The philosophy of digital minimalism and how it pertains to productivity and intentionality.
In this episode, Cal argues for rewiring your brain to crave slow distractions over their faster (often digital) alternatives. The goal here is not to get more done but to transform your life into something slower and more meaningful.
In the modern era, we're disconnecting from embodied interaction and inadvertently allowing parts of our brains to atrophy. Jocelyn K. Glei, host of the podcast "Hurry Slowly," speaks with Cal Newport about the philosophy of digital minimalism and how it pertains to productivity and intentionality.
Newport warns against leanings on technology for social fulfillment and advocates for a return to analog interaction, noting that centuries of human evolution cannot be effectively replaced by digital mediums. Glei discusses her new course "Reset," aimed to reinvigorate intentional, productive work habits.
Insights from Cal Newport and Digital Minimalism
Cal Newport emphasizes the impact of replacing engaged brain activities with tech solutions.
Digital Minimalism suggests alignment of technology with one's core values.
Newport proposes conducting a digital detox to reassess tech's role in our lives.
Transitioning from digital to more analog social interactions can increase well-being according to Newport.
Significance of Intentionality Over Convenience
Living intentionally and engaging in more embodied forms of communication result in higher satisfaction, as opposed to a life filled with convenient but distracting digital interferences.
Intentionally disconnecting from digital tools can rejuvenate cognitive capabilities and deepen relationships.
Prospective Changes in the Workplace
The "attention capital" concept predicts a shift in valuing focused cognitive effort over multitasking in knowledge work.
A forthcoming revolution in organizational structure will prioritize the effective utilization of human brain power over digital communication tools, possibly even leading to a "World Without Email."
The decluttering experiment underscores the need for substantial alteration in tech use to achieve meaningful gains in productivity and wellness.
Newport's arguments reflect a careful examination of deep-rooted human behaviors and the role technology plays in either enhancing or diminishing the quality of modern lives. Listen to the full podcast.
Read the full discussion in the transcript below 👇
Audio 207_HurrySlowly_CalNewport.mp3/2024-01-14
If you eliminate embodied interaction from your life, it's basically letting massive parts of your brain atrophy, and that just gets you in trouble. I mean, we have to, like to say, we have to get suspicious when you take something that has been evolved into us over hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, and figure that something that some 21-year-olds thought up in the rec room of a tech incubator can replace it without there being problems. I'm Jocelyn K. Glei, and this is Hurry Slowly, a podcast about pacing yourself, where I explore how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient through the simple act of slowing down. Now, we've just turned a corner into the new year, and I've no doubt many of you listening are keen to change some of your habits in 2019. So a quick announcement before we begin. On January 19th, I'm launching a brand new online course called Reset. It's a four-week program that's designed to completely transform the way you work. It's all about slowing down, getting back into your body, and generally taking a more heart-centered approach to productivity. Reset takes the themes that I explore on this podcast and turns them into a clear, actionable program that will show you how to work in a way that's nurturing, intentional, and energizing. Registration is open now, and I'm offering a special early bird rate that's only available until this Friday, January 4th. If you'd like to learn more, visit reset-course.com for all the details. That's reset-course.com. Okay, now on to today's guest, Cal Newport, who is a computer scientist, a professor at Georgetown University, and one of my absolute favorite writers on the future of work. He's the author of the excellent books, So Good They Can't Ignore You, in which he expertly debunks the idea of following your passion, as well as Deep Work, the runaway hit about how to do focused work in the age of distraction. I've been following Cal's blog and reading his books for years now, and I think he's easily one of the most lucid and thoughtful writers I know. And today, we're going to give you a sneak peek at the insights and ideas in his new book, Digital Minimalism, Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, which is due out on February 5th. In this conversation, we take a deep dive into the philosophy of digital minimalism. We touch on how to best align your use of technology with your values, how to conduct a 30-day digital detox, and the idea of embracing what Cal calls analog social media. We also discuss why living intentionally is more important for your general well-being than always having speed and convenience. And we dig into the topic of Cal's next book on the horizon, which will explore the idea of how we can maximize our limited attention capital at work. All right, let's get started. I want to start by talking about the idea of digital wellness. It's this new term that has sort of recently creeped into the cultural lexicon. Apple is launching new tools that are supposedly going to help you use your iPhone less. Twitter is launching new features that will help you monitor how much time you spend on the app, and there's a bunch of other tech companies that are developing similar features. What's your take on the idea of digital wellness? It's a good news, bad news situation from my perspective. So I think the good news is that our cultures embrace of this idea of digital wellness. It means that we're starting to recognize that something's amiss when it comes to our relationship with technology. We're out of the hype of these early breakthroughs and we're realizing that there's some consequences here and we don't quite have our arms around what relationship is going to be healthy with these tools. So I think that's good and that's a good thing reflected by an increasing conversation of digital wellness. However, the way that we're tackling the issue now as it first arises is way too weak. I think this notion of sort of just the social media attention economy companies, the companies that are sort of causing a lot of these problems are saying, well, we'll just add some features to our products. It may make them a little bit easier. It reminds me a lot of the sort of recent response to the obesity epidemic by having the sort of soda manufacturers would sort of put the number of calories on the bottle and put up signs that says, drink soda in moderation. Well, they sort of choose smart, have some soda, have some water. It's like, well, no, we need way more sort of thinking and action and philosophy to get people healthy. I think the same thing in the digital world. I'm glad that we're worried about digital wellness but I think to really get our arms around this, we have to go much beyond just sort of small tweaks and features and hacks and start thinking