A World Without Email with Cal Newport
Graham Allcott 0:07
This is Beyond Busy. I'm Graham Allcott. I'm the author of a number of books, including the global bestseller How to be a Productivity Ninja. And I'm the founder of Think Productive. We help people to make space for what matters and get more done. And we partner with some of the world's leading companies who share our mission to transform the world of work. Beyond Busy is where I explore the often messy truths and contradictory relationships around topics like work life, balance, happiness, and success, and explore with interesting people what makes them tick. In short, this is where we ask the bigger questions about work. My guest today is Cal Newport. Cal is of course the author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. And his new book, A World Without Email is a fascinating and ambitious plea for us to change how we work. In this episode, we talk about what a world without email might look like. We talk about the problems with what cow calls the hyperactive hive mind, and why it's so hard to make time and space for deep work. And if you stay tuned, later in the conversation, you'll learn a bit more about Cal's own strategies, what he gets right and a bit about what he struggles with too. This is Cal Newport. with Cal Newport scas.
Good afternoon here. Good morning there How you doing?
Cal Newport 1:28
Hey, Graham, it's, it's good to talk to you again.
Graham Allcott 1:30
First of all, just just how are you? How's how's the last few months been? We were just talking before I hit record just about some of our experiences of the pandemic, but just like how are you feeling today and right now and have the last few months?
Cal Newport 1:45
I'm feeling well, I would say things are optimistic. You know, I'm so I'm joining you from Washington, DC here in the States. And we are rapidly removing pandemic restrictions, which means among other things, I, for the first time will actually have other people come into my studio. I don't know if I'm ready for it. So this is a this is an office space, I started leasing during the pandemic, to have a place to do my my interviews and teach and, etc, and built the podcast studio and here when I start doing podcast, but I'm the only one who's ever really been here. And so now I am desperately trying to make this look like a place where humans live. So you know, buying more than two chairs and putting pictures on the walls and this desperate scramble to get prepared to welcome other human beings into my space. That's what I'm focused on right now.
Graham Allcott 2:37
Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? Because I feel like at the start of the pandemic, there was that rush where everyone went and bought the little, you know, the ring lights to go next to the next the cameras and just made their background backgrounds look good. And now there's the rush to get physical spaces looking nice for people to actually be in and have nice chairs and all that sort of thing. Like, firstly, we're going full circle, and if anyway. But yeah, so let's talk about a world without email. Really interesting book. And it feels like it really picks up on your recent work. And we talked on the last time you're on be on busy about digital minimalism. And also, of course, deep work, which you're probably, I guess, best known for just the idea of deep work as that has really sort of provided over the course of the last few years. And so it feels like you're on a bit of a mission to, to change, not just the technology of email, but just the whole concept of how we think about and organise knowledge work. Right. So is that something it feels like a really big, ambitious goal? Is that something that you, like, started to think about a long time ago? Like what was the process sort of behind this book?
Cal Newport 3:44
Well, so I pair or at least in my own mind, I pair in deep work. In a world without email. This is a, a tandem, that tackles that ambitious question of how do we work today and knowledge work? How has that been influenced by technology? Where is that an issue? And what should we do about it. And then I have the book that came in between, which is digital minimalism, which focuses on technology in our personal lives. And it's that identity dynamic we can get into later if you want, but it's interesting because it looks really similar on the surface. I look at my phone all the time. I look at email all the time, but it's really different underlying dynamics has caused you to and therefore very different types of solutions. And so I see deep work plus email is my magnum opus on knowledge work. Digital minimalism is my take on technology in our personal life in this moment, I call the whole collection there, my my tech and culture trilogy.
Graham Allcott 4:35
And so I suppose the idea that really felt for me, the most pertinent in this book is just the whole idea of the hyperactive hive mind. So do you want to start there because that really defines the problem, doesn't it? What What is the hyperactive hive mind?
Cal Newport 4:51
Yeah, and it's really what the book is about a more accurate title for this book, but a much more terrible one would be a world without the hyperactive hive mind. workflow. That's the actual villain in the book. Now the hyperactive hive mind workflow was enabled by email. Right? So you need email for the hyperactive hive mind workflow to be possible, but it's not equivalent to email. And it's not a necessary consequence of having that technology. So what is it? Well, it's a mode of collaboration in office work where you say, we will primarily work things out with unscheduled back and forth ad hoc, low friction, digital messages. So what about this? Can you come here when we're going to this meeting? What do we think about this client call? We need to brainstorm on this, you remember this is everything is just back and forth. messages. That's a very distinctive mode of collaboration. It emerged following email spread. There has since been additional tools that implement the hyperactive hive mind even slicker. That's basically what slack does take that mode of collaboration and give us a better interface for it. But it's that way of working that I think has a lot of problems that we underestimated, and it's the villain of my book. And it's what I what I set out to vanquish and it's an important distinction because, again, email is a tool. I'm not super interested in it, right? I mean, I think it's useful it replaced the fax machine or replaced voicemails replaced memos. I'm glad it did, I think it's stupid that we were messengering contacts, you know, contracts around the city with people on bikes, when we could just do it as an email attachment, a great tool. But the hyperactive hive mind workflow that it helped enable, that's a real problem.
Graham Allcott 6:25
You know, one of the things that I do with with think, productive, we have a whole workshop called Getting your inbox zero. And it feels like, on the one hand, the idea of getting your inbox zero is a good personal, you know, tactic to kind of almost check out of the hyperactive hive mind. But this is a much more cultural phenomenon, right? So however good you can be an email yourself, if you're still battling against the hyperactive hive mind, you're never gonna win. So it feels like there's and let's get on to some of the principles that you propose in the second half of the book to address that. But do you think ultimately, what's happened is, email arrived? And then of course, people just started using it. But there wasn't really the conversation about how and the kind of the kind of rules and methodologies to make it as productive as it could be.
