Deep Work, with Cal Newport – Episode 237 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Noted Computer Science professor and bestselling author Cal Newport explains the concept of “deep work”, the danger of multitasking, the outright stupidity of email, diversification of communication, the connection between Henry Ford and the “cognitive assembly line”, and rethinking how we’re thinking about our thinking. 

About Cal:

Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, who specializes in the theory of distributed algorithms. He previously earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2009 and graduated from Dartmouth College in 2004. In addition to studying the theoretical foundations of our digital age as a professor, Newport also writes about the impact of these technologies on the world of work.

His book, Deep Work argues that focus is the new I.Q. in the knowledge economy, and that individuals who cultivate their ability to concentrate without distraction will thrive. On publication, Deep Work became an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller, and received praise in the New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Guardian.

Newport’s previous book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, argues that “follow your passion” is bad advice. Since its publication, it has been selected for several best business books of the year lists, including those by Inc. Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and 800-CEO-Read. Newport’s New York Times op-ed on the book became the paper’s most e-mailed article for over a week.

Newport is also the author of three books of unconventional advice for students: How to Be a High School Superstar, How to Become a Straight-A Student , and How to Win at College. The How To student series has sold over well over 150,000 copies since its inception, and Newport has been invited to speak on these topics at some of the country’s top universities, including Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Georgetown and Duke.

Between books, Newport explores related ideas on his popular Study Hacks blog.

Learn more at CalNewport.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host: I am excited and honored to introduce one of the big thought leaders of our generation. His name is Cal Newport. His book Deep Work has been a mega bestseller, and he is a PhD. He is also a professor. He lives in Washington DC, and teaches at Georgetown University in the computer science department. Cal, thanks for being here.

Cal Newport: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Host: So, deep work. If people haven’t heard about that, can you just introduce us? What is the premise of the concept of deep work?

Cal Newport: Well, deep work is my term for the activity in which you’re focused without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. And when I say without distraction, I mean that very strictly. That is no glances at in boxes, no glances at phones. Actually 100% locked in on a cognitively demanding task. The core premise of my book is that this ability to perform deep. Is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy at exactly the same time that it’s becoming increasingly rare. And that this is creating a real economic mismatch, a supply and demand mismatch, which means that the ability form deep work is being essentially overvalued.

So if you’re one of the few to actually systematically cultivate this skill, be it for yourself within your organization, you could potentially gain a, a sort of huge, almost unfair economic advantage.

Host: Is taking notes on your phone while somebody is talking to you, taking notes about what they’re saying. Is that okay or is that considered distracting?

Cal Newport: Well, again, deep work is a very particular activity, right? So the idea is not that your whole life should be deep work, but that we should think about this particular skill, which is when you’re giving something intense concentration, pushing your mind to its limit to try to create new value in the world.

This particular skill is something we haven’t been talking about enough. We should think about it like a tier one capability, like being able to write good computer code or or market really effectively. And so I’m trying to get out this message that this particular skill is something. Talking enough about, it’s something we need to lionize, it’s something we need to protect.

It’s something we need to practice. It’s something we need to cultivate in our own lives. So what I like to think about I’m doing with this, this sort of thinking I’m doing is sort of writing I’m doing, is that I’m, I’m not that interested in talking about why distractions are bad. I think instead we haven’t talked enough about why they’re opposite is so valuable.

So life, especially in the business world, is a mix of deep and, and what I call shallow work, which is basically everything that’s not deep work and really this ratio, what is your ideal ratio of deep to shallow work in a particular week? That answer’s gonna be different depending on what you do. The issue is, however, is that most people don’t have a clear sense of what that answer is for their own life.

And when you don’t have a clear idea of what that answer should be, the ratio gets very, very small and people tend to fill more and more of their time with shallow work, which makes you feel. And it’s hard and you feel like you’re being productive, but it doesn’t move the needle right? I like to say shallow work will keep you from going bankrupt, but it’s deep work that’s gonna get your company acquired at a a 10 X multiplier or shallow work might prevent you from getting fired, but deep work is what’s gonna get you promoted.

