Should I Use Notebooks More Often? (Cal’s Strategy) | Monday Advice

Do you like the idea of an old-fashioned paper notebook? I mean, a lot of people do. There's something aesthetically pleasing about a well-made notebook. There's also the excitement of anticipating the original thoughts or insights that this tool is going to help you usher into the world. But then, if you're like most people, you buy that fancy new notebook and it ends up sitting idle and then eventually you forget about it. So here's the problem. It's not enough to simply own a nice notebook. You need a specific use for it that takes specific advantage of its analog format. When it comes to paper, in other words, it's how you use it that matters just as much as what you own. This, of course, inspires a natural question. What are the most effective ways to make use of a notebook? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this podcast, which is the perfect opportunity to go looking for some answers. All right, so here's my plan. I'm going to use myself as an example. I actually use four different types of notebooks on a regular basis. I have them here. And I'm going to go through them. I'm going to go through each of the four different types of notebooks that I use. I'm going to explain how I use each notebook. I even have close-up shots of interior pages of each so you can see that use in action. So if you've ever felt an urge to integrate more pen and paper into your daily life, but you weren't sure how to make that habit worthwhile, then this episode is for you. All right, as always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. All right, so as mentioned, here's my approach today. I have four notebook types that I actually use. I brought four of my own notebooks. I'm going to go through each of them. I'm going to go through and tell you three things. What activity I use that notebook for, why that activity is well-suited for analog on paper instead of doing something digital, and then why the specific type of notebook I use for that activity, why is that specific type of notebook the right one, at least for me? All right, so we're going to start with the first type of notebook I use on a regular basis, which is a planner. In particular, I use my own product, the TimeBlock Planner. What do I do with this particular type of notebook? I plan my days. So if you haven't heard me talk about time blocking before, it's an idea that I first introduced in my 2016 book, Deep Work, where I say the best way to make the most out of your mind during a workday is to actually block out the time of that day, to give every minute of your workday a job, to make a plan for your cognition as opposed to just reacting to what's happening, what's incoming, and what you feel like doing next. It could be an exhausting way to work, but it, I usually argue, gets about, on average, 2x more results per time. It makes it much easier to control distraction. It makes it much easier to arrive in states of depth. I'll pull up on the screen here. Here's a sample TimeBlock Plan page from inside that notebook. You see it's pretty simple, right? We have on the left side of the page the hours of the day, and then I'm just blocking off the hours of the day and saying what I'm going to do during them. So from 9 to 9.30, I'm reading. 11, I'm finishing the podcast prep. From 11 to 12, maybe I'm recording a podcast. So I'm giving a plan for every minute of my day. Just, you might notice my formatting here. I just evolve over time my own formats for TimeBlocks, but you'll notice dark lines, like around read, is how I indicate deep work. Double lines, like under finished podcast prep, is how I indicate administrative work or work that doesn't require deep work. And then triple lines, I don't know where this came from, but triple lines on the right is an appointment. So something where it's actually also on a calendar. Other TimeBlocking tricks, I put a number in this admin block down here, and then up in the upper right, I can have a more detailed list of tasks that are supposed to fit in that block. I can't actually fit them all in there. All right, so that's a key part of my day. A key notebook use of mine is to use a TimeBlock Planner. All right, question two. Why paper for this usage? We have all sorts of digital planning tools. Well, there's a few reasons why I like planning my day on paper. One, I think, your day feels more intentional when you've actually sketched it out with that tactile feel of a pen on page. A little insider knowledge about the TimeBlock Planner, because I actually sell this myself, is the paper is carefully selected to feel optimal with the type of pen I most often use, which is a Uniball Micro 0.5 millimeter ballpoint. Look, we got, Jesse has one for me here. We have these all over the office. I have so many of these at home, Jesse. It's crazy. So the paper in the TimeBlock Planner is actually optimized for it. It's a little bit rough. It's not, no gloss, and it kind of pulls the ink off there, but without being so grainy that it blots. So I love the tactile feel of drawing out my day, makes it seem intentional, much more so than if I'm just moving things around on a digital screen. I also want to separate my daily plan from my computer because not all of my work is at the computer. And sometimes I want to check what's coming next without having to go into the digital rabbit hole of this fully masking digital distraction machine. So I like having my plan as something I can bring with me that's not just on my computer. I also crucially have it in my room at night. So if I remember something, I can just go over to my TimeBlock Plan and I'll write it on the page for the next day so that when I make my TimeBlock Plan for the next day, I'll see it. So that's a way to try to get things out of my mind without, again, having to interact with the whole digital ecosystem every time I have any idea or reminder that I want to keep. All right. So why this particular notebook types? Like what's specifically good about this type of notebook for this particular use case of daily planning? Well, there's two things that were key to me when I designed the TimeBlock Planner. One was I wanted it to be lie flat. So we got good, sturdy, double spiral bound bindings that allows this thing to lie flat so I can work on it and plan it and have it on my desk. And two, I wanted full or near full-size pages because you need a lot of room for planning. You don't have to have my particular notebook to do TimeBlock Planning, but you want to look for those two features. A good, sturdy, probably double spiral bound, easy lie flat binding and near full-size pages. Before I created this planner, I used to use the black and red double spiral bound notebooks, which, you know, served a similar purpose for me. All right. So that is notebook number one. All right. Notebook number two. This is going to be controversial, Jesse. And we know already notebooks, is a touchy subject. Well, it's going to be controversial because my second type of notebook is digital. And that is my Remarkable Paper Pro, which the good folks at Remarkable sent me at some point. And I really actually, I really like, I really like this digital notebook. What do I use it for? We'll start there and then I can get into the details about why the Remarkable. Okay. So what I often use this for is for longer term plans, strategic plans for vision. So if I have some important, bigger thing, a sort of professional, big professional project I'm working on, or even more important, a Halloween display that is going to take a lot of my, my focus or energy, I'm going to build out an update, a plan that I'm going to use in reference to help guide my actions over many months. I will often use my Remarkable Paper Pro to keep that plan. So I'll load one up here on the screen. This is a screenshot. I kind of want to make sure that you guys can see what I'm talking about. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and drag this out from the Remarkable Paper Pro itself. You can see, you can draw. That's what I love about this thing. Even though it's e-ink, I'll get into that in a second. You can have different width pins. You can have colors, you can have highlighting. So here we have like a sample controller layout for a Halloween decoration plan. You can see here, we have our Falcon controller on a Raspberry Pi that's going through an ethernet hub over to a pixel controller that then has strands and daisy chain spots on them with the powered speakers coming out directly out of that. And then you can see here, you can see a little bit more detail of what's going on there. And then I can go ahead and drag this out. So I'm going to go ahead and drag this out. And then I'm going to drag this out. And then I'm going to drag simulated paper for this type of strategic planning is that I don't just type. I like to draw shapes. I like to draw diagrams. You saw that in my example. I want to use color. I want to use highlighting when I'm planning. I use all of those features. And so if I was just typing something, it's harder. You can't have a diagram. You can't have easily different colors. You can't highlight differently. That's one of the reasons why I use the Remarkable instead of an analog notebook is that I don't want to carry a bunch of colored pencils and highlighters with me, but all of that is built into the Remarkable. Also, it's expensive. So I take it seriously. And that somehow makes me take the plans more seriously. If I put a plan in there, I'm not going to lose it in the way that, you know, I have a lot of notebooks. And if I just write it in some notebook somewhere, who knows where that notebook's going to go. It's going to disappear in a backpack that I stop using. But this thing, I'm not going to lose. And so I like to put my more serious planning into it. All right. So that's both why paper and I guess why I'm using it. I'm using this particular notebook for those particular types of plans. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible. 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We're going to move on to our third type of notebook and usage that you might use in your life. All right, so the next type of notebook I use on a regular basis are these. This is a Field Notes notebook. So if you're listening instead of watching, they're small. It's like soft staple binding and the cover is just like a slightly thicker page. So it's very flexible pocket size notebook. I've used all different types, but I like the blank page variety I find to be the best. So I'm going to move on to our third type of notebook and usage that you might use All right, what do I do with my Field Note notebooks? I use this for single purpose brainstorming. So if I have a particular issue that I'm trying to make progress on, it could be working out a book idea. It could be trying to improve something professionally, like, okay, how do we push this podcast to the next level? It could be figuring out a personal improvement, like you have a vision for a new health milestone you want to get to, and you're trying to figure out, like, how do I do that? Why am I having trouble with this? You have a naughty issue, K-N-O-T-T-Y, and you're trying to figure out, like, how do I do that? Why am I having trouble that you're trying to make progress on, and you're not quite sure how? Single purpose planning says you have a dedicated notebook to that issue that you take notes in as you have insights, as you have ideas, you double back, you return to things. It's sort of an extended dialogue captured in paper of you trying to solve a particular problem. I'll bring up a page here on the screen that I mocked up. This is sort of the type of things it looks like in my single purpose planning pages. It shows me as trying to, like, understand, maybe this is YouTube and the role of YouTube in this podcast, and I have this sort of list here of on one side, do you want to just try to maximize views, and there's some pluses and minuses, or you try to maximize quality, but there's some minuses and pluses, and I have some notes on it. That's the type of thing that shows up in my single purpose notebook. So you could imagine, you know, if this notebook was dedicated to figuring out how to get more, you know, what to do with YouTube and this podcast. There'd be a lot of pages like that as I try to figure things out. So, you know, I'm trying to figure out, you know, what to do with YouTube right now. In general, I like single purpose planning like this because complicated problems take thought. We're not used to giving things extended thought anymore because we're so distracted and we're afraid of our own cognition. But hard things required hard thought. This is what I was taught as a theoretician at MIT. You want to solve a problem, you're going to come back to it again and again and again, and your mind gets better at it, you find different angles, and eventually, hopefully, you make progress. So a single purpose notebook helps you do that. You can double back. It's a great way to make progress on difficult projects. So why paper for this usage? Well, for me, portability is the key thing. I want to be able to have the single purpose notebook with me so that I am ready when insight strikes. I don't just sit down with these type of problems. It's hard just to sit down and force it. All right, I have an hour and I'm going to sit down and solve this problem. You might or you might get stuck. What you really want is the ability that, you know, you're on a trip and you're reading something and suddenly you have an insight about this problem and you want to be able to pull this out of either your pocket or whatever it'll fit in whatever bag you have. Pull it out and jot down some notes. The portability is what matters. It's like I'm working on this problem. I'm bringing this with me. I like to do problems on trips. Something I often do is like if I'm heading off on a trip, like a business trip, a book tour or something, I'll have a single purpose notebook. Like my goal for this trip is to make progress on this problem and I'll bring it with me at all times. It'll be in my pocket. It'll be in my bag. It'll be in my backpack. And I'm just sort of working on making progress. So why this particular notebook? Well, if you want portability, Field Notes is really a great way to go. They're small. They're flexible. They're light. They can fit in a pocket. They can fit in the front pocket of your backpack. They can fit in a purse. They can fit inside a jacket, inside the inside pocket. They're more portable than Moleskins, which I used to use for this purpose. Those are a nicer notebook, in my opinion. They're thicker with a hard binding and you can't fit them in a jeans pocket very easily. They're not going to fit in a lot of inner pockets of jackets. So there's like an extra level of portability. Also, you can buy these things in bulk. Moleskins are kind of expensive. I buy these like 20 at a time in just big packages. So you're not being precious. Like I'm just grabbing thoughts and maybe half the stuff I write in there doesn't matter. I don't care because it's, you know, I got a ton of these. It's not a real expensive thing. I think that helps as well. So that's why I use this particular notebook for that particular purpose. All right. So we've made our way to the fourth type of notebooks that I use on a regular basis. So here's my fourth type of notebook that I use for extending my working memory. All right. So let me be a little bit more clear about this. When I'm working, I need to separate this from single purpose notebook usage. When I'm working on a hard problem, this was a particularly true, I'll say when I was doing applied mathematics as a theoretical computer scientist, but I think it also expands to other types of technical problems, be them professional or in their