Cal Newport 7:16
Yes, I think that's exactly what happened is what I document that no one really sat down and decided that the hyperactive high vine was a good way to work. So this is not good intentions that had unexpected side effects. It's actually a haphazard and emergent phenomenon. So we had two things come together. One, there's a long standing culture of autonomy and knowledge work. Now, as I trace in the book, this largely goes back to one person, Peter Drucker, the guy who invented the whole field of management theory and coined the term knowledge work in the 1950s, he really pushed this message, knowledge workers autonomous, it's up to the worker to figure out how to do their work, we can give them objectives, but we shouldn't tell them how to do their work. So how you organise your work, how you do your work, all of this was left up to the individual. And then we threw this disruptive new tool into the mix to say, Hey, we can throw out our fax machines, because now we have email, which was great. But just like when you introduce some sort of new fish to an ecosystem, where it's never lived before, you've now brought into this office ecosystem where everything's very autonomous. So people just kind of figuring out on the fly, what works, how they collaborate, an incredibly low friction communication tool. Hmm, the addition of that low friction communication tool into the dry Tinder of completely autonomous work organisation created this hyperactive hive mind very flexible and easy and convenient, lowest common denominator way of actually trying to get things done. And that's where that emerged from. And you're absolutely right, you can't solve this problem at the level of the inbox is too late. And once you're using this workflow, you really can't avoid a getting a lot of unscheduled messages, because that's the primary way all of these work is getting coordinated and be, you can't avoid having to check that inbox all the time. Because if these back and forth conversations are how things get done, if you're not checking your inbox, the conversations slow down. And it has a negative impact. And so we we check our inbox all the time, not because of a personal failing of will or not because we have a lack of sufficiently sophisticated personal productivity habits. It's because we have this implicit agreement that the hive mind is how we organise work, that behaviour, constant checking constant emails is unavoidable. If the hyperactive hive mind is how you organise
Graham Allcott 9:25
it feels to me, you know, going and talking to companies about this it also feels like part of the problem then becomes addiction to this right. So it just becomes so entrenched as this is how we work. People find it really difficult the idea of how would they wean themselves off? So do you have any thoughts about just the addictive nature of email, which I think is where we can jump back to digital minimalism and some of the personal aspects right there's like there's a really addictive part to phones too. But do you think there's just an addiction to I mean, this podcast is called Beyond busy. Do you think it's addiction to buisiness within that as well as an IT to new information and kind of wanting to be plugged in the whole time,
Cal Newport 10:04
well, so this is where I think we get this interesting distinction between the ideas in digital minimalism and the ideas in these books. Because when we're looking at, let's say phone overuse, I'm on social media all the time, it really is a moderate behavioural addiction. These are apps and services that have been engineered to get exactly that response. And it's very difficult to resist, especially if you're approaching them casually. Emails a little bit trickier. These are not services that were engineered to be addictive. There's not more money to be made by Microsoft, if you check your inbox 100 times versus 50 times in a day, what matters is that you're using Microsoft Outlook. The addiction frame, I think came up early in the rise of the hyperactive hype mindset where we first noted the addictive frame applied to this issue was in the mid 2000s, when blackberries first spread, so that's the first time where we really began to see the hive mind takeoff email spread in the early 1990s to the mid 1990s. The hyperactive hive mind began to get a foothold in the late 1990s. Once we had mobile access to email, it really started to pick up. And that's when we introduced the term cranberries. And so we're really seeing that like, wow, what are you doing? What is wrong about your physiological setup, your psychological stuff that has you checking that thing all the time, what we were missing is none of that behaviour is completely rational. It's being driven by the hyperactive, high fine. And so I'm really a big believer that the reason why we have trouble with email overload style issues is that when we think about it from the perspective of how can I interact better with an inbox that's already filling with unscheduled urgent messages, there's not much you can do. I mean, there's things that makes it better, you don't want to be completely haphazard, there's things you can make that a little bit nicer to deal with. But the ultimate solution is to stop those messages from showing up in the first place. And that does not happen when you confront your inbox. It doesn't happen when you schedule your inbox checks. It doesn't happen when you write your subject lines. It happens when we go underneath all of that and say, Wait, here's the different things we do as a company again, and again. How do we want to implement these? How is the information can be stored and flowed? How are we going to talk about these things? When is that talking going to happen? until we actually start engineering our processes to not require, I'll just shoot you a message, you shoot it back, I'll shoot you want until we engineer away from that, there's not much we can do. I like the metaphor of a boat with a hole in it that's filling with water. All of these inbox tactics are really about changing how you hold your buckets, or how many buckets you use to try to bail out the boat. What really matters, though, is plugging that hole in the first place. And that requires us to actually change how we work.
Graham Allcott 12:36
And I'm curious to know, how What's your relationship with the hyperactive hive mind. So presumably, within a university, there's a fair amount of information flying around. And there's a lot of emails and different tasks and students to talk to and all of that. So I'm assuming that there's probably part of your life where you're able to design your own workflow that doesn't look too much like the hyperactive hive mind and then part of your life where you're very much just within it. So what's your relationship with the hyperactive hive mind? You know, personally?
Cal Newport 13:04
Well, universities are famous, I think for having particularly hyperactive, hyperactive hive minds, because you have a lot of semi autonomous units, all looking out for themselves all trying to steal time and attention from other people to make their lives easier. And there's no overall profit mode over something that would have a CEO come in and say we have to stop this because we're producing less widgets, the whole thing as a free for all. I wrote an infinite article or infamous article. Few years ago, when I was sort of up to my neck and writing this book, I wrote an article that got me in some interesting hot water for the Chronicle of Higher Education that was titled as email making professors stupid. So my, my point, I guess my perspective on this was pretty well known in academia. But here's the thing when it comes to taming the hive mind, and you have to do this by re engineering the processes. Here's how I do x here. So I do why here's how I do z to get rid of those messages. Even if you have very little control over what other people do. And I think academia is a perfect example of that I can't I have zero influence over how anyone else works. There's not even a mechanism for someone to change that really. Once you start seeing things from this perspective, my work is made up of different processes things I returned to again and again, how do I want to implement these even if you're just focusing on what can I can control right? What can I control about how this is implemented? And how can I adjust what I can control to try to reduce or minimise unscheduled messages? Just doing that exercise can significantly reduce the amount of unscheduled messages arrive in your inbox to require responses and completely change your relationship with it?
Graham Allcott 14:38
Yeah. Tell me more about some of the things that fit into that question then of what can I control? Because I'd imagine there's a whole bunch of stuff which is very dependent on you know, the sort of cultural assumptions that are made about how available you have to be or not available. You can be what are some of the things that you've really questioned for yourself in terms of what can you can What can you Control are not.
Cal Newport 15:00
Yeah. And for example, I, I downplay the cultural assumptions. It's not because again, this is another thing that comes up a lot. I think it's not quite right that norms C suite types always talk to me about norms or norms are wrong, we have bad expectations about responses, if we could just tweak the norms, then we would be back to a better state. But actually, those norms are not arbitrary. They are rational. Typically, if the hyperactive hive mind is how you collaborate, there's a general sense of I kind of need you to be available, because hey, if everything's going to be worked out with asynchronous back and forth conversation, that doesn't work, if you're not actually involved in those conversations. So when you come to actually, let's say, just re engineering processes, personally, right, like, I'm just going to change what I can control. You don't really have to talk much about it. So it's not it's not really an issue. In fact, I advise you don't really advertise what you're doing. Don't go around and preach to people what you're doing, if you're just making changes on your own. Just make the changes. If there's an issue, you can apologise about that specific issue if something comes up, but it's don't have an autoresponder don't do a, you know, a preachy soliloquy at the next staff meeting about, you know, the hype rectified mind, just start making the changes, you can do it in a way that's relatively non obtrusive for other people, there's a lot we can do, once we know what it is we're actually trying to solve. And I think this is the key shift. What we're trying to do is not have better inbox habits, what we're trying to do is update processes to reduce unscheduled messages. And once you know, that's what you're trying to do. It just unlocked all of these new ideas and innovations you never would have even contemplated before.
