Imagine if I could offer you a pill

that gave you the following benefits.

One, your symptoms of anxiety and

depression would significantly reduce.

Two, your overall sense of

moment-to-moment life satisfaction would

improve. And three, you would gain

substantially more ability to

concentrate.

Now, to make this even more enticing,

let's say this pill would deliver you

those benefits in only 2 weeks. If such

a drug existed, it would be a

blockbuster. Now, the bad news is

there is no such pill that can do this.

The good news, however, is that

according to a major new research paper,

there's a simple intervention for your

digital habits

that can deliver all of those promises.

I'm talking about something that's free

and that you can put in place with

minimal preparation, something that you

could start implementing

today.

Well, it's Monday, which means it's time

for an advice episode of this show, and

clearly this is a perfect type of topic

to dive deeply into. So, here's what

we're going to do.

I have the paper here. We're going to go

through it. I'll start by describing the

intervention they studied and quantified

the exact benefits that they measured.

Then we'll look closer at the mechanisms

that the researchers believe explain why

this intervention works so well. And

then we'll end with three pieces of

advice of my own for how to maximize the

chances that you will succeed with this

intervention if you choose to try it.

So, if you've been fed up with your

distracted digital life, this is an

episode you definitely need to hear.

As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is

Deep Questions, the show for people

seeking depth in a distracted world.

All right, so we're going to proceed

here by addressing three key questions.

The first question,

what was the intervention studied in

this research paper?

Well, if you look at the title of the

paper, it sort of gives it away. Here is

the title.

Blocking mobile internet on smartphones

improves sustained attention, mental

health, and

subjective well-being.

All right, let's look a little bit

closer at this. What do they mean by

blocking mobile internet? Well, they

used an app blocking tool called

Freedom.

And what they did is they set it up to

block internet-powered apps like social

media and the web browser, but leave

things like instant messaging and phone

calls alone.

Um this is key, as a lot of people know,

especially parents in the audience,

you need the ability to have a phone on

which you can do calls or messages or

WhatsApp. I I I checked it recently,

Jesse. I'm on three

different parental WhatsApp groups right

now that I have to monitor. Uh and with

three kids in school, I would say I get

called by the school nurse like roughly

once a month. All right, so they figured

out how to

block the internet without making you

have to live without the other

functional benefits of a smartphone.

Now, here's what's critical about this

research. Part of what made it good was

they could then check compliance. They

could look at the log produced by the

blocking software and make sure that

their research subjects actually

kept the blocking on. That they weren't

occasionally going around it. So, that

made a big difference. Then, to get even

better results, they did something even

more impressive. They made this a

randomized controlled trial. So, they

recruited a group of participants

and then randomly divided them

into a group that was going to have the

internet blocking and then a group that

was not, so that they could really be

comparing what was the difference

between these two groups and not

accidentally measuring things like

self-selection effects.

As the experiment went on, they could

measure the impact with various means.

They had surveys that they would have

the participants filled out. They had

various tests like test of attention

that they would have the participants do

at various times and they would do

something called random experience

sampling.

Where they would randomly text the

participants and say, "Hey, tell me

right now in this moment how you are

feeling." This is sort of the gold

standard in social psychology for

measuring

people's subjective well-being on

average.

Okay, so that was the experiment and

they had uh the intervention group do

this for 2 weeks

while the control group did not. And

then there there were some more

complexities after that where then they

swapped and the control group started

using them and they measured what

happened with the intervention group for

the week that followed. But that was the

core of the experiment.

What did they find? Well, I'm going to

put a couple plots up on the screen here

for people

uh who are watching. Okay, so this first

plot here is looking at sustained

attention ability. I want you to look at

the blue lines. This is the intervention

group. And between the beginning of the

experience and time point two, so two is

after 2 weeks, we see this blue line

goes way up. A marked increase in the

ability to pay attention.

Then as we go forward uh it falls a

little bit but not all the way back down

to baseline. So even after they started

using their phone for the internet

again, they still had some attention

left. All right, what about mental

health? An even more dramatic effect

here. Look at this blue line.

That's the intervention group. One is

right before the experiment starts. Look

at how high that jumps up by the end of

the experiment. It's a massive increase.

