Cal Newport: Deep Work

Transcript

[0:00:47] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Cal Newport, author of Deep Work. How many times a day are you distracted by email, Facebook, Instagram, Slack? Do you ever feel like all of these notifications are making you less productive? Of course you do. That’s why I invited Cal on to the show. His book was selected by Amazon as one of the best business and leadership books of 2016 and it’s potentially life changing. In this episode, you’ll learn why Deep Work is the number one super power you can have in our economy. If you want to do better work and you don’t want to waste your days in a frantic blur of emails and social media, then this episode is for you. And now, here is our conversation with Cal Newport. If you had to pick a soundtrack for your book, what’s the first song you would pick?

[0:02:07] Cal Newport: That’s interesting, yeah, I think – obviously, all authors originally imagine the Last Mohican soundtrack. It’s this heroic thing where you’re – but for Deep Work, I think it would probably have to be. I would imagine something jazz, you know, like some sort of… That often comes to mind. I mean, I think I had jazz on, a surprising amount of time when I was doing certain parts of writing, you know? Miles Davis, I definitely had some Miles Davis going on during some of the writing on the turntable. There’s something about that sort of soul instrument doing what it’s doing. It unlocks things.

[0:02:48] Charlie Hoehn: That makes me curious. I would – when I was doing what you called “deep work”, I would often listen to a really high energy album. I would listen to like Girl Talk which was not a deep music album but I found it for some reason, allowed me to focus on the work itself. Do you think certain music’s more conducive to doing deep work or does it not matter?

[0:03:18] Cal Newport: It probably doesn’t matter but what I’ve learned is you have to train or habituate yourself to whatever the music type is. I interviewed for example the self-published author who was incredibly prolific. I think it was a million word in one year which is a crazy amount and he had trained himself – and it was fiction. He had trained himself to write to Metallica and he would blast it in these huge NASCAR style headphones, partially for him was about blocking out all inputs. I think he had three or four kids, it was a noisy household. It blocked out all sensory inputs so that he could really be focused on the writing and if I put Metallica on tomorrow, I’d have complete inability to produce anything, it would be completely distracting to me. But he habituated to it. So I found this again and again – people habituate the different types of music and then the actual content of the music doesn’t really matter. It’s the ritual they built up. This is what I listen to, this gets my energy up or this b locks the sound or this inspires me, this sort of the ritual you build around it. Once you’ve habituated yourself to not be distracted by it. I think the ritual probably matters more in the long term.

[0:04:23] Charlie Hoehn: That’s completely true. Yeah, you’re right. Because I would listen to the same album over and over. Every time I wanted to get something that it was the same album and a guy I worked with, he would watch the same movie over and over. He watched Casino Royale. He’d seen it, he said several hundred times. So yeah, that makes sense. Cal, you’re not on social media, you have less distractions than the average person. What problems were you running into that ultimately made you want to write Deep Work?

[0:05:00] Cal Newport: The motivating question was pretty straight forward and it actually came out of the book I’d written before it. In 2012 I had written this book called So Good They Can’t Ignore You and it looked in career satisfaction, it studied people who were happy in their careers, looked to the science and said “Okay, what do you have to do if you want to be really passionate about your career.” One of the big ideas was this idea that you have a preexisting passion that you should identify and go follow that passion, that’s the key to being happy. I debunked that and said, you know, really, what seems to matter for most people who love what they do is that they get really good at things that are valuable. That’s the foundation on which they build really satisfying careers. That’s fine, I wrote that as I was sort of transitioning in the career world from being a grad student, post off and into the job market. There’s this natural follow-up question. Okay, let’s say I buy that, you become really good at all those things? How do you actually, you produce things that are impactful and valuable? This sort of secret sauce to creating a passionate career. Deep Work in some sense was the answer to that question. As I looked into it in my own life and then more broadly. This ability to focus intensely on something that’s demanding and pushes your skills, this was the key. You really can’t get around that step. If you really want to get better and produce things that are valuable. One book led to the other.

[0:06:17] Charlie Hoehn: While you were writing Deep Work, how did you find it changing your work style?