Graham Allcott 16:35
Well, it's also just that sense of efficiency, right? So what Henry Ford did with the assembly line was was figure out, this is the most efficient way if we're going to build cars, to put those parts together, and it feels like what you're trying to do here is is really be almost be the Henry Ford, for everybody collectively to say why don't we design this with the collective in mind rather than with the individual and autonomy in mind?
Cal Newport 17:02
Yeah, and the Ford analogy is particularly apt, because the way they were building cars before the assembly line, it was called the craft method. And it was easy and convenient and natural and put a chassis up on a sawhorse or two, and have a team of workmen sit around it and sort of fit parts and file them and put them on it's a very natural way you would build something and how do you scale up a factory, we have more sawhorses more teams, the assembly line was way less natural. It took it was difficult to figure out it took more upfront investment, it caused a lot of temporary, bad or hard things to happen, you know, hey, this part of the assembly line is going too fast, the whole thing shut down, like what a pain. But it brought down the manufacturing time from 12 hours to 93 minutes. So it was worth the pain. But hyperactive high fines like the craft method, it's the first thing we try it is very natural, it's very flexible, let's just kind of rock and roll back and forth on email, I don't have to learn new tools, I don't have to try to make processes work, I don't have to deal with the hard edges when a process doesn't handle this instance, let's just get rid of that all and just if we all just knew rock and roll, which is how if historically, if there's three of us working on a project in the same cave, that's how we're that's how humans collaborate just back and forth ad hoc on demand, right. So it's very natural, very convenient, just like the craft method was for building cars. But it's not the best way to do it. Now. The real issue here is not just it's not speed, I'm not speed is not actually the right analogy for brain work, the real issue is and this is why I don't like the hive mind is context switching. The human brain cannot switch its attention quickly back and forth between different targets. It's actually a very slow, expensive process to change our cognitive context from one thing to another. And so the reason why the hive mind is killing us is that all of these email checks that we have to do to keep up with those conversations. Every one of those checks initiate a context switch, which we then abort when we go back to the primary target of our focus, and that switch and abort to switch, go back to this other context completely scrambles our brains, fatigues us makes it hard to think clearly and makes us anxious. So the problem with the hive mind is not abstract. It's not about efficiency in terms of like we could be faster we could be getting more done, it's we're breaking our brains, it they can't do that. We cannot check an inbox once every six minutes, which is the average one of the biggest datasets I looked at, we can't keep switching our attention back and forth. That's why we're miserable. That's why by two o'clock we can't do any more work. So we're fixing the hive mind because it is, though maybe abstractly, a reasonable thing to try is literally inhumane. Our brains can't do it. And so that's the main distinction I want to make. I'm not interested in making people faster, I'm not interested in getting a we can get 10 test done instead of five. I'm interested in finding a way to work it actually fits with the way the human brain operates.
Graham Allcott 19:37
And doesn't make as miserable as that is pretty important. There's kind of four things in the second half of the book that you really highlight as the broad principles that need to change. And again, I suppose the one that really just landed with me was this idea of attention capital. And this may be was just really important for me to read because It feels like it's the problem I've been trying to solve when I'm in with clients. And doing keynotes is just getting people to recognise attention capital. So do you want to just talk about, about why that's important? And how do we get people to think more about attention capital in that way?
Cal Newport 20:14
It was surprising to me at least until I until I uncovered the storyline about autonomy and where it came from this insistence on autonomy and knowledge work. But until I uncovered that storyline, it was so shocking to me how curious we are about answering this question of what's the best way to have a bunch of human brains collaborate to add value to information? Like we're, we're so weirdly in curious about this, we have this sort of haphazard method that was sort of the first thing we tried. When these technologies arrived really fast. We weren't ready for this hyperactive hype is the very first thing we tried, haphazard, it's like, Whatever, let's just do this. We'll figure it out. This idea that I hear, you know, constantly in feedback from people that like, no, this is how this is what work is we figured it out. We've got it. This is the best way to do knowledge work. We cracked it on the first try. Let's you know, pop the champagne. I mean, it's both arrogant and a historical. Never before in the history of technology intersecting with commerce, have we figured it out? on the first try? It takes decades to figure out okay, how do we best integrate this technology into an effective way of doing work. And so the attention capital principle is my way of trying to put this issue into terminology that maybe those in business are used to from thinking about other sectors, which is you have a capital resource, which is the latent attention captured by people's brains, they have a certain ability to pay attention to things and think about it and produce new information. And the whole game is how do we get the best return on that attention? That's really obvious. In the industrial sector, we have this capital, we have all these parts and tires and metal sheet metal. And then what's the most effective way to get cars out of that, like, we're used to that in the industrial sector? We just don't do that thinking, in the knowledge sector, say, I don't know, I were just kind of let's just hook up the email and figure it out. We shouldn't be thinking about that. And so by giving it this actual frame of return on capital, we can say, Okay, let's be specific here. We have implicitly answered the question that right now the way that we are trying to get a return on this attention, capital is the hyperactive hive mind. Okay, let's measure that return. Oh, it's terrible. You're getting a fraction of the productive possible output of human brains while making those brains miserable, and bringing them out and getting tonnes of turnover. Okay, we're, we're metaphorically speaking, building the cars. And if spectacularly ineffective fashion, so we're gonna very low return on our capital, great. Let's experiment with different ways to get better returns different ways to collaborate different ways to assign tasks, different ways to keep track of information. I'm hoping by giving it this sort of standard terminology, I can shake people out of this weird, a historical rut we fell into where we just think this random haphazard way of collaborating that we came up with yesterday in any sort of historical scale, is somehow the best way to do knowledge. Or we just without even really trying stumbled into it on the first try. It's attention
Graham Allcott 22:52
capital, not interrupted capital, or even human capital. It's the attention that we bring to stuff that that really makes that change. And then you talk about the idea of the process principle. And I wanted to pick up on one of the stories you tell in the book about there's a guy called Dave ash. And he has really experimented with his marketing company about how to get away from the hyperactive hive mind and work in a different way. So he just tell the story of depression, what has he done differently than the other people listen to this podcast and try
Cal Newport 23:26
his approach to overhauling some of these processes to reduce unscheduled messages and inbox checks. He used that approach I sometimes think about is the externalisation strategy. So let's get the coordination and the information related to projects out of inboxes. And the way they did it is they actually use Trello boards. So there'll be one Trello board per client. So that board just has the information for that client, all the relevant information is on that board. So summaries of calls research that people are working on for the project they're doing. But also all of the tasks that need to be done or have been done are on there. They're under columns to represent their status. So this has been worked on now this is stuff we're going to get to later. This is stuff that we've already done. The cards have all the relevant information attached to them that you need for that task, and is very clearly assigned. Here's who's doing what right now. This externalisation that information was like a really big deal for us. Because before all of the information for all the clients was all mixed together and emails that were jumbled together in one giant inbox, it was always filling. And so their mind his mind was always jumping all over the place. Kind of working on this client and this client moving back and forth. Once they externalise things to systems dedicated to each client's a completely change that cognitive experience. It's okay now, I'm just working on this client. And all I see is information for this client, like cognitive context is just the context for this client. Where am I can get up to speed quickly. What am I What should I work on next? They have fixed times where they call the talk about each client. Let's all get on the phone. Okay, all we're talking about this client. We're looking at the board. You updated the board. What are you working on? What You need what happened to you on the board you're supposed to be working on? Why don't you do it? Okay, let's update this board break. You know, there's no inbox involved. There's no back and forth messages involved, there's no need to check because hey, there's a conversation ongoing about, you know, a aspect of this, this project that I need to be a part of the conversation. And so that externalisation strategy there made a huge difference the vest talked about is night and day difference in terms of just the the psychological feeling of actually doing work became much better.