seriously about what is the role of technology in our modern notion of the good life? And that this is a much bigger challenge to tackle. Yeah, well, and I think there's even this kind of subtle sleight of hand going on with terminology like that when you say digital wellness or you say digital health. And it's almost like these companies are trying to relocate our concept of health outside of our bodies so that rather than doing things that make you feel good or provide meaning or make you feel good in your body, which is what actual wellbeing is, you're sort of now focused on looking at an app that helps you optimize your quote unquote digital wellbeing. And of course that then keeps you engaged with your digital device. I mean, I think a lot of these companies wanna keep presenting sort of these issues with this false binary choice between you're gonna be living in a cabin in the woods, chasing your chickens around and not knowing what year it is or like, of course you're gonna use all these things but maybe you'll have a little bit of moderation. So they always want it to be this binary. Like you use no technology or you use all of it but maybe have some good tips and intentions to help tame it. And that always frustrates me because I agree, if you want digital wellness, some of the big things you can do is spend much more time without a phone, not have social media on your phone, be outside for a long amount of time, spend a couple hours face-to-face conversation with someone that you really care about with no other distractions in sight. Like these are things that give you a lot of wellness and digital tools have gotten in the way of it. So I do agree there's a bit of sleight of hand by adding digital in front of it, you are sort of seeding the premise that of course you're gonna have these tools, all of them in your life sort of omnipresent and it matters just like how do we sort of manage that state of affairs a little bit better. Rather than engaging with these types of supposedly healthier digital apps that still keep you focused on your phone, you are advocating for a different approach in your new book, one that you call digital minimalism. What is digital minimalism exactly? Well, first of all, you need the motivation even behind coming up with something like digital minimalism, which is a little bit more broad, is this idea that if we are going to actually solve a lot of these issues we're feeling or real issues around technology, we need to go beyond tips and tricks and hacks and actually adopt internally consistent value-based philosophies of technology use. We know this from other parts of our life and other parts of our culture where there's been systemic problems that we've needed to try to get our arms around like with health and fitness, for example, it was not enough just to say, try to eat healthier, maybe move some more. People needed full philosophies like CrossFit, high intensity, highly functional exercise or paleo or whatever it is or vegan, right? You needed full form philosophies with some sort of moral grounding. This is what actually helped people in that realm make progress and actually make change, positive change. I think we need the same in technology. We can't just have another setting on the iPhone or intention to do a digital Sabbath once a week. We need a fully formed philosophy grounded in morality that says, this is how I use technology, what technology use for what purpose and why. And so digital minimalism is one such philosophy. But even before I define it, I think half of its value is just what it is. An attempt to say you can have a internally consistent philosophy about technology use and that's much better than just having some good intention and tips. So what is this particular philosophy? Well, it argues that you should start with your deeply held values. For each of those values say, what is the best way to use technology to help this value? And the answers to those questions basically dictates what technology you allow in your life and how you use them. Everything else you're happy to miss out on. And that this is much different than the sort of default maximalist approach with most people take, which is if you can sell me on any potential benefit of a technology I'll let into my life. That's the maximalist approach. So I say do the opposite. You should be very minimalist. I'm very intentionally using a technologies to optimally help certain things I really care about. And I'm happy missing out on all the rest. I don't buy the sort of hoarder argument that if you're missing out on a value, it's like you've lost value. It's a malformed way to think about the world. So a digital minimalist would argue that the way to thrive in a high-tech world is probably to use much, much less technology, but use the technology you use much better. So you say that the idea of a sort of philosophy of digital minimalism is about kind of really getting clarity on your own values and then kind of mapping technology onto that, right? So what's the best or not, depending on what best serves that value. So what would be maybe a couple of examples of how that would play out based on some different values and then how that kind of relates back to how you use or don't use technology? So for example, you might recognize like sort of most humans do that social connection is very important. Like that's something you value. Relationships with people you care about is something you value. The maximalist approach would say, oh, you give me some of these social media apps and they have some benefit there. So that's justification to use it. But the minimalist would say, I can't do everything. So what's the best way to use technology to support this thing I value that is having strong relationships with people I care about? And if you're doing this assessment, you probably figure out like, you know what? Like leaving comments on Facebook and retweeting people, like that's actually a relatively weak way to support this value. I wonder if there's some better use I could get out of technology. And maybe depending on your circumstance, it might lead you to use technology in a way that helps you say organize a group in your local community that you actually do things with that helps your community you see on a regular basis or something like this. And so technology is playing a key role here, but maybe in this case you realize, using like a distro list to pull together a group that does things in person in my neighborhood is much more servicing of this value of strong relationships with people I care about than say, leaving comments or saying happy birthday on someone's Facebook. So Facebook didn't make the cut there. It might have some benefit for my relationships, but it wasn't the best way to use technology to use my relationships. I have something that's much stronger. And so that's what I'm gonna do. So it's a lot of these sort of cost benefit analysis. Some value is not enough. If you adopt that approach, you're gonna end up cluttering your digital life and clutter makes you worse off than having nothing at all. And so it's about what is the optimal way to use technology? So that's just one example. Yeah, I actually did a similar, sort of adopted a similar habit recently where as many people do, I