[0:06:25] Cal Newport: It made me more systematic about how I prioritize deep work. This is what I noticed is that, by the time I started writing this book obviously, I was really onboard with this idea that deep work was really valuable. This was something that I had been exposed to pretty early on as a theoretical computer scientist. I did my graduate work at the theory of computation group at MIT. Which is this famous place where there’s these famous theoreticians that you know, sit around and stare at whiteboards. I mean, it’s one of these places where the ability to concentrate is a talked about tier one skill. This is what people are proud of, how well they can concentrate. I had always been exposed to it and I knew it was important. I wanted to do it and I want to do it well. This was always on my radar but when I was writing the book, what changed is I got much more thoughtful and systematic about well what’s the best way to actually prioritize this? It’s almost like if you knew, as most people do, if fitness is important – I should be in good shape, I should eat well and you kind of know that and you’ve been around that message. But actually figuring out how you’re going to do that in your life can really be a hard question and something that has a lot more big impact than just understanding it. When I was working on Deep Work, I got much more systematic about how I scheduled my day, how I approached my work, how I cleared out my schedule, these type of things. I have to say, the surprise for me is that during that one year period where I was writing the manuscript, it should have been a period where my academic work reduced right? I was writing a book in addition to my normal academic work as a professor. Actually, my output as measured by peer view publications doubled in that year as compared to any previous year. That’s solely because as I was writing this book, I got more thoughtful and systematic about giving the most out of deep work and the effect was big.

[0:08:11] Charlie Hoehn: Let’s put that into a listener’s perspective, right? What could they reasonably see in their gains and productivity if they’re applying the system of deep work to their own work?

[0:08:25] Cal Newport: You can see, if you put in the time to train the ability and I want to underscore that point that it is something that requires training. It’s not just a couple of hacks you can do tomorrow. If you take the time to train the capability, 2x, 3x improvement and measurable high value output is common. It’s not in other words a book about you know, it would be nice to be a little less distracted or maybe I’d like to get a little more done. The people who embrace this skill, it’s almost like a super power the Economist called it, The Killer App of the knowledge economy. It’s something that has massive increases to what you’re able to produce.

[0:09:03] Charlie Hoehn: I’d imagine, maybe some listeners think this is a crazy leap, can you kind of humanize this and break down what your average day really looks like and how different or not different it is from the average person?

[0:09:21] Cal Newport: It can depend on the day, it can depend on the type of year but a very – the time of year. A typical schedule for me is during the week, I start with deep work. Just by default, that’s the first thing I do. What varies day to day is how long that deep work goes before I then switch over to shallow work and everything else. Maybe on a day I teach, it’s three hours in the morning and maybe that deep work is focused pretty intensely on preparing a lecture or something like this. Maybe on another day, it’s eight hours the whole day. I’m thinking deeply and on another day, maybe it’s just a couple of hours first thing in the morning and the whole rest of the day is tackling other things, meetings and emails and things that aren’t deep. It can vary but it adds up probably to, I like it to be 30 to 60% of my time in a given week.

[0:10:07] Charlie Hoehn: What do you mean by thinking deeply, are you just sitting on a rock with your chin on your fist and thinking and staring off in the distance? What are you doing?

[0:10:18] Cal Newport: Sometimes, it depends. There literally is a rock, I do sometimes sit on on one of the trails but more broadly…

[0:10:26] Charlie Hoehn: Can that be the cover of your next book? Just you doing that?

[0:10:30] Cal Newport: It should be just me on a rock thinking deeply. But you know, more generally, something I realized, especially after this book came out. Is that there’s different types of deep work and that’s why your question is a good one because it really helped my practice. To recognize that there’s different types of deep work. Each which is serviced best and different ways and recognizing that made a big difference. Because what happens is it’s easy to lock in to one image of what deep work means. I’m in the woods and I’m thinking and solving math proofs or something. If you lock in to one image, then you get sort of upset or discouraged during times of the year, times of the week or times of the semester in which other types of deep activities take prime seats. I’m not getting in the woods anymore, I’m not on my thinking rock anymore, I’m not doing deep work and so I learned not to have one approach. For me, there’s a few different types of deep work, as a theoretical computer scientist, I do a lot of math proof. For me, that’s often walking on foot, often outside, often in the woods with no books, trying to crack math proofs. I also have to you know, write up these proofs, write up grant proposals, this type of work which is very hard writing and it takes place you know, at a computer screen. Then of course as an author, there’s two types of deep work, sometimes it’s reading and thinking. I’m reading, I’m processing, I’m trying to understand information and then other times, I’m staring at the preverbal blank screen, trying to fill words. All that is deep work and all of it is supported in different types of environments with different types of rituals.