personal life. When I'm in the middle of trying to solve something with deep work and concentration, you can become much smarter if you're able to extend your working memory beyond what your brain can handle. And the classic way you extend your working memory in the moment beyond what your brain can easily store is with paper. And so I like to use gridline composition notebooks, usually cheap ones like you would use a paper. I like to use a gridline composition notebook, which is classically used when I'm trying to solve a problem to take notes in the moment, draw diagrams, put down the mathematical equation, see if they actually work. I'll load a page up here. This is actually from working on this from the notebook I brought. This is from working on a particular problem a few, I don't know when this was, maybe like five, six years ago. And it's just extending my memory. I'm drawing a bipartite graph and I have some questions about it. Then I thought some I was trying out a proof strategy here based on these different size bands. You can see I'm working out on the side here some simple math just to see how things simplify. Okay, this is from July 2018, Jesse, so this is seven years old. So, yeah, I'm working out the math here a little bit just to make sure what I had in my head actually makes sense. This is just, like, if you look at this as a whole, it doesn't really make sense. It's not like a well-thought-through argument. It's me just extending my memory. I'm having these thoughts in my mind. I'm writing them down so I don't have to hold it just in my head. And then I can check it, go back, think some more. Wait, is that math right? Let me write it. So I use gridline notebooks as a way of extending my working memory when working on particular hard problems. Why is this different than the single-use notebook? Because, you know, this is in the moment. The single-use notebook, I might over a few weeks be working on one problem and building up more and more thoughts. This is I am right now trying to make progress on a theorem. And I'm using one. So if I have one page from this notebook to write down and extend my working memory in the moment, I don't need to go back to it. If I make progress on a proof or a technical problem, then I'll transfer that over to, like, you know, LaTeX or wherever I'm writing up the formal paper. I'll send the notes via e-mail to my collaborators. It's not archival. It's just in the moment trying to extend your memory. So if I go through this particular notebook from five, six years ago, every page is completely different. You'll have a couple pages from one time I used it. A couple pages from another. So it's just about extending your working memory in the moment. But that does make you much smarter. This was actually my primary method, really, for working on mathematics when I was doing theoretical computer science research is I would go for a walk. And I would try to make progress. And I would stop and pull out a composition notebook from my bag and take notes and see if it made sense and then keep going and write some more in the notebook. Those composition notebooks and me on foot is how I did, I would say, like half of my mathematical insight. And then the other half. And then the other half was working on shared whiteboards with collaborators. Put those two things together and you got, you know, that's most of the mathematics that I've published. So that is a fantastic use for a notebook. But why paper? Well, because, look, what I'm doing, I'm doing a lot of math symbols. I'm doing a lot of diagrams. A lot of my work is sort of graph theory based. A mix of probabilistic randomized analysis and graph theory. So you're going to draw a lot of graphs. And you're going to do a lot of algebra. So pen and paper is the best for that. You could just, you could write all these different symbols and equations and simplify and kind of, you know, it's just the best for that. You can draw the picture. So it's by far the best technology for doing that. And the portability was important because, again, I would bring these things on walks all over the D.C. area to work on thoughts and take notes in my notebook. And I would use school ones. Like this is a cheap one. I had some for a while, the marble composition classic notebooks from the 80s and 90s. I used a bunch of those. I didn't overthink it because, again, it's just in the moment making my brain smarter. It's not that it itself is archival. Right. So why the particular, like, what did I care about? Like, why this particular notebook? Grid lining was the key to me. Right. Because if I'm going to be doing mathematical equations and drawing graphs and drawing diagrams and writing text, grids are what's going to be useful for me. Because it allows you to line up things. You can put different vertices in different boxes. You can line up your mathematical, you know, mathematical equations will have different lines. They're going to have different levels, big sigmas, plus small subscripts. And so it makes it easy to write and line up all your different symbols. Also, when you're doing, you know, like I was doing, again, I mentioned, I ended up doing a lot of probabilistic analysis, which means anyone who's done, like, concentration bounds, you're going to get these, like, giant fractions. And the numerator itself is going to have fractions. The denominator is going to have its own fraction. So those are going to be raised to exponents. You just need to be able to sort of expand and contract as needed on the page. The key thing for grid lining is that you're going to have to do a bunch of things. And one of the things about grid notebooks that I've learned in my life is it's really hard to find the right level of brightness for your grid. If the grid is too defined, it is going to clutter your writing, and it's going to be hard to differentiate. You'll see the grid lines will be interpreted in your mind similar to your marks on the page, and it's going to clutter the writing. I bought a 12-pack of grid notebooks recently, legal style, from Amazon because, again, I use this all the time to expand my working memory, and it's worthless to me because the grids are too small. And it clutters it. But like this notebook here, this level, this is pretty good. So the grids are noticeable, but you want them kind of in the background so that this is blue and light. So when I'm writing with my black Uniball micro on it, it clearly differentiates them. So that was a big part of the trick, why this notebook is grid pages but the right grid, blue and light. And that can be sometimes hard to get right. All right, so there we go. Let's just review these real quick because those are the four specific uses I use in my life for notebooks. In fact, let me grab them all here. All right, just to review, I use a notebook for daily planning. It used to be double spiral bound, lay flat, good paper. I use a notebook for longer-term or strategic planning. I use a Remarkable Paper Plus because I can do all sorts of colors. I can do highlights. I can do diagrams. And I take stuff in here seriously, so it makes me take those plans seriously. I do single-purpose planning in highly portable, pocket-sized, almost disposable notebooks like Field Notes. That's how I make progress on big, complicated projects. And I use cheap grid-lined composition notebooks for doing working memory extension. It's all about just being smarter in the moment. It's not archival. You don't want to be too precious about what you write in there. There's other uses for notebooks as well, of course. There's many other systems that are out there. But I want you to give a sense of what I do, right? Paper is important. Paper plays a big part in my life. But you have to know why you're using the paper. If you just buy a notebook from a museum gift shop because it looks nice, nothing's going to happen with it. You have to buy a notebook for a reason, a reason