And look what happens when they measured

in at the third time point after they

started using their phones again.

Their mental health began going down.

They had a long after effect of benefits

from spending those 2 weeks without

mobile internet.

Here's the third chart, subjective

well-being. Once again, look at that

blue line. From the beginning of the

experiment to the end of the 2-week

period, we see a massive jump. And

again,

as we go from time period two to a

period three and they start using their

phones again,

it falls, but we still get some after

effect benefits

from the two weeks they spent without

using their phone. So, these are notable

results and they were delivered really

fast.

In these sort of prospective randomized

control studies where you're really

comparing one group to another,

to see such a large jump

on such important metrics in only two

weeks is pretty rare.

It gives us the sense that maybe we were

underestimating just how much damage to

our ability to pay attention,

our mental health and our subjective

well-being, maybe we were really

underestimating what a hit we were

taking

by being using the internet on our phone

so constantly.

All right, so those results then

motivate a natural follow-up question.

That's what they saw, but why did they

see that?

What were the mechanisms that mediated

these improvements in those factors when

they stopped using mobile internet on

their phone? So, that's our second

question here. What explains

these results?

Now, fortunately, the researchers also

looked at this question. They measured

many factors during the experiment

before and after to try to figure out

what changed

during the period of not using mobile

internet

that seems at least like it's likely

candidate to be mediating the positive

results that they saw.

The first thing they looked at was just

the obvious top-line number.

When you take mobile internet off of

your phone,

how much less do you look at it?

And they discovered that actually

significantly less.

The average daily screen time before the

experiment began was 304 minutes.

By the end of the experiment, that had

dropped down to 161 minutes. So, they

basically dropped the amount of time

they were looking at their screens by

about a factor of two

when you took mobile internet off of the

phones.

Okay, so they freed up the sort of 150

or so minutes each day that they used to

be looking at mobile internet devices.

How did this then lead to them being

happier, less mental health impacts, and

ability to focus more?

Well, the researchers went on to the

isolate four what they called mediation

factors

that emerged as having strong changes

during the experimental period, and it's

their best guesses at what is actually

mediating the positive

dependent variable effects. So, here's

the four mediation factors that they

measured during the experimental period.

The subjects spent more time doing

meaningful offline activities.

They experienced more social

interaction.

They slept more.

And their sense of self-control

increased.

Let's think about those for a second.

So, the first three

meaningful offline activities, more

social interaction, and more sleeping

the researchers are saying this is

probably just a straight-up time

reallocation. That is where that 150

minutes that used to be looking at

internet-connected apps on the phone,

that's where it went. They just

reallocated it towards activities

that had much more positive impacts

on their daily life.

Now, here's what this tells me.

If we see pretty consistently that once

you take

highly optimized internet distract power

distracting apps off of phones, if we

see this in the research

the subjects all move towards those much

more meaningful activities, it tells me

that we're wired to do the right thing.

That if you don't have extra constraints

on us, if you put us in a situation

where we're bored

we have natural drives that will drive

us towards let's go do something

meaningful. Let's talk to other people.

I'm tired, why don't I actually go to

sleep?

And what we want to understand is

happening with our phones is that it's

basically just short-circuiting our

natural drives. If left our own devices,

we tend to do the things that are

good for us from a subjective well-being

perspective.

And it's only when we have these sort of

outside tools come in that hijack those

drives that we end up in trouble. I

mean, we see similar things with drugs

and alcohol where uh it will make our

lives worse because it's it's hijacking

our drives or our mind in a way that

gets us away from the activities we

normally would be doing that would be

beneficial. It looks like the phones are

doing the same thing. If we could just

get those highly engineered distracting

apps out of our life,

we will naturally start doing things

that are going to make us

much happier. But what about that fourth

mediation factor, which was a sense of

increased self-control?

Here's my understanding of what's going

on here, and this is sort of my theory

based on my own study

of these issues.