[0:11:53] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that makes sense. I want to hear about the book, tell me what is like the one major take away or even your favorite story from the book that listeners could remember going forward or take action on this?

[0:12:10] Cal Newport: The big picture hypothesis, I like nailed down when I talked to people. It’s this notion that we think too much and we worry too much about distractions. Is distraction bad, is distraction good? I like to flip the equation on that. See, I’m not that interested in distraction, what I’m interested in is the value of its opposite. I think the ability to focus deeply is being systematically undervalued right now in our economy. That in terms of the behaviors we promote and the things we reward and the things we lionize, we’re systematically undervaluing the ability to concentrate deeply. Therefore, I think it is a very big opportunity that if you were one of the few to systematically cultivate this capability, there are big rewards to be had. Really, I’m not about scolding people for being distracted. I’m instead trying to encourage people to recognize how much value there is if they can develop an ability to be focused.

[0:13:01] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, can you make it a little bit more concrete what that value looks lik? Because it really is a long-term play that you don’t necessarily see the rewards right off the bat.

[0:13:14] Cal Newport: Right, well, there seems to be two main reasons why the ability to focus intensely is becoming increasingly valuable. The first is it helps you learn hard things quickly. So the act of learning complicated information depends on intense concentration. I mean, just the neuroscience of it. It requires intense concentration. The more comfortable you are with intense concentration and the higher levels of intensity that you can usually get to, translates to the speed and effectiveness with what you can master new things that are complicated and hard. Be it whatever, a new programming language or business strategy or complicated suite of marketing analytics. That is incredibly valuable skill right now, especially in the knowledge economy where things are complicated and things change very rapidly. The second reason why the ability concentrate seems like it’s increasingly valuable is that it allows you to produce a higher quality and higher quantity output per unit of time spent working. If you give me three hours and I’m very adept at going into intense, deep concentration for those three hours. I can produce more stuff of higher value than someone who takes the same three hours but is not as comfortable with concentration and maybe scatters their attention more. You know, I find stories in the book of people who are able to really out produce their peers and it’s because they rely on concertation to get more out of each unit of time spent working. That of course also is very important in this economy. I mean, if you’re not producing at an elite level, you’re increasingly in danger of automation, of being outsourced, being eliminated or replaced. It’s the stars that are going to win going forward in the digital knowledge economy. Deep work is almost necessary if you want to become a star in most fields.

[0:14:50] Charlie Hoehn: Truth. I agree 100% and what I’m curious about is I find with myself and a lot of people, they feel like they’re never being productive enough. It seems like you have a really smart schedule where you block off chunks of time to do deep work and then you’re very consistent about taking time off, enjoying that time off and not letting work creep in. Do you find that’s unique with you or do you find that deep workers are allowed to check – they have an easier time checking out and not feeling guilty about not doing even more?

[0:15:28] Cal Newport: Deep workers in general are better about that and you know, some of it is just vocabulary. If you have this vocabulary, there’s deep work and there’s the other type of work which we can call shallow work. Just having that vocabulary makes a really big difference because if you don’t, you mix all that things together and then your only real measure of productivity in some sense is sort of business. Once you have it all mixed together and you have this general notion of just, you know, the more I work, the more productive I am, the less I work, the less productive I am. You're always going to feel guilty when you stop or take a day off or don’t check your email at night. Deep work on the other hand will say, “Well, wait a second, shallow work is fine and is necessary for me to keep my job or to keep my business afloat.” “It’s not what’s producing the new value. It’s not what’s growing my business, it’s not what’s going to get me a promotion and so it’s sort of a necessary evil you know? I want to handle it but keep it contained and make sure it doesn’t take over too much of my life.” Now, the deep work on the other hand, that’s what really matters. I want to give that a ton of attention. Once you can make that division, it’s much easier to say, “I have done a healthy amount of deep work today. I was very efficient about keeping the shallow work under wraps and now I can take off the rest of the day without worrying about it.” It separates you from this notion of just generic business is somehow a good proxy for your value.