Host: So basically multitasking would be shallow work, doing two things at launch or switching back and forth rapidly, right?

Cal Newport: Multitasking is not deep work, but there’s an even worse culprit out there that I think is, uh, flying under the radar, which is almost singletasking. Right. It seems to me that a lot of people with more advanced productivity, thinking long ago, let’s say in the early two thousands, got rid of this idea that they can do pure multitasking.

That you can literally have three windows open at the same time, and somehow being made progress on multiple things simultaneously. So serious productivity thinkers have moved past multitasking, but what they’re doing instead, I think it’d be just as insidious. They do what they think is primarily single pass and they just have one window open.

They’re just working on one thing. The just checks happen every five or 10 minutes. So let me just do a quick, just check my inbox. Lemme just do a quick, just check on my phone. Anyone say, Hey look, I’m not multitasking. I only looked at my inbox for 15 seconds and that was only 10 minutes ago. I’m not multitasking.

How much damage can 10 seconds or 15 seconds check actually do? But we now have compelling research that says those just checks can be just as damaging as pure multitasking. Because it’s not the length of time, it’s the cost of switching the context. So just the context switch of glancing your inbox means for the next maybe 10 or 15 minutes when you’re trying to go back to the original hard task, your capacity is reduced.

So I think we have a whole generation of knowledge workers who think they’ve given up multitasking and think they’re using their brain at its highest uh, capacity, but are falling well short because these persistent just checks are keeping them sort of perpetually in a state of reduced cognitive. And that’s why people that are very good at deep work can often almost look like a superpower.

You say, how are you able to get this much done? A big part of the answer is because they’re not doing that context switching. Without that context switching, their brain is operating at a much higher level of effectiveness and this much higher level of effectiveness simply put produces more results. So people who really, really.

Peer deep work with zero just checks tend to produce at a level that can almost mystify their peers. People wonder, well, how are you able to get this much done? You seem to be working less total hours than me. That’s a big part of the reason why.

Host: So what do you do with all the stuff that piles up while you’re in deep work?

Cal Newport: Well, I mean, in the short term, in the short term, you just have to be a little bit more obnoxious to your colleagues, right? I mean, in the short term, you do the deep work, right? I mean, the deep work in almost every job in the knowledge sector is what moves the needle. It’s what produces new value, right?

No one has ever made a fortune out of email. No one’s ever made a fortune outta going to a lot of meetings. No one’s ever made a fortune outta being really good. Posting things on social media value is produced in the knowledge sector by taking your brain and doing concentrated thought on it. So there, there, there can’t be any scenario in which you give that up so that the logistical stuff will be easier unless people be annoyed.

So in the short term, if you’re gonna put aside time for deep work and you’re gonna protect that time, you’re gonna be less available, you’re gonna miss some things, some bad things will. But business is hard. Business is about producing value, not making things convenient for people. I like to say when Henry Ford invented the assembly line, that was an incredibly inconvenient and annoying way to run a factory.

It was much easier to do it the way they used to do it. There’s a lot more hard edges when you’re trying to maintain a just in time assembly line system with the pacing of it, the inventory, getting people at just the right speed, but it produces cars 10 times faster. It’s the same thing in knowledge work.

Putting aside and protecting time regularly for deep work is what’s gonna produce. 10 times faster. And if that means that you miss an important email or no, a colleague now and then I think that that’s a fair trade. So that’s my short term answer is be okay with occasional bad things happening. There’s been longer term answers, things you can actually do within your organization to actually shift these cultures to be a little bit more hospitable to deep work.

But in the short term, I like to empower people. The email doesn’t produce value. No one pays you for it. The meetings don’t produce value. No one pays you for. Posting on social media doesn’t produce value. No one pays your company for that. In knowledge work, it’s the hard thinking that actually produces the cars off the assembly line, and you don’t wanna sacrifice that for anything else.