So, one of the things that happens when

you have your phone with you at all

times like most people do,

and you have these internet-based apps

that are highly distracting on the

phone, as I've talked about many times

before on this show,

the short-term motivation centers in

your brain

learn that picking up that phone and

tapping on one of those apps

is very likely to give you a reward

signal. The expected value is high, and

because of that, because you have such a

clean reward signal coming out of those

apps,

your short-term motivation center of

your brain is constantly voting for

picking up your phone.

And you feel this as like a constant

urge for distraction that that pulls you

away from other things you might want to

do or prevents you from doing those

things in the first place, and it can

make you feel

like you don't have control over your

own body or mind. You're like, "Why did

I just spend 150 minutes on TikTok? I

didn't want to do that."

So, it leaves you feeling like you don't

have much self-control.

Now, on the flip side, when you get

those apps out of your life, the

short-term motivation center of your

brain is no longer voting for picking up

your phone so strongly, and you find

yourself able to do other things more

easily.

Because you do not have to overcome

the vote of your brain saying, "Hey,

let's pick up the phone." It's not

nearly as strong anymore. What is that

going to feel like?

I have more self-control.

And so, a course that was going to pick

up on surveys is when you turn off

mobile internet on your phone,

you will begin to experience your day

as one in which you have much more

control or autonomy over what you do,

which is also going to be obviously a

very positive factor.

But, go to the end of the paper. Here's

one of the thing the authors say.

I'm quoting here.

These results provide

causal evidence that blocking mobile

internet can improve important

psychological outcomes

and suggest that maintaining the status

quo of constant connection to the

internet may may be detrimental to time

use, cognitive function, and

well-being.

And to put that conclusion more plainly,

constant access to the internet through

mobile devices is causing way more

problems than most of us guessed. It is

making us miserable. It really is an

emergency.

But, for all the urgency of this

problem, the solution fortunately looks

to be pretty simple.

Block mobile internet on your phone.

After even just 2 weeks, you will

realize just how much you were missing

in your life.

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All right, let's get back to the show.

All right, so that's where the paper

ends, but this leaves us with our third,

final, and most practical question.

How do I successfully stick

with this intervention?

So, if you know the thing to do is to

spend 14 days blocking mobile internet

on your phone and you get all these

benefits,

how do we make sure we'll stick with

this?

Well, this is a relevant question.

There's a key data point from early in

the paper

that should give us pause. They had

originally recruited right around 500

participants for this study,

but only 25.5%

of the participants remained compliant

throughout the whole experiment. Now,

remember, they could check compliance

exactly because they could look at the

logs of the blocking software.

Now, I assume some of this

non-compliance was actually unrelated to

the internet blocking. Just people got

busy or tired of the surveys and the

tests and the experience sampling.

They're like, "Ah, forget it. I don't

want to do it."

But, the sense you get from reading the

paper is that a lot of this measured

non-compliance was people getting around

the mobile internet blocking. They could

turn it off. Now, it would be logged if

they did, and then they wouldn't be

counted in the data, but you could turn

it off, and it seemed like a large a

number of people at some point

circumvented it at least a little bit.

So, this motivates a critical question.

If you want to do this experiment in

your life

to get these benefits, what can you do

to maximize the odds that you're like

the 25.5% of the participants who stuck

with the blocking and not like the 74.5%

who gave in and started using their

phone again?

Well, I came up with three tips, and if

you're going to put this into practice,

I came up with

the three tips that I think would be

helpful, okay?

All right, let's start with the first

one here. I'll reveal it.

This is dramatic, Jesse.

Those who are listening again are

missing

Avatar-style visual effects. All right.

Tip number one,

block precisely.

So, if you're going to

block internet-connected apps,

you have to be a little bit more precise

than basically saying, "Leave the phone,

leave text messaging, everything else is

blocked."

The problem is, and I'm sure a lot of

the participants face this, is that

there's many pragmatic apps on our

phones in the modern world that use the

internet or the cellular,

and you need them just to function

practically in the world, right? So, I'm

looking at my own phone, and I can see

on here, for example,

um

Parkmobile,

right? You park somewhere.

It's how we pay for parking here in DC

that uses the internet, but I need that

because I'm often parking in places.

