[Music] hi everybody we are thrilled to have Cal Newport on the show today known for his groundbreaking work on deep work and digital minimalism Now cal has revolutionized the way we approach productivity and focus in the digital age and basically you are what you focus on and today we focus on you Cal and your work so big welcome well thank you for having me I've been looking forward to this great now first of all what is deep work well deep work is the the state you're in in which you are giving full concentration to a cognitively demanding task so the two aspects to it is what you're doing requires a lot of concentration and you giving it concentration without any distraction so it's actually getting your full attention those two things together means you're doing deep work and why is it important well this is the number one way you produce valuable things using the human brain like if your goal is I want to create something valuable using my brain the most promising cognitive state for accomplishing this goal is one of undistracted focus now in your in your books you talk about the fact that we've kind of forgotten to differentiate between deep work and shallow work tell us about it well I think what happened is we got the front office it Revolution so suddenly we have Network computers in the office we have low friction digital communication um it's easier than ever before to move information back and forth and we accidentally created a work culture in which we were prioritizing the communication but by doing so we were fracturing time into fragments too small to actually give sustained concentration to anything we devalued unbroken concentration as an activity that mattered in knowledge work and by doing so I think we're greatly reducing the quality of what's being produced and we're burning out the individuals trying to do the production and how do you get into that mindset that deep thinking deep work mindset well it takes time first of all right I think this is important it's also easily subverted it can take about 10 or 15 minutes to really get a target of your attention completely locked in you have to inhibit certain neural networks you have to activate other neural networks it's why when you sit down to do something hard it's hard for 10 or 15 minutes and then you feel like a new gear kicks in like oh now I'm actually starting to make some progress that's because your brain takes time to really lock in so what happens then if you're trying to work on something hard and you're also doing quick checks of an email inbox or seeing what's going on on your phone you're breaking that hard one cognitive f FOC State and so deep work really requires that you remain focused on one thing without trying to change your cognitive context how do you build this into your daily routine do you have different types of different times during the day when you do this well I mean there's answers to this question at all different levels depending on how systemic you want to get at the lowest level of just I'm thinking about my day in front of me yeah you schedule time for deep work and it's on your calendar and you treat it like a meeting right this is on my calendar I'm going to do this thing I'm not available during that time time and you make a deal with yourself if I'm in a deep work session that's what I'm doing I'm not going to change my cognitive context while I'm working on this when is when during the day is the best time well it depends on the person but most people earlier in the day is better than later you still have more cognitive energy you still have less distractions that have been introduced into your cognitive landscape so far so your brain has an easier time actually focusing hey I'm a proponent of the idea that meeting should be something that happens in the afternoons now it might be too radical to make that an an absolute but as a thought experiment it's not a bad one what's the best way to eliminate distractions how do you do it well the biggest source of distraction and knowledge work is communication right so what happens is we have a mode of collaboration that we implicitly evolved once we got the front office it Revolution I call it the hyperactive hvep mind where we work things out on the fly with ad hoc back and forth messaging that's the number one source of distraction if I have seven different projects I'm working on and each of them have generated these sort of unscheduled back and forth conversations that's required for these projects to make progress that seven projects generating messages that need to be seen and replied to relatively promptly that creates an atmosphere in which I have to continually check communication channels and inboxes so if you want to solve this problem of being distracted we actually have to solve the problem of the hyperactive hive mind we have to find alternative ways to collaborate that don't just depend on unscheduled messages arriving that I have to see and respond to throughout the day what is a hyperactive Hive I mean this is the collaboration style we use without use without knowing it without naming it so I named it like we just decided once email arrived and followed by chat services that we can all just figure things out by talking to each other all the time that's why I say it's a hive mind oh just back and forth communication with anyone the the whole office is Interlink with just these messages going back and forth and I call it hyperactive because these are going back and forth at a really high rate but the problem is like this whole sort of cybernetic noospheric we're all connected and talking to each other all day the problem is is the human brain can't do it so can you're not a big fan you're not a big fan of CC all I'm not a big fan of CC all I'm not a big fan of uh let me just immediately hit you up on slack when I have a question and you answer me right away that's useful to you in the moment but it creates a macrocognitive environment that is intolerable for the human brain I can't switch back and forth between servicing seven different projects in a 10-minute period a crowded email inbox is like a Minefield for the human brain it can't do this well every message has a entirely different context that the brain has to load up just to answer but we don't give our time enough time