that needs paper and needs the particular format of that particular notebook you bought. That's how you get the most use out of the analog. So think in terms of specificity, and you will get more utility out of your notebook. Think in terms of specificity, and you will get more utility out of your notebook. I need to cover a lot of reading for the new book I want to write about thinking. And my goal this summer is to read a lot of books about related topics, about thinking and the mind and the evolution of human thought or whatever, so that I really kind of know what I'm talking about. I can think through this book more carefully. To get through all those books, because they're kind of beast, I have a rule where I want to do either 30 or 60 minutes of reading a day just of those books. Okay. Is that a 30-minute block? Yeah, I put a 30-minute block down. I'm at 40. I'm at 45 minutes today, but I want to get to an hour, because that's the only way to get there. And then I do other reading. All the other stuff I read, I just read after that. And that I'm not scheduling on my workday plan necessarily. So, yeah, I'm trying to see. I've discovered – it depends on the book, but on the book I'm reading now, I'm averaging about a page a minute. So if I do 60 minutes, I'm getting about like 70 pages done. And this is like a 450-page book. So, like, if I'm not putting aside an hour a day, I'm not going to get through it. Mm-hmm. I'm not going to take too long. So that's why that's on there. That's something I've been trying. So, to me, that's professional reading. That's, like, part of the effort. That's part of my key deep work right now, this summer. I'm done with one book. I'm in the early stages of thinking about another. And the way you do that is you read a lot. Yeah. I just want to make sure I get it done. And then do you still do a lot of math? Not right now. Do you miss it at all? I do a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Because, like, the summer – you know, the summer is when all those conferences were and I've been hearing about. And I've – you know, it's on my mind right now. But, yeah, for people who don't know, I mean, I kind of have an interesting professional trajectory. But my academic training was in computer science and, in particular, distributed algorithm theory, right? So that's what I did. I trained under Nancy Lynch at MIT. That's my main work is doing algorithms and lower bounds for distributed systems. And that's what I did. That was my academic work. And then I was always writing books and articles. Those sort of merged together at some point around the pandemic as Georgetown got very serious about digital ethics as an emerging field that they wanted to play a major role in. And they wanted me to play a role in them playing a role in it. So that happened. And also I ran out of promotions, right? So I'm a full professor. There's no more promotions to get. So it's not like I have to be super careful about keeping publication counts up to a particular level to make sure that I get the right letters to get promoted. Those two things came together. And in recent years – In recent years, I've been much more aggressively focused on the question of the type of technology I did the math for, how it affects us, and what we should do about it. So I haven't been doing almost any of the old mathematics. But I think I'm staying sharp because I'm reading a lot of hard things and I'm writing a lot. I don't know. I guess the, like – Is it kind of like golf? If you don't do the hard math, you get a little – Yeah, I think you get rusty. Yeah. Yeah. And I'll be honest. I was never great at math. I mean, I'm good at math compared to the average person, right? Because I'm a professor who does – is applied mathematics research. research but compared to other theoretical computer scientists it was always like one of my weaker there's it was always one of my weaker uh skills was some of the details the algebra like it's all experience i'm fine at it but i probably would have been wasn't the best at it um but i do kind of miss it it's fun i miss the puzzles but it's not like i'm not staying sharp because i you know hey working on like a hard new yorker piece or something like this no yeah yeah that pushes you as well to in somewhat different ways it's it's why by the way people detect if they really think about it a certain type of rigor or like logic or puzzle pieces fitting together behind my writing and thinking it's because i spent all my life doing mathematics so it definitely affects the way i write it's why you get that sort of feeling when you read my writing of like oh this all just kind of makes sense it's because i'm making sure all the pieces click together like in a proof and your mind recognizes that subliminally and it's like oh this makes more sense right so i i kind of structure my writing and i'm like oh this is what i'm writing and i'm like oh this is what i'm writing and thinking like a mathematician all right did you use notebooks jesse i gotta get you some notebooks yes i use two two to three two or three different types or two to three two to three different types i have a few notes that i carry around for what use um general thoughts general thoughts right sometimes i try like the solving a problem that will be a separate one i have a time block planner that's i make my own just because a little bit smaller yeah it's smaller because it fits in my bag can i just say something trader i know one word trader and then i have a notebook for my spanish classes so the field notes is because you want portability yeah that i can take everywhere i have like a nice little case so like write random stuff down that i don't forget and i do revisit it like i just like they're good for that too like i usually have my time block planner for capturing things but field notes can be good for that too like capturing thoughts or like if you're on a trip you can just bring one to capture stuff like to do something like that and then you can just bring one to use to come up i got to remember to do this like so you can get things out of your mind and then when you unpack from the trip you just go through it like yeah it's another good use it's the same case that it fits a nice little case and then i have like another piece of paper that i can like write my workouts on and then i can also like if i'm golfing i can put my scorecard in there and put in my back pocket you but you write your workouts into field notes or you have i have a separate piece of paper that goes behind it i see and then what do you do with that later if it fills up i just get a new piece of paper and that's like i fold it up so like and then i just get a new piece of paper and that's like i fold it up so like and then i just every time i go to like a gym i just like know what i'm doing oh so it has your workout on it yeah i read it out before i go yeah i put but i put in the same like so you don't have to be looking at your phone no i don't have my phone yeah i like that let's take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible now some of my proudest moments from earlier in my life are hitting key financial milestones i still remember the day i finally paid off the last of my student loans from college now you know what i wish i had had back then monarch monarch is the personal finance app that goes beyond just telling you what you've spent but to also help you set goals map out big purchases and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust for example monarch can send you a weekly ai recap of your spending which makes it easy to discover if there have been major 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delivers results now how to do this well when you sign up you're assigned a coach they help you devise a nutrition and exercise plan custom fit to your specific goal and you can do that by using the code deep and i also want to talk about our friends at