Uh the two-factor authentication

that I use to like log in to Georgetown

or if we're logging into our system here

at our production company,

I need that on my phone so that I can do

two-factor authentication. There's a

couple other apps like that as well. So,

if you want to succeed, you can't have

those type of frustrations. So, you need

to block more narrowly. Whatever

blocking software you're using, you have

to go through and choose specific apps

to block, not just all.

The simple

advice I would give is look at the

so-called SNG apps, social media, news,

and games.

These are the ones that are really

engineered to grab your attention and

therefore create that sense of

motivation to pick up your phone.

So, go block every SNG you can find, but

you can leave the other pragmatic apps,

the weather app, the parking app, the

two-factor authentication app, you can

leave those open so that you're not

going to have uh

the the issue where you're like, "Oh, I

really need this app. Let me turn off my

blocking." And now you never turn it

back on again.

All right, so that's tip number one if

you want to succeed with this

intervention.

All right. Tip number two,

strengthen controls.

So, one of the thing that they did in

this paper is that the the software they

were using to block

mobile internet access, it wasn't

particularly strong. The subjects could

turn it off or circumvent it. It would

take them out of the sample study, but

they could do it.

This is partially experimental design.

Like the researchers didn't want to

take over completely the subjects'

phone. I mean, what if they're in an

emergency and they couldn't use it?

But it's also has to do with the reality

of iOS,

which several years ago made a change

that made it very difficult for

third-party apps to really have strong

controls over blocking on your phone.

They didn't like the idea

of a third-party app being able to

strongly block other third-party apps.

But if you can have stronger blocking,

by which I mean blocking in which

there's more friction involved in

actually turning it off, it will

significantly increase your probability

of compliance

with this intervention.

So, if you want to move just one step

above the sort of basic controls they

were doing, you can think about a device

like Brick.

Brick has a physical key fob

that becomes involved if you want to

actually turn off a particular blocking

mode. You have to touch it to your

phone. You can put this in another room

or keep it in your car or your bag.

So, you still have access to anything if

you need it, but the friction of going

to get a device and touching to your

device is often enough to give pause

and to prevent that short-term

motivation circuit from winning because

it it it sees a real cost you having to

actually de- monstrably go and get this

thing and make it clear to yourself that

you failed with your own rules.

If you want to go a step above that,

you can configure your phone. So, if you

have a partner, right? You can configure

your phone such that it's it's protected

with iOS's screen time, but it's like

you're the kid and your partner is the

parent, right?

And only they know the PIN code for

actually changing what settings are on

your phone. So, if you want to change

the blocking software,

you you have to get the number from

someone else. Again, that's a higher

level of friction, but that's really

going to work as well.

You're going to think, "Okay,

uh I'm not going to go bother like my

husband or my wife or my girlfriend or

my boyfriend to get this PIN number.

That's just admitting I failed. I guess

I I'm going to have to do without

checking Instagram

right in this moment."

All right, those are three tips. Let me

give you the third

tip to succeed with this intervention.

Lean into boredom.

This is one of the more interesting

things I saw in the paper was this idea

that

many of these subjects

naturally drifted to the same high-value

activities once you took the mobile

internet that that sort of potent

distraction out of their life. The point

is our instincts are good.

If we get rid of these sort of

artificial constraints in our lives, our

instincts for how we want to alleviate

boredom tend to be good. I want to go

hang out with people. I want to go do

something interesting.

I want to make my man at my intentions

made manifest concretely in the world.

So, you're going to feel discomfort when

you don't have access to the same apps

that you're used to delivering you

numbing or diversion. That's okay.

Feel that discomfort. Feel that boredom.

And tell yourself rewire yourself to

think the solution to this boredom is

not circumventing the blocks and going

back to having access to

apps on my phone. Let me try

other things that might get rid of this

boredom unrelated to my phone. And

that's going to drive you really quickly

towards activities that are actually

very good for you.

Just like if you're very hungry and

you're put into a food environment where

you don't have ultra-processed foods

that are hyper-palatable,

you're going to eat the things that are

good for you. You're like, "Oh, I want

you know, I have like meat here and

vegetables and fruit." Like stuff that

your body recognizes and likes. So, in

the absence of the artificial, our

instincts work really well.

So in the absence of our artificial

diversions, the boredom will drive you

towards good behavior if you let it.