[0:16:39] Charlie Hoehn: Now, let’s get into the practicality of implementing this into our day to day lives. What are the first steps that people should take in order to really start doing deep work today? What do they have to cut, what do they have to do to their calendar, what are the things that you advise?

[0:16:57] Cal Newport: It’s helpful to think about the practical steps in two categories. There’s the sort of actual strategies you can deploy in terms of how you actually approach your work day you know? How you approach your time, how you schedule deep work, how you get the most out of the deep work sessions. But there’s this whole other category of cognitive fitness, the things you do in your life that sets the foundation for you to succeed long term with deep work. I think the right analogy is probably athletics, right? If you want to train to run a marathon or triathlon or something like this. I mean, there’s the actual training you do. I’m going to run these many miles today and then this many miles tomorrow but there’s also the general fitness stuff, you’re going to try to get more sleep, you’re not going to eat junk food. You’re going to – “I’m not going to smoke.” Sort of healthy habits and you have to have both. The same thing holds for deep work. We have these two big categories to sort of, how you set the stage for becoming a deep concentrator and sort of cognitive fitness and then the actual training and strategies you deploy in your everyday life. You know, I can give a couple of examples for both categories if that’s useful?

[0:17:58] Charlie Hoehn: Please.

[0:18:00] Cal Newport: If you look at the cognitive fitness side, something that seems to be really important is to break your addiction to novel stimuli. If you’ve trained your brain that at the slightest hint of boredom, you’re going to deliver it novel stimuli, usually from your smart phone or perhaps from a web browser on your computer if you’re at work. The slightest hint of distraction you’re going to deliver it novel stimuli. It builds up this association, this sort of Pavalovian connection. Boredom means stimuli. This has become a huge problem obviously in the last 10 years because smart phones has allowed us to actually do this sort of Pavalovian training everywhere we are. Right? From the bathroom, the wait in line, wherever. If you have that addiction, when it comes time to sit down and think deeply, you go to your cabin in the woods, you lock the door in your office, this is it, I’m going to think deeply, produce something that’s valuable. Your brain is not going to tolerate it because it’s been taught in the absence of novel stimuli, I get novel stimuli. Deep work is boring in the sense that there’s not a lot of novel stimuli, you’re doing the same thing, if your brain has been taught, boredom equals stimuli, it’s never going to tolerate that you’re not going to be able to do deep work with any success. Do different tactics that can help you break that addiction is a key foundation for becoming a deep worker and there’s some simple things to do there. Take social media apps off your phone for example right? It is not stopping you from using social media, it’s not stopping you from all the benefits everyone is always telling me about that they need on social media. But it prevents you from using it as a quick pull to slot machine when you are bored standing in line. So take that off your phone, and force yourself to actually wait to get back to the computer to use it. Two, schedule the times when you are going to expose yourself to sort of lightweight distraction online. So yeah, I put aside two hours tonight where I am going to get the iPad and curl up on the couch and go nuts. But outside of those times, just be comfortable being bored. So these type of regular exposures to boredom where you don’t get stimuli will help break that addiction and that’s a key foundation if your brand is going to be ready to train to do deep work.

[0:20:02] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. Yeah and just to add to that Cal, I had this discussion recently. If you can do this with anything that creates a distraction throughout the week where you block it off to a dedicated time it really does free up so much mental and emotional energy. My wife and I, we found that we were having discussions about finances or bills or little things that were maybe bugging us or whatever throughout the week, peppered throughout the week and it was creating this low current of stressful tense interactions because we would just react to them when they came up. And so we started having marriage meetings once a week where we dedicate two hours to just talk about all of those things that pop up throughout the week. We dumped the conversations into an agenda in the calendar event every week and so throughout the week we don’t talk about any of that stuff. We don’t do it, it doesn’t distract us. By the time we get to that point, we’re emotionally and mentally prepared. It’s much less stressful so just an analogist to what you are saying, it can be applied to everything.