my body tutor t-u-t-o-r app to let your coach know how things went it's this accountability that really helps you follow through it also puts an advocate in your corner who can help you adjust your plan to whatever life throws your way or notice where you might be struggling and offer help so if you want to get healthier go to my body tutor today and if you do mention that i sent you and they will give you fifty dollars off your first month that's my body tutor t-u-t-o-r app so if you want to get healthier go to my body tutor t-u-t-o-r dot com all right let's get back to the show all right so there you go uh that's enough about my thoughts uh we want to hear what you have to say as well like we like to do on mondays we open up our inbox to see what you want to tell us about if you have a question or an observation or want to send us something you think might be interesting you can send it to podcast at cal newport.com all right jesse let's open up this mailbox who do we have first our first message from joe and marcy who shared a podcast with us on monday we opened up our inbox to see what you want to tell us about perhaps controversial article well controversial articles are my favorite type of article so let's pull this up on the screen and see what joe and marcy had to send all right the headline here a neurologist claims gen z has a lower iq than millennials jesse i believe that for sure because i'm a millennial um let me just read a quote from this see what's going on here for the first time since cognitive development data began to be collected in the late 19th century an entire generation is showing lower intellectual results than its parents that is the assessment made by dr jared cooney horvath a neuroscientist and former teacher before a united states senate committee according to him generation z born between 1997 and the early 2010 shows a measurable decline in attention memory reading mathematics problem solving and overall iq i read further you know what he's going to blame that on uh it has to do with technology all right that is controversial right it's controversial because every generation there's a cliche that every generation thinks the generation that follows has all these issues or flaws but this is an interesting one this is sometimes known as the reverse flynn effect this idea that the global increase in iq began to stop around the time that smartphones became ubiquitous horvath is pointing towards data that shows that this if you break it out by demographic cohorts gen z is actually seeing a sharper decline or in the iqs as compared to the millennials or people who are only a little bit older and so i don't know i guess you would point towards the mechanism horvath would say is the use of technology during critical learning years horvath is uh very much against the use of technology in the classroom and ed tech so i think he connects it probably to that as well these are all complicated issues but uh you know i think it's an important one to think about is i talked about cognitive fitness i wrote that big new york times op-ed earlier this winter about cognitive fitness is the new revolution we need to care about this is the type of data that should be capturing our attention when you see a generation following on an iq measure when you see all generations starting to reverse iq gains around the time certain technologies spread it has to be the same as saying hey once we started using trans fats we saw jumps and heart attacks and so maybe that's a problem i think we need to see this type of data through that lens i'll tell you my other observation if you're bringing this back up here again jesse this is on msnbc my god they got a lot of ads it's everywhere look at this there's that and then over on the right and then there's another ad here and this is surrounding and other articles like it's almost it's unbearable maybe that's why our iqs are getting lower so we can't get to the text because there's so many ads msn talk talk about millennial references remember msn that was like the big deal microsoft was like the internet is important you got msnbc and msn.com all right what else do we have jesse our next message is from jenny who shares a surprising statistic from a recent report on how parents feel about smart point smartphone bans in schools all right so i'll just read the part of jenny's letter where she gives this statistic from a recent report jenny says this short report is about parents thoughts and expectations around the ban of smartphones in schools interestingly 39 of parents think that less screen time at school is a bad thing and that's why parents feel like they're being banned more pressure for screen time at home and 46 say that screen time is already one of the biggest causes of conflict at home i think this highlights a need for support for parents and how to manage screen time at home and as conflict-free away as possible all right so that report for those who are interested is uh conducted by u switch and letter u switch and the report was called cracked it so if you want to look up more details there um i do think we need to think more about how parents deal with screen time i'll tell you what a lot of parents are doing that's leading to the type of issues you see cited in this study is that they are being um ambiguous and arbitrary uh it's you talking to their kids well you have a phone and it's kind of yours and you have a right to use it but i'm gonna be kind of upset that you're using it and then i'm gonna uh but it's yours but i'm gonna kind of guilt you a little bit Like, are you on your phone again? And then occasionally just arbitrage. arbitrarily be like, put that phone away. You've been on it too long, which creates a situation in which it's entirely and always a negotiation. Like, okay, my parent is upset that I'm on the phone. Do I have to put away the phone now? Probably not, if I argue it enough. So you're just constantly going back and forth. Lack of clarity, lack of definitiveness. So what is the better way for parents to deal with phones? Well, first of all, wait till an appropriate age to actually give a kid a phone, which I think is restricted phone in high school, unrestricted phones after the age of 16 at the earliest. Your kid will be upset. Your kid also wants to drink beers at lunch and watch TV all day instead of going to school. If they want to do something, doesn't mean that it's necessarily critical for them. Number two, when you do give your kid a phone, it's yours. It's not the kid's. The kid doesn't have a plan with AT&T or Verizon. They didn't sign a contract. They're not old enough to do it. They're not paying for it. It's your phone that you are letting them use for particular purposes. You make that clear right up front. This is not your phone. There is no portion of the Declaration of Independence that says thou are, you know, have the right to pursue, to own your own phone as your property that can't be taken from you. No, parent's phone. They're letting you lease it on their terms. Three, I think those terms have to be, let's keep it simple, landlining. When you are in the house, all smartphones, are plugged in in the kitchen. That's just how it works. Now, here's the thing. You as a parent have to do it too, but it'll be good for you. Trust me. The phones are in the kitchen. If you need to look something up, you go into the kitchen, look something up. If you're expecting a call from a friend, you put on the ringer, you go into the kitchen when it rings. If you have text conversations you keep up with, you need to go stand there in the kitchen, hunched over the toaster oven, doing those text conversations, which is going to make you after a while be like, I don't want to just do this all night. And it means when you're not in the kitchen, when you're at dinner, when you're watching a movie, when you're reading a book, you're not looking at your phone. It's not there as a second