day. And even then you probably don't.

Cal Newport: Yeah.

Cal Newport: And I'm the person that doesn't have email. So they have a chief of staff. He does that for them. But this is a key point though, because one of the big things I argue is that even if your rational part of your brain says, it's okay. Because look, last week I went snowboarding all day and nothing bad happened.

Cal Newport: Yes. There's a lot of messages in there, but our company has expectations around response time. No one is expecting a response. It's fine. The deeper part of your brain is still going to get anxious, that rational part of your brain that knows the rules of emailing company culture. Can't influence that really fundamental, deep social network.

Cal Newport: And one study, I talk about that captures this. What's that insidious study, where they brought in research subjects to do some sort of fake experiment on a computer that allowed them to hook them up to heart rate monitors and skin. Galvanometers like the stuff you could use to measure stress. And at some point in the experiment, they have the researcher come in and say, ah, your phone is messing with our instruments, so we're just gonna move it, so they would pick up your iPhone and they would move it across the room. And the reason why they focused on iPhone users is they could turn off the do not disturb because it's on the side of the phone. So they turn it off surreptitiously as they moved it across the room and you'd go back to the experiment and then they would text the phone, see, would hear it.

Cal Newport: Now here's the thing rationally. These subjects had put their phone on, do not disturb. So they had been completely fine rationally with this idea of, I can't be reached. I'm not going to hear it. If something comes in, I'm completely fine with it. My phone's on do not disturb is going to last a half hour, but when they heard the phone ring.

Cal Newport: All of those markers of stress response that were being monitored by the fake experiment, all of them shot off the charts because that deeper part said, someone in your tribe is tapping you on the shoulder. You're ignoring them. If you ignore them, they're not going to give you food next time. There's a famine and you're going to die.

Cal Newport: And it doesn't care about, your company, no norms or your rational explanation. So it's not that this is not malicious, no one designed email to try and make us miserable. It's just,a, an unfortunate, but unavoidable side effect of this means of communicating. Join the uplifting global event of the year inspired by Japanese tradition, Asics world academic Asics world accident is a free virtual relay that you can run to race the global community.

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Srini Rao: I think we're all pretty aware of the fact that email is not only killing our productivity, but fairly ineffective yet. It's still the backbone of communication and 90% of knowledge organizations.

Cal Newport: Yeah. And so this is the key distinction. So right now we can late arrest. I think the concern people have about if I don't use email to send a message, what am I going to use a fax machine or a voicemail?

Cal Newport: And so we can establish here that email is a tool I think is a fantastic tool. If you need to deliver information, you need to deliver. It is far superior to a fax machine or voicemail or memos. There's a reason why it spread so rapidly. Once it became available, it solves real problems, fantastic tool.

Cal Newport: So what's the actual problem. The way we began to work once email was available. So once email arrived on the scene, we switched over to a workflow that as you said, I call the hyperactive. High-five where we said now that we have low friction, digital communication, in addition to just using this to replace what we used to do on the fax machine, in addition to using this, to replace what we used to do with memos, in addition to using this to replace voicemail, let's now actually work things out, like collaborate together with back and forth unscheduled messaging.

Cal Newport: We'll just rock and roll the inbox. Let's go back and forth. Hey, what about this? You want to jump on a, do you want to come on over? When should we do this? And from this client what's going on with that just back and forth, unstructured, unscheduled messaging. And we can just do this with anyone on any issue in the company or out that's the hyperactive hive mind.

Cal Newport: It's not inevitable that you work that way, just because email as a tool. But it is how most people migrated their work habits once this tool arrived. And so when I call my book a world without email, what I really mean is a world without the hyperactive hive mind mean the main way that we actually collaborate or coordinate.

Cal Newport: So this hyperactive hive mind rapidly emerged following the arrival of email. It's how most, and there's some key exceptions here, but it's how most knowledge work organizations now organize themselves. And there's the mind that causes the problem is, Hey, if you're going to broadcast, let's say, there's announcements in our company are broadcast via email.

Cal Newport: Great. That's a good way to do it. It's not going to hurt me. Let's say oh, I'm going to send you the proofs of this thing. I'll send it to you via email instead of printing them. Great. That's a great use of email. The thing that kills us is I have 13 different back and forth asynchronous conversations happening via,email or via slack.

Cal Newport: I don't really care about the technology. And so I have to constantly tend those channels to keep this high flying chatter. That's where we get the pain of email is once we start using it to implement that way of collaborating.

Srini Rao: Wow. My community manager Molina had two very actually interesting questions about this.

Srini Rao: She asked, one, if you're in an organization that is heavily email focused, you have the option to opt out. And then we'll start getting into the principles here. And then the other, she made a good point, like w our email list is the prime, one of the biggest drivers of our sales for our membership community.

Srini Rao: And, and it's funny because there's also this issue of, we don't want to become overly dependent on channels, like social media that we don't own, because they can make change any time that really hoses us. So with that in mind how, w how would that mind do you think about this?

Srini Rao: Cause I know you have an email list, obviously, like if you're an author who wants to sell your books, that's a pretty critical part of it,

Cal Newport: right? This is where the hyperactive hive. Clarifies everything. So when we realized that the actual thing that I am against is this hyperactive mind, workflow is the way that you collaborate within your organizations.

Cal Newport: It clarifies all these issues. So an email newsletter, that's a great way. Broadcasting information is a great use of email. It's a great tool for it. It's much cheaper and more flexible than trying to print out newsletters and mail it to everybody, right? That's a great innovation.

Cal Newport: But sending out a newsletter has nothing to do with a hyperactive hive, mind, workflow for collaborating with work. And so I think we get a lot of clarity now. Of course, I got a lot of those. I get a lot of those ironic, isn't this ironic emails. Every time I email about the book about, I think once once I actually clarify yeah, it's not about email as a tool being wrong, what's wrong is this idea of organizations saying we'll just work things out on the fly with back and forth messaging.