Just take your phone off the table as

the solution and see what other

solutions arise in that royal wake.

And you're going to find yourself drawn

to activities that make a big

difference.

All right, so what's the long-term

vision here? Let's say you do this

intervention for 2 weeks, you feel much

better, you can concentrate, your

subjective well-being is better, your

mental health is feeling stronger.

The idea is once you get to that point,

you will follow something like my own

lead, like what I do in my life,

and permanently quit or disable these

apps that are on your phone that are

causing these diversions to make your

phone boring. Like losing your taste for

junk food.

And now you can be around potato chips

and have no desire to eat them. You will

get there when it comes to these digital

diversions. If they're not normally on

your phone and you don't normally spend

much time with them,

they become less alluring.

And what becomes more attractive is all

of the other interesting things going on

in your life. Getting a full night's

sleep, interacting in the real world

with other people,

meaningful offline activities.

So this is my advice. Take the

Take the lesson from this paper

and right away go ahead and do a 14-day

mobile internet break

on your phone.

Keep all the apps you need for your

day-to-day life. Just takes off the ones

you don't. Remember the three tips that

I mentioned so that you're more likely

to succeed with this. And if you make it

to the other end, then ask yourself like

a true digital minimalist,

"What role do I really want these

technologies to play in my life?" And

then it might be time

to make some permanent changes.

So there we go. That was a well-done

study, Jesse. It actually involved one

of the co-authors

uh is a colleague of mine at Georgetown.

>> Oh, really?

>> Yeah, from the psychology department. So

there we go. It's a pretty international

group of researchers. I see a lot of

these papers. Some Some some are bad.

This is a high-quality one. It appeared

in the uh

Proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences Nexus open access journal, so

it's a that's actually a really solid

one. That paper's been read like 200,000

times.

>> Did you know about it before it came

out?

>> Um

I had heard rumors. I mean, I there's a

lot of papers. I kind of heard people

mention it, and then I think it was uh

newsletter director Nate who was like

telling me about this two-week paper.

And I went and read it and was like,

"Oh, this is a good one."

So, that's how we decided to

to do it on the show.

One thing, another quick break

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All right, let's get back to the show.

All right, well, that's enough uh

hearing from me. We also like to hear

from you because it's a Monday advice

episode.

We often uh introduce a second segment

in which we open our inbox

to get questions, comments, and

reactions from

my audience. If you have things you want

to send in to be covered on the show,

you can use podcast

at calnewport.com.

All right, we got some time today, Jess.

Let's do a few questions. Who do we have

up first?

>> Our first question is from Tyler, and

it's about AI and academic research.

>> All right, so Tyler says, "I imagine

you've gotten many emails with this link

already,

but just wanted to make sure it got to

you.

Keep up the good work, fellas."

All right, so what he sent me was a

Substack essay. I'll put it on the

screen here.

It's from a Substack called So, Here's

the Idea, the Organization Science

Substack, and the essay is titled More

versus Better,

part one.

Now, I actually went through and read

this essay

and enjoyed it so much that I wrote a

newsletter about it. So, the newsletter

that came out today at calnewport.com

goes deep into this. So, if this sounds

interesting to you,

go over to calnewport.com and check out

my essay today where I get into the

details on this essay. Uh you should

subscribe. I mean, this is dispatches

from the front lines of the war of depth

versus distraction. So, if you listen to

this, you should subscribe. But, let me

let me go over some of the high points

here um on the podcast. So, here's the

the basic idea.

This is a task force. The authors are a

task force that were organized by a

particular well-known journal in

organization science. It's called

Organization Science.

Um this task force was pulled together

to answer the question of what role is

AI having

in the

submissions and publications, like what

role is it having on the academic

research community that is publishing in

this journal. And they gathered really

good data because these are researchers

from a field where what you do is gather

really good data. So, they know what

they're doing here. Um I want to show

you a couple charts. I'm going to bring

this up here. All right, here's the

first chart.

So, this is labeled monthly submission

volume at Organization Science from

January 2013 until the end of 2025.

The key thing here is at the far right,

we see this massive increase in

submissions, and it happens right after

this vertical line just labeled ChatGPT.