[0:22:03] Cal Newport: Right and you probably found too that when you batch it like that, when you get to the actual conversation, the amount of conversation you end up having to do is probably a lot less than when you’re sprinkling through. This happened in the book, I had the suggestion for people where I said, “Take a 30 day break for example from social media.” So you could see what do you really miss, what was a problem and what did you not miss? And then only add back to things that you really missed or it was a creating a real lack in your life and people really protested against this for various reasons. So then I revised it and said, “Well okay, don’t take a 30 day break, just take it off your phone for 30 days” and the funny thing was it had the same effect that people, just by taking a lot of these services, taking them off their phone. So now to access it there is maybe 15 extra seconds of effort involved. I’ve got to open my laptop, I’ve got to open the browser and log in or something like that – found that in the 30 day period they never used the service and it had the same effect. So they didn’t even have to take it out of their life, even just adding a little obstacle in front of these some of these distractions can go a long way to highlighting, “This one really wasn’t so important.” So you don’t have to step away from it. I don’t need people to quit things but batch and make a little bit more difficult. You are not losing anything and what you are gaining is a mind that becomes much more comfortable than just being there in the moment.

[0:23:22] Charlie Hoehn: And that’s what everybody is going for anyway, that’s why meditation and everything has taken off. You probably wouldn’t need all that much if you just did exactly what you are saying, so that’s really good. So I loved a lot of the stories and examples of your book. I’d like to touch on a few of them. Can you talk about Adam Grant’s strategy for deep work and being productive? Adam Grant is the author of Give and Take. One of my favorite business books. I guess it’s a business book but one of my favorite books of all time. It’s fantastic and he’s very productive and does incredible work. What are his strategies?

[0:24:03] Cal Newport: Right, Grant is a bestselling author but he’s also a very successful professor. So he’s a business professor at Wharton and he became full professor at a very young age which is the top rank that you get to in the US system. He’s the youngest full professor at Wharton and he did this in part because he publishes a lot and this is not surprising. I studied his CV and I talked to him about it and he publishes a lot more peer review journal papers than his average peer. That’s how he became such a successful professor, became a full professor at a young age and so I talk to them and I asked, “So how do you do this? How are you actually producing almost a factor of two more peer review journal papers than your peers?” The answer is very clearly his embrace of deep work. In what detail what he does is, he has this by-modal approach to how he approaches his work. Where he is either entirely in shallow work mode, during which he is incredibly accessible. I mean the door to his office is open, he is answering emails. Or whatever or he’s in deep work mode where he’s completely inaccessible, out of office responder in his email as if he is on a trip somewhere where he can’t be reached. When he does this deep work carriage, he’ll do them for multiple days in a row. So it’s not, “I am going to spend the morning doing deep work” it’s “I am going to spend the next four days doing deep work.” He also does this at a higher, slightly higher level granularity too. He stacks all his classes in the one semester and basically does no deep work that semester and then can do a lot of deep work in the other semester. So yes it is a by-modal approach. So when it comes time for him to do work on a paper let’s say, an academic paper, he completely can get lost in it for hour after hour, day after day. He produces a massive amount of quality and quantity in that period and I don’t think he spends more total hours than his peers working on these things. It’s just that he concentrates the hours into these long sessions where he works with these deep concentration. Because of that he is getting a lot more out of the same amount of time.

[0:26:05] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, again anybody can do this stuff. It’s just a matter of having, I guess the discipline and putting the constraints in place that will allow it to flourish. The example that you gave from the book or the story of David Dwayne’s Machine, the architecture professor, how do you pronounce this word? Is it Eudaimonia?

[0:26:28] Cal Newport: Eudaimonia.

[0:26:29] Charlie Hoehn: Eudaimonia. The Eudaimonia Machine, this really stuck in my mind and I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot, of how can you construct this for yourself in your own home or work den. Can you explain what Dwayne’s machine is?

