Classic Episode: How Do I Kick My Scrolling Habit? | Monday Advice

Introduction and the High-Quality Leisure Toolkit

0:00Last week, we talked about the importance of meaningful activity as a way to reduce the allure of mindless scrolling. Well, I want to continue this discussion this week by revisiting a classic episode that first aired back in the winter of 2024. In this episode, I described what I called a high-quality leisure toolkit, which contains six concrete activities that you could consider adding to your life as a way to help rewire your brain to depend less on the quick hits of distraction

0:31delivered through a screen. I thought I would play this episode for you today as it seems as relevant now as it was back then. Now, I recommend staying tuned past the deep dive for the questions in the second segment of this classic episode as there's a pretty good collection of queries. This is, you know, some shows have a better collection of questions than others. There's a bunch of sort of classic questions that I tackle in this episode. So the full episode is worth sticking through, all right?

1:02Now that my summer travels are winding down, this will probably be our last classic episode that we replay for a while, but I hope you enjoy this final interesting blast from the past. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.

1:26My philosophy of digital minimalism, my approach for dealing with these issues, argues that these tools push out other things in your life and therefore then feel a void that those things used to fill. When you just do white-knuckle abstention, you are faced with the yawning void of boredom and your own thoughts and anxiety. It's very uncomfortable. You just sit there like, what am I supposed to do? You need something to have that smoothing distraction.

1:57So the first step is not to abstain from your phone. The first step is forget your phone. Do what you want to do on your phone. Watch your Dino Mountain Gravy videos. But start adding at the same time really quality alternatives. Start adding into your life things that can eventually take the place of just looking at your phone, that can eat away at that sensation of boredom and anxiety of being alone with your own thoughts that drives us back to the sucre of low-quality distractions.

2:28So what would these things look like? I'm going to give you six different things. We'll call this our high-quality leisure toolkit. Six different things that you should probably engage with, all of them to some degree in your life in preparation to change in your relationship with your phone. One is going to be reading. You should read a lot more. This could be a mix of things that are just really fun, magazine articles or books that are really fun to read, as well as things that are smarter. A recent episode of this show,

2:58Jesse, I don't know if that was 286 maybe, I got into how to engage with this higher-quality leisure, how to learn to engage with harder books. So you might want to check out that episode. All right, second, higher-quality video media, prestige TV, movies, documentaries. This is another piece of this toolkit. This is content which I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that slightly more money and time was invested than in the video of gravy being poured down

3:30the mashed potato dinosaur mountain. So stuff in which real creative energy and focused effort was placed. Number three, skill-based hobby. Something you're into that requires a skill you can get better at, your results get better as that skill improves. This creates a feedback loop that our mind really likes that can be more compelling to our mind than low-quality distraction. Hey, I'm working on this new project that is more advanced than I've done before. I think I might pull it off. This is compelling to me.

4:00Compelling enough that these other lower-quality distractions aren't so strong in their appeal. Four, have some sort of exercise-based hobby, some sort of physical fitness where you're trying to build a streak, hit some marks in terms of where you want to get in your health, some sort of serious engagement with the physical. Among other things, this frees up. It frees up your body. It releases these chemicals into your mind that gets you out of this torporific state of,

4:34I'm low energy, I want to minimize energy, what's the lowest energy thing I can do to engage? It puts you more into a state of, we're active, our muscles are growing, our lungs are being used. It changes your outlook at the world. Number five, get involved with communities that meet regularly. Even if this is just friends, that you have a standing, we go and see a movie every other week, we go to dinner once a month, or a bigger, more organized activity, a league or a group that you go to. Have something that meets regularly that involves other people.

5:05And six, seek out adventures. I want to go travel to see this sports team play at the away stadium. I want to go to this museum. There's a special exhibit that's coming. I want to go read by a waterfall that I heard about that takes a two-mile hike to get to. Things that are above and beyond what's easy and are really cool or could create a really interesting experience. If you have these six things in your life, reading, high-quality TV movies, skilled-based hobby, exercise-based hobby,

5:37regular meeting communities, and adventures, take some time to add all these into your life. Now you're going to be in a position where the monopoly that your phone has on your time and attention has dissipated. It is now competing against higher-quality versions of things that can satisfy the same needs that were driving you to your phone. Those needs are going to drive you one way or the other. But the phone gives you a low-fidelity solution

6:08to what you crave. These high-quality leisure activities give you a higher-fidelity solution, and therefore they're going to be more easily victorious.