So, the first thing they noticed is

there was a a bump during COVID-19. It

was it bumped up from what was happening

before, but it was pretty steady.

And then post-ChatGPT,

they've been having an increasing

uh rate of submissions per year. All

right, so that's chart number one.

Here's chart number two. This is monthly

submission volume by AI use category.

So, that black line is the total

submissions per month.

The dotted line in the middle is ChatGPT

gets introduced.

These lines down the bottom are

measuring how much AI was used in the

paper submitted. The orange line is 0 to

15% AI. And what you can see is as the

total volume of submissions go up,

the total fraction of those submissions

or volume of submissions that don't use

AI is going down.

So, they're clearly measuring

they are getting more AI submissions

um ever since ChatGPT came out.

I think let's see here. Ta-da. Okay. And

then here we see a chart that measures

essentially the readability of papers.

And Jesse, as you'll notice, it's pretty

flat

from 2013 through COVID-19.

And then what happens to the ChatGPT

line?

It takes a nose dive. Just a nose dive.

So, the papers become massively and

notably less readable

right around the time ChatGPT

is emerging.

Here's a couple numbers from the paper.

Among manuscripts that were uh high AI

submissions, so 70% or more of the

manuscript was generated with the help

of AI,

nearly 70% were desk rejected, which

means an editor determined they should

not be sent out for review. So, they

were so bad the editor is like, "We're

not even going to peer review on this."

By comparison, the the desk rejection

rate for low AI manuscripts, manuscripts

where there's very little AI used,

was 44%.

So, it almost doubled the chance you

would get rejected right off the bat if

it was written with the help of AI. Now,

remember the editors don't know that.

They they labeled these after the fact.

This is just strictly based on their

assessment of the quality

of the paper.

Later on, the researchers fell that

found that the the percentage of high AI

papers that made it all the way through

to the final stage where they say

revise and resubmit for publication

was around 4% whereas for low AI papers

that rate was 12%. So, you have a 3x

reduction in the probability that your

paper would actually make it through and

be published.

So, what they're finding is this is a

real problem.

AI made it easier to write and submit

papers and because of this they're

getting a ton more submissions, which

really is actually taxing their

resources because editors have to look

at these submissions and peer reviewers

have to peer review them if they're

sufficiently good.

Now, this would be okay if these were

all good submissions and we're just

strictly increasing the amount of good

science. You know, great. We're going to

now have a productivity boom in this

actual academic field, but it's not what

they saw. What they clearly measured

is AI made it faster to produce papers,

but the papers you were producing were

bad.

They were they weren't readable. They

were way more likely to be desk

rejected, way way more likely to not

make it through to accepted. And I think

this is a a good specific case study of

a more general issue

that we've been talking about recently

on this show, which is when it comes to

productivity,

making things faster

doesn't necessarily make things better.

Making it easier to technically finish

and submit a paper doesn't necessarily

necessarily mean that you are a more

productive scientist or science is

proceeding more productively.

And often you can have a reverse effect

where producing lower quality things

faster gunks up the works and prevents

the good stuff from happening. And

that's for sure is what's happening in

this particular journal.

By flooding the works with significantly

more uh submissions that are lower

quality,

I am sure that now the energy required

and the rate at which good research is

produced is down.

And we see this in our individual lives

as well. I've talked about this effect

like in

last week's podcast with Dave Epstein,

right?

You speed up one part of your life at

some work process you're doing like I'm

going to use email

like very quickly

bounce back and forth ideas with people,

but it leads to too much work on your

plate. It all piles up at the bottleneck

of you actually doing the hard work and

because you're so distracted keeping up

with all these email conversations, the

rate at which you actually finish things

goes down. And you made one thing in

your work process faster, but you made

the rate at which you produce useful

stuff slower. And this happens time and

again when we bring in digital tools

that makes one thing faster easier,

and we assume that's going to mean we'll

just become strictly better at what we

do, but they can make things worse. I

think it's a great experiment, but if

you want a if you want a shareable

version of this discussion or you want

to get some more details, go to

calnewport.com. I just wrote about it

today.

