How Do I Escape the “Busyness Singularity”? | Monday Advice

Summary

Podcast Summary: "How Do I Escape the Busyness Singularity?"

Deep Questions with Cal Newport (June 1, 2026)
Host: Cal Newport

---

Episode Overview

This episode of Deep Questions dives into the changing nature of knowledge work under the influence of technology, especially AI. Rather than focusing on fears about widespread job loss, Cal Newport argues that the real risk is the rise of meaningless, overwhelmingly busy work—what he calls the "busyness singularity." He traces the evolution of knowledge work, critiques the management paradigm of "pseudo-productivity," explores the impact of AI on daily work life, and delivers five practical strategies to help individuals avoid getting trapped in endless busywork. The episode also features Q&A segments on the ethics of AI-generated speech, implementing slow productivity as a manager, and strategies for improving cognitive fitness.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Real Threat of AI in Knowledge Work (00:00 - 10:30)

• Initial Headlines & Public Anxiety: Cal surveys recent news coverage that presents AI as a job destroyer, but argues the greater (and overlooked) risk is the erosion of job quality rather than job quantity.
• Notable Quote:

  “What if the real fear... is not that these technologies are going to take your job, but instead are going to make your job miserable? And if this is true, what specifically can you do to avoid this fate?” (02:11 - Cal Newport)

• Evolution of Pseudo-Productivity:
  • Knowledge work, coined by Peter Drucker in the 1950s, was supposed to value autonomy and creativity.
  • Managers struggled to measure output, defaulting to "pseudo-productivity"—visible activity as a proxy for useful effort.
  • The introduction of computers, networking, and mobile devices ramped up opportunities to appear busy, leading to a frantic, distraction-riddled work environment.
• Microsoft Report Findings:

  “The average number of emails received per employee each workday is 117… Average time between interruptions by meeting, email or message during core work hours: once every two minutes.” (09:24 - Cal Newport)

• Result: This has fueled unprecedented levels of burnout and dissatisfaction among knowledge workers.

2. The Busyness Singularity – What Happens When AI Supercharges Pseudo-Productivity (10:30 - 17:11)

• AI’s Actual Office Use:
  • Rather than driving innovation, AI is mostly used for automating “pseudo-productive” tasks: emails, summaries, reports, slide decks.
  • These activities bring little real value but are performed to show visible busyness.
• The Busyness Singularity Defined:

  “It will be a digital blitz of back and forth nothingness. The density of shallow work here will become infinite. It will collapse in on itself. You will end up with a busyness singularity.” (15:24 - Cal Newport)

• Insight:
  The real problem isn’t AI alone, but how it interacts with a broken system of measuring productivity. If we keep rewarding activity over value, AI will only make things worse.

3. Five Actionable Strategies to Escape the Busyness Singularity (17:11 - 25:54)

1. Plan Weekly

• On Monday, schedule important, value-adding tasks for the week and protect time for them.
• Prevents daily “slide” into pseudo-productive busywork.

“If you want to open up space between you and pseudo-productivity and actually start producing value, you gotta plan in advance.” (18:16)

2. Maintain a Value Portfolio

• Keep a document tracking your key projects and accomplishments.
• Use it for reviews and conversations with managers; shifts attention from busyness to real achievements.

“You want an alternative to just let my visible busyness be how you judge me… actually keep track of it.” (19:46)

3. Avoid What AI Can Do

• Regularly ask: Could an AI or a minimally trained assistant do this? If yes, minimize your time on it.

“If most of what you’re doing is just automated by AI… then you are vulnerable. You’re kind of bringing this on yourself.” (21:05)

4. Pursue Upskill Projects

• Always be developing a new, job-relevant skill.
• Ideally, tie it to your current projects.

“The harder your skills, the more rare and valuable the skill, the more you can escape the trap of AI-accelerated pseudo-productivity.” (22:41)

5. Write Well

• Treat clear, concise, thoughtful writing as a differentiator from AI-generated slop.

“When more people are trying to automate their writing, you should spend longer on your writing than you were before. It’s a huge differentiator.” (23:43)

• Recap:

  “Use weekly plans...maintain a portfolio...Avoid what AI can do...Always be pursuing upskill projects...Value your writing.” (24:00)

4. About Pseudo-Productivity and Newport’s Evolving Terminology (24:07 - 26:30)

• Cal discusses the origins of terms like "pseudo-productivity" and introduces new concepts from his upcoming books, including "cognitive fitness".
• Memorable Moment:
  Cal jokes about his penchant for inventing new terms and his hope to shape the conversation around work and thinking.

---

Audience Q&A: Additional Insights

On the Ethics and Value of Human Speech (29:03 - 33:35)

• Cal discusses feedback on his newsletter essay “On Gods and LLMs,” which explores whether there’s something sacred about human-generated speech.
• Key Takeaway:
  Many listeners share discomfort with AI speech, emphasizing the spiritual and ethical aspects of uniquely human communication.
• Notable Quote:

  “There’s a sort of emotional, spiritual fraud there… our mind thinks it’s talking to another being and treating it as such, and it’s not. And there’s just something there that makes me uncomfortable.” (30:52)

Implementing Slow Productivity as a Manager (33:35 - 37:24)

• Managerial Tips:
  1. Make workloads transparent—know who's doing what.
  2. Have regular “docket clearing” meetings to triage new work, rather than constant messaging.
  3. Use office hours as the default for longer discussions.
  4. Require employees to keep a portfolio of high-value outcomes—creates accountability for real accomplishments, not just activity.
• Key Quote:

  “All these things work together to create a system that is based off actual value-producing accomplishment and not on just visible signs of busyness, which again, in an AI world is just going to collapse into a busyness singularity.” (36:48)