Graham Allcott 25:28
And you're also using Trello boards yourself in in kind of managing the academic part of your world as well, right?
Cal Newport 25:35
Yeah, I use a different board for every role that I have. So I break out my professional life in different roles. There's a role as a researcher, there's a role as a teaching professor, there's a role as a writer, because when I'm looking at one context, I only want to be thinking about that context. I have cards for all the different things I'm need to do obligations for those different roles, and they're categorised, and the different columns that keep track of what their status is. So I can look at this thing each week and figure out what's going on. What should I be working on? Where can I put information, this is a key one, oh, here's a nugget of information related to a project that I haven't started yet. But I want to work on soon for my writing. Now I know what to do with it, I go to that board, I go to that card, I put it on there. Another key innovation of these boards is the waiting to hear back from column. So okay, I'm waiting to hear back from this person about this, I'm waiting to hear back from my web developer about this, you have a post in the ground for each of these here, it's here, I'll see it, I don't have to remember it. You know, when I'm looking at this board, if I like you know, I'm waiting to hear back look at that card and waiting to hear back from this person about this. I never heard back, it's been three weeks now I know to actually ping them or to nudge them to see what's going on. All of this makes a huge difference. We're used to this idea that well, it's all just kind of in an inbox and Slack, we just kind of go after it and figure it out. But it is, cognitively, so much superior to segregate these things into their own isolated context and deal with each thing when you deal with it.
Graham Allcott 26:56
Yeah, a lot of what you're describing there with Trello, I do through to do it. So it's not as visual, but I'm happy with just the sort of tech space thing. But that's one of my favourite things to do is just being able to throw the little bits of information or the notes or the other sort of non actionable things, and tag them in that same project. Right. So it's kind of all in that that same place. And just, you know, that's how I guess, you know, I'm able to just kind of look at that and just be surrounded by this is all the stuff that relates to this particular project, rather than like you say you want to in one mode, you don't want to be seeing all the stuff that relates to the other modes as well. And then I suppose that that probably leads us on to the protocol principle. So there's a lot of really interesting stuff towards the end of the book, where you start talking about the different rules that people can can set up around this and really try to eliminate as much of that kind of back and forth email communication. And, and so many of those things that create friction, that that's just kind of unnecessary. So if you want to talk about the protocol principle, and also again, you know, how do people tackle this if they're trying to challenge this idea of the hyperactive hive mind?
Cal Newport 28:04
Yeah, so a lot of work is going to require interaction, you're gonna have to interact with people to like reach a decision or get information. And the argument behind a protocol principle is that it is often worth putting in the time upfront to figure out how do we want to do this type of interaction, even though it's a pain up front to figure it out and get agreement to it, it's going to get you so much more efficient and effective communication going forward, every time you apply it, that is going to be a big win. And the analogy I use here is communication protocols. This was the information theory revolution from the mid century, led by Claude Shannon, is where we went from a telegraph model, where, okay, I'm sending you whatever telegraph or talking on the phone, on these analogue lines. And the only tool we had to sort of improve communication was to just put more power on it, like, we'll just put more voltage on the line and try to make it louder. And Shannon came along and said, actually, if we build these complex protocols that you and I both agree on about how we're going to encode the information, we can now talk to each other way more efficiently on much less powerful lines, because now we have we put things into bits, and we have error correcting codes. It's very complicated. But communication is incredibly more efficient. And of course, all of modern communication, the entire modern communication infrastructure, the internet, streaming video, the ability to download an mp3. All of this is based off of information theory, style coding, let's spend time up front to figure out a more complex way to that we're going to communicate now we can communicate much better. This needs to happen for office communication. In the moment, yes, it's easier just to be I just send you a message. And we have a general implicit pact that we check messages a lot. It is easier in the moment, right? But it's causing a tonne of these context shifts, right. We have to now constantly monitor these channels. We're constantly shifting context. It's a huge, huge actual cost so we can avoid that huge, hidden cognitive cost. If we instead put an effort up front, this a for this type of interaction, here's how we do it. And by figuring out those rules, what we get away from is meaning that just keep checking, because at any point a message could come. And there's a lot of different things this could look like it could look like for some things, office hours, like that's a great catch all, for a bunch of little one off interactions that have to happen in the office. Every day, these times like doors open zoom is on my phone is on. Most things that are small, you know, back and forth conversations, you just immediately defer to that like great gravity, the next office hours is convenient, you grab me at my next office hours is convenient to you, right? It's a little bit more pain up front, there's a little bit more structured, you might have to wait before you start talking to someone. But you've significantly reduced the cognitive context cost because now no one has to check anything, they just have to be in their office hours when it's office hours time, and they can efficiently deal with a bunch of different interactions. There's a lot of other ideas like it, status meetings, etc, the different ways client communication protocols, but that's the underlying idea. Pay some pain upfront, that make the ongoing communication less costly. The only trick here is knowing what the right cost is. And again, it all comes back to context shifting. When it comes to knowledge work, the cost, you're always trying to reduce it's not time it is context shifts, you know, how many unscheduled messages will I have to see and respond to in order to finish this interaction? If that answer is greater than one, I want to have a better protocol.