to do that because we have to get through a 100 messages uh it's exhausting it can be deranging on paper it seems very efficient but the reality of our human neurological Hardware says this way of working is not compatible with humans in the way we actually think and exist so so how should I work through my email backlog we have because I have I have I wake up in the morning I got loads of stuff you know because we're a global company and uh I get stuff from uh from us from Singapore uh you know you know you know what it's like what what do I do well first of all we have to get to this problem at the source right so so wherever we have a source of email where there's another way to do that communication that doesn't require just an unscheduled message arriving in general inbox let's put those systems into place let's get rid of the idea of having a single email address associated with each person now we maybe what we should have is different communication channels for different types of communication so when it comes time for me to uh deal with whatever supply chain issues with International Distributors there's like a place where all that communication is and there's a time when we look at that uh we don't want all of this to arrive unscheduled all mixed together into one big jumble that I then have to sequentially move through so we want to reduce the unscheduled messages being uh generated in the first place and then we want to pull apart having a just generic everything mixed together inbox and have more specialized communication channels all this will be better for the human brain well I mean talking about being interrupted um smartphones um even worse right I read somewhere that on average people check their phones every seven minutes what what what do you think when you hear that right they do and it was not the original uh purpose of these phones you know I wrote it this this time op at a few years ago about Steve Jobs original vision for the iPhone which certainly was not this should be a constant companion that you check every seven minutes the cause of us checking our phones all the time is actually different than the cause of us checking for example our email inbox all the time uh the problem with phones in the nonprofessional context of course is the rise of the professional attention economy when it was discovered around 2012 oh if we make these apps sticky we can get people to look at them all the time and there's an incredible uh attention resource we can mine here so we look at our phones too much because we put apps on the phones designed to make us do that we look at our email inbox too much because we have a mode of collaboration that requires us to do so similar sounding problems different sources of the of the problem I read somewhere that when you even if you hear like Ping and you know that there is a message on your phone when you then solve a task you apply less IQ to it you become basically less intelligent just by knowing there is something on the phone well we're we're a social species and and so for good reason we take very seriously for good evolutionarily evolutionary reasons we take very seriously someone in our tribe needs us because we've learned through our long history if someone in our tribe needs us and we ignore them uh we might get a spear in the back so like we really care about this the problem is that same brain that's been around for a couple hundred thousand years has a hard time then with the idea of an email inbox because as far as it's concerned messages in an email inbox is our tribe members need us and we're and every moment that we're not checking that inbox and there's messages in there is US ignoring our tribe members and this is a dangerous thing to do alarm Bells go off in our brain the social human brain has a hard time with a modern digital inbox now I'm going to ask you a lame question given what you already have said but uh should we exclude telephones from classrooms yes uh and in many places they don't why uh tell me what your view is on all this I think unrestricted internet access so what you would get for example if you just had your own smartphone uh the research is becoming increasingly clear that probably 16 is the age when that begins to become uh safe psychologically speaking post puberty right you should not have unrestricted email access until you have basically gone through puberty 16 plus it's very different than what we've tried for the last 10 years the last 10 years we experimented with let's just give kids phon and sees what happened a reasonable experiment I think the results have come back terrible things happen so we need to change the way we think about this culturally I think that's where we're going to be in two or three years this idea that a 12-year-old or 11y old be given a phone we're going to think about that not too far in the future the way we learn to think about oh we shouldn't be giving cigarettes to a teenager okay that they need to be older before they can deal with it that's where I think we are with phones when you talk about deep work what are the similarities to deliberate training which Erikson is talking about the 10,000 hours just what are the what are the links between the two well you need to be in a state of deep work to do deliberate practice so it's it's one of the things you can do if so so focus without distraction is the cognitive state required to do deliberate practice and to get better so if you uh are uncomfortable focusing or you never give yourself time during your day to really be focused on something you'll never be able to fall into a state of deliberate practice at the way that Ericson would have talked about it which means you're going to pick up new skills very slowly you're going to learn things very slowly not all deep workers deliver practice uh a flow state which of course is very different is also something you can't fall into unless you're in a state of deep work so deep work is like an umbrella when you give something unbroken concentration you get these potentialities you get the potential of deliberate practice getting good at hard things fast you get the potential of Flow State getting lost in your work and having creative insights but all of these are unified by the need to have unbroken concentration K explain the