Why do you think people struggle with the deep work? Well, I think there’s two big issues, right? The first issue is that deep work is hard, right? I mean, it’s a skill that you have to practice. If you’re not practicing it, it’s not gonna go well. And this is something a lot of people get wrong. I think a lot of people think about deep work as a habit, like flossing their teeth.

I know how to do it, I know how to concentrate, I just need to make more time for it. I’m just not doing it enough. But the reality is that deep work is much more like a skill, like playing the. If you haven’t been practicing it and you just pick up a guitar, you’re not gonna expect to sound very good. So if you wanna be a serious, deep thinker, someone who can concentrate on an intense level and produce at that, that sort of superhero level, it takes a lot of work to get there.

I mean, I can’t just take you today and lock you away in a Faraday cage where no electronic signals can possibly get through and say, okay, think deeply for three hours, and expect necessarily that it’ll be very product. If you haven’t been practicing over time, your ability to do it. So that’s one reason why I think it’s not as common is because when people just flirt with it, it’s not a very pleasant experience.

Uh, the second issue is, I think when it comes to digital knowledge work. So knowledge work in the age of digital computer networks, which is a very new thing in the history of sort of modern commerce. We don’t yet have any idea what we. Right. What was our first reaction to this idea of knowledge work In the age of digital networks?

We created a workflow that I call the hyperactive hive mind, where we say, let’s just give everyone an email address, right that’s attached to their name, and let’s just send messages back and forth, unstructured all day. Well, I’ll just sort of send messages to each other all day and kind of figure things out on the fly as they unfold.

And maybe we’ll have a Slack channel so we can send these messages even. And we think about that, like this is what it means to work in the age of digital knowledge work, but it’s actually one very arbitrary way you could approach work. And I think it’s actually an incredibly ineffectual one. It’s, it’s kinda naive and simplistic.

I mean, it, it’s nicely flexible if everyone just sends messages back and forth all day, you don’t need a lot of processes. Your, your, your organization’s pretty flexible. You can kind of just rock and roll and figure things out on the. , but it’s also an incredibly inefficient way to make use of the primary capital investment knowledge work, which is human brains.

You’re investing almost all of your money in human brains, building buildings with air conditioning so the brains can be comfortable, you know, putting in lights and desks as human brains to go computer terminals so the human brains can, can. Uh, record the value that they’re creating. You invest all this money in human brains, and then you hook ’em up into a workflow where the human brain can only produce value at a very small fraction of this capability.

So I, I think we are in an early stage of digital knowledge work that is, uh, incredibly ineffectual and naive. And so, yes, it’s very hard to do deep work in part because we built workflows that depended, I think, stupidly on human brains constantly tending ongoing, unstructured conversational flows. You can’t have a human brain produce new original things and tend a persistent stream of back and forth unstructured communication.

It can’t do both. Computer scientists figured this out. In the early days of computer networks, we realized you had to have a separate processor dealing with the traffic on the computer network and make that separate from the processor on the computer that actually does the main applications. The very first technologies that people tried was, okay, we will have the computer itself monitor the copper cable.

And look at the messages on it and say, okay, is this one for me? Is this one for me? Okay, this one’s for me. And that’s how you would know when there was messages on the network for the computer. The problem was, is when you set up computer networks this way, your main C P U spent all of its time just monitoring the network, traffic on the network and didn’t have any cycles left to actually compute things or, or do valuable tasks for the users.

So really quickly in the history of computer network technology, people figured out, oh, we have to separate those two things. We’ll build a piece of technology that we call a network interface card that has its own processor on it, and all it will do is sit there on the network and monitor the traffic and see, okay, what are messages that we need the CPU to look at?