Graham Allcott 31:19
Yeah, my thing around that personally, is, I kind of leave the morning blocked out as this is my create time. So that's my non office hours, right? That's like, I'm just heads down. And I mean, that deep work kind of space. And then the afternoon is where it's like, yeah, here's my Microsoft bookings thing, just put me in, you know, so here, here's the times where people can just book half an hour book an hour, whatever they need. And I find that that's usually helpful. But then I suppose you have. So I really liked the example you gave in the book about Basecamp. And but I suppose then you have this thing where, say, Basecamp, as a software company, they've got all these people who are experts in JavaScript, or whatever it is, and their expertise is really useful to unhook other people's work, who might be stuck. And it's like, Hey, can I just grab five minutes of this? So do you want to tell that story of a turn? Because because the cost of that, is these these interruptions, right there, the idea that someone having having to switch context, and stop working on the JavaScript to answer a question for someone else about JavaScript. So what happened when they started to introduce office hours? Basecamp?
Cal Newport 32:26
Well, they were worried about it, you know, and I actually asked Jason about this, I, I know the co founder of Basecamp, we did an event around the launch of email, and I could ask them about this live as it were, they were worried about this, they knew they had to do it. Because context shifts are expensive. And in the world of software development, you can really see these expenses, because you get an index developer that's producing 1x, because they have to keep going on slack. And it's so valuable. It's so valuable to have, like a 10x programmer actually do what they do, that you're willing to go to relatively large extremes, or you're more motivated to do so to try to actually protect that ability. So they said our segment, experts can have office hours. And some of these some of these experts were doing just once a week. So they're really worried like, you know, are people gonna wait a week? Is it gonna be a revolt? Is this gonna even work and it turned out, it was fine. Like what people need more than anything else is clarity, not accessibility, where people need accessibility is where there's no structure to how the interaction supposed to happen. So if this is a free for all, and I, I'm just going to have to keep this in my head and remember it until I hear back from you. I would rather just hear back from you right away, because every minute I haven't heard back, I'm like, I have to deal with this, right. And I'm not very good at productivity. And so just get back to me right away. It makes my life easier. I want to get this off my plate. But if there's structure like yeah, you have a question for Graham. Yeah, Tuesday is when it happens. Like Okay, now I know how that works. I'll just, I guess I'll just have a, you know, put a note on my calendar. Go to Graham's office hours, ask about this. And I don't have to worry about it. And that's really what people actually want is they don't have to keep track of things in their head. So if you have some structure for how questions are asked or interactions happen, or questions are answered, if you have some structure that they can trust, that's a perfectly fine substitute, in most cases, for accessibility accessibility is just what you need. If you don't have structure.
Graham Allcott 34:16
It's very similar to my new book, how to fix meetings, and one of the things in there is often a meet what is a meeting? Often it is a group of people that getting together because someone's sat at their desk, and they thought I need to make progress on a thing. And as a substitute for clear thinking they brought five other people to sit around a desk for an hour or ran a zoom call for an hour to be able to deal with it, right. So just actually having that clarity of thinking just reduces that cognitive load for everybody else as well.
Cal Newport 34:45
Just gonna say By the way, I think you're so right about that. Because what the other thing that goes on is most people are bad at productivity. And there's there's only really one tool they trust, and that's their calendar. It's like Well, I do know if something is on my calendar, I will check it and I will go And so they deal with the stress of this is on my mind, I'm responsible for it. alarms, right? Like, I don't want to keep this in my mind, I'm stressed like if I can schedule a meeting, now I get relief, because I trust my calendar, I will see that meeting and I will go to that meeting. So I have relief. But of course, the answer is, look, you got to get better at organising what you have to do, you can't let your calendar be how you keep track of things that come back to it, because you're stealing everyone else's cognitive cycles to make up for the fact that you're not comfortable with, you know, full capture in a to do list.
Graham Allcott 35:31
I feel like the last decade for me has been trying to get people to trust their to do list as much as they trust that calendar. One other thing I want to ask you about the book before we move on. So it's been out for a couple of months, I wondered if you'd had any. Like, it's a really big idea. It feels like an idea that that really calls for huge change in the way people organise offices, teams organisations, we're already in this slightly post pandemic period right now where people have just spent the last year in constant change to. So I imagine that's quite scary. And I'm interested in Have you heard any big criticisms of your hypothesis in of the book? And also, have you heard any that you've thought? That's a good point, you know, maybe some of the things are being driven by fear and by the fear of change? But are there other things that people have said in reaction to the book in response to the book where you thought, Oh, yeah, no, that's, that's, that's gonna be difficult to shift. That's quite a good point.
Cal Newport 36:32
You know, what's interesting is very little criticism. And that's my marker of, oh, everyone is here. Which is, by the way, the type of book I try to write, I tell people, I'm not trying to convince people of things. I'm trying to give them vocabulary for things they already believe. Because I think that's where I can be most effective. And I think five years ago, there might have been a lot of pushback and like, well, what are you talking about this is effective, this is how we get things done. When digital minimalism came out, because we were right at the cusp of that transition, you know, away from exuberance, about smartphones, to really not trusting them. Like there was a it was really on the line. Like there's a lot of people like that this is this is just a kids these days argument. I'm telling you this email stuff everyone's like, Yeah, I got it. I'm on it. It's, and I think that is incredibly telling. I mean, I think it means we are we are well past the point where the negative aspects of the hive mind are just emerging, and now they're suffocating. And so the, the lack of criticism about this concept, they say everyone's like, great, I like that term hive mind, we do it, it's terrible. We do need to do do thing, that the biggest obstacle that people point out which but the book kind of acknowledges this as a central point to is that it's just very hard to do. Right. And it's one of the reasons why we haven't got past the hive mind is that it's easy. And the other stuff is hard. The assembly line was a huge pain to figure that out. It's why document in the book. So it's not really a it's not a critique, I guess of the book, because the book makes the argument very strong, like this is very hard. And that's why we haven't done it. That's the main thing people are agreeing with is like, yeah, this is going to be hard. The other thing I will say is, and this is something I was disappointed by, is, you know, I wrote this whole book, for the most part, pre pandemic. I mean, we were I was doing final edits in the early stages of the pandemic, in May of the last year, so like, kind of peak early phase pandemic, I did a big article for The New Yorker on the future remote work, but also the past is prologue, like what what happened with the history of remote work, and what can we expect and, and one of the ideas from that article was, hey, the hyperactive hive mind that we use is very ill suited for fully remote work. So it's going to really ramp up the pain that people feel it's going to be way more hyperactive. And it's going to be really tough period, which was true. I think people going remote unexpectedly said, Man, all I'm doing is emailing zoom, like it really got out of control. You know, I had this optimistic prediction does like but maybe this pain point, will will be strong enough that like, okay, we are going to have to innovate past the hive mind just to survive this year, because hey, this isn't working. So now we need to have more structure and processes just so we can make this remote work thing work. And then when the pandemics over, we'll have jumped started that process of evolving past the hive mind that then it happened. It turned out that we had an amazing capacity to just white knuckle terribleness during the pandemic because there are so many different terrible things happening that we were just in a mindset of, it's the Blitz and it's London and it's 1941 and yeah, this work is terrible. I'm on zoom an email all day, but also like That's terrible. And this is terrible. This start what everything's terrible. And there was there was a nuff terribleness going on. But it didn't actually spark a response. Because we were willing to just say, Yeah, I expected this to be terrible because everything's terrible so it did not spark the pandemic shift to remote work did make the high fine, worse, did not I don't think yet. Accelerate alternative models. So that was something I was disappointed by.