the the concept of flow which is uh kind of invented by the guy with a very difficult name um yes that's M CH sent me high well there go so so I knew him did I knew him and Anders yeah good what um do you need uh to be in a kind of a deep work situation in order to be in the flow and and and what and what I'm sorry and what is being in the flow I mean flow State's the psychological state that mahaley identified decades ago in which uh you get lost in what you're doing the task becomes all-encompassing and you have this sensation of you've you've lost track you're not even thinking about the passage of time so it's characterized so it's like when you really get lost in something it's athletes report this all the time you're just you're lost in the skiing down doing your ski run as an Alpine skier and just it the activity becomes your whole world artists get into the state a lot uh I'm performing on stage and I don't even I'm not even aware my fingers are just doing what they're doing and it's I'm just in the music it it could be a very creative and a very pleasurable State uh it requires unbroken concentration you can't be in a flow State while also keeping up with your email inbox so deep work is a prerequisite for a flow State how does his tiin whe simultaneous capacity is that then a fallacy that you can do two things at the same time yeah we know that's a fallacy right uh we've done this since basically the early 2000s that there's you know Cliff Nas's research on multitasking like we learned pretty quick L okay when we literally multitask like tell ourselves I'm doing these two things concurrently um I'm clearly just switching my attention back and forth between them really quickly uh so nothing is getting my full cognitive attention and so we do both of them worse I think there's something even more Insidious than multitasking though because a lot of people now have heard that so they won't keep two windows open at the same time they won't try to answer emails concurrently with talking on the phone but what we do instead which I think can be almost as bad is the a quick check so I'm I'm mainly just trying to write this memo that's very hard but every five minutes I just check my email real quick because I'm waiting for something and then I come back to it and we Pat ourselves on the back and say look I'm single tasking I'm not doing two things concurrently but what we leave out is that even the quick checks have a huge p a huge price right so when I glance at that inbox my brain sees all of these emotionally Salient sort of urgent Communications from my tribe members even if I then turn my attention immediately back to the memo it's too late my brain started the process of like uhoh all hands on deck we got to like fire up what we need to deal with these situations and so the the quick checks gives us a situation almost as bad as actual multitasking our brain falls into what Linda Stone calls partial continuous attention uh it never is fully focused on any one thing it's always halfway through changing from one context to another this is the state where most knowledge workers spend their entire day uh it's exhausting and we're producing at significantly reduced cognitive capacity a ween better at multitasking than men no human brain can multitask every human brain needs 10 to 20 minutes to really lock in on a on a complicated cognitive context every human brain no matter how long you've been doing it is going to be befuddled by checking an inbox every five minutes or trying to do two things at once what happens when you uh are in this state of hyperactivity over a long period of time what happens to your brain and to and to your wellbeing well it's uh quite literally exhausting right it's Why by the time you get to the afternoon you find yourself unable to really do anything hard you find yourself unable even really to deal with your inbox and You Begin picking out just the messages that are easy to respond that's basically your brain crying Uncle like okay I've had enough you've been trying to do this unnatural thing you've been switching me around uh I'm exhausted so so there's a literal exhaustion to it we have you can connect other negative AFF effect like stress or anxiety to it as well we just feel bad because again we're doing something that we're we're not wired to do and then there's the psychological distress of saying I know there's these important things I should be doing that I have a lot of training that I'm good at that I could be strategizing or producing stuff that and I'm not getting to it all I'm doing is talking about work and and I can't keep up with it so we have like neurological discomfort plus this sort of psychological distress of like this can't possibly be the right way to work those two things together is a recipe for Burnout so as a reaction to this you wrote another book slow productivity so what is this about so I think right now our implicit definition of productivity and knowledge work is based on activity I call it pseudo productivity it's this notion of activity will be a proxy for useful effort so the more I see you doing stuff the better this does not play well with a world of email and chat where I can show you activity uh incredibly frantically and in a very fine grain scale slow productivity is a different way of thinking about productivity which is based much more on results I want to produ produce good stuff over time that really matters and in order to do this uh I need to work on less things at the same time I need to be more realistic about my time frames and I need to couple that with really obsessing over the quality of what I do that is like the much more natural from a human perspective the much more natural way of approaching cognitive work less exhausting and ultimately much more effective it's going to produce much better stuff so we have to slow down from this frantic activity do less things at once but do these things really well move through them at a faster rate I think this is going to be a much better uh this is the recipe at least I'm pitching this book this going to be much more sustainable for knowledge workers is this science or is it philosophy uh it's a combination of all these things right I mean we we know for examp some of this just common sense right uh if we work on too