And then it’ll buffer ’em up and the CPU gets a chance, it’ll. Come down and read those messages. We, we separated those two tasks. It’s a waste of a expensive computer CPU to have it spend most of its cycles monitoring network traffic. But that’s essentially what we’re doing in digital network. Uh, digital knowledge work organizations.

We’re taking expensive human brains and making them spend most of their cycles monitoring and responding to communication. Which doesn’t leave nearly enough unbroken periods left for to do what actually they do best. It’s main competitive advantage, which is producing new value from scratch. And so I think we’re just in an early stage of figuring out what’s the right way to run a business where you have a collection of human brains that need to work together to produce value. And I think what we’re doing now is not gonna be the final answer. And as we get smarter about it, t’s gonna become more.

Host: I wanna talk about social media for a second because you’re, you know, you’re referencing sort of the idea of email and this unstructured communication flow. What is your philosophy about social media?

Cal Newport: I’m not a big fan of social media. I think it’s, it’s, uh, importance and impact is way inflated in our culture. And I think the idea that it should be universal, that it’s something that everyone should use, is sort of an insane proposition. Now, it’s important to separate business from personal. If you run a business and you use social media to market, I can’t blame you for that.

It’s an excellent tool for marketing because despite my. Efforts, almost everyone uses it and it allows you to target these people really well. And so I, I hold nothing against businesses who use social media professionally to try to target audiences or spread their word. I mean, why would you avoid such a powerful tool if it existed?

But when it comes to social media in people’s personal lives, um, I, I think its value is, is probably greatly. I’ve never had a social media account. Uh, it turns out that’s allowed. I still know what’s going on in the world. I still sell books. People still know who I am. I still have friends. Um, so this idea that somehow it’s a fundamental technology that you need to be involved with, uh, I disagree with.

Now, a lot of people are nervous about it. So what I often suggest to people is try this experiment, take it off your. None of the benefits that anyone ever gives me about why they need social media in their life has anything to do with the need to be instantly available or have it instantly accessible.

And in fact, most people, if you really push ’em, like tell me the things that would be really bad, the things you would really miss out on if I took social media. Your life, make me that list and you get people to make that list. For most people, if you look at that list, it’s something they could probably satisfy in about 20 minutes.

Well, I need to check up on this. I’d like to know what this friend is doing, and I get updates on X, Y, or Z or something like that. For most people, they could get 90, 95% of the value that they really derive outta social media, logging on, on their desktop on Sunday night, and yet the average American spends close to two hours per day on social media.

Why is say this mismatch, cuz you’re being exploited. You’re being used by these massive attention conglomerates. You’re trying to extract as many minutes as possible out of your mind. So I don’t buy this idea that social media is this fundamental technology that’s some, somehow at the core of life in connected age.

I think it’s a, the standard oil of the 21st century. It’s a few massive companies trying to exploit as much as your time as possible. So my simple suggestion is just take it off your phone for. , you know, do the stuff that’s important on your desktop, but don’t allow yourself to be a matrix style character in that pod.

With the social media pipe plugged into the back of your head, using it two hours a day on your phone. If you take it off of your phone, you defang most of the addictive alert of the service. And all that’s left is the utility stuff. The Oh yeah. Once or twice a week. I need to log on and check on this and check on this.

So I, I’ve, I’ve mo I found myself to have more success when I moderate myself from saying just. Which people are comfortable doing. Just saying, well, just take it off your phone. What could possibly go wrong? And I think it’s IT people, it definitely improves people’s experience with these technologies.

Host: So how do people connect with you?

Cal Newport: One technology I’ve loved since the very early days, web 2.0 is blogging. I love this idea of blogging and now the idea of podcasting. Uh, the idea to be able to produce long form, interesting thoughts on your own. So I have a [email protected] that I’ve been maintaining for over a decade. So if you’re interested in, in sort of dipping your toe in, in sort of the weird world of Cal Newport’s thoughts on productivity and depth and social media, you can go there and there’s, there’s quite a few things you can read. It’s also a good place to find out more about the, the various books I’ve written as.