The Thirty-Day Digital Declutter

6:20So that's step one. You put alternatives to your phone in your life before you even worry about your phone habits.

6:26Step two, we declutter. Now this is the core idea from my book, Digital Minimalism. I don't believe in detoxing in the sense of take a break and then go back to what you're doing before. I believe in decluttering. So you step away, you take a break as step one of making permanent change. So the way this works is that you take 30 days where you are now ready to stop using these optional digital technologies in your life, the TikTok, the Instagram, the Twitter, the video games,

6:57YouTube. You step away from these optional technologies, but now you're prepared to do so because you have these six areas of high-quality leisure already in your life, already rock and rolling. Just lean heavily into those. You're not staring into the void. You're not sitting there like a detoxing drug addict, shaking, like, what am I going to do next? You're doing other things. So you're getting a taste of life without these tools. In doing so, you can see what you miss. You can also figure out what you really care about.

7:28At the end of the 30 days, then you can decide what, if anything, you want to add back into your digital life. To add back a tool, it must be really valuable. Like, hey, this actually satisfies something that's important to me. And two, when you add it back, you should have clear rules for how and when you're going to use it.

7:46So maybe Twitter comes back into your life because you realized you really do need to keep up with baseball trade rumors that are going on. This is really important to you that during the hot stove season, you do really like baseball and it helps you engage to hear the baseball reporters sharing rumors on player trades. Let's say this is the situation. Well, now that you know this is why you're bringing Twitter back into your life, you could have clear rules on it. All right, I check in on these rumors during lunch break.

8:18It takes about 20 minutes. I don't follow anyone on Twitter. I just bookmarked the four baseball reporters who I follow, two from my team and, you know, maybe like Kent Rosenthal and Jay Papasan or national reporters that have good sources. And I look at it on my desktop computer when I'm at work. So now I get that value. Every day I go on and see what's going on, but I also don't have Twitter with me on my phone and these are part of a much larger timeline that I can check at any time and has endless information. I've put this tool

8:49back into my life for a specific reason with specific rules. This is how you reconfigure a digital life that operates on your terms, supports what you value, and yet minimizes the unnecessary negative side effects. So none of this is about this technology is good or that technology is bad. None of this is about you need to live exactly this way versus that way. It's about intention, but you can't have intention about your digital life until you build a life

9:19that's better than what we just saw when we took this quick tour through the state of social media in 2024. Again, what we just encountered here is fine, but also sort of weird and eccentric and idiosyncratic. To look at that now and again, who cares? It's like reading the tabloid in the supermarket checkout line, but if I found you reading the National Enquirer three to four hours a day, seven days a week, I would say, okay, buddy, I think we need a better hobby. And that is implicitly what we've all ended up doing. So to fix this relationship

9:50with social media and our phones more generally, put in place the alternatives that are much better. Get yourself to the place where your mind is increasingly embarrassed by choosing TikTok over all of these other much richer options and then do your organized declutter. If you want to find out more about this, my book, Digital Minimalism, of course, dives into all these details, but hopefully I've given you enough there to get you started. Did you see, Jesse, in the Super Bowl there was an ad for Snapchat?

10:21I did. It seemed to me like Snapchat was trying to argue we're better, we don't have some of the same problems as other social media platforms. Even though Snapchat, as any social media research will tell you, has been at the core, for example, of the teenage mental health crisis and its intersection with social media. It's very big among teenagers, and Snapchat conversations, it leads to all sorts of issues. I was joking with the person I was with when we were watching the Super Bowl. I was like, this is sort of like having an anti-fentanil ad

10:52sponsored by crack. Remember crack? This was better in some sense than it was now with fentanyl. That was sort of the sense I got with that ad. It was hard to get crack, so you wouldn't do as much of it. Fentanil is, it's an interesting argument. Hey, we're better than the other stuff that's causing damage. Oh well. All right, well, there we go. So I'm not joining social media yet, Jesse, but it was good to see it. Yep. By the way, I was proud that Instagram was not signed in