many things at the same time What Happens everything we've agreed to is going to generate its own administrative overhead every project we're working on generates its own emails and its own meetings so if I say yes to 10 things I have 10 projects worth of administrative overhead squatting there in my day on my schedule and the ability now to actually make progress on any of these 10 things gets greatly reduced if I instead say wait a second uh I've agreed to do 10 things but I'm only going to work on two at a time now I only have the administrative overhead of two projects on my schedule at a time now I can spend a lot of time working on these two things I can get these things done fast I can get these things done at a much higher level of quality and then pull in the next thing I mean so some of this is just common sense some of this is science you know how is the human brain wired what is our relationship with work over the last 300,000 years it's not 8 hour days full intensity all year round we need more variation and some of it's philosophical humans want to produce stuff that's good so reorienting work around quality in a way just from activity is something that's going to philosophically resonate with the human Spirit Cal supposedly we walk and talk 10% faster than we did 30 years ago and you indeed talk faster than most I mean how do you react if these slow dudes come along well you mean here's the thing about the people who are slowly productive right they don't seem slower and in fact when you zoom out you say wow this person's producing you know I mean case after case in this book is you you zoom out and look at this person's last decade or their career and like my God this is a super productive person they did all of these things these things are really important but then you zoom in on a particular day and it looks non-f frantic right so like the interesting thing about slow productivity is the scale you look at matters if you zoom on a particular hour you might say wow this person is slow like they're they're just working on something they're not running back and forth and jumping on this call or whatever but you zoom out to the whole year like wow look at all this stuff they got done like they're they're really like delivering they're really making a difference so you know that the perception of slowness depends on what time scale you're looking at and how do you how do you structure that kind of attitude in a company I think workload management has to be transparent right I mean this is like one of the number one things a company can do is we have to move away from this knowledge work ideal of uh how you manage your work is up to you like everyone is just autonomous about it we have we have our kpis we have our objectives but how you manage your work how you that's all up to you the problem about doing it that way where it's fully just everyone does their own thing is that workloads get out of control it's like I don't know I have to decide on every single thing whether I should do it or not I have to navigate to social dynamics I think workload management should be much more transparent I push a lot of examples like this the book where okay here's what we need to work on and we have it listed right here you don't own it as a person yet here's the things our team's working on all right here's the specific things from this list that you're working on now here is specifically our idea about how many things each person should be working on at once it's two but also I know exactly what you're working on so did are you done with that great let's get you a new thing we need to be much more explicit about what needs to be done who's working on what how much should people be working on what's the status of what they're working on this should not just in uh exist in internally to each person they only they know what they're working on it's all just sort of spread out over various emails and things they've agreed to on slack explicit workload management is the foundation for having sustainable workload management you you talk about something called small seasonality what is that well we need more variation in intensity if we want work to be sustainable so uh broad seasonality the literal seasonality is seasons are different right this is the Neolithic Revolution the winter is quieter than the fall small seasonality is saying okay we can have variations in intensity on smaller scales right it might be this week we're sort of pulling back a little bit to regroup after a hard month it could be I'm not putting meetings on Friday so like Friday is a day I can sort of pull back and and think deeper about bigger projects right so it's putting variation of intensity into your schedule not at the scale of whole Seasons but at smaller time scales do you think we should go to full day weeks to me I think uh we need to get to the actual problem before we just treat the symptoms the problem is overload we're working on too many things simply reducing the number of days we work doesn't solve that problem what solves that problem is explicit workload management we should be working on fewer things at once to me that's way more we can't solve that problem by just trying to reduce the number of days we work we need to actually reduce the number of things we're working on um it's not a superficial fix like let's just change what days we work we actually have to get down to how do we figure out who's working on what how much should each person be working on at a time so I I'm a much bigger proponent of getting to the actual systems by which organizations run the way work is assigned the way work is done how collaboration happens that's where the fixes need to be not let's change our schedule let's make it hybrid versus not hybrid that's just dealing with the symptoms it's not getting to the underlying disease let's um focus in on Focus um now you say that we must TR we must train our mind to be to be in Focus just how do you how do you train your mind to be in Focus well it has to get used to it like the the state of maintaining your mind's eye internally on some sort of abstract symbolic Target is not necessarily that natural for humans it's just like reading we have to hijack parts of our brain that evolve for other purposes and teach them how to interpret symbols