screen. It's not there as the second source of distraction. I think that is the best way. I mean, because again, parents are like, here's why I have to give a phone to my kid. Is there some complicated scenario in which they're going here at this time and they might miss a bus and they need to coordinate with their friend for the ride, which I get. This is why our family has like three or four dumb phones that we kind of give out to our kids as needed for various logistical things. I get it. But if that's why the kid needs the phone, then this is a fantastic way to introduce that into their lives without having it colonize their brain like the chestburster aliens from the Ridley Scott movie. You have it, but it's not with you all the time. And at home, it's not up in your room. It's not with you everywhere you go. We're not fighting about it. It's my phone. You can use it. Here's the terms plugged in when you're at home. That's it. That's just it. And if you've already given your kid a phone and you're in these types of debates, it's an easy switch to make. You say new household rule. Here's what I do with my phones as the parent that I'm paying for. It's under my name. It's my contract. They're going to live in the kitchen while we're at home. And that's just it. It's a binary rule. Boom, boom, boom. That's it. You want a phone? We do the rule. That's it. No more daily negotiations, no more arguments, no more vague shaming. Like, well, if I just act upset enough, maybe they'll voluntarily use the phone less. They will thank you. Their brain will thank you. Your cognitive fitness will thank you. Their mental health will thank you. So to me, I think that is the way to deal with teenagers and phones in your own home. Don't argue with me. I'm not going to argue with you. All right. What else do we got, Jesse? Our next message is from Jackson, who has a practical question about remote working. Oh, man, remote working. Remember how much we used to talk about that? Yeah. When we were doing the pandemic, like, it was a big, I wrote a lot of New Yorker stuff about that. All right. This is a blast from the past year. Jackson says, I work remotely and my wife works out of the house. This means I'm home by myself most of the day. I have noticed I really struggle during downtime between meetings or deep work sessions with being out of the house. I'm home by myself most of the day. I have noticed I really struggle between meetings or deep work sessions with being out of the house. I have noticed I really struggle unable to resist listening to a podcast or checking my phone. How would you suggest combating this urge? All right. So, Jackson, I would say two things are going to come together here. One, you need the time block plan, right? So by time block planning, you're not asking yourself the question, what's next? If you're asking yourself all day the question of what's next, then you're constantly going to have to answer why what's next should not be checking your phone or listen to a podcast. Hey, I'm feeling a little bit of exhausted. I'm not really inspired. Let me go do that instead. Make the plan in advance. This is what I'm following. But you got to couple this with part two. The plan needs to be very reasonable and sustainable. So if you're working from home, this is the key. Don't think about this as I'm in the office for eight hours that I have to fill. It's no, I'm making a reasonable time block plan for the day that's going to get a lot of good work done. But some days I'm going to finish that work at three. I'm going to have two hours before my wife gets home and I'm going to be done with my work and go do something else with that time that I feel is very productive. I'm training, I'm running, I'm woodworking, I'm building complicated Halloween decorations or something like this, right? Or a couple of days a week, I'm going to start my day late and I'm going to go my first block of the day. I'm going to go to the coffee shop. I'm going to read. I'm going to go for a long walk or I'm going to have a long midday section some days as well. And some days are just going to be packed and I have so much to do and have a lot of meetings. The whole day is going to be full. So you use time blocking to get intentionality about your time so you don't have to question what should I do next all day long. And then you couple that with, again, I call it variability and sustainability. So you have different schedules, different days, some days into earlier than others. You have breaks in there. And so you don't push yourself to exhaustion, but you also don't leave it up to yourself in the moment about to decide whether you're exhausted or not. And so that's what I recommend to remote workers, especially in summer. Put some variety in there. Just don't schedule meetings after three on Thursday and just be like, I'm going to leave at three. And I'm going to go watch a movie. Like, that's how you get the value out of remote work. So time block plan, but be more variable and sustainable with your schedules. All right. What we got next? Our next message is from Ulysses and it's about focus in the World Cup. Last night. You watched last night, Jesse? Yeah. Yeah. U.S. didn't play a great game. I mean, they got crushed. Yeah, crushed. I watched the, you know, it wasn't going well when you watched the goalie run up to kick a ball and just kick the ground instead. And then someone else just scores on them. I feel like that would be every play if I was the goalie in a World Cup game. Like to me, it is stressful. I don't know soccer very well, but it's stressful to me. The fact that like the goalie has to come way out of the goal all the time and he can't use his hands. Yeah. And they're constantly kicking it back to them. And like, you're constantly kicking the ball back towards your goal because it's like the right thing to do. Yeah. Meanwhile, in better news, the Nationals game last night. Oh, what happened? Crazy. It was when I turned it on, it was Astros were up 6-1 in like the third inning or whatever. Then the Nationals turn around and come back and push it next time. I started watching it now. Check back in. It was 12-6 Nationals. Get out. 12-6 Nationals, including a James Wood Grand Slam, including a C.J. Abrams three-run home run, including a Curtis Meade home run. All right. Come back again. It's a 12-11 Nationals. By the time we get to the eighth inning, two outs, the lead's only one. And they bring in Beater and they hold on and win the game by one run. The 23 collective points. Yeah. It was a crazy game. A lot of home runs. The Astros are a home run hitting team as well. So does that answer your question? Who are we talking to? Ulysses. Ulysses. Does that answer your question, Ulysses? I hope it did. All right. Wait, he had something about the World Cup, right? All right. So he sent us a tweet. This is the coach from Uruguay. So let me, I'll read this tweet here. Beisla, who I think is the coach from the Uruguay World Cup soccer team, explained that the Uruguayan players asked him to shorten his 10-minute team talks. I understand that today's youth struggle with attention, but is it right that professional players who earn millions can't concentrate for 10 minutes? Should coaches adapt? I don't know. All right. That's interesting. So the supposedly, allegedly the players from Uruguay told their coach, we can't listen to you for 10 minutes. Here's why I'm a little suspect about that, Jesse, is isn't a soccer match is like a phenomenal feat of concentration, right? Yeah. Like you're on that field for like a lot of the game. And as we learned, you can't have like a moment. If you have like a moment of lost concentration, you kick the ground too easily, right? Like you constantly have to be thinking where everyone is, what's the right play, what's happening over here. And so I have a hard time believing they can't concentrate. They probably have film sessions too, right? Yeah. You have to study the other team and your offense and your defense. And also these are of all the young people in the world, the young people who probably spend the longest stretches of time without phones or distractions has to be these like soccer athletes who have to train for hours a day. It's like them and baseball players. These are long games without break. You know, so they're, they're very used to not having that type of distraction. Maybe they think his speeches are boring. Yeah. Or so here's my other theory though, is attention contexts are unique. So that's the other thing that's possibly going on here, which is maybe a general point worth us all thinking about being able to concentrate in a particular context. It doesn't necessarily translate over to other contexts, right? So, you know, if you're in the context of playing a soccer game, your brain, there's nothing else that's voting for your brain to raise attention during that time, because it's put a lot of value on making the right plays and a lot get a value on making the wrong plays. And so staying focused on the game clearly wins the sort of your brain voting for what we should do next. There's also no other real option. There's no phones out there. Like, what else are you going to do? But there's a completely separate attention context, which is I am, you know, inside the locker room and this is a place where I look at phones and there isn't this drive of if I don't focus, I'm going to make a mistake. And in that attention context, I don't want to sit and listen to a speech. I mean, I think that is probably common. And it gets to a bigger point of like, don't put too much stock in the transference of skills. Right. So, I mean, I've talked about this a lot. If you play chess, there's a lot of advantages you might get by playing chess. That's hard to do. You'll get very good at playing chess and it requires a lot of focus. It doesn't necessarily make you better at ignoring your phone when you're watching TV because it's a completely separate context. So if you want to practice concentrating in a particular context, you actually have to practice concentrating that context. That means you have to remove the very desirable stimuli, take them off the table and rewire your brain so it gets used to actually getting value out of what's happening there. And so we have to be a little bit careful about if I do this one thing really well with focus, it's going to make me better at other things. There's tons of meditators who you can't get off their phone when they're at dinner because it's a different cognitive context. So that might also be rearing its head. All right. As our final segment on Mondays, we like to do an update about what I have been up to. travel we managed to get enough of the monday episodes in the can that you guys didn't miss anything uh but i was out in colorado um jesse we went to crested butte and then we went to rocky mountain national park i decided that crested butte would be a really good location for summer book writing like if i was finishing a book uh it's a the town is literally have you been there no it's at the end of the road like literally the road ends you know goes to the gunnison valley and ends at crested butte there's like a dirt road you can take over the mountain to the rocky mountain research station but like it's the end of the road it's 8 000 feet it's really high but it's like a cool town kind of a hippie ski dirtbag town with a western vibe and surrounded by beautiful mountains you could rent like a house on the edge of town i thought about it and you could like get up you could go for a hike or mountain bike to lower loop trail ride all day then go do like some athletic thing in the afternoon it gets cold every night no matter when it is because it's so high i like crested butte uh the rocky mountains were beautiful as well did a lot of um hiking out there the whole state's on fire which is not optimal but but otherwise uh that was a pretty good trip i didn't bring work on the trip it's really been a while since i've had a trip like this i wasn't riding in the morning i was just on the trip i wasn't even doing a lot of like brainstorming or planning because i was hiking with my um my eight-year-old because one of the two kids are at camp and when you hike with my eight-year-old he has a sort of dada-esque nonsense dialogue that he just goes mile after mile or like you can't it's not an interaction he's just sort of like saying things and just unloading things from his mind it's very zen so like but if you're not talking if you don't listen he's not going to do the hike so it's like meditative hiking he's had to sort of just let you know there's details about minecraft that don't quite make sense wash over you mile after mile so it was actually a it was interesting sort of cognitive cleansing trip for me though i am kind of glad to be back to writing what am i reading two books i finished since the last episode that we talked about it i finally read walter ong's book orality and literacy the technologizing of the word everyone always cites walter young right so this he's a mid-century to late mid-century 20th century scholar and he wrote this book orality and literacy about how writing changed the way the human mind works everyone cites it but i never got around to reading it and now i'm thinking a lot of these people who cite it i'm like i don't know if they're going to read it because they're often just citing the the big picture thesis but the book is fat the details are fascinating like really getting into just and you can see it you know the just the way we're able to think and how words as a technology change the way the mind actually operated and perceived the world it's academic but it's i found it to be very readable couple interesting things in there one is he talks about the phagreous dialogue from plato right so this comes up there's a time when he talks about the phagreous dialogue from plato in the 2010s where every technology book brought up this this dialogue it's a plato dialogue from the phagreous where the character of socrates has a conversation with phagreous this young athenian and basically he expresses skepticism about the written word here's why i'm worried about writing we're going to forget things you're not going to be able to really understand something if you can't debate it our memories are going to become bad like he's basically and it's often brought up as like a famous example of techno skepticism adlong maintain like i think that's overblown i think it's over reading what's really being said here that socrates uh the character of socrates is really talking specifically about philosophy we do still actually privilege the socratic method back and forth dialogue i guess it's a pretty reasonable point but actually ong is on board with like no no plato was really suspicious about writing but then on points out which i've never heard before the irony of it is that plato didn't realize the way he was thinking about writing the way he was thinking about philosophy everything in the way that he thought was only possible because of writing he has a post-literate mind so the rise of greek rationality required writing without writing you're back to more like the homeric epics where you you're everything is memorized and you're it's a completely different you read have lock it's a completely different type of way of thinking and transmitting information so plato didn't realize that the very grounds on which he was creating the socratic method of writing were criticizing writing were formed by writing and that's why like in the republic he's like we need philosophers not poets that's basically saying we need literate people instead of illiterate right in other words writing made philosophy possible before that you just had epic poets and he's like the philosophers with their systematic thinking that's what we need in the ideal society and then