Graham Allcott 40:02
I mean, this is I suppose this is also the, the kind of contradiction of these things is that busy and being reactive does not require much thought, right. It's just you're on the treadmill keep going. And so I suppose if we'd have had, if we'd have had three months to prepare for the pandemic, and knowing that chef was going to happen, we might have had the clear space to be able to think about how we design those things. But at the exact moment that we needed everyone to be thinking about how do we design alternatives to the hive mind, we're at that point where everyone's homeschooling thinking about how you know, your relatives that is sick, and everything else that's going on. So I suppose it's just um, and
Cal Newport 40:41
the worker, which I didn't get, right, it's also the work of figuring out how to make your work remote is a lot of work. So yeah, so right, yeah, you're saying it's absolutely right, you need a little bit of space to step back and think about processes. And so yeah, we added a lot of nonprofessional hardship at the same time that we unexpectedly and drastically increased our workload, because we now had to actually figure out how to produce the magazine or produce the whatever with everyone at home. And there was just no breathing room to make these changes.
Graham Allcott 41:09
Yeah, let's shift gears a little bit and add a couple of other things I wanted to ask you about before we finish. So I'm writing this book at the moment. What about kindness and leadership? And so asking a few of my guests and I'd love to know from you how you see kindness at work, and if you've got any particular experiences or memories of where you've experienced kindness at work?
Cal Newport 41:31
Well, I mean, if we're going to connect kindness to the type of things I've been writing about Recently, there is one clear connection that's, that's probably worth unpacking, which is, we're very bad at human as humans at communicating purely linguistically. So just through text, or email, or slack or text messages are really bad at it. Because we have evolved to understand an interaction to be this incredibly rich multimedia stream, your voice, your intonation, your body language, the back and forth pacing. All of these channels are critical to how we actually understand each other when we can see another human in front of us, that also triggers these mirror neurons so that we're trying to actually simulate your mind within our own. So the incredible empathy happens when we're doing face to face interaction, you can trigger this sort of mirror neuron empathy in the written word, but it's very hard. This is what novelists do very good novelist why novels are so effective as they can do very careful use of language start to actually trigger that empathetic response. All of this is critical for kindness. You know, I am here with someone and all those responses are going, when you're just shooting quickly written text messages, or emails or Slack, check back and forth, you don't have any of those processes happening, you don't have the empathetic simulation, you don't have the really rich streams allows you to understand the other person, it makes interactions cold and abstract. And they're often misunderstood. And you quickly veer away, you quickly veer away from kindness. And one of the great examples of this is, let's look at Mass conversation is purely textual. Let's look at something like Twitter. And the degree to which when you look at interactions on Twitter, people are mad and name calling and attacking each other in a way that the circumstances required in a real world interaction to get someone to where they get at a drop of the hat on Twitter, would be absurd to get people to act in the real world like they do on Twitter, there would have to be sort of, you know, a nun being held hostage in a school bus about the blow up or you would have to be a, a really weird situation to get people to be as mad at each other as so quickly as they are in Twitter. A big part of that is because we can't, we can't human human interact with text, we're really bad at it. And to do it, right takes a lot of care. And we don't have time to do that care, when we're shooting off our 75th of 126 email messages of the day. So that's one aspect of kindness and work is people need to see each other interact with each other. And that allows us to use all of the human mechanisms that support kindness, you get rid of that, you get this sort of, I don't know Lord of the Flies type situation really, really quickly, because we're just not good at let's just talk back and forth with ASCII characters on a glowing screen.
Graham Allcott 44:12
Yeah, I guess the couple of things I'd say to that. One is, I do feel like there's a slight improvement with using stuff like Slack, versus using email in that you can start to have, you know, emojis and voting like there there is a slightly more dynamic, I guess, process at work there than than it just being pure Tex. And the other one for me that I really value quite a lot is using like WhatsApp voice notes, because again, you just that intonation and some of the kind of additional dynamics that you get through the voice that you just don't get on text, but particularly around and I get this a lot. You know, being the founder of the company often the thing that someone reads on text as being super urgent And in super important, do it now. If I put it in voice, it's like, yeah, I'm just thinking about this, maybe do something about it. Maybe don't Yeah, it's just really difficult to get that across just on on flat text, I think. So I would say there's that there's something about how those services kind of inter evolve and kind of improve a little bit.
Cal Newport 45:18
Well, right. Before we started this interview, I was I was on doing a call with a, like, a pre interview with a producer. And we were just chatting a little bit. He's like, okay, maybe you can help me understand this, like, you know, we just started using in our production company, this new tool called Marco Polo, where you record video, it's called video email. Yeah, you record a message, it's a video. And he's like, it seems like on the surface, this should be a pain because it you know, you have to record this video, and you have to watch a whole video when something comes in. And that's much slower than reading He's like, but we there's this weird effect happening that like all of these emails, which have drastically reduced our back and forth, messaging, and he What's going on? And I was helping him on package like, Yeah, what's going on is that a 45 minute 45 second video clip can contain a massive amount of information, because it's not just the words, you're saying. It's your tonality, as your body language, as you're talking about, they're just some subtle shifts in your tonality is capturing perfectly what might take many sentences carefully crafted in terms of the urgency of something. Or if there's a subtle thing, like, I think we need to do this, but we can't get this guy on the phone. I mean, we probably get away with it. But maybe you should think about this, maybe we could send them an interview like whatever. Like they're just somebody who has these complex, multifaceted scenarios, we can communicate that incredibly clearly in 20 seconds, right? Trying to put that in words would have been really hard, you have to really carefully craft the message. But we don't carefully craft because we're overwhelmed. So we shoot an ambiguous message. And that's one of 20 that end up back, going back trying to figure out what we actually meant to do. But there was a great example. It's just like, with the WhatsApp voice memos, or office hours, you jump on the phone or having stand up status meetings, it is the best communication technology we have is the human voice.