Improving Cognitive Fitness (37:24 - 44:03)

• Memorization (e.g., Bible verses) is recommended as an excellent concentration exercise.
• Additional "brain workouts": reading (deeply), writing (not automating it!), and self-reflection (e.g., walks without devices).
• Quote:

  “Strain is not bad. It’s like lifting a weight. You want the burn—you want to feel the burn of a blank page.” (40:20)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the coming age of performative work:

  "Soon we’ll be managing teams of agents... while intercepting, summarizing, and responding to those incoming AI decks... It will be a digital blitz of back and forth nothingness." (15:12)

• On writing as a differentiator:

  “When more people are trying to automate their writing, you should spend longer on your writing than you were before. It’s a huge differentiator.” (23:43)

• Cal’s humor and self-awareness:

  “Cal Newport doesn’t go down rabbit holes. The rabbits come out of the rabbit holes when he wants them.” (33:45)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• The Real Threat of AI: Busyness, Not Job Loss (00:00 – 10:30)
• The History of Pseudo-Productivity (02:12 – 08:50)
• AI’s Impact: The Busyness Singularity (10:30 – 17:11)
• Five Solutions for Individuals (17:11 – 25:54)
• Cal’s New Terms & Book Insights (24:07 – 26:30)
• On the Sacredness of Speech (29:03 – 33:35)
• Managing for Slow Productivity (33:39 – 37:24)
• On Cognitive Fitness (37:24 – 44:03)

---

Conclusion & Final Takeaways

Cal Newport urges listeners to resist the gravitational pull of technologically amplified "busyness" and instead focus on working deliberately, building meaningful skills, and measuring value by results, not visible activity. The episode is a practical—and urgent—call to reclaim depth and sanity in an age of AI and digital distraction.

---

For New Listeners:
If you want to go deeper, Cal suggests reading his book Slow Productivity: it’s “the source template” for much of his thinking on escaping the busyness trap.

Transcript

[A]