yet in his other book he was saying oh writing is bad but writing made all of everything he did possible he just didn't realize it yet right he didn't realize writing is what had changed because you don't notice when ways of thinking change so i thought that was interesting anyways it's a really good book don't be afraid of its academicness uh i really enjoyed it i also read the book lost by rachel hardigan who's a tacoma park writer she used to work for national geographic which is downtown uh it's about amelia erhart the interesting thing about it is it's a dual narrative structure you have the story of amelia erhart intertwined with the story of lots of people who after her death were trying to like find a plane or had different theories about what really happened with her the whole book came out of rachel doing a few excursions for national geographic on some of these trips that were going out to try to either find erhart's plane at the bottom of the ocean near howland island or to survey these there's these theories about she actually landed and she died on this island or that and there's these surveys to go try to find out what happened to her and what happened to her and what happened to her and what happened to her bones and stuff like this so she went on some of these expeditions of people who were convinced they could um they had the real story of amelia erhart so it intertwines those with the story of amelia erhart and uh i found that interesting and then i was at a air and sub museum in chicago the wings over the rockies air and space museum we stopped on the way to the airport they had an exhibit of a amelia rose erhart who's actually not related but in like the 2000s or 90s or something like this recreated her flight so interesting amelia erhart's a fascinating character um can you imagine trying to find her plane at the bottom of the ocean bob ballard tried oh because he found the titanic right yeah and they did uh a really comprehensive survey with all the latest technology of a particular area and did not find it um i mean the problem is yeah i mean it's not like we don't know where in the ocean she was trying to she was with fred noonan her navigator they're trying to land on a particular island howland island they got close because they were there's radio communication with a navy ship that was out there they try to help guide them in but there was just a like always with the aviation disasters a confluence of different mistakes the radio wasn't being used properly they didn't know morris code they had different some miscommunications about things so the the antenna for the directional finder they had taken it off the plane there was winds that were strong enough to push you off course but not strong enough that you would like see obvious signs of the winds on the white caps and like so it just seems like all these things added up and they just they you know you're 60 miles off where you need to be and then you're in the pacific and so so the plane's probably out there somewhere but um but actually it would mainly be just disintegrated by now anyway so it's interesting um jesse's put up well with my cables with my ethernet cables the there's a lot of electronics in the in the hq right now because i'm honing in on some projects i do have one question for you did you listen to the walt disney episode on acquired i did indeed as someone so to me this is significant i don't quite quite know what this means but i'm listening to uh audible a book on tape about disney i i mean i'm like an expert on the walt disney i know so i was like i found another book about uh disneyland like the machinations behind making that project work. And I was listening to that and, and I stopped to go listen to the whole acquired episode and then came back to it. And then I was like, wait, man, this is interesting. They're, these are very similar things like long form audio. They're within a couple hours of each other. One, they, you know, spent a couple months working on the other is like probably two years, three years of effort or whatever. They'll probably make more money on advertisements. On that. I'm sure they will actually on that episode than the author would make for the book that I read. And so I, it felt significant to me to be doing both of those at the same time. Is this like the future of audio books is like what they're doing, which is it's somewhere in between the effort required to research and write a whole book, but it's, you know, more detailed and comprehensive than just like a blog post or a sub stack essay or something like that. I didn't realize how many cigarettes he smoked. Yeah. I mean, constantly like three pack, six a day. Yeah. That's why he died at 65. Yeah. It was kind of lucky to make it that far. I'm fascinated by him. I'm fascinated by the, and then how about the city you wanted to build and experimental city of tomorrow? Yeah. I might, I might end up, I got a building, a city. I'm going to build a city with Halloween lights, all Halloween, 365 days, 365 days a year of Halloween. That's all right. So that's what all these wires are for. I'm working on my, um, I mentioned I'm building a much more complicated Halloween controller for this year. So I'm actually using open source software, but like real controller software as opposed to just custom building. And I'm buying custom circuit board instead of building my own. Um, and it's all networked. So like more professional or prosumer displays are ethernet network. So you're, you're all the different circuit controllers you're using can speak over ethernet to a common controller. But my hub is in the lab. And I need to hardwire that to the internet. So I have a hundred foot wire to, that's what that wire is here because our router is here in the studio and I need to, for now I'm hardwiring the hub and the other. So I'm making progress. I've been working on the light controller. I programmed my own light controller last year. So it's really nice to have a off the shelf light controller. It's a little more complicated. Um, and that's what, that's what I'm working on now. Um, so progress just like Walt Disney and his chains. I thought about that. So, uh, like Walt Disney is, I write about it in my new book, by the way, the deep life coming out next year. I write about Walt Disney and his trains. And I actually argue about that as a general strategy, um, seeking, I had a term for it, but like seeking these sort of remarkable projects that are completely nonsensical. It's just like interesting and completely non-instrumental, um, as a way of getting out of sort of the doldrums and sort of finding new inspiration, whatever. And I give a lot of examples of different people doing that. So yeah, I go, I go deep on Disney and his trains. I know too much about Disney and his trains. I know too much about Disney. Actually, when they were talking about the trains and the acquired, I was just thought of your newsletter and the picture you had. So I could easily. Oh yeah. Yeah. Because I wrote about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wrote about it last summer. Yeah. Of him on the trains. Yeah. Uh, fascinating stuff. All right. That's, uh, that's all the time we have for today. Um, back next Monday with another advice episode, the Thursday area, I check episodes are a little bit off and on in the summer just because of my travel. Um, so there may or may not, there may not be one this week, but we're keeping the Monday ones going. So you'll always have your dose of Monday advice. So until next time, as always stay deep. Hey, if you made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world. Now, the best way to do this is to join over 125,000 people who receive my email newsletter. Each Monday, you can sign up at Cal Newport.com slash ideas. And when you do, I will send you a free guide to my, my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today. Cal Newport.com slash ideas.