Graham Allcott 47:00
The other thing I just wanted to ask you coming back to the kindness thing is do you think your approach around not being on social media? You know, really focusing on on on deep work? Does that have I suppose some people might look at that approach and think what that puts you in more often than not, is this kind of very, like solitude, state of monk mode and all of that. But do you find that actually, what that means is that in the rest of your time, you're much more prioritising of face to face, you know, and through the pandemic, face to faces video to video, but you know, that the human side of it is that something that you find, you naturally veer to when you're not in a deep work state?
Cal Newport 47:42
I do. I mean, I have a lot of analogue interaction via in person or on or over zoom, but because you can hear a voice etc, right? It's not tech space. The interesting thing, though, is that three or four years ago, I think it would have been very different, right? Like, oh, that's unusual that you're not interacting with people in your life on social media, this is actually changed social media, the major platforms, pivoted away from their network effect model where the primary use the primary use case for their tool was connecting with people, you know, right, that used to be the primary use case of social media. Why do you use Facebook? Because that's where the people you know, are, and no one could ever compete with Facebook, because how are you going to get 100 million users over to your platform and until you have 100, they've moved away from that and said, Now instead, newsfeed model, we give you a stream of information. So most people have already migrated their digital interaction with people they know they've already migrated off of social media platforms, they do it in WhatsApp, they do it in text group text threads, they do it on zoom or on the phone. People have abandoned, you know, Facebook, and Instagram is a place where I go to keep track of the people I know. And it's become just another streaming service, except for instead of watching, you know, episodes of the Mandalorian you're watching a news feed constructed by algorithms that's going to press some buttons. So it's all kind of just diversion streamed at you algorithmically optimised. And so I think it's a really interesting thing, that what I've always done is now become a lot more mainstream, that people have basically taken back control of how they interact with people. Like I don't need to use Facebook to talk to my, my friends from high school, we have a text thread, that we send things back and forth. So yeah, I think it's true. I do interact quite a bit with people, but it's no longer rare.
Graham Allcott 49:26
One final thing on on the kindness topic, and then one of the things to ask you about so have you does anyone spring to mind if I say kind leaders? Is there anyone that you've worked with that springs to mind at any particular stories around that?
Cal Newport 49:42
I mean, I I associate kind with good leadership. I guess I'm thinking back like people I've worked with an academia for example, department chairs and Dean's etc, for example, that have been very successful tend to be people who are genuinely empathetic and kind You know who Yeah, this is this is I care about the people I work with and work for, and I, you know, want to make things better. And, you know, in academia, for example, you're always going to have just because of the nature of the, of the culture, there's always going to be, you know, kind of some warring and sniping and back and forth. And really, nothing works better. They're like the neutron rods, you put into a nuclear reactor to prevent the chain reaction from going out of control than just the someone in the centre of it is like, okay, but um, I still like you, I still care about you. And I'm still nice, like, I'm not, you know, they don't take it personally, it has such a calming effect. And so, like, that's almost a cliche, in academia, in my world, if you have a leader that's more self focused, or is worried and defensive, or is taking sides, on things, everything, everything flies apart. And if you have a leader, that is not, things can hold together.
Graham Allcott 50:53
And then the last thing I wanted to ask you about, you're just a really prolific writer on the top of having a whole nother career outside of this as well. So I just wanted to ask you about your own writing process. And I'd love to know if you have any examples of of your own really good habits. And also, if you could share with us what are your bad habits when it comes to your own your own productivity and, and managing your own stuff.
Cal Newport 51:18
I mean, the one thing I'll say to the sort of moderate my, my prolific nest is that I am an academic and academics write lots of books, and I write books about technology and culture, but I'm a technologist and academia. So it's, it's not want to be as odd, let's say, as if I was a, you know, very successful musician, at the same time, as a computer science professor is like, Okay, I'm a computer science professor at a university that thinks a lot about the impact of ideas on culture, and I'm writing about technology and culture. And so we, it's not an unusual thing, for professors to write a lot of books that kind of go in there, overlap their fields. And in terms of my writing habits, just don't stop doing it is a big part of my habits. I'm just a big believer in aggregating the way you get high quality outputs is that you produce those very big, high quality outputs is that you produce a very small, high quality thing today. And then you repeat. And that's, that's my mindset, just right. Right. Right. Right. Work on this work on this chapter make this part good. And, and just over time, that adds up. And because every day, I mean, not every day, I tend to plan out my weeks, right. So I do this on a weekly scale. What's my when I do my weekly plans, where's the writing going to fit into the week? And, and so I'm flexible in that way. Because my, my job can change like, well, I'm have a bunch of early morning meetings this week, you know, this week, I have Friday, Monday off, because there's so much of a change. For me, having like I write every day at this time is probably not the right approach where it is for other people. So I look at my week, and I'm like, What am I What is my writing happening during this week? But my mindset is, I've been writing professionally, since I was 21 years old, that's when I signed my first book deal was right after my 21st birthday. So it's just something I'm always writing, you know, that's just always something that's happening in the background. Oh, and over time books come out. And that's that is, I think, a healthier way of thinking about it than Oh, I have this big challenge of I'm trying to write a book and how impossible that is, how am I ever going to finish this whole thing. Instead, it's like, oh, I just live a life where like, every week, there's times from sitting down and writing, it might be book chapters, it might be like a magazine article, I don't know, I just like to always have some writing going on. And, and then just over time decrease, give yourself enough time is a big part of my theory, you know, okay, if this is how much writing you can do, then give yourself as much time to write the book, you know, it's not so important. If you do that twice as fast or twice as long just repeat over time. And more and more things. More and more things come out. That's worked pretty well. That's
Graham Allcott 53:49
the thing I get asked quite a lot around productivity, which is like, what's the everyone wants the silver bullet? Right, or the secret sauce? And often I say there's no secret sauce. But if there was, it would be doing the simple things consistently. And well. Yes.
Cal Newport 54:05
Which means don't have too many other things competing with it. That seems to be the whole system. Yeah, do the valuable things Well, again, and again. And again. Why is that hard? Because there's so many other things pulling out your time. So figuring out how to keep that at bay, and then just diligence.
Graham Allcott 54:20
So maybe part two of that is say no more and then you have more time to do that. So I noticed you cite sidesteps the second part of that question, which was to share with us your bad productivity habits. So I'm going to get asked you that one more time. Yeah, what do you what are you working on? What are you conscious of at the moment that you want to change or improve or get better?