There are a lot of concerns in our current discourse about work and technology. Here, for example, is an Economist article from just a couple weeks ago. The headline reads, prepare for an AI Jobs apocalypse. It is not here yet, but government should lay a safety net. Yikes. Right now, here's a Times headline from just last week. California's Governor signs AI Order Aimed at Protecting workers. Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to explore an overhaul of labor policies to deal with potential mass job displacement from artificial intelligence. Now, notice what these examples have in common. They're all about the potential catastrophic loss of jobs that might occur if technology automates existing roles. But there's another possibility that people haven't been discussing as much. But it's a possibility that I've increasingly come to to worry about. What if the real fear with new advancements like AI is not that these technologies are going to take your job, but instead are going to make your job miserable? And if this is true, what specifically can you do to avoid this fate? Well, it's Monday, meaning it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to go seek out some answers. All right, so here's the plan. I'm going to start by telling you a story, a story about how technology has slowly and somewhat accidentally made knowledge work jobs increasingly worse. And then I will talk about how the arrival of AI might take this long unfolding process and accelerate it to an absurd degree, creating what I've taken to calling the busyness singularity. Now, once I've told you this tale, I'll then share some practical advice about what you can do individually to avoid the gravitational pull of this grim fate. In more detail, I have five important suggestions to share, and we will go through each of those. All right, so we have a lot to cover today, so let's get started. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. All right, I want to start by telling you a story about the evolution of knowledge work. And I should say right off the bat, if you want the full version of this story, you need to read part one of my most recent book, which is called Slow Productivity. This is basically sort of the. The primary source material for a lot of what I talk about these days about work on this show. So you should have your own copy of it. All right, so here is the short version of the summary I tell in part one, the story I tell in part one of that book. In the beginning, we have the notion of knowledge work emerge in the mid-1950s. Roughly speaking, that's when the management theorist Peter Drucker actually coins the term knowledge work. His job was to help the business leaders of America in particular understand what knowledge work is and how it differs from the industrial work that had been driving the American economy up to that point. Now, one of the key concepts of knowledge work that Peter Drucker drilled into the heads of American executives was autonomy. Unlike assembly line workers, knowledge workers are creative and have specific skills. They often know more about what they're doing than the managers who manage them. So instead of trying to give them an exact step by step checklist to follow, like you would do if you're building a magneto for a Model T Ford, you need to give them autonomy to figure out how they're going to work and what they're going to do with their work. It's much more, it's going to need to be much more of a hands off management style. Well, this created a problem for managers because how do we manage knowledge workers if we can't just have a pile of widgets? We look at and say, how many did you produce today? If they're autonomous, how do we manage them? The implicit answer that arose is what I call pseudo productivity. It was a heuristic that says, let's use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. The more we see you doing, the more useful we'll assume you're being. Now this is not a very precise way to manage productivity in the knowledge sector, but for decades it worked well enough, right? It was like at the water cooler, if the boss comes in, change your conversation from, you know, the latest episode of Alf to instead some work like topic. This was also like the Mad Men era. Like, well, we'll just be here long hours, so we look busy, but also we'll have like full bars in our offices. Like, pseudo productivity wasn't the best way of actually managing knowledge workers, but it was good enough. Then digital technology arrives in the office environment and this is where pseudo productivity begins to take a turn for the worst, at least when it comes to the subjective experience of the individual workers. First we get computers on the desk. This greatly increased the number of different things that each individual worker could work on. Many of these things would be administrative focus. Many of these things are sort of never ending. There's like endless things you could be doing well that created a new level of busyness that didn't exist before we had the computer. And in a pseudo productive environment where more busyness is better than Less we began to feel like we had to run after all these different things. And suddenly we were switching our attention back and forth between different, meaning more tasks than we had been before. Then we get networking technology. We networked up these computers, giving us tools like email. Well, this increased both the granularity and rate at which you could now demonstrate to people that you were doing visible effort. Right. It used to be you had to just be at the office and kind of hide the martini glass when the boss walked by. Now how quickly you respond to an email thread is an indication of useful effort. How many emails you send to people is an indication of effort. So now there was this incredibly fine grain granularity at which you could be demonstrating that you are pseudo productive. And then finally we got mobile computing laptops and then smartphones, which meant the times and locations in which you could be working became nearly endless. Which again in a pseudo productive environment was a disaster. Because now every moment that you weren't in the office, you still were navigating this question of should I in this moment jump on my phone or my laptop, answer some emails, jump on Slack, demonstrate some sort of effort? Because the more busyness the better. So it became a never ending tension. So digital technology, computers to networks to mobile computing played poorly with pseudo productivity. And in the 90s into the 2000s, these jobs got increasingly frantic and busy and all encompassing. The result of this sort of supercharging of busyness has not been great. I'm going to bring up on the screen here, for example, this report I like to talk about from Microsoft, the Work Trend Index annual Report. This is where Microsoft used data from their online office products to figure out what online workers are actually doing. There's a chart in here that I think is really telling. Here's what they found in their data. The average number of emails received per per employee Each workday is 117. The average numbers of Teams messages received per workday 153. The portion of meetings that are ad hoc called in the moment without a calendar invitation. 57%. The average time between interruptions by meeting, email or message during core work hours, once every two minutes. Right. So what we're seeing there is a portrait of work getting insane and not because of some deep capitalist plot to exploit the workers that for some reason we weren't implementing until we got to the 90s or 2000s. It's because technology played poorly with pseudo productivity. I'm going to load up another headline here. This is another natural consequence. This headline from Axio says Global Survey Worker Burnout reaches NEW high this is going to be the obvious consequence of a work that is now hyper busy. And so this is sort of the story I tell in slow productivity. I think it's one of the defining stories of office work in the 21st century. But all of this happened before generative AI began to make its move into the workplace. So what's the effect of this new technology when we add this into the mix? What's its effect onto this ongoing story? Well, this is where things get even worse. People often talk about LLM power tools as providing some sort of productivity miracle. Right? We hear reports of computer programmers who are handing off the actual writing of computer code to AI. And we imagine this is coming for all of our other main work as well and all these other jobs. And this gets us either terrified or excited about AI's possibility. But what's really happening with AI in most non computer programming office jobs? Right now? It's much more mundane. Here are the most common uses of AI in most non programming office jobs at the moment. Writing long emails. Automatically summarizing long emails. Automatically creating slide decks. Transcribing meetings and turning transcriptions into some sort of work product that can then be shared. Creating verbose reports and trend analyses. So having to do some research and then write a report. What unifies those examples is that they're all more or less pseudo productive activities. The type of things you do to demonstrate effort to show that you're busy, but that bring not a ton of actual value to the bottom line. Clients aren't paying for the reports or emails you're sending back and forth. So AI right now is often being used in the office to support pseudo productive activities as things you do to show that you are being busy. Now the problem is AI has essentially reduced the cost and friction of these existing pseudo productivity act pseudo productive activities down to zero. So what happens when you set up a work environment in which visible activity is rewarded? Then you give everyone a machine that can automate those efforts, making them essentially free. Well, what's going to happen is work will become a mad performative dash of button mashing who can churn out more slop quicker than the next person. Soon we'll be managing teams of agents that are producing emails and slide decks on our behalf while intercepting, summarizing and responding to those incoming AI decks that have been generated by other people's agents. It will be a digital blitz of back and forth nothingness. The density of shallow work here will become infinite. It will collapse in on itself, you will end up with a busyness singularity. It's productivity reducto ad absurdum. All right, so if we step back here, what we're facing is not really an AI problem in the sense of oh, everything was fine and then AI came along and created a new problem. Pseudo productivity was never the right answer for measuring useful effort in the knowledge work. And with each new decade a new technology came along that made these shortcomings even more apparent. And it's on this trajectory that when you then throw AI into the mix, we now are collapsing towards a self destructive conclusion. This busyness singularity to me is going to have a much more widespread negative consequence society wide than the threats of jobs being fully automated. Hey, let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. Now if you listen to this show, then presumably you're interested in ideas about taking control of your mind to produce deep results in a distracted world. But there can be a difference sometimes between scattered advice like I'm giving over a bunch of different podcast episodes and a carefully produced class. This is why I recently recorded my very own Masterclass course. It's called Rebuild. You'd Focus and Reclaim youm Time, and it's a comprehensive look at the types of things we talk about here on this show. Now, I was excited to record this class not just because I wanted to get my ideas out there, but because I'm a Masterclass fan myself, just to name a few examples among many. I've eagerly devoured Malcolm Gladwell's, Aaron Sorkin's and Ron Howard's Masterclass