was texting with a number of different close friends of mine and just feeling like that was really dissatisfying or certainly not particularly fulfilling. And I realized that I wasn't talking to these people on the phone because I would often feel like I had to have like an hour to catch up with them or something like that. So with a couple people, I started engaging more with them, these sort of little bursts, just calling like when I was on a walk and talking to them for five or 10 or 15 minutes, which felt like it wouldn't be that meaningful, but ended up having the impact of just making me feel like I was much more connected to them in a day-to-day way than I felt when I was just sort of texting with them. That's actually something specifically I suggest in the new book is this idea of sort of conversation, conversation-centric approach to relationships where you start to feel that anything that's non-analog, so texting or comments on social media or likes, that you see that all is just purely serving a logistical purpose. Its main purpose is to help set up real analog interaction. And you switch your mindset so that you no longer count a text conversation as, oh, I've had a conversation with that person. And so like, if you've only been texting with someone for the past month, you would just conceptualize that as I haven't talked to this person in the last month. And then once you shift your mindset to say that type of digital non-analog conversation doesn't count as conversation, it doesn't count to support a relationship, it changes the way you think about things. You put in an effort like you're talking about to get back to analog conversation. We have a lot of evidence to suggest that this is incredibly valuable for the incredibly social human brain. That it needs the sort of rich data stream you get from analog conversation where you have nuances and voice and tonality and pauses. And if you're in person, body language and seeing someone's face, we need that. Our brain does not understand one bit of a thumb up on Facebook in the same way as it does a wink or a smile from someone in person. It just doesn't process it in the same way. And so you can actually be intensely lonely even if you never go more than five minutes without some sort of electronic communication with someone. So I'm a big believer, that's another idea that I push out of digital minimalism is think about analog interaction as real interaction. And everything else is mainly just logistical, a convenient way to set up the walk with a friend or the next time you call them. I was just listening to a podcast that's sort of a mindfulness podcast the other day called Audio Dharma. And I was listening to this episode that was really focusing on sort of speech and this concept of wise speech. But one of the metaphors that the host used that I thought was really interesting was talking about embodied speech versus disembodied speech. So embodied speech being anything that happens face to face on the telephone, where we're actually in some way having sort of a physical interaction versus disembodied speech being everything else, texting, email, online chats, et cetera. And there's something quite powerful to me about this idea of thinking about it as sort of like being in your body versus not being in your body, which kind of correlates to the same sort of dichotomy that you're setting up there. Yeah, and there's thousands of, not hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that has built our brain into being a sort of massively powerful social processing unit. It's one of the primary purposes of the neurons in our brain is to do complicated, nuanced social processing. And so if you eliminate embodied interaction from your life, it's basically letting massive parts of your brain atrophy, and that just gets you in trouble. I mean, we have to, like to say, we have to get suspicious when you take something that has been evolved into us over hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, and figure that something that some 21-year-olds thought up in the rec room of a tech incubator can replace it without there being problems. Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard probably didn't find something that is going to satisfy what our brain needs that's been crafted over thousands of years of evolution. So you've got to be very wary when you take something so central to the human experience and start messing around with it. And say, well, what if we just do most of this with text messages or comments or this or that? That's dangerous territory, and it's going to cause a sort of a lot of ungrounded and unpredictable reactions. Many of them are going to be negative. At the end of last year, you invited your audience to participate in a 30-day digital declutter in which people would take a break from the optional technologies in their lives, including social media. And about 1,600 people participated, if I'm remembering correctly. And I'm really curious, what were the stories that you heard from people? Like how did taking that break from social media and other optional technologies impact their lives? It was a really interesting experience. Well, first of all, because I was expecting maybe 100 people or so would do this and I could kind of get some of their experiences. So the fact that 1,600 people plus ended up signing up and going through this, that itself told me that something was going on in our culture and people being a little bit fed up. But the basic idea of the declutter was not just to take a break. This was not just a detox exercise, right? So though you would get this benefit, it was not just, I want to get a break from some of these technologies before returning to them. Because to me, that doesn't make sense. Like you would never tell a drug addict, like I know you're addicted to heroin, but don't worry, I've got a plan. You're gonna take a month where you don't do any heroin and you can really get a break from that before you come back and use your heroin again. What's the point? Or if you told an alcoholic like, hey, I think if you took a week every month off from drinking alcohol, then things would be better. He'd be like, no, we probably need to actually completely rethink your relationship. And so the idea with the digital detox was that you were going down to a blank slate. And it took about a month away from the tools to kind of be comfortable with that, to get over the sort of immediate feeling of I need to be on this or the immediate anxiety or concern. It was all supposed to be a period in which you could reflect on what you really care about. And you could experiment and revisit the sort of analog activities that used to bring people great pleasure and reacquaint yourself with those and what really resonates with you and what doesn't. And then at the end of that 30 day period, you're prepared to do what I think is the core piece of the digital declutter exercise, which is saying, I am now gonna start from a blank slate in reintroducing technologies to my life, right? So it's just like with a minimalist cleaning out their house you get rid of everything and then maybe start adding back crucial things as opposed to just putting everything back in your house. It's the same thing. You now have to start from a blank slate and justify from scratch each of these optional technologies you add back in asking the question, is this just nice? Or is this the best way I could support something that I really value? So that you come out on the other end of the digital declutter, a digital minimalist, a completely transformed life. That was the idea. And for a lot of people who went through the declutter that was their experience. I mean, one of the major splits I detected in the stories I heard is that those who went into this thinking this is just a detox I wanna break ended up where they were, where they started and had sort of minimal benefit in the long run. But those who came into this saying, I'm trying to clean the slate so I can kind of build up my technological life from scratch. They saw the more profound changes and you really saw people embracing a level of intention in their life that had been really. had been really missing. And it was profoundly beneficial to the people who did this. Who came back and had a say in, this is why I use this. And I don't have a good reason to use this, so I don't care. And this is how I use this. This seems obvious, but one of the things I write about in the book is how a lot of us sort of got introduced to a lot of the technologies that dominate our lives now in a very casual and haphazard way. And then looked up 10 years later and realized they had completely transformed their role in our life until the point where they were really taking up a lot of time and attention, having a real impact on our thoughts and our actions and our mood. So this notion of just casually letting things into your life, these technologies, you lose control over a lot of autonomy. So this reclaiming of autonomy that the serious digital clutter has experienced, where they say, I now am in charge of what technology is in my life, why it's in my life, and exactly how I use it, was a feeling of profound relief. And I think one of the common reactions I got from those serious digital clutters was this sense of they didn't realize how much of a sort of psychological weight they'd been carrying around, feeling controlled by all these different technologies pulled around, fragmented, emotional, their actions being changed, how they feel, what they did, all this sort of lack of autonomy. They didn't even realize the extent to which they were feeling that. Until they started from scratch, it got much more intentional. So I am now a huge promoter of this activity. And so I really do recommend it to anyone who's feeling like, I like technology, but something is not right with my current relationship with it. Well, and what types of shifts did you see people making? I know you wrote about it on your blog afterwards. And you coined the term analog social media, which I really liked, which I think was related to some sort of trends in the way that you saw people returning to social media or not returning and replacing some of that interaction that they used to have on social media with more real world interaction. Was that a significant trend? Or what were other sort of major shifts that you saw people making after they did the declutter? Definitely a shift to analog was a big trend. And I sort of saw it in three ways. One was the embrace of analog social media, as you mentioned, which is this idea of reemphasizing analog interaction with real people as opposed to sort of digital interaction with people you barely know. And what people experienced is when they started prioritizing like, no, I'm going to, my good friends, I'm going spending time with them every week. And I'm getting my parents on the phone and I want to know what my sister is up to. And I'm going to bother her until I really know what's going on in her life because we talk all the time. The trade-off is they aren't using the sort of digital social media. So their actual circle of acquaintances in which they have regular contact gets smaller. If you stop using social media or stop using it for socialization purposes, yes, the circle of weak tie contacts in which you have some sort of touches on a regular basis gets much, much smaller. But what they found is the net benefit was profound. Less friends, much better interaction. Analog social media is net, net, a much bigger benefit in their life than doing less analog interactions. They can do more weak tie contact with people. So that was one big thing. Analog leisure was another big thing. So people are getting reacquainted with what you could also call embodied leisure, actually doing things in the real world with your hands, activities with other people, creating things that didn't exist before in the physical world. People finding profound pleasure in this that they had forgotten about. So lots of tales, certainly people who are a little bit older who remember sort of a pre-mobile internet age talked a lot about returning to activities that used to be very important for them and younger people picking up new activities. There's writing and painting and sports and knitting and all sorts of different things. And then the third was you saw a lot of a shift of a mindset of technology often plays a better role supporting old fashioned analog type things we know are valuable. So making those old fashioned analog things even better is a much better use of technology than trying to replace it. So in some sense, meetup.com is a significantly more value producing piece of digital property than Facebook from the perspective of individual social happiness. So when you're using technology to help support and accelerate the types of old fashioned analog behaviors that we've learned over generation and generations as key to a thriving life, it's a much more sort of a healthy relationship you form with these tools. So I definitely saw a lot of that shifting as well. It's time for a quick break now, but stay with me. After the jump, we talk about how social media impacts our cognitive performance, as well as Cal's newest theory about the future of work, which revolves around a concept called attention capital. This episode is brought to you by Hover. In the internet age, your website is your calling card. And just like when you meet someone in person, a lot is riding on that first impression, which is why finding a domain name that truly captures the essence of your personal brand is a crucial first step. And fortunately, Hover is here to make finding a domain name that matches your profession and your personality super simple. They have a massive amount of extensions to choose from, including all the classics, plus some special favorites for creative folks. For instance, if you're building a new website to showcase your portfolio, consider checking out Hover's extensive .design offerings, which allow you to bake your expertise right into the URL. And once you've found the perfect match, Hover makes setup a total breeze. They don't bug you with unwanted upsells, and you can easily connect your new domain to a bunch of popular website builders with just a few clicks. So if you've got a new website that you're itching to build, start laying the groundwork now by heading on over to hover.com slash hurry slowly to get 10% off your first purchase. hover.com slash hurry slowly. This episode is also brought to you by Twist. A guest on this show once described real-time group chat as an all-day meeting that never ends. Instead of death by a thousand paper cuts, it's death by a thousand pings. Well, now there finally is a better solution for teams that collaborate remotely but don't want to feel crazy. It's Twist, a mindful teamwork app that reduces stress and promotes progress. Unlike apps like Slack where information gets jumbled together and quickly buried, conversations in Twist stay neatly organized and in context because they're grouped in threads, which allows you to easily jump back into a conversation after taking a break without feeling overwhelmed. And guess what? It's working. 81% of teams who have switched to Twist say that their team communication is more efficient and organized. And 71% say that they now feel calmer. If you want to cultivate a more organized, transparent, and most importantly, balanced workplace, it's time to try Twist. Visit twistapp.com slash hurry slowly to automatically receive $100 in Twist unlimited credits when you sign up for a new account. That's twistapp.com slash hurry slowly for $100 in credit. What would you say to people who would argue that they have to use these technologies for work? So whether it's engaging with your audience on Twitter, Instagram for professional reasons, or, you know, working in an office that insists that employees be available on Slack, for instance. There's sort of two different issues there. So if we're talking about social media in the professional sphere, what I've noticed is two things. One is people often greatly exaggerate the degree to which social media is necessary in their professional life. That you encounter this again and again, where someone will say, if I don't use social media here, you know, no one will ever find me, or I can never advance my career, no one will ever find my work. The reality in a lot of these fields is that if they've been around for a long time, there already exist many different legacy channels for how people sort of discover other people and spread their work, and that terrible things don't necessarily happen. Like we're told if you're not on social media as an author, it's terrible, you'll never get a book deal, you'll never sell a book. But I've never had a social media account and seem to still be able to sell books. Because it turns out this idea that that's the only place that people find audiences has been greatly exaggerated. And then for those people who do have to use social media professionally as part of their job description, I usually advise use it like a professional, which means for one thing, it shouldn't be on your phone. There's no use case, no sort of somber or sober business use case for social media that requires you to need to look at it while you're bored waiting in line at Chipotle. So if you're gonna use it professionally, use it like a professional. And I actually talked to a social media professional in my new book to really get at, okay, how do they actually use these tools? And it's on your desktop or laptop, often with sort of professional tools like TweetDeck, it's very systematic, it's very structured. They know what they're trying to get out of it, how they're gonna use it. So don't allow a required professional use of social media be the excuse you use to have this thing just be a mobile drag on your attention at all times. Now, email and Slack, this is a completely different issue. I'm actually writing a new book about that right now. As you can tell, I like to write books. And it's a different issue. I think what we see in the knowledge workplace with the role of communication and knowledge work is a separate issue and a big issue. And one that requires different types of remedies, but one that I also think is a big point of contention that we're gonna see a lot of movement on soon. Yeah, Walna, I wanna come back to that in a moment because I suspected that's what your next book was about. And I have some questions about some of the stuff you've been writing on your blog with regard to that. But sort of continuing down this path, thinking about social media for a second, it's something I've been reflecting a lot on. I think it's about two things for me, is where it's strategic and where it feels authentic. So I am only on Twitter. I'm not on Facebook. I'm not on Instagram. I'm not on any other platforms. I used to be on Instagram, but I found that it just didn't feel like sort of an authentic way for me to communicate. And I was as well on Facebook. And I just, it didn't feel natural to me. Whereas Twitter feels sort of like natural and comfortable way to communicate for me. And then it actually provides real value. Like it helps me build my newsletter list and it helps get my blog posts out there. But it also is something where I have kind of boundaries set up where I use an app called Buffer to kind of schedule out most of my posts for Twitter. So it's not like kind of constantly interrupting my day. So to me, it seems like when you wanna engage on those platforms and when you wanna rationalize it in professional terms, that it needs to be a very clear analysis about what the ROI is. And then also just if it feels like something that is like a sort of comfortable, natural place for you to engage with people and not something you're just doing because you feel like you have to do it. That's for sure. But I mean, Twitter in particular though, it's an interesting case study because it's also an anxiety machine. It's like hooking yourself up to an IV drip of anxiety producing medication. I mean, I've never had a social media account, but last week during the MLB trade deadline, you have to go on Twitter if you're gonna find out what the rumors are. And I was a mess. I couldn't get any work done. I was like, got to see what's happening now. Is there gonna trade Bryce Harper, this or that? And the way it was delivered, it was like this whole thing is engineered to be an anxiety machine. And a lot of that's intentional because if you have to keep clicking and checking and responding, then you feel really worried or maybe upset someone. And now my emotions are at play. You use it more. The stock price goes up, right? And so this is the type of thing that makes me nervous about something like Twitter versus like your blog. Twitter is owned by a company whose business model depends on trying to get you to use this as much as possible whether or not it's good for you. Your blog, you own or rent a server. No one makes any money in a way that makes you unhealthy. You using it more doesn't make someone else more money. It's you using technology in a way that allows you to sort of reach an audience on your own terms, own your own content, kind of own your own space. And so I often, this is why I use a blog but don't use Twitter. They bring with their benefits come coupled with these sort of psychological negatives with many of which are kind of baked into the business plan. So the whole thing just makes me worried. And so, you're right. I'm probably missing out on some, maybe I'm missing out on some book sales or something not being on these platforms. But I'm probably also ahead in sort of psychological anxiety or something because this is kind of baked into the platform. And so it's an interesting thing that's going on now because unlike other business tools which typically do exist, the better they help you solve your business problem the more profitable the company is. The social media tools are in this weird intersection where they do need to help your business goals but also if some of the goals they're trying to promote is going to help them make more money are counter to your interest. And that's a really kind of unusual circumstance when it comes to business tools. It's a weird place we're in now where some of these biggest must use tools are running counter to the best interest of their users which is just something that's rare. I think if like Microsoft Word had built in features that made you really unhappy but they could make more money off of it people would stop using Microsoft Word. So there's sort of a weird thing going on here which fuels some of my skepticism. Yeah, well and speaking about that kind of cognitive weight that you were talking about, you recently wrote a piece about Alex Honnold, the rock climber who climbed El Capitan and is arguably the best free climber in the world. And it was about his relationship to social media and it's potentially negative impact when you're trying to perform at an incredibly high level. Yeah, he stopped using social media for a month before he did this difficult free climb because he said this is a cognitively very demanding task. Preparing and executing this climb is cognitively demanding. And so I need to take out of my lives things that reduces my cognitive capacity and social media does that. And what was surprising to me is that more people who are doing important, creative, impactful cognitive work don't think about these tools in the same way. I mean, if I was an athlete and I said, look, I'm not gonna smoke in my free time or eat junk food because that's gonna get in the way of what I'm trying to do here. People say, yeah, you're focused on what's important in your life but we're not quite there yet with cognitive work even though an increasing fraction of our economy is engaged in these types of efforts. And so I think what he's doing is at an extreme but it points out a principle that is worth noting which is this idea that our cognitive resources which is why I sometimes call attention capital is one of the more valuable things in our economy right now. We need to treat them probably with more respect. Just like if you're an athlete you know to treat your body with respect. If you're doing something that's cognitively demanding in your sort of professional life you have to treat that attention capital with respect and tools that are sort of designed to solely this sort of resource to take advantage of it to weaken its capability to produce value is something that we should be like Alex a lot more skeptical of. Well, and so you mentioned attention capital which is sort of a new theory that you're working with and kind of starting to shape and put out there. I'm thinking about this idea of how companies can help knowledge workers in particular realize their best performance. Can you go a little bit more into that concept of attention capital and explain it? Yeah, so I'm trying to better understand the knowledge work sector through some sort of traditional economic lenses. So we know through like traditional capitalist market theory that an organization has their capital investments and they wanna get a good return on that capital. So if you're running a factory 100 years ago you make your main capital investments or when you have these giant pieces of machinery you have the big dynamo that powers your whatever that powers the assembly line belts. I mean, it's physical things with gears and oil and you care a lot about, I wanna get the best return. I wanna produce the most stuff and be as efficient as possible. And I really care about getting a return on my capital. Well, knowledge work is no different but we don't think about it in these terms enough yet. So if I'm running a knowledge work organization or if I'm a freelancer and the organization is just me the main capital resource is human brains and their ability to concentrate on information and produce new information that's valuable. So in the knowledge sector the main capital resource is no longer hulking pieces of equipment, it's human brains. This is what produces the value. It's ultimately the thing that produces the new information that actually has valuable in the actual knowledge economy. And so we should be thinking about how do we get the most return on investment in this attention capital? And I don't think we're having that thought yet. We're not having this conversation enough so we set up workflows that significantly diminish the capacity of individuals to take their attention capital and produce value out of it. So if I have to be on a Slack channel all day you're significantly reducing the amount of value that my brain can produce. If I have to answer email all day if the way our business unfolds is that we just send unstructured messages back and forth all day, the amount of return you're getting on the investment of my human brain is really diminished past what is possible. So this means not only are organizations getting less value, it's not only is it stalling productivity and non-industrial productivity by the way has been stalled for the past decade or so. This probably plays a role in it. So not only are you not getting as much value to kind of your corporation or organization it creates a sort of miserable working environment for the people who own those human brains because our human brains don't like being used subpar and being scattered in this way. And so I've been really arguing that I think we're gonna see a revolution in knowledge work just like we saw similar revolutions in the early stages of industrial work where we're gonna start to think critically and more sophisticatedly about how do we actually get the best value out of human brains in a knowledge work organization? And we're gonna prioritize that over more parochial concerns like the convenience of being able to answer an email quickly or the complexity of trying to think up diversified workflows that takes advantage and are more complicated. How does this work? Okay, this person does this. Here's how they communicate to you. It's more difficult perhaps to work but we're gonna get past. but we're gonna get past those to try to figure out but what we really wanna do relentlessly is get a better return on attention capital. And I think this is gonna unlock a lot of productivity in the economy. I think it's gonna make a lot of individuals lives much more meaningful and satisfying. And let's just say the working title of the book I'm writing on this is called A World Without Email. And I think that kind of captures the vision I have of how things are gonna change. So coming back to that idea of attention capital and the things that are coming between us and really leveraging our attention. You recently wrote about a study that I think you were, well, you're sort of both pleased and disheartened to see at the same time as was I, which is that open offices were actually proven to be incredibly unproductive and distracting. Could you maybe talk a little bit about your perspective on that? Yeah, open offices I think are a classic case study in not understanding the value of attention capital, but prioritizing other types of goals. And so, I mean, the study confirmed something that is obvious to anyone who works in an open office, which is this idea that we're all gonna be collaborating more and have more serendipitous insight and cross-discipline creation is nonsense. What happens when you put people in an open office? Everyone stops talking because if anyone talks, it bothers everyone. And it's a pain to go try to reserve one of those small number of conference rooms at the edges. And so this study found that face-to-face interaction dropped significantly. Same group of people, same company, they measured them before and after they switched to an open office format. They stopped talking to each other as much. It was the opposite effect. They sent much more emails and instant messages and their overall productivity went down. So it was just, it failed to meet or had the opposite goals of everything that they attended. And I think we see this type of thing happen a lot. So why do we do open offices? My theory is that actually, for the most part, it's more about signaling than it is about some sort of actual productivity gain. It's a way of quickly signaling to investors and prospective employees that you're disruptive or doing business in a new sort of way. And getting investment money or trying to get top prospect hires is very, very valuable, especially in the tech sector. And that's why that took off. And now as it's becoming more homogenized, it no longer is a sign of disruption. We'll probably see them go back away, which actually is exactly what we're seeing. People are starting to move away from them again because they no longer get that signal that we're disruptive and different anymore, and it's not actually helping anyone's productivity. But it's a classic example of the type of things that happen when you prioritize other values over what I think should be the core value, which is we have these human brains that are going to produce through concentration new things that's valuable. How do we help them do that at the highest level? It just seems like a very simple question to ask, but we do everything we can to avoid it and focus on everything else instead. And I really think that has to change and it's going to. You mentioned before this idea of a revolution around the concept of attention capital and that things are gonna start to begin to change as people recognize that they're sort of just kind of wasting all of this attention capital. What do you think that that revolution will entail? What types of changes in the office, what types of changes in the way that we work or what types of changes in the way that we manage our attention? Well, I think right now, almost every knowledge work organization uses more or less the same workflow, which is what I call the hyperactive hive mind, which means we allow work to unfold in a sort of ad hoc unstructured way. We just by sending messages and answering messages and communicating in an unstructured way all day, we kind of figure out things as we go along. This is sort of the implicitly agreed upon workflow in most knowledge work organizations. Like, be on your email, be on Slack, we'll figure things out as we need it, sort of assign tasks, move around, get information. The hyperactive hive mind, it's not surprising that in these early days of knowledge work in the IT era, that that's what we do because it has the benefit of being very simple and adaptable. So you can kind of plug this workflow into almost any organization and sort of people will figure things out and things will happen and the business, the wheels of business will move on. It's a very adaptable, very simple and very easy and cheap to implement. You just need an email server, everyone kind of understands it. The problem is it requires that you're constantly serving the communication because you have to have unstructured communication all day or there's no other systems in place. So everything will grind to a halt if you try to disappear off email or Slack. But this doesn't acknowledge the way that the actual wetware of our brains properly function. So if you have to constantly service communication, it makes your brain very, very poor at actually producing the valuable products that all this communication is supposed to help support. And that's sort of the sort of productivity paradox type gap we're in right now. So I think the way the revolution is gonna unfold is organizations are gonna start to recognize the hyperactive hive mind is not synonymous with work in the IT age. It's just one way among many that you could think about structuring knowledge work in the IT age, and they're gonna start experimenting with other things. Just like in the industrial age, Henry Ford started thinking, you know, there's maybe different ways to build cars than just having a bunch of teams in a factory and each team builds a car in place. Like that makes sense, that's simple. That's the hyperactive hive mind of the early industrial age. Of course, how else would you do it? We can have all the tools in a centralized place and these 10 guys build a car here, these 10 guys build a car here. If you wanna build more cars, you hire more guys. That was the easy thing to do. And Henry Ford said, well, what if we built the assembly line? Now the assembly line is a sort of a huge pain, an incredible pain to run an assembly line, to get the speed just right, to get the mechanics working. I'm sure early on you constantly had problems where this person's going too fast and this process is too slow and the whole thing breaks, huge pain. Much, much more complicated and annoying, many more exceptions and faults throughout the day, requires more management, more oversight, but it produced cars at a rate of 10 to 100 times more. And I think once we start experimenting with knowledge work workflows, we're gonna get our equivalent, our cognitive assembly line, if you will, new ways of approaching work where we don't just sit there doing ad hoc communication all day. That's gonna be a pain. It's gonna require more structures and processes and rules, more small bad things will happen, more hard edges and exceptions will get hit up against, but the first organizations to figure it out are gonna be like the digital Henry Ford. They're gonna be producing massive amounts more value and once that happens, it's gonna spread. And so I can't tell you exactly what that's gonna look like and I don't think it's gonna be the same for different types of fields and different types of organizations, but I think it's that mindset shift that's gonna spark the revolution. Once we start thinking hyperactive hive mind, that's arbitrary, it's not synonymous with work. Let's try something else. How can we get more value out of the brain? Let's prioritize return on attention capital and value production over convenience and simplicity. There's gonna be a revolution that if it happens, I think it's gonna unfold fast. So I recently read a great article that Dan Pink wrote in the Atlantic and one of the sentences in it was, what's even scarcer today than attention is intention. Do you think that that's true individually in the workplace, in the world at large? Yeah, I think Dan's onto something there, right? I mean, this idea that focused work that's focused in both the target of the work and also in the cognitive attention you're paying to the work, that moves the world. It changes the world, it produces new things, it innovates, it causes revolutions. And that's the case, and that's been the case since the enlightenment. And if we get away from that, I think it is problematic. And I think this sort of hyperactive hive mind approach to work during the workday, which really dissuades that, it's much more about moving information around, being a human network router, helping to in ad hoc way try to figure out this, that, here's this information, let's set up that meeting, gets us away from that. I think the fact that we've taken high quality leisure outside of work and replaced it with just a sort of cheap, but highly engineered flow of hits of entertainment, humor, and outrage that we get through our phone, that gets us away from that. And so I do think Dan is onto something that, in the book I wrote, Deep Work, I sort of ended on this claim that sort of a deep life is the best type of life, or I choose the deep life because I think it's the best type of life. And I really agree with that. I think a life where you do a few important things, you do them with great intensity is something that we're wired to do. It's something that has great output and it requires a lot of intention. And it's just much better than just being busy all the time. And so I think he's hitting on that. He's hitting on that idea and it's resonating. Well, and you in your new book, Digital Minimalism, outline kind of three sort of core principles of which the last one is intentionality is satisfying. What does that principle mean exactly to you? People worry a lot about convenience and especially in our current age, there's this thought that it's the sort of avoiding of hardships and maximizing of conveniences that's necessary for happiness. And so if you lose conveniences or introduce more hardships and happiness decreases, and this just goes contrary to not only positive psychology, but basically millennia of human thinking and philosophy. Convenience is not that important. Intentionality can be incredibly important. And so I talked about the example of the Amish who are incredibly intentional about their technology use. It's a myth that they don't use modern technology or just reject it, or that they're trying to freeze their technology in a particular time. The Amish instead have this very clear, intentional approach to technology, which is what really matters to us is our community. So we will consider each technology as it comes along. They usually do is they have a sort of an Amish alpha geek test drive a new technology when it comes out and they'll observe them and then they'll decide as a community, do we wanna introduce this or not? And they do so from the perspective of, is this gonna strengthen our communities or potentially weaken it? And so it's why a lot of Amish communities will have lots of different sources of electricity, solar panels and generators, because there's nothing about electricity itself that hurts their community, but they're wary about plugging into the power grid because they worry about being too, it might hurt the community to be too meshed in the outside world. Or they really don't like cars, for example, because people can drive far away and don't have to spend as much time in the community. So they're very intentional. There's obviously a lot of issues with this community as well. And I wouldn't wish this particular model, especially the fact that these intentional decisions are made by a small group of people, all of whom tend to be men and everyone has to abide by the decisions. That's not good. But what you notice is an interesting principle is that a lot of Amish people feel incredibly satisfied, incredibly happy, because the intentionality of I'm living in a certain way that I really value, way outweighs the conveniences and benefits lost of the things they turned down and not being an electrical grid, not having cell phones. And so there's a principle to generalize here, which is being very intentional about how you live your life, trying to support things you really value and not get too cluttered up with the other things. That intention can give you way more satisfaction than what you lose by various minor conveniences of the technologies that you sidestep. This underlies not just digital minimalism, but almost any minimalism movement is undergirded by this idea that being intentional about your life is more important than maximizing conveniences. I think Cal is really onto something with this idea of intentionality versus convenience. About a year ago, I removed the Twitter app from my phone. I still have a Twitter account, but I can only access it from my desktop. And even now, 12 months later, I still have moments where I have a reflex to post something I'm thinking about while I'm out walking around in the world. And the interesting thing is, I wouldn't even classify myself as someone who was particularly addicted to Twitter in the first place, but that's how deep these things run. And it occurs to me that that reflex, that impulse to share, is rather like volunteering to be the sportscaster for your own life. It's like you're locking yourself in a little booth high above the crowd and high above the action so that you can comment on it. But by choosing to constantly comment on the action, you effectively remove yourself from the playing field, remove yourself from the game of life. You no longer feel the flow of really sinking into a good conversation without the distractions, or the soothing solitude of sitting with your own thoughts and letting them marinate into something richer. You cannot both comment on the action and be a part of the action at the same time. It's impossible. But even though I'm aware of all of this, I have no doubt that that reflexive twitch will come again because convenience is easy and being intentional is not, but it's a heck of a lot more rewarding in the long run. And speaking of sports, now it's time for your final moment of zen. What do you do when you need to slow down? If it's a busy day, busy week, baseball on the radio. There's no better invention for sort of shifting your mind into another mode than to sit outside on your porch on one of these sort of humid mid-Atlantic summer nights. And I have an old battery-powered radio with an analog dial, which I love. And Charlie Slows and Dave Jagler do the call of the Nationals game. And you sit there and you just kind of listen to it and your mind wanders. There's a lot of downtime. Man, it's like medicine. I mean, it's a game that's paced well for slowing down a mind in our current age. Thanks to Matt Susage for producing this episode and to Devin Craig Johnson for composing our lovely theme music. If you feel like this episode gave you some new ideas, I would love it if you left us a review on iTunes. Every review helps us spread the word about the show, which helps us keep making the show. I've even put a handy link in the show notes. As always, thank you for listening and remember to take your time. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