[0:26:47] Cal Newport: Right, so David had this thought experiment about how would you as an architect design a building that would optimize your ability to produce value with your brain. The design that he came up with he called it, The Eudaimonia Machine. Eudaimonia being a term out of Aristotle. It’s a Greek term that has to do with humans, it is a state of human flourishing. You are flourishing in the sense of doing everything that a human can do and the human condition and you are pushing what your capabilities are as a human to a degree that means you are flourishing in your existence. It was a very Greek notion of what you are supposed to do with life. So David, he thought about what that means on a professional setting would be if you’re really pushing your brain to its limits to create new things, new things of value. That’s the state of Eudaimonia. So he designed this cool architecture of, I guess a building you would call it. But it’s a really a series of rooms you have to pass through. One to the next to the next to the next. Each of them prepares you more and more to get to the very last room which is sort of the sound proof chamber where you actually do the deep thinking. Yet a very careful way you set it up. So in the early stages you are in a room where you are seeing other people’s projects and drinking coffee or beer and inspired and talking to people and then you move to a room for some more reflection and preparation and then finally you move to this final room. But that resonated with a lot of people, not so much that they’re going to build that exact design but because it emphasized this notion that the spaces that you’re in and the rituals surrounding your work in the field of cognitive work and knowledge work – is vitally important. As important as how you arrange the machines in the factory and the industrial work. Yet, we’re not giving that any attention. Instead we build open offices and connect people to Slack channels. And do all of these things that basically keeps you away from that type of flourishing. So I think people really resonated with this thought experiment of what if we actually designed our work spaces and work days, to produce as much value as possible out of our brains.

[0:28:48] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. Cal what have been some of the opportunities or unexpected things that have risen that have come into your life because you wrote this book? I imagine companies are reaching out to you and saying, “How do we get our workers to have deep work in their routine?” Wwhat are some things that have come up?

[0:29:11] Cal Newport: It’s opened up a lot of interesting opportunities. I’ve got to spend some time for example at the Capital with the US senator who was showing me the room he had set up off of his Capital office for deep work in the morning and it’s role in trying to understand whatever legislative issues. I got to hang out there for a while. There has been a lot of companies who were very interested in discussing it. Some people sent me recently, there are some companies who have been pretty big products who are now even integrating the term “deep work” actually into the product design itself and so that’s been interesting. We actually say like it’s an explanation like, “Okay this button pauses your inbox so that you can go into deep work mode” and there’s a couple of other well-known large companies where I had a chance to talk with executives there. They are talking about how they are rebuilding their products to emphasize promoting deep work as a tier one skill. So the idea that people in places that matter are starting to recognize this activity as something that is important and plays a big role in our economy. It plays a big role in human satisfaction. That’s been really exciting.

[0:30:20] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah and I hope that you’re referring to the biggest technology companies that have us all addicted to our phones. So tell me about your favorite reader success stories. What if people reached out to you and said, “Hey I implemented deep work and it’s transformed my life”?

[0:30:39] Cal Newport: You know I was talking recently with a well-known song writer. So she writes songs for a lot of the big pop names that you have heard of and she was really having a hard time with distraction. I mean I guess it’s a weird world. I don’t really understand the world of pop music and producing but she was telling me how she was just spending so much time obsessively checking social media and email and are people listening to me or replying to me. Are there likes on this or that and it was hard. I convinced her basically to have work be completely separated from anything social, anything online and she was very worried about it. It took two weeks and she came back and is like, “I’m incredibly productive now. I work in a place where I don’t have my phone. That stuff didn’t really matter.” Also I was talking recently with a standup comedian that plugged this idea that well you’ve got to be on Twitter and doing on all of these things on Twitter. Otherwise you are not going to have an audience and no one will know who you were. He went back and said, “You know I reflected on this and I never got a gig off of Twitter. Everything that I have ever gotten, any important connections has always been someone saw my show and they liked it. I was talking to them backstage and they say the quality and they wanted to work with me.” He quit social media and I don’t know, it was like a one month time frame or something. I think he finished the movie screenplay, a spec script for a TV show and a proposal for a book all in one month or six week period or something like this. Once he cleared out and it was emotionally draining for him because once you were in that world, you’re going to have trolls and attacks and controversies. He said it was just emotionally draining and he just walked away and was suddenly very productive. So at least recently I have been liking these case studies from the world of entertainment.

[0:32:26] Charlie Hoehn: I love that, yeah that is very motivating to hear. I know I don’t get that much pleasure out of Twitter anymore. I stay on the platform because there’s this little part of me that’s like, “Well maybe one day I will end up writing a proposal and when it comes to the section where you say, “How much reach you have?” They’ll ask, “Where are you are on Twitter?” and I think that’s ridiculous for the amount of energy and distraction that it zaps away. So I’ll tell you this, I am going to do the 30 days away from Twitter potentially from Facebook too. I need a break from that after this call. So thank you for the motivation.

[0:33:10] Cal Newport: Good, I’ll hold you to it. I will check your Twitter feed.

[0:33:15] Charlie Hoehn: So what does the rest of this year look like for you Cal?

[0:33:18] Cal Newport: Well I am writing again. I just did a two book deal to continue to explore some of the spaces. So I am looking forward to for the rest of the year. I have a sabbatical coming up for example to really dig in, work deep, think deep, do some writing. There is nothing that makes me happier than having hard things to do but non-urgent. Hard things that are going to take a lot of work but there is no urgent deadline so you can control when and how you work on it. That’s my sweet spot and I am looking forward to doing a lot of that coming up.

[0:33:51] Charlie Hoehn: And is this sabbatical a grand gesture as you call it in your book? Have you done sabbaticals to write before?

[0:33:59] Cal Newport: Well I’m going to use it as a grand gesture. I mean it’s a perk of being a professor so in some sense, whether or not I also had a book to write, I would be taking a sabbatical. But my wife and I are exploring ways to make it more of a grand gesture. It is also primarily a time for me to work on my research as sort of the primary goal. Which is quintessential deep thinking. But we are thinking about ways to make it a grand gesture. What we are almost going to certainly de-camp from Washington DC and go somewhere for maybe a month or six week,s where we’re really prioritizing for the exoticness of the location. We want to go somewhere, rent a house for a month or two where the whole grand gesture is we’re here to think deeply.

[0:34:45] Charlie Hoehn: And are you allowed to talk about what the follow up book is?

[0:34:49] Cal Newport: Yeah, so the two ideas that are bouncing and they are still evolving and don’t necessarily have any order on it. One has to do with this philosophy of digital minimalism which I have been writing and talking about recently. Which is basically a philosophy for how to handle all the technology in your life. What is the right way to approach technology so that it makes your life much better and doesn’t overwhelm you. I think we’re drowning in the sea of little tips and tricks right now but what we need it some big philosophies like, this is an approach to life. Not that it has to be the right one but I think we need to start talking in that way. We had to move past tips and get to just like in fitness and eating. We have vegetarianism and paleo and big name philosophies for trying to tackle these things. We need the same thing in our tech lives. And then other one is called A World Without Email and its more business focused and it’s making an argument that the way we work now, with all of this constant unstructured communication, is not fundamental and in fact is something that is going to disappear in the future as we move forward to more efficient ways of doing knowledge work. So the only question is whether or not you get out in front of that trend or not. 20 years from now, we are not going to sit around with an email inbox and an email address associated with our name and instant messenger and chat windows. That is not what work is going to look like. So I am trying to make the case that this trend is coming and whether or not you are going to get out in front of it. So a personal book and a business book.

[0:36:17] Charlie Hoehn: Wow and when are those coming out?

[0:36:19] Cal Newport: The first would be – yeah that is a good question. The first manuscript is coming in June. So that would probably put it in New Year 2019 or December 2018.

[0:36:32] Charlie Hoehn: Phenomenal, that sounds great. What’s the best way for listeners to follow you and keep abreast of what you are working on?

[0:36:43] Cal Newport: Well I blog at calnewport.com and so you could dive into those archives or look at my new postings to get a sense of – you can watch me exploring these and related ideas on there. You can also find out more about the books and it’s such a good place to learn about me and see what I am doing. On the other hand, I’m very hard to reach but that’s my design. I am not on social media. I don’t have a general purpose email address but that is the necessary tradeoff I guess to support a life of depth.

[0:37:09] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, well I really appreciate you doing this interview Cal, sincerely I know the listeners will as well so thank you so much man.

[0:37:16] Cal Newport: Sure, well thank you Charlie.

[0:37:18] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Cal Newport for being on the show. You can buy his book, Deep Work, on amazon.com. Did this episode made you want to quit social media? Let us know on Facebook and Twitter. Psyche. I’m just messing with you. For real though, leave us a review on iTunes because otherwise my self-esteem will just fall apart. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.