Host: Do you have anything as you look towards the future that you say, here’s what I think is gonna happen, or Here’s what we could at least do personally, some actions that we could take to sort of better survive and thrive in the future, given all the noise.

Cal Newport: Yeah. Uh, it’s something I’ve thought a lot about. I, I’ve been actually hunting down and researching companies that embrace what I call email freedom, which is a workflow that does not depend on unstructured messaging for it to unfold. There’s not gonna be a one size fits all answer. I mean, obviously there’s gonna be some.

Customization to different industries, but, but two ideas that seem like they’re gonna play a bigger role in sort of the future digital knowledge work. One is having more variety among the communication expectations of different people. So right now we sort of smooth out the communication expectations of everyone in organization.

You all have an email address, you’re all accessible to everyone. I think going forward we’re gonna see, uh, more variation there. So, like a developer at Google might not have their own email address. Or any real easy way for the outside world or any real expectations that you can grab their time and attention, and maybe they have a, a, an assistant on their team that handles most of the communication on their behalf, the team behalf of the outside world, where marketing executive would’ve completely different.

Maybe they have multiple email addresses and there’s more of an expectation that they would be available. We’re gonna see more diversity in communication. Second, I think we’re gonna see almost certainly, this is what we, if you study the, the history of, uh, the evolution of the industrial sector in the, the late, uh, 18th and early 17th century, you see that what happens over time is that we get more clearly defined processes. So I think right now a lot of digital knowledge work organizations don’t have a lot of clear processes because you can kind of just figure things out with meetings and back and forth emails. I think going forward you’re gonna see more hard edge processes, right?

So, okay, here’s our process for how whatever the weekly podcast is produced and it’s clear and it has clear cut interfaces for here’s where the information comes in. Here’s how you communicate with this process. Here’s where you can expect the information to come out. On the other side, there’s gonna be these processes to each have their.

Communication protocols associated with them, and then individuals will be associated with these processes as opposed to just being autonomous sort of inboxes to which you can put information. So we’re gonna start to see work become much more process focused. I mean, if you’re an editor, it might be much more clear how your day unfolds.

If you’re a programmer, it’s gonna be different than if you’re a marketing executive. So we’re gonna see much more, I think, structure, just like the assembly line, was a much more structured way to build cars. And what they used to do, which is we just have a few teams and each team builds a car in place in their spot on the factory floor, right?

That was the obvious, easy way to build a car. It didn’t, it was very intuitive, but it was very slow. The assembly line’s very structured and complicated, but works much better. Right now, just sitting around and sending emails back and forth is like building the car in one place in the center of the factor.

It’s very intuitive. It’s easy. We understand that it’s how we built things throughout history, but the sort of cognitive assembly line is coming, so we’re gonna see a lot more, I think, specific hard edge. Disease, they’re gonna be a pain, they’re gonna be inconvenient. There’s gonna be hard edges. We’re like, ah, I kind of need like the tension right now and I don’t have an easy way to do it and this is gonna really mess up my morning.

Like that type of stuff’s gonna happen more, but we’re gonna get more comfortable with the idea that inconvenience is okay. Because that’s not really the role of business. The role of business is producing value out of things that’s less valuable, and that’s sort of inherently an inconvenient, hard thing to do.

So I think that’s what we’re gonna see. Different people will have different communication expectations. No one size fits all, and we’re gonna start seeing more hard edge processes defining these businesses, processes that are very clear about how information comes in and how information.

Host: One thing that we know for sure is the people who are thinking and adapting are gonna have a, a key role in the future. Deep work is certainly a part of that, and Cal Newport is really the thought leader in that space. So thank you for your message and for, uh, the gift of your attention and just for providing all of us with the value of rethinking how we think about our thinking.

Cal Newport: Well, thank you. I appreciate it.