All right, Jesse, what uh what we got

next?

>> Our next message is from Emily who had a

question about our recent episode on

reversing brain rot with cognitive

fitness.

>> That was a popular episode.

>> Yeah. Yeah, especially online.

>> The kids like the term brain rot.

I guess it's what's going on. Um so for

those who missed it, I gave advice for

how to get your brain back in shape in a

world in which we have lots of

distractions. So obviously today's

episode

follows up on some of those ideas. I

would add the 14-day intervention we

talked about today is like idea number

six from that how to reverse brain rot

episode I did a couple weeks ago. All

right, so Emily is writing in reaction

to that episode from a couple weeks ago.

Here's what she said.

I really enjoyed your recent episode on

building cognitive fitness. I'm

currently using the composing of this

email to not avoid writing. So, thank

you for the motivation.

My question for you is also related to

this writing portion of your proposed

regimen.

My expertise is in architecture and

design, and I have found that my journal

and notebooks tend to fill with drawings

and schematics as much as with words.

Do you think that there are equivalent

alternative forms of creating,

composing, and communicating that

require the same sort of brain processes

that writing does? Or do you believe

that written language is uniquely

superior for practicing that mental

orchestration?

Well, I think exercise is a useful

analogy here, Emily, because there's

different types of exercise that can

promote fitness in different ways, all

of which is good and in general variety

is good. And I think that's what we're

talking about here.

Technical drawing and schematics are

going to work your brain in useful ways

from a cognitive fitness standpoint.

They're not the same ways that writing

works it. There's some overlap and

there's some ways where they're both

different.

So, they're both good.

In a life where you're doing some

writing and you're doing some technical

drawing and schematics, I think that's

like an athlete who cross trains.

You know, you're you're a you do a lot

of running, but now you're also doing

some cross country skiing.

There's some overlap and you're going to

get fitness in the same same sort of

fitness boost in both cases, but there's

also ways in which you're going to get

different types of fitness from each of

those. I think it's all just good.

Hard cognitive activity is good for your

brain. It's never been more important

because we're out of shape mentally.

The more you do, the better. But, I just

think fundamental

reading and writing are fundamental

activities. This is like

jogging and lightweight training. Like

you you do need that. You want that

foundation in there no matter what other

things you are doing

as well. So, I sometimes hear from

people who are like, "Well, look, I

don't write. That

I'm just not a good writer. But, I I I I

kind of fake writer. I'll use like chat

GPT and talk to it and still express

myself and and But, I do other things

that help me concentrate. And I would

say the other things are good.

But, you want that reading and writing

is like the core dynamic duo

of the post-paleolithic human modern

experience. It's where like all of the

ideas that defines modern humanity came

from. Our morality, our technology, our

politics, our philosophy.

All of those brain circuits

were forged in reading and writing.

So, you do not want to take those out of

your routine, but adding other stuff in

the routine

can only help.

All right, what do we got? Message

number three.

>> Our final message is from Tyler, but a

different Tyler than our first message.

It's about your suggestion to leave your

phone in the kitchen.

>> All Tylers today, all Tylers all the

time.

That's just a nice motto.

All right, Tyler. Thank you for what you

do. Oh, here's his message. I'm not I

mean, Tyler, thank you for what you do,

whatever that is, but I'm I'm now

reading his message.

Uh thank you for the Thank you for what

you do. Deep work and slow productivity

have been transformational in helping me

move away from distracted lazy forms of

working from home to more focused

satisfying days as a data scientist.

Deep questions help me helps me remember

why the increased cognitive effort is so

worth it.

As it's easy to get excited after

reading a book then fall back into bad

habits 2 weeks later.

My wife and I adopted leaving our phones

plugged in the kitchen as a sort of

mindfulness challenge during Lent and

couldn't believe how impactful this was

for both of us.

We now call it landlining and have

continued to practice this even after

Lent. It's easy to just tell my wife I'm

landlining, so please call if she needs

anything while she's out.

Uh I like that terminology. I think it's

useful. So, this idea of leaving your

phone plugged in the kitchen is one I

talk about all the time. I think it's

one of the easiest ways to begin to de-

de-addict your mind

from the attraction of your phone,

especially if your phone just

fundamentally has things attractive on

it, is keep it plugged in your kitchen,

so you would have to get up and go get

it if you want to use it.