courses, and I've enjoyed every one. Now, here's the relevant details. Masterclass offers more than 200 classes across 14 categories taught by the world's best instructors, including yours truly. You can watch the classes, but you can also listen to them in audio mode on your phone, meaning you can learn while working out or commuting or doing the dishes. And it's affordable. With plans starting at just $10 a month when you you choose to bill annually, Masterclass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you can get at least 15% off any annual [e-mail] deep. That's 15% [e-mail] deep Head to masterclass.com deep to see the latest offer. I also want to talk about our friends at Laradin. Here's something I've learned as someone who writes about technology, sometimes figuring out how best to use a new tool can be just as hard as innovating the tool in the first place. This certainly seems to be the case with AI right now, where you have teams rushing to deploy dozens of different tools with no clean way of figuring out which ones actually help. Sometimes this will make things worse rather than better. Which is all to say, the real challenge at the moment isn't just adopting AI, it's understanding how it's being used and how to maximize the value you're getting from it. This is exactly what Laradin focuses on. Laradin gives a clear view of AI tool adoption and how teams are using them daily. No more guesswork. It tracks real usage data and outcomes so you can connect AI activity to actual business results. It can even help you enforce internal policies and manage risks, which is critical as AI usage grows. So if AI is already a part of your organization, now's the moment to get control of it. Head to laradin.com today and book a demo to start maximizing impact from AI. That's Laradin L-A-R-R-I-I N.com all right, let's get back to the show. All right, so what can you as an individual do to try to escape the worst effects of this coming busyness singularity? Well, I have five suggestions that I'm going to offer. I'll go through these one by one and we will discuss. All right, the first suggestion Plan weekly. Let me talk about that. Here's what I want you to do and then I'll explain why on Monday morning I want you to look at the week ahead. I want you to ask what important things, things that create non ambiguous value for your organization do you want to make progress on that week? Then I want you to find and protect time for it on your calendar like you were scheduling a meeting or an appointment. This might mean canceling or rescheduling less important things that are already on your calendar to open up bigger swaths of time to make progress on the things that are actually important. Now why do I want you to do this? Because when you zoom into the moment of a given day, it's easy to get lost in pseudo productive busyness. There's always more emails to send or slide decks to create or transcriptions to mess around things it look like you're on it and you're busy. And so if you're just saying what do I want to work on next? The obvious answer will almost always be something pseudo productive. So if you want to make open up some space between you and pseudo productivity and actually start producing value. You got to plan in advance. And the weekly scale is a very good way of doing that. All right, what's my second tip? Let's go back to our big list here. Number two, maintain a portfolio. All right, so what I mean by this is you actually want to keep somewhere like in the document, like a professor would with their cv, a growing list of the important initiatives, projects, or accomplishments that you are responsible for. So if tip number one was about finding more time to do valuable activities, tip number two is about keeping a record of the valuable things you actually did. You want an alternative to just let my visible busyness be how you judge me. You want an alternative to that that's actually grounded in actual value producing accomplishment, activities and initiatives. So actually keep track of it. Here's what I did this month. Here's what I did this quarter. I took on this project. We did this. It had this positive consequence. I did this with this product. We made these changes. Here's the hardest part about it. Here's where I brought my expertise. It had these positive consequences. You're going through and creating a portfolio of things you did that actually brought value. Now you actually want to share this. This could be something that you bring into your quarterly reviews. It could be something that you show to your bosses. It can say, here's what I did last quarter. What should I focus on for the quarter ahead? What you're trying to do here is rewrite their understanding of you and your value away from pseudo productivity and towards the actual pursuit of things that are valuable. Try to free you from this trap of just trying to automatically generate busyness. All right, I have a third idea here. Bring up my big list. Avoid what AI can do. Well, if you read my 2016 book, Deep Work, I have this suggestion in there where I say, hey, when thinking about what activities to spend your time on in a professional context, ask yourself the question, is this something that a smart 22 year old recent college graduate could do on my behalf with just like a little bit of training? And if the answer is yes, I wrote, that's an indication that this is not an activity that's really making use of hard won skills. And so it's a lower value producing activity and it's something that you shouldn't spend as much time on. You want to find activities that a smart 22 year old without your particular skills and training could do. Well, we have a better version of this test today, which I think, is this something that I could have? You know, Claude, Cowork do. Is this something that I could, like, largely automate with ChatGPT queries? And if the answer is yes, you say, then I want to avoid that activity to the extent possible. I want to move my work away from things that AI can do and towards things that it cannot. If most of what you're doing is just automated by AI, or soon will be, then you are vulnerable. You're kind of bringing this on yourself. If you say, yeah, I. I go to the meetings, I get the transcripts, I create slide decks, I write a summary of the points with AI. All this in AI, I have an AI agent send this out to everybody. You might feel like you're doing a lot of things, but these efforts the AI is doing or could do, so you're producing very little value yourself. You're more vulnerable. So just do the AI test. Is this something that, like an AI agent or chatbot could do or do most of? Then I want to move away towards something else. If the answer is no, I won't even know how to use AI to really help this, except for, like, at the edges. Then good. I want to spend more time doing that. So you need to move away from activities where it's obvious that AI can do them. You're not being productive if you're letting AI automate your work. You're working on things that is not very valuable. All right, my fourth piece of advice. Let's do the big reveal. Pursue upskill projects. So what you should be doing is always have some sort of new skill that's valuable and relevant to your job that you're working on, something that will make you more rare and valuable in your field, if possible, to find a way to connect this skill to a project you're doing for your job. Right? So, like, hey, I will take on this responsibility, boss. And in order to do this project, I have to learn a new skill. So at least you can get credit for doing it. But if you can't do that, then just take a half hour every day to be making slow and steady progress on learning something new that is going to be valuable for your job. The harder your skills, the more rare and valuable the skill, the more you can escape the trap of AI accelerated pseudo productivity. Because you're now playing the game of hard won value that you can point to and say, I did this and it's valuable. The better you are at things, the more valuable things you can do, the less you have to play the game of using visible busyness as a proxy for useful effort. All right, the final tip I am going to suggest. Write well. Differentiate yourself from the AIs by writing well, taking the time to write well. Make your emails, your reports, anytime you're putting down professional text, make it super clear, make it super concise, make it succinct, make it well crafted, make it clear it's from a human. While everyone else is going to be sending out these long reports with bullet point list with emojis next to the list for some reasons and all sorts of sort of convoluted language where you're like this, this seems like it's smart, but when I look closer, I have no idea what it's actually saying. Coming succinct, coming clear. This is the issue. We can do it. This is a trap. This is the right way forward. Here's what we should do. We can make this happen, right? Clear, succinct and smart. Care about your writing. So when more people are trying to automate their writing, you should spend longer on your writing than you were before. It's a huge differentiator from you and what's going on with AI. It means that people value the things you send more than other things. So if you're sending less because you're avoiding the pseudo productivity trap, that's okay because everything else is going to seem sort of sloppy and your things might be more rare, but it's to the point when you send it. You're trying to set yourself up as this sort of alternative to what's going on with some of this AI auto gen. So let's look at these five things again. I think this is what you can do right now to help escape the busyness. Singularity. Use weekly plans to make sure you're making time for what values. Maintain a portfolio so you can point to other people. Here's the stuff I'm doing that's actually valuable. That's unrelated to how busy I am. Avoid what AI can do. Tasks that could be easily or substantially automated by AI are tasks you need to spend less time on. Always be pursuing upskill projects. You want to be better, better, better, better. You have to rely on skills, not busyness, if you're going to survive this moment without going insane and value your writing. Be succinct, clear and valuable when you write so you don't have to write as much and yet still get a lot of value or acclaim for what you do produce in the professional context. All right, so this is what you know. It's an idea I've been developing. If you're look, computer programmers have their own issues you should listen to. A couple weeks ago I did a whole AI Reality Check episode on what's really happening with computer programming. There's all sorts of issues with AI in the fields. Last week I did something on what's happening in mathematics with AI. These are the fields where AI is best suited to play. But when it comes to like normal knowledge work jobs, you're not a professional mathematician or computer scientist, you're not a programmer. This is what I'm worried about. The business singularity, pseudo productivity being pushed reducto ad absurdum. And these are the type of things this is. What you have to be doing now is you have to leave the pseudo productivity trap. This is the time to start leaving pseudo productivity and moving towards depth. It's the time to stop relying on visible activity as your main marker of value in the workplace and instead relying on actual hard won things you did and can point to. Now, it might seem scary at first because there's a certain predictable comfort that just sitting there and sending emails and having AI make that even easier, but that is a trap that's not sustainable. It's going to become increasingly exhausting and you will become increasingly vulnerable. Do the hard work of actually doing hard work. That is the key to differentiating yourself in our current technological moment. All right, so there we go. Jesse, I got all the tape off this time.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