into meaning like we do when we read focusing on abstract ideas a business strategy an idea that we're going to write it's not natural we have to practice it and the more you practice it the more uh easy it is for you to get in that state and the deeper you can actually push your concentration but if you don't practice it and then you're like okay I'm gonna put aside some time for deep work but you've never really practiced this before it's not going to go well right it's gonna I can't keep my focus my mind's all over the place like nothing's getting done and so it's really important to remember if it doesn't go well that doesn't mean you're not wired to focus it just means you haven't practiced it yet does meditation help it could help right but I to me the right practice is practice the actual thing you want to get better at right don't like meditation has some muscles in it that's similar to what it's like to actually focus on something but why not just practice actually focusing so the exercise I give to people more often I call it productive meditation and what I suggest they do is you go for a walk uh this helps you with the exercise because the walking silences some of your neural circuits so it's a little bit easier to concentrate go for a walk have a single professional problem that you're going to try to make progress on just in your mind and just like in mindfulness meditation if your attention wanders from the problem which it will you just notice that and bring it back nope come back we're going to try to solve this problem it wanders and thinks about your email like no come back we're just going to think on this problem if you do productive meditation on a regular basis you will actually get much more Adept at sustaining internal concentration on a Target so I'm a big believer of let's just practice the thing we want to get better at not adjacent things let's just get cut right to the chase of what we want to do better I walk to work when I uh work from uh when I work in London and New York so I should uh establish one problem before I kick off and then think about it for an hour it's fantastic I look I used to walk to work when I was a postto at MIT and I did this every single day wow I really could tell a difference it really was like a superpower it's just like when you're exercising regularly you realize like oh I'm feel I can lift heavy things or I can run faster you can feel the same way cognitively if you're doing this on a regular basis what about um um well somebody like Bill Gates for instance so he uh spends a week a year um reading right reading lots of different types of research spend a week away doing this what do you think about those kind of activities yeah I think think weeks are a good idea I mean I even write about Bill Gates in that in that book deep work uh he would do this he would get a pile of books and go to he had a cabin somewhere up there you know outside in the countryside Beyond Seattle I suppose though I did hear recently from someone who knows him he's changed the structure of his think weeks I forgot exactly how he did it but he still has a week where he gets away from all stimulus from the outside so he can let his mind just slowly develop thoughts taking new information famously it was in one of these think weeks in the 90s that Bill Gates said oh oh shoot the internet the consumer internet is going to be a really big thing and he came back and wrote inter the internet Title Wave memo that came out of a think week just having that time for him to sit back and think he suddenly realized my God we're about to miss the most important Trend in consumer digital products of the last you know since the personal computer the think week is where he got the space to figure that out is serious thinking and lost art you know we're getting worse at it I would say just as a populist because we are so distracted all the time we're just out of shape we're out of cognitive shape there are still places where it's preserved we Academia preserved in certain Fields I mean I'm a theoretician I I I wrote a New Yorker piece about this recently about my time in the theory group in the computer science lab at MIT and how much I learned there about just thinking about thinking as a tier one skill you want to get better at and care about there's still Pockets like that around Sports has pockets of this uh not surprisingly there's some professional athletes who are big Believers in my books uh we see that especially in golf like Rory mikoy is a big fan of deep work in digital minimalism because that turns out to be a game where the ability to focus is everything you lose your focus that's it you're out of the tournament uh the Arts I think this is still preserved there's a lot of Arts where you can't get better at an instrument without giving it intense Focus so this art still exists but as a populace we're worse at thinking probably than we've ever been uh in the last 50 years or so and when you meet people what distinguish people who are into deep thinking from those who aren't uh the clarity and original of their thoughts right this this ability because when when you're practice that deep thinking you can hold an idea in your mind you can hold related ideas in your mind you can look at them together okay how does this relate to this they they see things and patterns and systems they find the interesting angles they they they they what's what's really going on here how do these pieces fit together so originality and Clarity of thinking that is the the Hallmark of someone who is very comfortable just maintain concentration in their Mind's Eye that's very interesting so when you sit next to somebody at a at a dinner and if they have really interesting clear different ideas that's probably because they've done deep thinking on their own so yes not sved by General thinking yes this is probably someone who does not spend a lot of time on Tik Tok like I could just make that you could usually pick that out that they're yeah an originality of thought definitely just they're not they're just just sitting and thinking about things and you come out of left field and you have these interesting ideas you have these know in Academia you could pick this up right away like the deepest thinkers it's very focused like if you're a theoretician like me it's originality and an algorithm design it's the oh you took in what this person did and what that person did and you saw that they were really connected and here was the thing that really mattered and if we tweak it this way we can then do that and now you have like a new result that that's beating what anyone else ever was able to do before so like in academic circles if you're a physicist if you're a theoretical computer scientist if you're a mathematician the signature of deep thinking is just incredibly clear you see it right in the work which aspects of Life can you improve by doing this you think well professionally speaking uh almost any knowledge work job you're going to be much better at like it knowledge work is the human brain being monetized right so if you are really good at focusing that human brain you are really valuable in that Marketplace outside of work it's fantastic for introspection for trying to understand who you are and how you fit into a larger understanding of the world because you're able to take in information build up this internal schema about what matters what doesn't value structures idea structures you can understand your relationship to these pieces so you're going to have a much more sophisticated understanding of yourself and your world so there's a great uh introspective Advantage as well enjoyment of Arts is another thing of thing right I mean if you see like a great filmmaker movie critic for example you know that requires the ability to to really concentrate on what's happening in the art and understand what why these pieces fit together why is this so affecting well it's it's they're doing this and that with the cinematography but also with what they're doing with the cuts you know so you can appreciate Arts at a higher level as well so there's a lot of areas where you know I I say this in one of my books that the sort of a a deep life is a good life because I really believe and this goes all the way back to Aristotle right this is the nican ethics he talks about this but humans are distinguished by this ability to give sustained abstract attention no one else no other animal does and so it's our in our sort of intrinsic nature that we should be doing this what makes us most human we should really embrace it does make our life I think richer so you say a deep life is a good life so what do you do when you have a bad life uh when you are relaxing and not going deep what do you how do you relax what do I do personally yeah all I do is sit around and do Focus exercises um you know I have three kids who are young so I this word relax you speak of is odd to me so we have we have a I have a lot going on with my family life um I do like my one hobby outside of just you know I read a lot and WR a lot is I do like movies and so so to me uh I love going to the movies I love watching movies I love reading about movies I I love that it has nothing to do with what I do professionally so I can just enjoy that art without having to worry about all of the stuff that goes behind the other types of art I'm involved in but what kind of state of mind are you in when you watch a movie I'm really engaged I I I mean I'm I'm really interested in I mean I often have to it's my second viewing of a movie is when I really start to like a movie I really like the second viewing I usually like a movie a lot better uh the first viewing I'm taking it in and noticing myself like how am I reacting to this my second viewing I'm looking at the film making like what did the what did the director do to generate this you and I begin to notice you know it's just the the the things that sort of matter like what are they doing with the editing what are they doing with the cinematography um what are they doing with the acting here what's happening in this screenplay like why and I I I I really love like interesting aitor voices and people who take interesting chances um it just I find it like creatively exhilarating to see the creative risks and experimentation that happen in that field because we don't have as much of that like I'm a non-fiction writer in addition to being a professor like non-fiction writing we don't have as much experimentation to the way you would see in like the movies like the people do interesting stuff with a huge amount of money on the line too I think it's just a fascinating corner of the Arts ke um we got tens of thousands of uh young people listening to this so you're a young person how do you attack this this thing what do you do well first of all I'd say respect your attention right this is like your most important resource in a cognitive culture and economy like we have now is your attention like what you pay attention to what you do with that attention respect your attention so don't just rent it out to the first uh company that comes along and says we want to rent out your attention and monetize it look at our video scroll this thing here's a Tik Tok Instagram Twitter uh have more respect for your attention than that like what do I really want to pay attention to I want to like read something good I want to watch something interesting I want to connect deeply with a real person who's in front of me I want to do this thing in my job really well right so just just treating your attention as something that deserves your respect and not something that can just be AMU abused and monetized by everyone trying to make a dime off of like minutes of your active user minutes it's a completely different way of living when you're not just sort of constantly distracted I've had readers tell me it's like your life goes from black and white to Technicolor you're noticing things you're understanding things you're thinking about things and so I don't know that's how maybe that would be my my summary for a young person if you respect your attention it will do wonderful things for you if you don't there is many people many corporations many apps that are looking to just take advantage of your attention and your life is going to be imp harage because of it so be deliberate about how you spend your time now one of the things you should do is to read of course deep work by Cal Newport fantastic book really really important I absolutely loved it and Cal it's been fantastic you have you on big thanks well thank you I enjoyed it