Cal Newport 54:38
Right sort of thing for me if especially in academic work, so I write a lot of peer review papers. And so this is something I'm working on right now is if I'm if I momentum on a problem, like okay, we're making progress, it's clear what to do. You know, like if it were let's, let's like get this proof and the nodes in this new proof is gonna fall out. Let's work that through. I don't have much problem like let's go go Like Work, Work Work, like make progress accrete, when we're in the hard spaces like we've been working on this for a while we're kind of stuck. It's not really, you know, we're not, it's not really clear what to do. You know, here's some things we could try just to try to spark some new thinking, let's, let's let's like right now, on a paper, we're kind of stuck. And I'm literally taking another paper and rewriting their proofs. And like, let me just redo the results from scratch so that I just get build up my toolbox on this problem space. And maybe that'll shake something clear, I have a hard time I'll I won't do enough, I won't do the work as much. You know, when it's like, not clearly, here's what we're doing. We're making progress. It's just a grinding background, hard work you need before you get to the exciting stuff. When it comes like with my academic work, I'll plan to do it. I'm like, just get this done this week, this way I need to do it'll take about seven hours. And then like this week I get far enough is like I kind of took over that time. I had some writing I was doing that was more exciting. And I just other stuff, took it over. And so I get I get in, I'll slow down or get in ruts when I'm at the part of a demanding project that is ambiguous or unclear, or it's just I have been grind for a month Intel. You know, I my random digging shows a diamond vein that I get to work. So that's definitely something I'm working on.
Graham Allcott 56:20
And what's the when's that when that's worked for you? What's the secret to pushing through that? Is it about getting it into someone else's world as well? And having collaboration like, is it accountability? Like what yeah, maybe
Cal Newport 56:32
collaboration helps. Yeah, accountability helps. But I've also doesn't always cure it. So this particular thing I'm working on, I was supposed to be done yesterday, and I didn't, didn't get there.
Unknown Speaker 56:43
Usually,
Graham Allcott 56:44
that makes people listening to this call is that sometimes you haven't delivered on things like that you're human to people love that.
Cal Newport 56:52
Oh, yeah. That's the thing about academic work. It's so hard. It makes writing seems like much more clear to me because it's, it's really hard to explain academic work, especially theory work like I do, because unlike anything else, it's not just like linear function of do this much effort, and you get this much results. It's this instead, this weird thing of, if you can crack a really hard proof, you can publish a paper. And if you can't, you can't. And you can't, so it's not. You're like, I don't know, I'm just trying, I'm trying to solve this thing. And maybe I'll never be solved, but it'll take me two years, maybe it is so different than Okay, if I write this month, I can finish a book chapter for sure. You know, and so it's really hard. And that's definitely so it makes the writing seem easy to me. Because it's like, it's like a proof that you always solve, you know, we're in academia, it's like, no, it's really, really hard, because it's very competitive. And only 15% of the things submitted are going to get accepted this year. So you have to be better than 85% of the stuff that the other people who are really smart and thinking really hard at your stuff has to be better than all that. And there's no guarantees, it's going to work. And you have no idea how these insights come. And so I struggle all the time in that world. And so hopefully, it'll, it'll make people feel better, but I'm constantly less the world I'm working on more, I haven't cracked that world
Graham Allcott 58:08
in the way I have other things. Well, it's great to hear you. It's just great to hear you sharing those those struggles. And you know, and the thought process around that. And I think people find that really useful. We're nearly at our hour. And I'm really mindful that YouTube as we started that you had a call after this, I want to make sure you have time to, to break in between so just before we finish the book is a well without email. Do you want to tell people where they can connect with with this than any of your other work mindful that you're not on social media? But like how do people find out more about what you're up to?
Cal Newport 58:39
Well, you know, if you like these type of ideas, I do have a podcast deep questions, where it's I answer questions and all this stuff. It comes in from readers, we talk about work and deep work and email, we also talk about the general quest to live a deeper life. So we get pretty philosophical twice a week. So deep questions if you want to go farther. And then at Cal Newport comm is where my weekly essays, which I've been writing since 2007. And you can join my mailing list where I send that weekly essay out each week. So if you like this type of thinking, or it angers you, and you want to get more angry, or whatever it is, those are the two places to go.
Graham Allcott 59:15
Perfect. Well, Cal, always a pleasure. And thank you so much for being on Beyond Busy. I enjoyed it and look forward to doing it again.
There you go Cal Newport and always a pleasure to have him on the podcast. I think for me when it comes to productivity. For me, the people I always want to hear what's on their mind is cow and Seth, you know, Seth Godin, and Cal Newport, for me, they're like, they're the people who I think just really think about productivity in a way that really chimes with me. And also, I feel like they're just really good at being curious and then putting labels to things that we kind of maybe inherently already know. I think that's a really important part of thought leadership actually, you know, just being able to give other people The ability to tell the story and pass the story on, you know that that, for me is a really important thing. And, you know, Khalil said that said it himself during the episode like why he does really well, let's just put labels on to things that we can already see. But it just helps us to really define and, and sort of, you know, make sense of, and I think he just does that brilliantly. So, really great to have cow on the podcast. Thank you cow. And, yeah, I've also been checking out a couple of his podcasts Actually, I must confess, I had no idea that cow had a podcast. And so I didn't talk to him about it during the interview. But I've been checking out his podcast and what I really like his he talks about deep work on there, but he also talks about deep life and really, you know, really feels like it really, tribes would be on busy. Feel like maybe I need to have another episode with Carl just to really get into that a bit more. But yeah, but checking out his podcast is really good. So check out Kyle's podcast, we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And as ever, you can get all the previous episodes and all the show notes over at getbeyondbusy.com. Also just want to quickly shout out for Val and Emily, my team around the podcast for just really making it such a slick operation of the last few weeks feels like it's a lot less stressful at the moment than it's been for a while. So that's really great. So thank you to to Emily and Pawel for making that happen. And this episode is sponsored by think productive, I should say we are one of the world's leading providers of productivity training and coaching, we're all about helping teams to be more productive. And to make space for matters. We've got offices all around the world. It's all at think productive.com. And you can find out more there. And also my own mailing list is just Graham allcott.com forward slash links. If you go there, you'll find a little button to sign up for rev up for the week. You can also check out what I'm doing right now. And you can also find details for my kindness event happening in the autumn kindness and leadership is my whole new thing that I'm building right now. Really excited about the project and looking forward to sharing that with you really. So just go to Graham Allcott comm forward slash links and you'll be able to find details of that. And everything else I'm doing so it Yeah, just such a pleasure to be able to do this over the last few weeks or months and to get some lovely feedback. We're going to have a few weeks off during the summer break and then be back with new episodes. And if you have ideas for guests are you just want to say hi, it's it's at Graham Allcott on Instagram or just email me Graham at think productive co.uk I'll see you next week with another episode. Until then take care bye for now.
Links:
Buy Cal’s books: https://www.amazon.com/Cal-Newport/
Follow Cal Newport: https://www.calnewport.com/
Buy “How to be a Productivity Ninja”: http://amazon.co.uk/dp/1785784617
Our Show Sponsors: Think Productive - Time Management Training: http://www.thinkproductive.com
Useful links: https://www.grahamallcott.com/links
Edited by Pavel Novikov: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavelnovi...