Cal Newport's Blog, page 8

Did Early Humans Use To-Do Lists?

Early in my latest article for The New Yorker I take a closer look at the recent protests waged by Apple employees in response to CEO Tim Cook’s announcement that they had to return to their desks in Cupertino. On the surface, the employees were concerned about losing what they like about remote work. In an open letter addressed to Cook, they cited worries about time lost to commuting as well the difficulty of achieving “deep thought” in a crowded office.

As I write in my article, however, protests of this type might actually be a proxy for a deeper unease:

“Knowledge workers were already exhausted by their jobs before the pandemic arrived: too much e-mail, too many meetings, too much to do—all being relentlessly delivered through ubiquitous glowing screens. We used to believe that these depredations were somehow fundamental to office work in the twenty-first century, but the pandemic called this assumption into question. If an activity as entrenched as coming to an office every day could be overturned essentially overnight, what other aspects of our professional lives could be reimagined?”

If burnt-out employees lose their bid for permanent telecommuting, “the last highly visible, virus-prompted workplace experiment,” the window to push for more serious transformation — the types of changes that can save knowledge work from its current drowning into a sea of distracted busyness — might slam shut.

But as I conclude: “The tragedy of this moment…is how this reform movement lacks good ideas about what else to demand.” We learned through experience that working from home is not enough on its own to cure most of what makes office jobs unnecessarily exhausting, and few believe that four-day work weeks or, dare I say it, quiet quitting are somehow sufficient either. We need bolder notions.

This then brings me to the central provocation of my article: What if a good way to chart the future of work is to look to its deep past?

I go on to investigate what the anthropology literature teaches us about what “work” meant for most of our species’ 300,000 year history. My conjecture is that in identifying places where our current activities most differ from how we toiled in our Paleolithic past, we might identify specific sources of discomfort with our current ways of working. How does, in other words, the modern necessity of juggling full email inboxes or managing crowded to-do lists conflict with a brain adapted over hundreds of thousands of years for hunting and gathering in small, close-knit tribes? And once we find these points of friction, what can we do to reduce them?

All of this, of course, is messy and imprecise, but it’s also really fun to think and write about. You’ll have to read the full article to learn all the details of what I uncover during my deep dive into the deep history of work, but the short version of my conclusions should sound familiar to fans of a slower productivity mindset: do fewer things, working at a varied pace, focusing on quality.

Such a deliberate approach might sound unachievable in our moment of hyper-connected busyness, but it might just be, for lack of a better word, much more natural than how we approach ours jobs today.

The post Did Early Humans Use To-Do Lists? first appeared on Cal Newport.

Larry June’s Slow Productivity

In August, a reporter from Rolling Stone sat down to interview the San Francisco-based rapper Larry June before he took the stage at Lollapalooza in Chicago.

June is known for his status as an independent artist. After an early deal with Warner Brothers fizzled, June went on to produce and release almost all of his subsequent work without support from a major label. He’s also known for his productivity. June has released 10 albums since 2018, with his most recent, last summer’s Spaceships on the Blade, reaching number 39 on the Billboard 200. In addition to these projects, June has released 5 collaborative albums, 4 EPs, 5 Mixtapes, and made appearances as a guest artist on singles from artists like Post Malone.

It’s this latter reputation, as an artist who ships original work at a fast pace, that makes what June admitted to the Rolling Stone reporter so surprising:

“Since we’re on Rolling Stone, I’ve go to let y’all know, that for everybody that wants to feature: I only rap three hours a day. You know what I’m saying? I only rap three hours a day. I get in the studio at 6 o’clock and I’m done around 9 o’clock in the morning…I don’t really like rapping too long. It gives me anxiety. I feel energy, I’m in the studio, I knock it done right there.”

As the music producer who originally sent me this clip emphasized, this slow but steady pace is unusual in the industry. “Rappers are notorious for claiming to live in the studio, brag about never sleeping, working 12-16 hrs a day,” he told me. But as June elaborates to the reporter, his technique works because of the miracle of compounding achievement:

“It might take me 3 hours to do one song, I might like just do the intro…and then the next day [record some more]….the thing though is consistency…If I do only 3 hours a day, every day, for 365 days, I just did outstanding numbers.”

Don’t underestimate the power of this productivity arithmetic. During 2020 alone, when June found himself isolated at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, recording each day, free from distraction, in his basement recording booth, he finished six different projects.

In this interview clip, we find a classic example of slow productivity. Spending 16 hours in the studio feels “productive” in an exhausting, performative sense. Retreating to your basement for only a few hours each morning seems somehow diminished by comparison. But as June’s success unambiguously illustrates, accomplishment is often best measured on the scale of years not days, and when you zoom out to this grander level, the advantages of a focused slowness become hard to ignore.

The post Larry June’s Slow Productivity first appeared on Cal Newport.

On Michael Crichton’s Busy Ambition

By his last year at Harvard Medical School, Michael Crichton, 26-years old at the time, knew he didn’t want to pursue a medical career, so he went to the dean with a proposition. He planned to write a nonfiction book about patient care, he explained, and wanted to know if he could use his final semester to hang around the hospital gathering research for his project. “Why should I spend the last half of my last year at medical school learning to read electrocardiograms when I never intended to practice?”, Crichton remembers asking.

The dean replied paternalistically with a warning that writing a book might be more difficult than Crichton expected. It was at this point that the young medical student revealed that he had already published four books while at Harvard (under a pen name), and had multiple other writing projects in progress, including his first medical thriller, A Case of Need, that would soon win him an Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year, and his first fully-developed techno-thriller, The Andromeda Strain, which would become a breakout bestseller.

I came across this story in a New York Times profile of Crichton written in 1970, a year after he finished medical school.  What struck me about this profile was less its origin story heroics, and more its revelation of the sheer busyness of Crichton at this early point in his ascent. While nominally still a postdoc at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, when the profile was published, Crichton’s energy was clearly radiating in many different directions. He had just published Five Patients, the non-fiction book he had proposed to his med school dean (who had, as it turned out, ultimately agreed to Crichton’s plan),  was about to release an experimental novel about drug dealing that he had co-authored with his brother, and had, since that fateful meeting a year earlier, finished two other pseudonymous potboiler thrillers.

Perhaps most notably, he was also finishing the manuscript for The Terminal Man, his follow-up to The Andromeda Strain. As the Times reports, Crichton had become a “one-man operation” dedicated to this project: in addition to the book, he was simultaneously writing a screenplay adaptation and was determined to direct any resulting movie. To support this latter goal he began spending a couple days every week in Hollywood as part of what he called “a skills-building gambit.” The Times described the 27-year-old’s career as “hyperactive.” This might be an understatement.

It’s interesting to compare Crichton’s rise to that of John Grisham, one of the few novelists of the late 20th century to rival Crichton’s publishing success. Grisham’s ascent began with his second novel, The Firm, which attracted significant interest from publishers after Paramount, based on a bootleg copy of the manuscript, snapped up the film rights for $600,000. The book went on to eventually sell 7,000,000 copies.

It’s here, however, that Grisham’s path diverges from Crichton. As I’ve written about before, instead of embracing a haphazard collection of overlapping projects, Grisham instead built a simplified routine centered on the singular goal of producing one book per year. He typically starts writing on January 1st, working three hours a day, five days a week, in an outbuilding on his farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. He aims to finish the first draft of that year’s book by March and have the manuscript completely done by July.  Grisham will conduct a limited publicity tour surrounding the book’s fall release, but otherwise devotes all of his remaining time and energy to non-professional activities, like the youth baseball league he started in 1996. When his longtime assistant retired, Grisham didn’t bother hiring a replacement as there wouldn’t be enough for them to do. The only professional acquaintances who might call were his editor and agent, but they we familiar with his routine, and rarely bothered him.

In Crichton and Grisham we see two different models of ambition. The first model, exemplified by Crichton, is what I call Type 1. It craves activity and feasts at the buffet of appealing opportunities that success creates. The other model, exemplified by Grisham, is what I call Type 2. It craves simplicity and autonomy, and sees success as a source of leverage to reduce stressful obligations. Medical school wasn’t sufficiently stimulating for Crichton. Life as a lawyer was too hectic for Grisham. They therefore reacted to their success in much different ways when it respectively arrived.

As best I can tell, different people are wired for different ambition types. The key seems to be to recognize what type best matches you before success begins to exert significant force on your career. A Type 1 personality stuck in a outbuilding on a farm, quietly writing day after day, will quickly become bored. A Type 2 personality working on a screenplay at the same time as two books while filling weeks with Hollywood meetings will be crushed with anxious unease.

Ambition type mismatch, of course, is a lucky problem to have, as it means that you must be doing something right. But this doesn’t diminish its importance for those that it does impact. It didn’t take me long, for example, to realize I’m more Grisham than Crichton (in terms of personality, not, alas, cumulative book sales). This has likely saved me from untold volumes of unhappy anxiety. If you haven’t yet, now might be a good time to figure out what type you are.

The post On Michael Crichton’s Busy Ambition first appeared on Cal Newport.

Professio sano in vitam sanam (on balancing work and life)

A reader recently pointed me toward a long and thoughtful reflection on academic life written by Stephen Stearns, the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. In a section titled “Learning Balance,” he talks about his work habits in the early 1970s, when his first son was born. “I was not around much to help, for during that time I was working seventy to eighty hours per week,” he writes.

This type of absentee fatherhood was common in this era, but fortunately for Stearns and his children, his wife wasn’t having it. As Stearns recalls, she sat him down, and gave him the following ultimatum:

“I want you to promise not to work nights or weekends: you need to be sharing the parenting, and your child needs a father.  If you don’t agree, I will divorce you.”

Stearns listened. “For the next twenty years I did not work nights or weekends, and I spent thousands of delightful hours with our sons while they were growing up,” he recalls.  “She was very wise, and I am grateful to her.”

What’s particularly interesting about this story is what didn’t end up happening. Even though Stearns was now working less than the norm among his peers, he continued to thrive professionally. Toiling within the constraints of a fixed schedule turned out to amplify his effectiveness. Here’s how he describes it:

“When I was at work, I worked.  And when I was with my family, I concentrated on them. The change in focus cleared and refreshed my mind so that when I went to work, I was efficient…Five to eight hours per day of clear thinking and concentrated work five days per week produces more impressive results than the coffee, chit-chat, and various displacement activities that often fill the time of many of those who think they are working seventy or eighty hours a week.”

Stearns describes his approach as embracing professio sano in vitam sanam: a healthy profession in a healthy life. Here on this newsletter, of course, we’ve long used a different name for this same strategy: fixed-schedule productivity. 

I’ve embraced this slow philosophy for most of my professional career. As with Stearns, I too have become a believer in how much can be accomplished in normal 40-hour weeks; if you’re willing to really work when you’re working, and then be done when you’re done. It’s nice, however, to see someone so much more eminent than me also find success with this fixed-schedule approach.

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During the pandemic, I setup a modest deep work hideaway in some office space I lease on the main street of the town where I live in the outskirts of Washington, DC. This is where I record my podcast, Deep Questions, meet with other writers and professors, and, in general, escape when I need a change of scenery to focus my efforts. By popular demand, I’ve posted a video that includes a tour of the space. If you’ve been curious what my “Deep Work HQ” actually looks like, check it out.

The post Professio sano in vitam sanam (on balancing work and life) first appeared on Cal Newport.

On Vampires and Method Writing

In my last dispatch, I reported on how the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson writes in a “supervillain lair” built twenty feet underground near his otherwise unremarkable home in suburban Utah. According to an article published last weekend in The Guardian, Sanderson is not, as it turns out, the first author to use extreme measures to generate fantastical inspiration.

In 1894, an Irish actor who was struggling to write a novel in his spare time traveled with his wife and young son to the remote Aberdeenshire coast of northeast Scotland. They stayed in The Kilmarnock Arms, an oak-paneled hotel in the center of Port Erroll, a small fishing village located near a desolate sandy beach. Most days, the actor would make the twenty-minute walk to Slains Castle (pictured above), a ruined 16th century fort situated dramatically on a seaside cliff. He was seeking inspiration for a character he was attempting to bring to life in his manuscript—a count who was hiding a horrific secret. The actor’s name was Bram Stoker, and the fictional count, of course, was to be called Dracula.

In London, Stoker had been acting alongside Henry Irving, a stage star of the era who was famous for his early embrace of what would later be known as method acting. Stoker decided to apply Irving’s approach to his novel writing. As detailed by The Guardian:

“According to his wife, Florence, everyone – including the hotel staff, and the locals – was frightened of [Stoker]. He ‘seemed to get obsessed by the spirit of the thing,’ she later said. He ‘would sit for hours, like a great bat, perched on the rocks of the shore, or wander alone up and down the sand hills thinking it all out’.”

Stoker returned to Aberdeenshire at least a dozen times in the years that followed, sometimes staying at the the Kilmarnock Arms and sometimes taking a cottage. “For Stoker, Aberdeenshire stood in for Transylvania,” explains a local historian quoted in the article. And he translated that inspiration into a memorable gothic tale.

I tell this story not because I think a method approach, in which you inhabit your characters and their behaviors, is the best way to write fiction. (If this were true, a lot more authors would take a swing at romance novels.) But instead because it’s an extreme example of a more general point that I’ve been emphasizing recently: when it comes to cognitive work, setting makes a difference.

Putting professors into stark and spacious modern offices is functional. But is it as conducive to deep thought as the fire-warmed study of the Oxford Don? Setting up your laptop on your kitchen table might technically give you access to everything you need to do your job. But will your mind end up in the same state produced by commuting to the marble-lobbied skyscraper in the city center?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the next big innovations in knowledge work will be less about technology and tools, and more about better understanding the psychology that goes into wringing value out of thought matter.

The post On Vampires and Method Writing first appeared on Cal Newport.

Brandon Sanderson Built an Underground Lair in Suburban Utah

The pandemic got knowledge worker types suddenly thinking more seriously about their telecommuting setups. Once it became clear that we might be toiling hour after hour, day after day, in our own homes, that Ikea desk in the corner by the washing machine no longer seemed quite so adequate.

I enjoyed, during the early months of this period, sharing here on my newsletter case studies about some of the more unusual or interesting home office setups that my readers sent me. You’d be surprised, for example, by how many people relocated to tents in their backyard. One professional musician went so far as to build a cabin for practicing inside his apartment. I even wrote an article about the topic for The New Yorker.

As I recently discovered, however, the bestselling fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson put us all to shame. His home office heroics began in 2008, when he and his wife bought a nondescript house in a nondescript Utah suburb. Sanderson noticed the adjacent lot was still undeveloped. As he explained in a recent Reddit comment:

“So I started to plan. And the next year, I bought that lot. When my wife asked what I wanted to do with it, I was quite decisive. I wanted an underground supervillain lair.“

It took Sanderson eleven years of planning, but as revealed in a series of stunning photographs that he shared on his newsletter, he finally built up both the resources and courage to start digging.

Here’s a photo of the hole he excavated. Keep in mind that this is in a normal-sized lot between two houses. Sanderson admitted that it took some wrangling to get the needed permissions from his town (“the city really has no idea what to do with someone like me”).

Here are the concrete walls being added to the lair. To keep the space epic, Sanderson insisted on twenty-foot ceilings.

After the lair was completed and covered back over, Sanderson built a garage and extended driveway on the lot so that it looked as if nothing unusual was going on in this space next to his house:

 

Though Sanderson posted these photo back when construction began several years ago, it wasn’t until last spring, when he allowed cameras from the CBS Morning Show to tape an interview in the lair, that we got our first look inside.

Here’s the secret stairway that leads down to the complex from inside his house. The stained glass windows depict covers of his popular books.

The nook where he’s sitting in this photo is where he plans to setup his writing desk. The more formidable tiled space in the background, surrounding the cylindrical saltwater fish tank, is meant for larger gatherings. He calls it his “Adventurer’s Club.”

Here’s the movie screening room he added that features three rows of reclining seats and a full-size screen.

“It’s…admittedly a little extravagant,” Sanderson writes. “[But] what else would you expect from a fantasy novelist?” No explanation is needed for me. As my readers know, when it comes to producing important work, I’m always happy to see someone go, well, deep.

The post Brandon Sanderson Built an Underground Lair in Suburban Utah first appeared on Cal Newport.

Your Work Matters. Build Your Schedule Accordingly.

About halfway through Laura Vanderkam’s sharp new productivity guide, Tranquility by Tuesday, we’re introduced to Elizabeth, an education professor who, worried about her ticking tenure clock, came to Laura for time management advice.

Elizabeth was struggling to find time for her research. Her husband and two children had followed her to northern Long Island to be close to the university were Elizabeth taught. As a result, however, her husband now faced an hour-long commute into the city each day, leaving Elizabeth with the primary responsibility for taking care of the kids before and after school. This created tight constraints on her available work hours, and the time that did remain was all too easily devoured by the demands of the classroom and teaching assistant supervision.

Laura asked Elizabeth to come up with a set of fixed time slots she could dedicate to research, to help ensure progress would be made even during busy weeks (longtime readers might recognize this as a variation of the autopilot schedule strategy). Elizabeth came back with the following options:

6:00 – 7:30am on Monday and Fridays, before her husband left for work.5:45 – 6:45pm on Wednesday night, when she had childcare coverage before a night class.

Laura knew these meager options weren’t going to produce a lot of new research. “You don’t need to be a professor to deduce how easily those three small spots could disappear,” she writes. With this reality in mind, Laura pushed Elizabeth to be more aggressive in carving out time for deep work. The result was the following more substantial schedule:

On Thursdays, Elizabeth arranged for their normal sitter to pick the kids up from school and stay with them until 5:00. Because Elizabeth doesn’t teach on Thursday afternoons, this frees up a five-hour slot she can consistently dedicate to research.Turning her attention to the weekend, Elizabeth arranged for her husband to take the kids from 12:00 to 4:00 every Saturday, freeing up another four-hour research block.

I know from my own academic experience that a pair of four to five hour chunks each week can really support some serious academic output. On the flip side, Elizabeth’s original proposal of three apologetic, short bursts, scheduled early in the morning and at the end of the day, wouldn’t have likely been that effective.

This example is important because it underscores a psychological reality of productivity that can be lost among all the posturing around systems and tools. It’s easy to feel like it’s impolite to prioritize work that’s important to you above other peoples’ demands. This is what led Elizabeth, at first, to limit her research to only the few scraps of time during her week that no one else had already claimed.

Sustainable production of valuable work, however, requires a dash of selfishness. Elizabeth’s revised schedule was exactly right. No reasonable person would find her investment in a once-a-week babysitter, or request for weekend dad time, to be excessive. These acts of self-prioritization were, objectively speaking, small. But they made a large difference in Elizabeth’s ability to produce the tenure-caliber work she knew she had in her. Your work matters. It’s okay to fight for it in your schedule.

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Laura’s new book will be released in October. She’s offering some nice bonuses, however, if you pre-order it now. (Learn more here.)

The post Your Work Matters. Build Your Schedule Accordingly. first appeared on Cal Newport.

Whitman in the Knapsack: Mary Oliver and the Power of Walking in Nature

Among those who find pleasure in cataloging the habits and rituals of prodigious creatives, the poet Mary Oliver is a familiar companion. Her commitment to long walks outdoors, scribbling notes in a cloth-bound notebook, is both archetypical and approachable.

This vision of Oliver finding inspiration in her close observations of nature, made as she wanders past ponds and through forest-bound glades, matches our intuitions about the artistic process. As Oliver writes in her poem, The Summer Day:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.

We can also, if we’re being honest, imagine ourselves extracting a diluted version of this inspiration, if only we too could find the time to take our moleskin into the woods. It’s here, in other words, that we find a key piece to Oliver’s enduring appeal.

This is all preamble to my delight in being pointed recently, by a reader, toward a 2015 interview with Oliver, where she discussed the origins of her habit of retreating into nature to wrangle her muse. As Oliver explained:

“I don’t like buildings . So the one record I broke in my school was truancy. I went to the woods a lot, with books; Whitman in the knapsack. But I also liked motion. So I just began with these little notebooks and scribbled things as they came to me and worked them into poems later.”

Today, as in most times past, there’s a lot going on in the world, much of it distressing. We could respond by staring with increased intensity into glowing screens, hoping that the resulting numbness outcompetes the anxiety. Or, like Oliver, we could put Whitman in our knapsack, and head outside, slowly, into nature, with our minds as our only companion.

The post Whitman in the Knapsack: Mary Oliver and the Power of Walking in Nature first appeared on Cal Newport.

The Most Important Piece of Career Advice You Probably Never Heard

This essay was inspired by Top Performer, the online course about engineering a more meaningful and satisfying career that I designed with Scott Young. The new and improved version of this course will be open for new registrations next week. Find out more here.