My protest against technology is using painter's tape and a notebook as like our main graphical element on this show.

[B]

Do you have new terms in your new book that you've developed, like pseudo productivity?

[A]

Yes, I always have new terms.

[B]

Yeah, you always have great new terms.

[A]

Yeah. So for the Deep Life book I'm working on which the final edits for the pre copy, like just the main edits. The final edits are being done as you hear this episode. By the end of the week you're hearing this episode. In theory, I will have submitted the sort of polished version of that book. Yeah, you've heard these on the show before. Lifestyle centric planning, the phase shift model of the deep life as being worse than the lifestyle centric approach to the deep life. I get into lifestyle visions, lifestyle properties, keystone habits, things like property scraping, resonance, isolation. I got a lot of terms in that book. It's a very practical book, which is the way I'm trying to write it. And then the new book idea I have, if I end up writing it about thinking, is all going to be about cognitive fitness, which is a term that I'm also really trying to promote. I was actually brought that idea is kind of making the rounds. There's an Atlantic piece last week where the president of Amherst, I think, was basically reacting to my idea of cognitive fitness. He thought it sounded too grim and that college would be more fun. But I've actually written tons of stuff about how to make the intellectual life of college fun. Go back and see five years of my writing from the late 2000s. So we're actually more on the same page on that than he might realize. But the key thing here is the idea's out there, it's being reacted to. So, you know, the more I can change the vocabulary, the happier I am, for whatever that's worth. All right, I want to take another quick break to hear from our sponsors. Look, starting a new business is hard. I remember what it was like starting up the media company that produces this podcast. Here's what I learned. Don't reinvent the wheel. Trust existing industry leaders where you can and this is where Shopify enters the scene. If you need to sell something, you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from big names like Allbirds and Mattel to new brands just getting started. Want to sell online? Get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Need help spreading the word? Shopify can help you easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. If we ever start selling products related to this show, I know exactly what platform we'll use. Shopify. So it's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com deep go to shopify.com deep that's shopify.com deep hey, going online without ExpressVPN is like forgetting to mute yourself on a zoom meeting. Sometimes it might end up okay, but eventually your colleagues are going to hear you talking trash about them to someone in the next room. All right, let me get into the weeds a little bit about what I mean by that. When you go online, you request the websites and services are included in little bundles that are called packets. Now, the contents of these packets might be encoded, but the address of where those packets are being sent is not. And this means that your Internet service provider knows exactly what sites and services you are using. And in the US they are legally allowed to collect and sell that information to advertisers. A VPN helps you reclaim your privacy. It works by encoding your entire packet and then sending it to a VPN server that then decodes it and talks to the site and service on your behalf. Then it encodes the answer and sends that back to you. So all your Internet service provider learns is that you're communicating with a VPN server, not with specific sites and services you're actually talking to. Your actual traffic is hidden. Now, if you're going to use a VPN, I recommend ExpressVPN. Why? Here are three things I personally find compelling about this service. Number one, it's affordable, with plans starting at just $3.49 a month. Number two, it's easy to use. You just click a button to launch the app and you're protected. You can now just use your apps and browsers as you normally would. And three, it works on all of your devices, from phones, the laptops, to tablets and more. So you can get privacy however you're accessing the Internet. So protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com deep that's E-X-P-R-E-S-S V P N.com deep to find out how you can get up to four extra months expressvpn.com deep all right, let's get back to the show. All right, well, that's enough about my thoughts. Now it's time to hear what you have to say. As is our tradition on Mondays, we like to open the show's inbox to read some of your messages. Remember, if you have a question, comment, or interesting article or idea to share, you can reach [e-mail] all right, Jesse, where are we going to start this week?