Cal Newport: That's where the problem is now going to your community managers. First question, once we now understand again, that the issue is this work. The huge realization you have is that you're not going to fix these problems in your inbox, right? You're not going to fix these problems by having better inbox etiquette.

Cal Newport: You're not going to fix it with batching. You're not going to fix it with turning off notifications. You're certainly not going to fix it by saying I'm just not going to use email because if the hyperactive hive mind is how your organization works right now, if you're not an email, you're not collaborating.

Cal Newport Part 3

Cal Newport: You're, everything's going to get stuck. It's not going to work. You're going to either get fired or forced back on the email again. So once you realize just the workflow is the problem you realize, oh, if we're going to solve this, we have to go below the inbox and fix the underlying processes. And that's a huge message in this book is that if you actually go through and list out, these are actually the processes that are relevant to my job or my work.

Cal Newport: These are the things I do regularly that produce value for my company. And for each of these, say, how do we actually collaborate with each other to execute this process? And if you've never thought about that before the answer by default is probably the hyperactive. But once you have a name for each of these processes, you can say, is there a, another way to implement this process that minimizes the need to do this sort of unscheduled back and forth messaging and inbox and chat.

Cal Newport: And as you do this process after process, the pressure on your inbox reduces the need to keep checking your inbox to bounce these conversational ping pong balls, back and forth across the net that reduces, and all of these productivity hits from the constant checking. All of these miseries caused by the overflowing piles of people, needing things from you that all dissipates.

Cal Newport: So it's not about my inbox habits. It's not about do I use email or not use email? It's do I used a hyperactive Highline workflow or something? That's.

Srini Rao: Let's talk about how to build something that is better because as I said, to me, this was one of those things where it made me really rethink how we thought about this.

Srini Rao: And you mentioned process like the it's funny, you may have read it. Victor Chang wrote this book called extreme revenue growth, where he talks about how to scale a startup from a million to $25 million. Do you know what, one of the first things that he has CEOs do when he works with them document every single process for every single thing that they do on a regular basis?

Srini Rao: Yes.

Cal Newport: Yes. And processes are king. The problem, a lot of people have, whether you're running your own business or are an employee in a big company, is you get into the impression that, oh, like the email is my job. Yeah, this is what I do. I answer emails, move it back and forth. That's my job. No.

Cal Newport: The email communication is serving underlying processes. You have the answer client question process to produce podcast, episode process put together a white paper for publication process. You might never have named them before. You might not have thought about them before, but all of this back and forth ad hoc messaging is serving these processes.

Cal Newport: And so once you name them, you can say what's the right way. Or what's a better way to actually do these. And it opens up so much innovation. And so small businesses know this. So you mentioned extreme revenue growth. You can look at traction, you can look at work, the system you can work at E-Myth revisited.

Cal Newport: Book after book in the small business space comes back to the same thing. Figure out what your actually processes are and then figure out how to make those better. All growth comes from that. That mindset needs to extend to just about everybody, because if. You still have processes. It's just that they're really bad.

Cal Newport: In other words, the way you're implementing them, it's just, I don't know. We'll figure it out on the fly and that doesn't scale. I know training your company in particular is really into this process oriented thinking. So a lot of them are probably a lot of familiarity when you're reading the book, but for a lot of people, for a lot of people, they've never thought that way.

Cal Newport: It's what do you mean? I get emails. I respond to them and we have meetings on my calendar. We rock and roll, which, which means they're proverbially stuck in the small business that has the opportunity to grow to this sort of metaphorical, large revenue.

Srini Rao: It's funny because right after I read your book, we have an air table contact form and it, for guest pitches and it's really simple.

Srini Rao: If I say yes, it sends somebody an email automatically saying, yeah, we'd love to have you. If I say no, it sends them nothing. I'm like, why the hell am I getting this delivered to my inbox? There's no need for that anymore. So I immediately turned off the zap that was sending the emails to my inbox, and now I only have one place.

Srini Rao: Cause it was like, I'm looking at the same thing in two different

Cal Newport: places. Yeah. And so I think this is useful, right? So let's like rattle off some concrete examples. The main thing I want to emphasize in these examples is that based on the research we know about the cognitive hit from context, switching, the metric you are trying to minimize when you're optimizing these processes should be the number of back and forth messaging.

Cal Newport: It's not time. It's not complexity, it's not pain or convenience. It is how much unscheduled back and forth messaging is required for this process to complete. And you want to minimize that number, right? So you want to keep that in mind. So you, you gave a good example there a way of going from a guest pitch to booking a guest that does requires essentially what you have, that one incoming email, and then you just click something in an air table.

Cal Newport: That's a fantastic example. Another example is like the way I work with my publicist for booking podcast, for book publicity, we have a shared document. Where she puts the opportunities in there along with the scheduling information okay, here's a link to schedule if they have a scheduling link or if not, here's the times that could work.

Cal Newport: I check this document twice a week and I go through and add my responses and update it. Then she adds all the details lower down in the document. There's zero back and forth messaging involved, even though I'm doing dozens and dozens of interviews that sometimes requires lots of back and forth.

Cal Newport: That's a process. Another example of one of these processes could be, we have a team that uses Trello and each client has a Trello board. Everything we're working on for that client is on a card. Every related file is attached to a card, every list and processes on one of these virtual cards, the columns capture their statuses.

Cal Newport: We have these short, highly structured meetings at regularly scheduled time where we look at this thing who's doing what do you need? How's it going. Zero inbox involved, no messages involved. And yet these clients had all the information stored in progress has been made. So that there's dozens of examples.

Cal Newport: But I do think it's useful to hit a few and the keep underscoring that your key here is minimizing back and forth messaging. You want to minimize that even if it's more overhead, upfront, back and forth messaging the need to do the hit the message, ping pong back and forth across the net. That is the killer.

Cal Newport: That is the poison. That is the thing you need to look at with like huge skepticism and.

Srini Rao: Even, the other thing I did right after this is, we have an ad sales team and I'm like, you guys send me a lot of email and glad that you're sending me email. Cause it's all potential revenue.

Srini Rao: But I said the amount of email is causing context, which so I was like, I'm going to set this up as a document notion. I want you to put everything there. But let's talk about it. I think that actually is a perfect setup. Cause I think notion really in my mind was designed with this idea of reducing context switching in mind.

Srini Rao: But let's start with the attention capital principle and you talk about four or five different concepts with the two that I think there, there are a couple that really intrigued me. One was building structures around autonomy. The second was minimizing context, which is an overload, which I think we've more or less covered.

Srini Rao: And then the idea of an assembly line. Can you talk about those and

Cal Newport: how they apply? The structure one's important because there's a good reason. That's largely unknown. I pull it out in the book and I don't really think anyone had reported on this until I did. And why. If the hyperactive high bind, if that is so uneffective, right?

Cal Newport: If it makes us so unproductive and makes us so miserable, why have we remained with it so long? And a big part of that answer is that in knowledge work, we have a huge emphasis on autonomy. Say unlike an industrial work, where we break things down, everything in the processes, we have assembly lines knowledge workers, too complicated, too skilled.

Cal Newport: We can't tell a computer programmer how to write code. So just give them objectives and let them figure out how they organize their work and get things done. This goes back to a single individual. It goes back to Peter Drucker. He helped midwife the whole idea of knowledge work. He actually coined the term knowledge work and he really helped American industry understand what this type of work was, how it's different than industrial work and how to deal with it.

Cal Newport: And he hit again and again, and I document this, decade after decade autonomy. And this principle of autonomy is a, one of the big reasons why we've been stuck with the hive mind is because we're just used to this notion that if I run a company, unless it's like a small business or something, if I'm a manager of this or that, look, I'm not going to tell my workers how to work.

Cal Newport: If they want to be more productive, they can buy a Cal Newport book, but it's not, we shouldn't be thinking about how they organize their work. Just, we just need really clear objectives. Here's our OTRs, rock and roll, right? And I argue, this is what has got us into this trap because you can't get rid of the hive mind in an organization, unless you actually have the organization on board with, we need to change this with other processes.

Cal Newport: No individual can do this very effectively on their own. So how do we escape that trap? My argument is that Drucker was right. That how knowledge workers actually execute their work. You know how you write the algorithm. If you're a computer programmer is highly autonomous, can't break it down into steps, leave people alone to figure out how they do.

Cal Newport: But everything that surrounds the actual execution. So all the details about how we identify task and review task, and assigned task and make sure that people have the information they need to execute the task and report. Once they're done all of these things that surround actually executing that should not be left up to the individuals.

Cal Newport: That's where we need organization. Think of what's our process. What is the process that surrounds this type of work, build structure around the autonomy. That is the balance I think we need we need to actually get, but it's hard to underestimate the degree to which it's so pervasive. Drucker's influence, you run a team.

Cal Newport: You're like, look, it's not my job to tell people how to work. But if everyone is fighting for themselves, you're going to end up with the least common denominator and the least common denominator when it comes to workflow collaborations. Fire up the inbox and we'll just rock and roll.

Srini Rao: It's funny. I think the assembly line struck me so much because even before I read your book, I had been writing about this idea with, our private, you mighty network listeners.

Srini Rao: Because the whole premise of the membership is, we're designing content to basically help you make your ideas happen. And I said, you want to think of creative work like a factory in a lot of ways, I said the part of it, that's not factory, is the part that you bring to it.

Srini Rao: But the rest of it is very much like an assembly line where you have inputs, outputs, raw materials, and labor, where today labor is the combination of, your own habits. And then you know, all the apps and tools you use. But I think that, it seems so contrary to doing creative work. Yet, if you want to produce media at scale, you have to run it like an assembly.

Srini Rao: Yeah. It's like

Cal Newport: an assembly line, except for, instead of what you're doing is turning the bolt on the steering wheel, 45 degrees, repeatedly when the steering wheel comes to you, you're recording a podcast, so you're right. It's nuanced it's, there's structure on here's how the materials move.

Cal Newport: And we fought a lot about it, but I need step when you're actually doing the work. But the other thing that's important about the assembly line. It's why I spend a lot of time on the story of the assembly line is that if we step away from the specifics of industrial manufacturing, what we learned from Henry Ford story, which is a very important lesson for today, is that the way they used to build cars, just like the hyperactive hive, mind and knowledge work was very convenient and very flexible and very natural.

Cal Newport: They call it the craft method. You put a chassis on some saw horses and a bunch of craftsmen would sit around it and build it. It was the same way that, whoever olds, the original or bins or whoever, the original German car makers, the way they built the cars. And if you wanted to scale it up, you just get more sources and more teams, and everyone would have their own car that they would sit around and they would work on.

Cal Newport: So the way they're building cars was very natural. It's a natural way you would do it. In fact, it was called the craft method. What Ford did with the continuous motion assembly line was a huge pain, right? It was like really inconvenient. It required them to spend more money. They had to hire more managers and it was very difficult to get, right.

Cal Newport: And until they got it right, it caused a lot of little bad things to happen because until you had all of the different stages calibrated properly, if you spent too long here, the whole assembly line would come to a halt. So everything about designing the assembly line would have been a huge frustration to everyone involved to the investors, to the workers, to the managers, like we're going to spend more money to do something more complicated that requires more managers and breaks a lot.

Cal Newport: However, it was a hundred X more productive and made for the richest person in the world for. And I think that part of the assembly line lesson is also really important because it says, look, our goal in work is not the maximize convenience. Our goal and work is not the maximize. What's going to be easiest.

Cal Newport: Our goal is certainly not the reduced friction to the lowest possible levels. I think we fell into this weird trap with technology, mediated knowledge work productivity, where we felt like, oh, our whole goal here is to make it as low friction as possible to communicate and see information. But no, we don't get paid for the number of emails we sent.

Cal Newport: We don't get paid for the amount of bits of information we see, we get paid for whatever it is, the books we produce, the ad campaigns that go out the computer code that is compiled and the processes that might push that to the best levels that might make us most effective. They might be like the assembly line a hundred years ago, be a giant pain to figure out.

Cal Newport: So that's why I also like about that story is don't fear, inconvenience. Don't fear, lack of simplicity. Don't fear, friction. None of those are what you're trying to optimize in a bit.

Cal Newport Part 4

Srini Rao: It's funny. Cause I'd mentioned to you, we a good amount of our production process was automated, but our promotion process was still clunky.

Srini Rao: I'm like we're manually writing, social media updates and stuff. And to your point, I spent probably the last three or four days trying to build out a nother, just full blown air table automation to automate, promotion of guest interviews. And I wanted to shoot myself at the end of the day yesterday.

Srini Rao: Not literally, but it was so frustrating because every time I solve one problem, I would run into one or another hurdle where I'm like, okay, this isn't gonna solve this problem. I finally narrowed it down to figure out first I mapped it out using a mind map and I'm like, all right, how is this going to look if we did this the right way.

Srini Rao: But then when it in practice, I realized it didn't align perfectly with the mind map. All right, great. Now I've got to go and fix all this stuff. Which I think that, that kind of makes a perfect segue to talking about, two other principals you brought up, we've talked a lot about process but you mentioned a couple of different things.

Srini Rao: I think that we didn't get to, and that is the task board revolution and personal Kanban. And then let's talk about protocol.

Cal Newport: So the task board, revolution's a big one. Basically the idea with any of these tools that allow you to put virtual cards on a virtual board arranged in columns. So you could use Trello, you could use a sauna, you could use flow.

Cal Newport: Notion has a ton of power. I'm not as familiar with it, but there's a lot of different tools, right? That do basically this metaphor. It's a huge revolution because what it's doing is making the work happening within a company or a team transparent, and it's making it shared. Everyone can see what's going on.

Cal Newport: Who's working on. And all the information relevant to what's going on and who's working on one is right there. And once you see a project run this way, you'll shake your head at what people normally do, which is all of that information is just implicitly spread across a ton of ad hoc messages, spread over a bunch of inboxes.

Cal Newport: And when you do this comparison, you're like, wow, what a terrible way to organize a project is there's just all these random back and forth messages. And somewhere in my inbox is this file that a client sent. And I don't know who's working on this. I'll just bother them with a message and we'll go back and forth.

Cal Newport: It's so inefficient and the inefficiency becomes so bald. Once you see like a beautiful flow board, oh, here's everything that's going on. You can see the icon picture who's working on it. It's right there on the card. If you couple something like this with regular, highly structured, real-time, check-ins you get a huge boost of productivity.

Cal Newport: And one of the points I made in the book is that even if you're just doing this for yourself, it is much, much better. That your work doesn't just live in your inbox. It's on these boards, you have one board for each of your different roles or projects. These very set times you go in and you check and update these boards and very specific way.

Cal Newport: Again, this structure makes all of the difference compared to just all of this information is somewhere spread across our inboxes. Yeah.

Srini Rao: It's funny you say that we had Chris Fussell here who worked for Stanley McChrystal, and we're talking about the U S military and Al Qaeda. And he said that, the advantage that they had over the U S military was the rate at which information spread.

Srini Rao: And he said, basically what we realized is we had to create a collective consciousness, which is, sounds very similar to what you're talking

Cal Newport: about here. Yeah. All the information is here. We can quickly see who's doing what, and also, I think here's an added benefit. It allows you to be much more sequential in your work.

Cal Newport: And what I mean by that. And it's just like one of the stories from the book, the vicious marketing firms, what I have in mind, they had one board for every client and one of the things he really emphasized. Is what this meant was okay. When I want to work on this particular client, I go to that board. I am now immersed in only that client, like that's what I'm seeing.

Cal Newport: So all of those networks related to this client can be amplified. All of the neural networks related to other things can be inhibited. Now your mind is in a mode where you can do some good work on this client. And he's no, stay there with the board. And I'd worked things through and an update to cars and do some work and update the status of things.

Cal Newport: And then when I was done, I could shut down that board and move on to something else. We, that is incredibly important to be able to have your cognitive context on one thing at a time and work on one thing after another, if you used a hyperactive line by contrast, you're in an inbox trying to find and relay information about that client while seeing simultaneously emails about all of your other.

Cal Newport: And also emails about, a problem with HR department and the parking changes, and that all gets jumbled together. And until you actually experience the alternative of all I'm doing in my brain is this client until I'm done, you don't realize the degree to which having everything being visible to you all the time is an incredible drain on your ability to think.

Srini Rao: Let's talk specifically about protocol. I love this chapter because it really made me think about, email meetings and all sorts of stuff. So let's start with meeting scheduling and an office hours. And then we'll talk specifically about short messages and non personal emails.

Cal Newport: When I'm talking about protocols, I, what I usually mean is okay, here is a regularly occurring back and forth interaction that accomplishes a set goal, right? So it's a process, but for like very specific things such as we have to set meetings and my argument is in these situations, it's usually worth if something's going to happen a bunch to put in a little bit hard work ahead of time.

Cal Newport: They say, here's our protocol for this repeated app. There's this interaction that happens all the time. And here's a protocol that's aimed to minimize back and forth that you do a little bit of work upfront, but then you get to reap the benefits of that effort again and again, every time you're more efficient protocol run.

Cal Newport: So I think meeting schedule is a great example. Most jobs, people have to schedule meetings. It happens all the time, the way most people do it. It's let's just go back and forth on email. It's an incredible cognitive drag because all right. Hey, how about Wednesday now? You're going to get back to me and be like, okay.

Cal Newport: Once there's no good. How about Thursday? And then I say, okay, but maybe in the afternoon, tell me what times are good. And you have to say, how about three? And you have to say actually three is not great. So maybe we can do it at four. The problem that conversation is not only is it six messages, but you have to keep checking your inbox, waiting for the next message to come back to you.

Cal Newport: Because if you drag this out, you're like, I don't want to spend four days trying to schedule this meeting. So then if you scale that up to six or seven meetings being scheduled at the same time, Those seven meetings might generate 300 inbox checks in a two or three day period. It's devastating.

Cal Newport: Simply solved. If you say, let's just do a protocol up front and when it comes to meeting scheduling, there's actually a lot of tools that can implement protocols for you. So I'll use Callan leaf which one I believe you use or schedule wants, or acuity, or the shared meeting feature and outlook or whatever, but I'll use one of these tools that allows me to do one message scheduling, yep.

Cal Newport: We should meet. I think we should do it next week. If you go here all my available times are there because I know you're busy. So just choose the one that works best for you. One message. And again, it seems minor in the moment because in the moment, it's very quick to just shoot off an email that says what's next, but you have now saved 300 email inbox jacks in this scenario.

Cal Newport: So that's an example of a protocol, but anytime there's an interaction that is frequently occurring, that leads to a consistent outcome. Asked the question, can we do a little work up front to figure out how to do this interaction with very few minutes? Yeah.

Srini Rao: So there's one thing I do want to ask you about, because I remember you bringing up the fact that, often you are trying to force other people to change in response to the way that you're going to change it.

Srini Rao: And the reason this struck me in particular is I had this guy just the other day with this exact example, and I gave him my Calendly link. And I gave it to him twice and he said, he replied back saying, please pick a date and time. And I was like, okay, let me know if this date works and I'm like, wait a minute,,you didn't get it.

Srini Rao: Which was pretty interesting to me, but I think that the more important question here is when you're dealing with people who you have to get, on board, even the notion example of getting our, ad sales team to start using it, I'm having to change their behavior a little bit.

Srini Rao: Fortunately they are adapting very quickly, but I don't know that's always going to be the case.

Cal Newport: Yeah, this, the social engineering aspect, the social dynamic aspect of moving towards these processes and protocols is very important, right? So I get into this a little bit to try to understand how to succeed.

Cal Newport: And there's a few different things that are relevant here. One, I say really clearly, don't really explain what you're doing. Let's say you're in a team and you don't really have control over your process. You work for a big employer or your boss. Doesn't like Cal Newport. Don't explain what you're doing.

Cal Newport: Don't have an auto responder. Don't say here, in order to serve, my team better, I'll be blah, blah, blah. Just execute. And if someone gets upset, then you can apologize. But it's better to apologize to the small number of people who are actually upset than to teach a lot of people. That there's a reason they should be upset.

Cal Newport: So don't announce it to, and just be careful in your presentation. So like the way that you get bosses to use Calendly. As you say look, I know your schedule is more crushed than mine. So what I did is I just put all of my available times in here. So you can choose one that works best for you. That you're just flipping it around. So it's oh look, Shreeny went through a lot of trouble to make my life easier. Okay. All right. I appreciate that. Three, when working with teams buy-in is crucial, right? And this is an, all these in traction or extreme revenue growth, or E-Myth revisited work, the system, all these books say the same thing.

Cal Newport: If you're trying to build a team, a process to have everyone involved in building the process, to empower everyone, to help Polish the process makes a big difference versus just saying, Hey, by the way, here's what we're doing now. So that's important. And then finally be okay with sometimes people will be upset, right?

Cal Newport: It's like the Ford's assembly line would occasionally get stuck because someone dropped the wrench at the steering wheel station. That's fine. In general is producing cars a hundred X faster. We sometimes, some personalities in general, really overemphasize an overestimate. That fear of what if this upsets someone?

Cal Newport: I never want anyone to be upset. I never want to. Or what if I I miss a client opportunity because the way we have this set up is I can't just respond right away. And what if a client gets ignored and say, Hey, you didn't, I didn't hear from you. So I'm moving on and I'm mad or something like this.

Cal Newport: And just being comfortable with that. The assembly line is, was expected to get stuck five times a day. That was just part of what they factored in. So you can think about the same thing we're putting in place, processes and protocols. There'll be a certain number of annoyances and small, bad things that will happen.

Cal Newport: But that's part of the cost of your factor in, into becoming a hundred X more.

Srini Rao: Let's talk specifically about email protocol non-personal email protocols and short message protocols. And I'll give you an example because I had the autoresponder, like you said, and it actually was just leading to a lot of unnecessary crap in my inbox.

Srini Rao: And the one in particular that you're probably all too familiar with, at least for me. It is pitches from potential book publicists for authors that they're working with. And it's the same stupid galley letter. Every time I can tell that no effort went into thinking about how this is a fit for us.

Srini Rao: It's just the same letter that everybody gets. And I even wrote an article on medium about how book publicists should pitch, potential podcast guests. And, we've worked with the same publisher and they still don't listen. They do the same thing. I think the only reason they didn't do that to me with you was because you and I happened to know each other.

Srini Rao: So would that sort of, would that as the example, let's talk about a non-personal email protocols and short message protocols.

Cal Newport: So once you have this mindset of, oh, the issue is the hyperactive hive, mine let's think of better ways to implement all of these processes to define our business.

Cal Newport: It opens up tons of innovation that when you're just in the hive mind, none of it seems relevant. So one of the big things that pops up, I just think it's a cool idea is you realize, huh? This notion, for example, that we even just have email addresses associated with names. Is that really the best way to do it?

Cal Newport: Like we know email like pop three or SMTP is a great protocol for sending information asynchronously, sending files, asynchronously. But this notion that it's going to be, cal@georgetown.edu, which by the way, is not my email address. So don't try to use that, but you know that it's like a person and that's what an email address is associated with.

Cal Newport: When we think about that objectively, it causes a lot of issues. It just means everything comes into the same undifferentiated inbox. There's no structure or control over what comes in or people's expectations. It's a huge source of stress. And so imagine instead an alternative in which we use email for communication, but our email addresses are associated with, let's say clients, you're a client of ours.

Cal Newport: Great. We're going to give you an email address at our company, client name@company.com. Every communication you have with us, send it to that email. Now there's no one individual who feels like, oh, there's this interpersonal obligation. I have a client has sent me as a person, a message and I have to get back.

Cal Newport: And I'm just an expectation. It's much more abstract. Imagine having email address for a team, so now I'm the HR department and there's like some new forms I need my developers to fill out like tax forms or something. Instead of blasting everyone individually, there's actually like a administrative announcements or requests for this developer team email address and all that goes there, where it goes into a common inbox and maybe the project lead aggregates this stuff and pulls it out into a like a memo that you go over for 10 minutes and the weekly status meeting, it just opens up a lot of ideas. And again, you're not going to have this type of thinking until you actually realize oh, here's the whole game. We have a bunch of processes. We want to implement these in the best possible way to minimize back and forth. And suddenly everything's on this.

Srini Rao: It's funny you say this because I remember Dan Kennedy has this wealth attraction seminar, where he talks about email and he had a really funny saying, he said, I separate my email into two categories.

Srini Rao: People who are trying to give me money and people who are trying to get me to do something. And I remember thinking about that. I said, you know what? I think I'm gonna do the same thing, except I'm not going to separate email that way. I'll separate the email addresses that way. So I literally have an email address for people who generate revenue and another one for everybody

Cal Newport: else.

Cal Newport: Yeah. And then you can put, so once you've you have different addresses, they're not just see if an address is a person. Then you have the standards of personal interaction dictating all interactions, right? So like in general, in polite society, if we're in the same room and I start talking to you you're not going to ignore me.

Cal Newport: You're, whatever. We personify email addresses that are associated with names. So if it's just, a Shreeny at unmistakable creative or something like this I don't know, I'm sending you a pitch, I'm sending you a galley and send you a request. I'm trying to get you to jump on a call.

Cal Newport: I'm trying to get you to do a coffee. A sort of feels like I'm just talking to this guy and it's rude if you don't answer me. But if you get rid of that connection to a person, you can completely reset and build from scratch the expectation. So if there is a coffee request@almostaworkablecreative.com address like, oh, alright, this is where I do coffee request.

Cal Newport: And there's some notes here about here's how it works. I only do one

a month and this information whatever, I don't know how it works. Or here's like galley requested almost equal creative.com. Here's how it works. Fill out this form, send this information. If it's a fit, we will blah, blah, blah.

Cal Newport: When it's not associated with a person, you can build the expectations from scratch. So I do this. I don't have a publicly accessible general use, email address as a writer. You want to send me like interesting links are news clips. I like that, but I have an address called. At Cal newport.com. It's not cow.

Cal Newport: It's interesting. And it has some rules. I appreciate people sending me things. I can't respond to the messages, but all these things get looked at. No one has any expectations I'll respond. If that was just cow, like how newport.com no matter what I said, people might say, why is this guy ignoring me?

Cal Newport Part 5

Cal Newport: That's rude. So there's these huge advantages you get when you disconnect these communication channels from individuals. Wow.

Srini Rao: Okay. So let's talk about this whole short email idea. Cause you know, sometimes people will send me really long emails and I send one sentence responses and I almost have to always put PS don't, see my brevity as something, as it lack of caring about the email you've sent.

Srini Rao: I just have more important things to do it and write emails,

Cal Newport: but what I liked about this idea different people do this. I was talking about this former university president that did very short emails. That was his protocol, but it was the thinking behind it. That caught my attention. So basically his thoughts.

Cal Newport: If I can't do this in a short email, by default, we're going to move to a different mean of interaction, right? So it's not that everything is going to be a short interaction. It's that only things that can be handled with a short interaction are going to happen on email and everything else will get moved to, we need to come to my office hours.

Cal Newport: We need to set up a meeting with my assistant. We need to talk about this and do this back and forth. His main insight, which I think is correct is that email is a fantastic medium for broadcasting information or sending electronic files is great for that. It's very bad for a conversation it's very bad for.

Cal Newport: Let's go back and forth and figure something out. So that was his simple rule. If I could answer it real quick, I will. And if I can't, then I'm going to push you towards another system so we can get you on the phone and get you in the office. But let's work this out in real time, which I think is very, a very astute way of trying to think about navigate the value or lack of value with when it comes to email.

Cal Newport: So the examples he gave is there was, he's a university president, so there was construction projects going on. And for whatever reason, there's like a lot of things he had to approve. Like the color of the tiles they were using for whatever. And he's oh, email is great for that. They could just shoot it to me.

Cal Newport: What do you think about this? A or B do you like this glass? I don't know, because yeah, no good. But if it was, we have a problem, we have a problem with our sprinkler system, unclear what system we should use. Cause the codes have been changing. He would be like, okay, I can't resolve this in two sentences.

Cal Newport: So we're going to talk on the phone. And I was, I thought that was a great heuristic. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Let's talk about the specialization principle because I really liked the things you said about outsourcing, outsource what you don't do well. And then it reminded me of this experience I was having, probably a couple of months ago we were launching a new service or do product.

Srini Rao: And I was trying to mobile optimized landing page. And my roommate comes to me. He's you're the CEO of a damn company. Why the hell are you trying to optimize a page for mobile? He said, somebody on Upwork could do that for $20 in 10 minutes.

Cal Newport: Yeah. This is the real tragedy. I think of the.

Cal Newport: Productivity revolution. Right? So starting, I'll start this with personal computers emerging in the late 1970s. And then through all the tools that we got on computers, you got word processors, you got spreadsheets, you had a company intranet. So now through interactive web forms, you can enter information and and gather information.

Cal Newport: And then ultimately we get things like email, right? So we had all of these tools technology-based that made specific business tasks, lower friction or quicker. And so the promise was, oh, we'll become a lot more productive than it happened. And I'm talking about the economic metrics here. I actually am working on an article.

Cal Newport: It might be out by the time this airs, but I this article based on the book for wired, that gets into the history of the personal committee. And talks about how there's all this excitement. Like when we put computers on people's desks, it's going to have this huge productivity revolution.

Cal Newport: Because when we put computers into the back office, we moved records and databases, we got inventory control systems. It was this huge boost in economy-wide productivity. Right? Huge win. So we figured we put these on individuals' desks. Productivity is going to rise it stagnated. Instead throughout that whole period at stagnated, a lot of research was done.

Cal Newport: It turned out the computer, wasn't making people more productive,

right? And I think something similar happened with email. So what was going on? We did the wrong thing with these productivity enhancing tools. What we should have done is say, oh, this is great. This means that the support staff we have in place that supports the executives and coders and ad copywriters, we can now make them even more efficient.

Cal Newport: So now our typing pool can use word processors instead of typewriters, and they're going to be even more efficient. And, maybe we'll even need less people in the support staff that do the same amount of support, or we can offer even more support with the same number of. What we did instead is we fired the support staff and said, oh great.

Cal Newport: This is now easy enough that you can do it yourself as an executive. Like you, you're not going to mess with carbon paper and your typewriter, but you can use WordStar, you're not going to take messages on the phone because you have too many phone calls, but you can answer email. And it actually brought down our productivity.

Cal Newport: So we made things easier, but then we moved more things on the every individual's plate. And so their overall ability to produce value went down. And so I'm calling for a return to specialization. I actually think the more efficient configuration of all this attention capital, so you have everyone doing less, but doing what they do better.

Cal Newport: And part of the way you do that is you have to take a lot of this crap off of people's plates, and you probably have to hire dedicated people just to deal with the crap. And with all these high tech productivity tools, you can now do this with many fewer people, but don't use productivity innovations to say great.

Cal Newport: Now everything is just easy enough that we can technically put it on your plate. It is technically possible for you to do this now, because time is. And now you've just take a time away from, they could have landed another client or written another legal brief. So that's the way I think we need to get back to specialization.

Cal Newport: We all do too much. We should all do much less.

Srini Rao: Yeah. It's funny you say that. So like I realized one, I don't even know how to edit the podcast anymore because we'd gotten to the process. So dialed in that my editor, Josh and we've gone weeks without talking to each other and he still manages to publish every day without any input from me.

Srini Rao: The only exception to that has been when he got appendicitis a few weeks ago, where luckily he had created a video to show me exactly how to publish an episode. Yeah. So that was the thing you say that really struck me in this section was this idea of simulating your own support staff? What did you mean by

Cal Newport: that?

Cal Newport: Yeah, so in the short-term let's say, okay. They haven't read county report yet. And you still have, you still don't have support. You still have a bunch of crap on your plate, simulate, specialization. What I mean about that? Bifurcate yourself in the two roles. There's like me who does the value producing stuff.

Cal Newport: And there's me that does all the support stuff and treat those almost as two different jobs you have, right? Like you're working two part-time jobs. So how you, where you keep track of your tasks and your systems and everything for the support work is separate from where you keep track of tasks and your systems for when you're doing your main value producing work.

Cal Newport: So when you're in your value producing mode, you're pretending as if you have a staff, and you operate that way. And then when you switch over to the support staff mode, then you're like, how do I do this as effectively and efficiently as possible? And you don't mix. And by not mixing it too.

Cal Newport: Like on the scale, maybe you do a half day in one mode, half day in another one day in one mode, one day in another, but there's a really clear separation between those two things. Now you're saying, Hey, it's the same amount of total work. W why does it matter? But you get a lot more done because a, you don't have that context.

Cal Newport: Switching cost of interleaving and all the crap with the value producing stuff. And two, when you imagine your support life as a separate job, it's much easier to start to build out systems to start optimizing it. Let's get some,air table going here. Let's get a little bit of zap going. Let's get a Calendly app here.

Cal Newport: Let's get some Trello boards, let's get some automation, because that becomes a whole game over there. And the footprint of all that work begins to really shrink. And so until you can actually get that support staff, which I think we should have more of what we don't right now, pretend like you have two different.

Cal Newport: You

Srini Rao: know, it's, I think about this from a standpoint of something as simple as,

publishing a blog post because our blog posts are, sometimes upwards of five, 6,000 words, because we do these long detailed guides, they require illustrations. And I sat down and mapped it out and I was like, the only useful thing I do in this entire process is right.

Srini Rao: And so I started thinking, I was like, oh, adding the images, putting it up on WordPress, putting it into different publications, like medium. And I finally just outlined it and I handed it off to an assistant and I realized now I finished writing and I'm like, all right, I've run this through Grammarly.

Srini Rao: I've read it myself. I've done all my revisions, go through, proofread it, set it up to be published and, go from there.

Cal Newport: It may, this type of thing makes a, it makes a difference. And I think it's just easy in the moment to say, yeah, but it's fastest right now in the second that just answered this.

Cal Newport: Or just to do this. But we have to have that longer-term view of what's the drag of having to do all the stuff surrounding writing this blog post times two, each week after week after week in the end, it's a really large, it's a really large cost. It's a really large drag.

Cal Newport: I actually think that one of the exciting things that's going to happen then also scary in the future of work. If we look out at a longer timeframe, this is where a lot of workplace AI research is heading, where we can essentially have a presidential style chief of staff. That's not a real person, but it's an AI agent and it's going to completely change work because now imagine in your situation like the AI agent, which has talked to the AI agent of your publisher and of your editor, and they've all kind of communicated together, and it just tells you like the best thing for you to be doing right now is writing.

Cal Newport: And here's some background, here's your source material. I gathered it for you. And when you're done, I'll take it. Don't worry about it. Okay. And you're done with that. Okay. We need you to make a decision on these three things, right? Just like a Leo McGarry in the west wing, we're all going to have the OMA.

Cal Newport: Gary, it's going to be a productivity revolution, right? Because that's the end game by far, that's gotta be the best way to take the uniquely human aspect of human intelligence and produce value from these brains. The very best way to do it is to just have the brains do nothing. But the actual producing value part, that's where AI is going to get us, which is both exciting and scary.

Cal Newport: And I almost feel like my book is okay, but while we wait for that, how close, how can we get close to that in the next.

Srini Rao: It's funny that you say that because to me, I think it, it also takes us back to so much of what you've talked about. And so good. They can't ignore you so many years ago. Cause I had been writing this book about, or this blog post about the hidden dangers of following your passion largely, based on, things you're talking about in that book.

Srini Rao: But I think that to me, if when this happens, it's going to reveal who has skills that are valuable and who

Cal Newport: doesn't well, that's the scary part. So that, and also we're going to have a surplus at first, because my contention is that we are incredibly unproductive because of the hyperactive hive mind incredibly unproductive.

Cal Newport: And I think it shows up in the economy-wide metrics. Non-industrial productivity has stagnated throughout this period that we made communication, lower friction and more ubiquitous than ever before in human history, we didn't get more productive. And I think we would have actually lost productivity if not for the fact that we added hidden second shifts in the morning and the evening to try to make up for the lost productivity during the day.

Cal Newport: So we are, we're leaving. A huge fraction of our potential on the table. If overnight, Google has some breakthrough and we all have, Leo McGarry bots you're going to need a fraction of the people we're using now to get the same amount of work done. Two professors are gonna publish what five used to publish before one lawyer is going to handle what three lawyers were able to produce when they had to check email once every six minutes, right?

Cal Newport: In the short term that if that happens too fast, it's going to create a giant surplus of attention capital. And, I don't know where it's going to go. So it could open up brand new markets, which I think could be very exciting or it could lead to a creative worker recession because Hey, we only need a third as many workers to get the same amount of work done because we're not doing email all day.

Cal Newport: We're going to be way more profitable. If we fire two thirds of the workers, those of us who thought that AI won't bother us because our work can't be on. Don't be so sure because we don't have to automate what you do. We just have to make it a lot more productive. And when you have a similar sort of crunch I tend to be more optimistic.

Cal Newport: I think this change will come slow enough that we will adapt and reassign this attention. Capital it'll expand markets. It's what happened in the industrial sector. We had a 50 X increase in productivity in the industrial sector from 900, 1900 to 2000, as we got much better at building things. We didn't end up firing all the industrial workers.

Cal Newport: Instead, we built the wealth on which the entire developed economies of the world were founded on. Good things actually happen probably that will happen to knowledge or to if we explode the productivity. But it's a really interesting thought experiment. And I don't think we talk enough about, it

Srini Rao: sounds like you have a subject for another book.

Cal Newport: I've got it. I got a subject for a bunch of, and I don't think anyone wants to hear me opine on economics that I guess, so what I'm trying to do there is just convince economic types who are smart to write.

Srini Rao: Amazing. As always, you have packed this with, just nuggets of brilliance and wisdom that somehow will always lead to very noticeable and tangible changes in our lives.

Srini Rao: I want to finish with my final question. And you've heard me ask this before, so I'm curious to see, what it'll be now for the fifth time or fourth time. What do you think it is to make somebody or something unmistakable?

Cal Newport: I should probably go back and remember what I said before, or maybe as far as structure, if I don't so I can see if it's a consistent I would guess my answer has been pretty consistent.

Cal Newport: To be so good, you can't be ignored, make someone unmistakable, going all the way back to that book, so good. They can't ignore you. And what I mean by that is that there's something you do. You do well, you've done the practice you've built up. It's important. You're good at. Yeah, focus on it.

Cal Newport: You don't get too distracted by other things that are less important and you get after it and execute. And here's the thing I do well, and it's important and I do it and it makes a difference. You can't go wrong. You do that. You are going to have an unmistakable presence, I think in the world.

Srini Rao: Amazing. As always, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us, to share your story, your wisdom, and your insights for our listeners. Where can people find out about the new book and everything else? You're up to,

Cal Newport: Cal newport.com. You can find about the book and that's where my longstanding blog is housed.

Cal Newport: The new edition since the last few times I've been on here is that I podcast. So I have a podcast called deep questions where I take questions for my readers on all of these type of topics and we get into it. And so you can also hear more about these details on my my deep questions about.

Srini Rao: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.