In the spring of 2008, I published one of the more consequential essays in the history of this newsletter. It was titled: “The Most Important Piece of Career Advice You Probably Never Heard.” At the time, I was a doctoral student at MIT, still more than a year away from defending my dissertation. I was also, as I explain in the opening of the essay, about to attend my second college graduation in less than three weeks. As a result, my mind was mired in thoughts about career advice.

As I considered what I might write on this topic an insight struck me with a jolt of electric clarity. In the end, what matters is your lifestyle. The specifics of your work are important only in how they impact your daily experience. As I summarized, when choosing a career path:

“Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.”

This idea, which I dubbed lifestyle-centric career planning, subverted popular advice from that period which tended to emphasize the importance of passion and dream jobs. In this widely-accepted schema, the full responsibility for your ongoing satisfaction was offloaded to the minutia of your professional endeavors.

This didn’t strike me as correct. There are so many other aspects of your life that matter in your contentment, including, as I enumerated in my original essay, the following:

How much control do I have over my schedule?What’s the intensity level of my job?What’s the importance of what I do?What’s the prestige level?Where do I live?What’s my social life like?What’s my work life balance?What’s my family like?How do other people think of me?What am I known for?

Confident answers to these types of questions might identify many different jobs that, if properly pursued, move you toward the life you desire. They can also help you direct the job you already have in directions that will provide you the most benefit.

The conceptual seed planted by this essay soon began to grow in my work. My very next essay, published three days later, was titled, “The Problem with Passion.” This was one of the first examples of me taking direct aim at the all-too-popular recommendation to “follow your passion.” But it was not the last.

Four years later, I published my first hardcover idea book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which explicitly rejected passion-centric career advice and promoted an alternative approach more aligned with the philosophy of lifestyle-centric career planning I had first sketched out back in the spring of 2008. It went on to sell 300,000 copies, and counting.

Two years after that, in 2014, Scott Young and I launched the first version of our online course Top Performer, which operationalized many of the ideas from that book. Eight years and more than 5,000 student later, we’re opening the latest evolution of this course to new registrations starting Monday, August 29th. It was this upcoming launch — one of many of over the years — that got me reminiscing about my long history with thinking critically about career satisfaction, and led me, eventually, back this pragmatic gem of an essay from all the way back in 2008. It’s sometimes the smallest ideas, articulated at just the right moment, that end up most changing the trajectory of your life.

The post The Most Important Piece of Career Advice You Probably Never Heard first appeared on Cal Newport.

New Study Confirms the Value of Solitude

 

In my book Digital Minimalism, I emphasized the danger of a newly-emerged condition that I called “solitude deprivation.” As I wrote, the introduction of the smartphone caused our relationship with distraction to mutate into something new:

“At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have been optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds. It’s now possible to completely banish solitude from your life.”

I went on to argue that this condition was worrisome. Us humans evolved to experience significant amounts of time alone with our own thoughts. Remove this solitude from our lives and we’re not only bound to get twitchy and anxious, but we miss out on much of the subtle but deep value generated by a wandering mind.

A new paper, published by researchers at the University of Tübingen, and appearing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, provides some support for these claims. “Psychologists who studied a group of more than 250 people encouraged to engage in directionless contemplation or free-floating thinking,” summarizes The Guardian, “said that the activity was far more satisfying than the participants had anticipated.”

Furthermore, the paper reports benefits to losing yourself in thought, finding that this state can “aid problem solving, increase creativity, enhance the imagination and contribute to a sense of self-worth.”

Kou Murayama, the lead author of the study, noted that the subjects underestimated the value of contemplation, and in many cases worried that this activity would be a negative experience. They often preferred the easy distraction provided by technology such as smartphones. “This could explain why people prefer to keep busy rather than to enjoy a moment of reflection or letting their imagination run away with itself in their everyday lives,” he concluded.

These results do a good job of summarizing our current troubled relationship with our own minds. We fear solitude, but it’s exactly this time alone with our own thoughts that we need to make sense of our experiences and grow as humans. TikTok is fun, but grappling with the core questions of our existence is fundamental.

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This week on Deep Questions: In episode 208 of my podcast, posted earlier today, I tackle my problem with task lists, the liminal space between deep and shallow work, and the anxiety of not making enough progress on your goals. You can watch the full episode on YouTube or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

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