Do not have it on your person while you

eat, while you watch TV, while you read

books, while you socialize with your

family. It makes such a big difference,

but I like having a term for it. So,

Tyler and his wife call it landlining.

I think that's useful because it gives

you a shorthand for explaining to people

don't expect me maybe to immediately

see, for example, a text message you

send.

That's one of the big hooks that keeps

us near the ocean, so that the jaws of

distraction can grab us and pull us

under, is this idea of

people might expect me to answer a text

message, and I I don't want to seem like

I'm being rude, so I need my phone with

me to check those text messages, and now

it's on you, now they've got you. And

all the other stuff are there.

So, if landlining caught on, you could

use it in the same way that Tyler uses

it with his wife, right? You could say,

"I'm landlining in the evening, so

you're going to have to call

uh if you have something urgent to get

my attention, right?"

So, I like that, landlining.

People should use I like the

terminology. People should use it.

All right, so uh

because it's Monday, I want to close out

by uh talking about what I am up to. I'm

actually loading something on my phone.

And Jesse,

see here. You know what I'm seeing as I

go through my phone, looking through the

photos,

um

a lot of baseball photos. It's a lot of

Little League coaching photos of

All right, what we're going to do now is

we're going to break down multiple

pitches from my son's last Little League

appearance.

That'd be a good episode of the show.

No, I was looking up a a thing, a book

title. All right, uh

I finished my fifth and final book of

May. It was actually an early release

version of a new book written by my dad

that's called how society should deal

with inequality. Um so, my dad's a

sociologist who then went on to become

the editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll

before retiring from that role to be a

senior scientist at Gallup in 2018. He's

also currently a visiting scholar at

Stanford's Institute for Excellence in

Survey Research.

It's a cool book because

it mixes positive psychology which was

bigger a few decades ago about using

sociology to try to figure out how to

make society function better as opposed

to negative sociology which is just

about trying to highlight issues with

current society.

And as one of its core sources of

information and motivation for what is

proposed is survey research, actually

public opinion polls. So it's sort of

like a great merging of roles in which

he is a world-class expert.

I enjoyed that book. That was my 5th of

May.

And now I am I'm deep into recording

this on what the 3rd or 4th What day is

it?

>> 5th.

>> All right, I got to get rolling. I'm in

my first book of

That was my last book of April.

I'm moving slowly through my first book

in May. So I got to kind of pick up the

pace. I've been busy recently.

>> We talked about last week having

counting long longer books for multiple

books.

>> I want to try that. I definitely want to

try that. So I think what I'm going to

do So I'm I'm reading a sort of long

enough It's a long book, but it's going

to count as one. I'm also reading the

book that you got me which is short. So

I'll be able to finish that pretty

quickly. I think I want to finish three

regular books by the halfway point and

then go for a twofer.

It's like a 600-page book or something

like this to be count as the final two

books of May.

>> Yeah, I kind of as a fan I want a

twofer.

>> I want to do a twofer.

I don't know what I'm going to do.

I got some ideas.

I got to I got to be

I got some I got some ideas. There's

various constituencies in my life that

are uh

arguing for different things. My son

wants me to read more Brandon Sanderson.

Those are usually twofers. Those are

long.

>> Yeah.

>> He reads these

doorstops of books.

There's some non-fiction twofers I've

been meaning to read as well.

All right. Oh, I got one in mind. All

right, so I got to get through my three

because I really want to

I really want to dig into uh, a twofer.

And I'm building up my strength, Jesse,

for a threefer.

>> Yeah.

>> 750 pages or more.

All ca- count. So, like an 800-page book

would count as three.

>> Mhm.

>> I have some options.

But, I got to I got to get my speed up.

All right, well, that's all the time we

have

for this week. Uh, we got an AI reality

check

coming out on Thursday, and then another

advice episode on the Monday that

follows. So, hopefully I'll see you or

you'll hear me both those occasions.

Sign up for my newsletter at

calnewport.com.

And until then, as always,

stay deep.