[B]

We received a bunch of notes and comments in reaction to your newsletter from last week about LLMs and the sacredness of speech.

[A]

Yeah, we did. People were into this one. All right, so let me just load up the essay real quick on the screen. It was called on gods and LLMs. It opens. You know, I talk about Genesis. I talk about the identification of humans as speaking beings. I'll just read one quote from the rabbi Shai Held. According to the medieval commentary Rashi, speech is thus not only central to who we are as human beings, it is also key to our uniqueness alone among God's creations. Jewish tradition affirms human beings are capable of speech. The essay goes on to say, there's something sacred about the production of ideas, whether it's vocalized or written. It's A telepathy. It's a mind state from one human being recreated in another human's mind. It's the foundation on which we democratize holiness, and from that, all the ideas we enjoy today about things like human rights and justice. That speech is at the core of the human experience. And then the point of the article is asking the question, the ethical question. So is there something profane then, about letting a machine produce speech as well? Is this unique to humans, something we should cherish? Or something like. Machines can do this as well. We'll just automate it around. So I asked that question. This generated a lot of feedback. I'll read a few of these pieces of feedback here. Yoshua said, great peace. I'm an Orthodox Jew, and had I not known otherwise, your piece could have come straight out of a rabbi's Shabbat sermon. Well, this does seem. I don't know, Jesse, like a good place for a blasphemous Cal Network joke. Here's the one I came up with. Cal Network doesn't give sermons about God. God gives sermons about Cal Network. Something I'm going to go to hell for. All right, let's see what else we have here. Thomas wrote and said, I consider LLMs to be practice for communicating in real life, not a substitute. What I do is similar to what Ben and David have acquired. Do they use Claude to train themselves on their spiel and test the coherence of their ideas, and then they hit the recording booth and talk to each other? I think that's the model. I mean, I get that, Thomas. I know people do that. They test out ideas, the back and forth. It's a way of thinking that lowers the energy required to think because you get all these mental breaks while you're waiting for the chatbot to say things and to do some thinking on your behalf. I get it. But it also still makes me uncomfortable. It still makes me uncomfortable. The sort of interacting, using something as uniquely human and sacred as speech with a machine. There's a sort of emotional, spiritual fraud there where our mind, even though part of our mind knows this, is a matrix being multiplied a bunch of times to create tokens autoregressively. A deeper part of our mind thinks it's talking to another being and treating it as such, and it's not. And there's just something there that makes me uncomfortable, but I can't quite articulate what to do about it. France writes in to say it's hubris to think that because other species do not use our speech that they have no speech with which to communicate. Well, I'm sure all species or many species have different ways of communicating, but I think the point here of Jewish tradition is that speech as we know it, that is the ability to transmit arbitrary mental states from one individual to another. This deeply human thing is core to the human experience and therefore should be treated with care. Alex says you nailed it. I couldn't put my finger on why AI generated emails and messages just feel inhuman. Like we can now see through it and know that it did not come from a human. So we just feel jaded when we read AI generated communication. I will be crediting you when I say the sacredness of speech. Yeah, I mean, I'm there. Alex, there's something we should think about this. It's an ethical question. Here's how I end. I'm going to read the final paragraph of my essay here. I said, this is all to say before we blindly embrace whatever AI product Sam Altman or Dario Amade declares to be inevitable, we still have a lot of work to do in figuring out what we're willing to accept. We have to be asking these questions. This is my philosophy of techno selectionism. We don't just have to take whatever technology comes our way and just try to survive the waves. We have agency here and we can ask hard questions, we can make hard decisions, we can change our usage patterns, we can push back, we can change our mind. After we adopt the technology and cut back on how we use it, we have control. And this is the case with LLMs as well. All right, let's move on from AI. Jesse, what other. What other messages do we have here?

[B]

Kevin has a question about slow productivity for managers.

[A]

This is well connected to today's deep dive. All right, Kevin says, I have gone down the Cal Network rabbit hole and am sold on your productivity ideas. I recently was promoted manager of a small team of two other employees in my knowledge work job. How can I ensure I'm encouraging the slow productivity principles for my teams? All right, interesting side note. Cal Network doesn't go down rabbit holes. The rabbits come out of the rabbit holes when he wants them. Not going to go down a hole, they're going to come out. All right, here's some notes. You want to take my ideas of slow productivity. I feel like I should show the book again. Hold on. Ta da. There we go. And you want to make sure that you're implementing them in your workplace. All right, couple things I wanted. I'll tell you right off the bat. Make workloads Transparent who is working on what? Do not let that exist. Implicitly implied by a bunch of messages and static, you know, stack Slack channel transcripts. Here is a central place where we keep track of who is working on what task. The central place needs a holding pin for things that need to be done eventually, but that no one is working on. Do not play the game of all potential work has to be distributed among people and now you have each individual with these huge workloads that are unworkable at any moment and they have to kind of figure out how to juggle all these things and try to make progress on some but not others. Keep the workload transparent and have a place for things, things that need to be worked on but no individual is working on in the moment. Have clear work in progress limits for how much any one individual should be doing. 2. You need docket clearing meetings at least twice a week. These are meetings where your team gets together and you review a shared document where when anything new pops up on any team member's plate as something that needs to be discussed or potentially done, an issue to be handled, a task to pursue. There's a shared document called a docket where you put it so it's off your mind. You don't email it out, you don't jump on a Slack channel, you don't call an impromptu meeting right there. You put it in the docket. It's a shared Google Doc. 2 or 3 times a week your team gets together and goes through that Google Doc thing by thing. And what are we going to do for each of these? We don't need to do this. This we need to work on now. So let's add this to the workload for you in our transparent workload document. This is something we need to do, but not now. So we're going to add it to our transparent workload management system. In the list of things that need to be done but no individual is doing. Oh, this we could do right now as a team. Let's just handle it right here and you go through and you clear out that docket. Doing this two or three times a week, 30 minutes at a pop, saves so many context switches of just ambiguous back and forth messages as you try to sort of toss these things around. 3. Insist that your team holds daily office hours at posted times as much as possible. Move any discussion that requires more than a single message to answer to the office hours. Come by my office hours. Come by my office hours. If you have an issue that you need feedback from multiple people on, do A reverse meeting. You go to each of their office hours one by one instead of making all of them come to you. Office hours can make a huge difference. And finally, borrowing one of the pieces of advice that I talked about in the deep dive of today's episode, have your employees maintain a portfolio of high value accomplishments, right? So that you can cut through pseudo productivity and really be monitoring who is doing what. That's valuable. And if someone is not growing that log, you say, what? We have to change it so that you're being more valuable to us. This cuts through pseudo productivity. We no longer care about visible busyness. We care about this list growing. And when you have transparent workloads, this also becomes clear because you're like, I know exactly what you're supposed to work on. Why is this not done right? So it's a really. All these things work together to create a system that is based off of actual value producing accomplishment and not on just visible signs of busyness, which again, in an AI world is just going to collapse into a business singularity. We could do one more. What else do we have here?

[B]

Jesse Evan reports on his efforts to improve his cognitive fitness.

[A]

All right, so Evan says, I started the deep work process again and feel so much better in my entire life because I have my focus back. The main things I am doing are landlining and memorizing the Bible. I have completed all the book of James. Is there anything else I can use as a mind workout that requires my attention so deeply? Like memorizing a. I like the use of the term landlining, which one of our listeners. I don't know. This was a few weeks ago. Right. So one of our listeners suggested this idea. Landlining is the idea of keeping your smartphone plugged in in your kitchen. When you're at home, you treat it like an old fashioned landline. You have to ring around. You go there if someone calls, you go there to check text messages. You go there to look things up. It's not on your person as you do everything else in your house. I think it's a great idea. It really helps your focus. Memorizing as a way to get more cognitive fitness is an interesting idea because I talk about it in my book Deep Work. I actually talked about a particular. It's a cool story. It was a student in Australia who was struggling academically. He was a university student struggling academically. He gets involved in competitive memorizing. So there's competitions you can go to where you memorize a deck of cards and stuff like this. It's Memory competitions, the techniques he learned. So he's doing this in this memory competition. This helps him. This helps his general ability to focus and sustain concentration. And what happens to his schoolwork? All of his grades go up. And when I talk to him, he was on his way to a prestigious Australian graduate program. And so I use it as an example of, hey, you can train your brain to be better at focusing and get all sorts of general benefits. And memorizing is the type of thing you can do to in general, make your brain stronger to get more cognitive fitness. So that's interesting what you're doing there, Evan. Other things you can do to actively strengthen your concentration muscles. The three things I talk about a lot on this show is read, write, self, reflect, right? Reading has a unique value to your brain because it's not just practicing using your brain. It actually rewires your brain in a way that you can make more areas of your brain work together to produce smarter thoughts. So reading literally makes you smarter, not just from the content, but the way it rewires your brain. Writing is where you reverse those circuits and actually produce original thoughts. Using them, you get better at actually focusing these circuits to producing new things of value in the world. So care about writing. Don't automate it. With AI, Hard is not bad. Strain is not bad. It's like lifting a weight. You want the burn. You want to feel the burn of a blank page. And self reflection is going for a walk and thinking about something in your head without a phone. Can I maintain my mind's eye on an internal subject like myself? Some problem I'm having, something I'm trying to figure out and make progress on it with just internal dialogue. Those three things, reading, writing, self reflections, I think, are the primary activities to strengthen your cognitive fitness. Right? It's like what would be in the athletic context, like doing cardio and strength training and stretching. I think it's roughly that equivalent. All right, that's all we have from our inbox for this week. Also, on Mondays, we like to finish with an update about what I am up to. I finished last week my fifth book of the month, Jesse. I reread In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan because again, my rough idea for a new book, which I'm not sure if I'm doing yet or not, but I have this idea for a book tentatively titled In Defense of Thinking. And I want to go back and read Pollan's manifesto about eating to see what did he do there that might be relevant for how I think about structuring this book about thinking. And so it was interesting to go back. It was kind of nostalgic. I remembered when this was 2006, this book came out. All these ideas were big back then. It's so non surprising today. Like the ideas in that book have been so because he was successful have been so well inculcated to our culture that like it didn't. I remember the freshness that book has which it you know, doesn't have anymore because like he was successful in changing the way we thought about thinking. So but it was good to go back and reread that.

[B]

Is it like no processed food?

[A]

Well, his three pieces of advice is eat food. Mostly plants, not too much. But it's a three part book. Part one kind of lays out the problem of nutritionism which is like focusing on individual macro and micronutrients when you're thinking about health as opposed to like thinking about food as you know, a whole. And then he talks about getting beyond nutritionism. And then the third part is like he goes into those specific pieces of advice and actually like gives a lot of advice. So you know, it's a, it's a very good book if you haven't read it before. A lot more science reporter y than I remembered. It's a lot of science reporting on this study came out and this legislation happened very much. It's more reportorial than the book that inspired it was his previous book the Omnivore's Dilemma which is based around four set piece stories. I reread that not long ago as well. And that's also a good book in terms of what I'm up to. Again as I mentioned, I'm in the line edit. The book that's coming out next, coming out next spring is called the Deep Life. A one off book about cultivating a deep life. Takes all the ideas from the show, puts into a system step by step. Boom. Now you have it. This is the source guide for making your life so interesting that your phone will seem less exciting. I mean the final line edit. So that's like we've. You go back and forth a lot with writing. You kind of as you write you go back and forth with your editor until you get something that kind of works. And then there's like sort of higher level notes of like work on that here like chapter by chapter. We need something here. This doesn't make sense. Maybe cut this and then you get to sort of the line edit piece of the frame. First round of editing where your editor will actually go through and make particular. Let's cut this sentence, this isn't clear to me, those type of things. And that's where you do your final out loud read of sections two to really try to get the language working. You hope that's what leads to what's then called the manuscript acceptance. Okay, now we have a manuscript. It works. There's still a lot of editing that happens after this because you still go on the copy editing where you have professional copy editors getting into the precise grammar and languages and word repetitions and fact checking. And we have a professional footnote editor to come in and get all the endnotes in the right format. So there's a lot more editing to come. But it becomes much more lower level and production focused. So anyways, I'm hoping to be done with that by the end of the week. This comes out. When this airs, I'll actually be on my way to Asheville where I'm going to hang out with friend of the show, Brad Stolberg. And I'm going to edit in the morning. I'm staying in some mountain lodge up there in Asheville. I'm going to edit in the morning. In the afternoon we're going to. We share a trainer. So we're going to train and then think big thoughts about the world of writing. So that's going to be a cool trip. So as you hear this, I'm on my way to finish my edits among the crisp mountain air of Asheville, N.C.

[B]

is editing easier than writing?

[A]

Yeah, I think writing's hard. Today I was struggling with because this is the type of thing I struggle with. Chapter one, chapter one of the book. Here is the what is our approach? Here's what the deep life is. I'm going to kind of get to in the intro, but I'm like, let's give the formal definition of the deep life. What is the approach we're going to pursue in this book? And I set up two contrasting approaches. There's what I say is like the most common model that people think when they think about the deep life is something I call it the phase shift model, which is like a singular event. So either a radical change or really impressive accomplishment will deliver me a deep life. So I need to move to an island or win this major award and then I will have a deep life. And I argue that doesn't work. No singular achievement is actually. It doesn't last. That's not going to work. Give a lot of examples. They said the alternative notion is the lifestyle centric approach that obviously is going to be the right approach. Because I talk about all the time on the show where you say, no, no, no. Actually, the. What generates your subjective experience of your life is like all the aspects of your, like, what is your daily life like? Like all the aspects of your life. And so what you really need to do is engineer your lifestyle so that it every single day is making, you know, producing depth. It's. It's your daily lifestyle, not any singular event that really determines what your life is like. So you need to think about re engineering all the aspects of your lifestyle, not just pursuing a single sort of like, major change or accomplishment. But there's these subtleties because the way my brain works is like the definition of the deep life is too much overlapping the definition of the lifestyle centric approach to the deep life. And I need good separation. This is the deep life. These are two potential ways to pursue it. This is the better way. But the definition of the deep life I was using, and I was using an old definition I'd written about five years ago was a little process oriented itself. Amplify this, reduce that. And so anyway, so that's like the type of thing. This is the type of thing I really care about is these little details about how the pieces fit together. You get that just right. It's implicitly felt in the reader's mind of like a pleasing sensation of things are clicking together and their mind gets it. And you can make progress. If they don't quite fit, they won't be able to articulate what's making them uncomfortable. But the book will. That doesn't quite match with that and just gives you a sensation. So the key to my books, part of the sensation my books create is all the pieces are gears at mesh.

[B]

Yeah, 100%.

[A]

And it's supposed to be. You're like, all of this is. And then your brain is like, this makes sense. It can grok the whole thing. So anyways, that's what I'm working on.

[B]

I think I noticed that a lot during your promotion of your last book. People would ask you a million different questions, but you'd always bring it back to like a core set of fundamentals.

[A]

And I was like, that's what works, right? That's what works is like it has to. People's minds are uncomfortable. I've been doing this for 20 years now. People's minds are uncomfortable when the pieces don't fit. And I think too many pragmatic nonfiction writers come into it like, I just have a bunch of good ideas and they're thinking about how they present each idea and they want to zig here and zap and yeah, and capitalism this and that and da da da. And they want to have like these moments of these sort of rhetorical moments where you're like, boom, oh yeah, I'm on board with that. Or oh, that's funny. Or yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm fired up. Or whatever. What they miss is if the pieces, the big level pieces don't click together beautifully, the whole thing is going to make the reader uncomfortable. Like, ah, these like ideas and this kind of fit. But doesn't this push back on that? And what are you trying to say here? Idea? First all the pieces have to click and then you got to deploy craft when you explain things or explain things well and clear. And that's all fine too. You need craft as well. But the ideas have to click. And so yeah, I'm obsessive about it, but that's what I do. All right, that's all the time we have for this week. I'll be back next Monday with another advice episode. We usually on Thursdays have AI reality checks. I'm going to be on the road, so maybe we'll see. So don't be surprised if there's not one this week. But we'll be back with an advice episode next Monday. Hey, sign up for my newsletter KellNewport.com if you want my dispatches from this fight for depth versus distraction. You know it's my thoughts on the fly of things I'm thinking about. So if you really want the most up to date view of like new thoughts I'm having about this fight for depth and distractions. Kellenewport.com for that newsletter, Bicycle Productivity was the star of today's show. If you haven't read this book, you need to because I talk about all the time. It's the source template. So you need to buy that book if you have it. All right, that's it. See you next week. And as always, stay deep.