11:23on your iPad. That means you must not be a heavy Instagram user. I tried to open it on the app on my iPad, and then I was asking for my password, and I haven't used it in a while, and then I tried to find my password, and I entered it, but then wouldn't let you reset it. No, I like that though. That means you haven't used it in a while, and you've been okay. I've been okay. Think about all those beach vacations though you could have been learning about. Yep. Every once in a while, like a coach, like my golf coach or someone will send me a video, so I go in and check that out. Yeah, people have done that too, and they'll let you

11:53see like one thing, and then they'll say you have to log in. Yeah.

Sponsor Break

11:59So there you go.

Sponsor Break

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14:31All right, let's get back to the episode.

Neil Postman and Media Ecology

14:34Who do we got first? First, questions from Henry. What do you think of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death? I feel like that book fits well as a route for your digital minimalist philosophy. Do you think that the medium of screens fundamentally opposes the deep life? That's a good book. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. The late Neil Postman is often cited by people who do techno-criticism. So Henry, I'm going to point you towards a recent article I wrote for The New Yorker. This would have come out

15:05in December. I don't remember the exact title of the article, but I can tell you it is about Neil Postman not amusing Ourselves to Death, but instead his subsequent book Technopoly. So I argue in this article that Technopoly is probably the best full summary of Neil Postman's philosophy regarding technology. And in that article I get into the impact of Postman's Technopoly theory on my own

15:36thinking about technology and techno-criticism and it did have a big impact. So you're correct to note that Postman is related to my work. I draw probably more heavily from Technopoly than Amusing Ourselves to Death. So check out that New Yorker piece to get a better sense of that. I like Amusing Ourselves to Death. It definitely is a stand-alone book worth reading. What people often get wrong about it is they think it's just a book about TV being bad. And yes, that's the main theme.

16:07It was written in the 1980s, the Amusing Ourselves to Death. It's talking about doing so with TV and the way that TV has evolved. But there is a deeper techno-critical argument that's proven very influential in that book. What Postman argues is technologies in general and media technologies more specifically can affect the way cultures actually think. TV was just the latest example of this. So he talks in the book famously about how during the time of Abraham Lincoln,

16:38the media culture was built on newspapers. And newspapers would have really long articles in them, right? You have thousands of words, articles, and speech transcriptions. The American America at that time was actually highly literate. You didn't have a lot of other diversions, so you're plenty happy to spend lots of time reading all these details in the newspaper. He called it a lexicographic media culture. He said in a lexicographic media culture, we were very comfortable with consuming information

17:08in sort of long, discursive discussions. He's like, this is why, for example, when Abraham Lincoln was the debating Stephen Douglas in the famed Lincoln Douglas debates, these were huge spectacles that would have huge crowds. They would each talk for three hours at a time. Lincoln would talk for three hours, then they would all get lunch or dinner, and then Stephen Douglas would talk for another three hours, and then Lincoln would have a one-hour rebuttal. And Postman said, we were completely comfortable with that in the mid-19th century because this

17:39was the media culture was one of long discursion. And so he argues in the culture of the 80s, which was based on sound by television, the way that we process information and think about things is much different. The media affects how we think. The bigger example, I mean, he goes into how Gutenberg and the printing press, that gave us a way of thinking and introduced a way of thinking that was more precise and structured. And he said that the printing press changed the way we thought in such a way that the Enlightenment and the scientific

18:11revolution became possible. And until the printing press, the media changed and changed the way our minds worked, we weren't actually capable of having the scientific revolution. Books came before it. Books changed how we thought. How we changed how we thought we could do things like invent science. Newspapers changed how we thought, so we were comfortable with very long, discursive discussions, and so on. So, of course, the interesting question is how did social media and phones change the way we thought? How does it change the way we engage with the world? That's a question a

18:41lot of people post post-ment have been tackling more recently and is a smart one to think about. If the media itself, the form of the media changes how we just cogitate, what does that mean about how our brains operate in a world of social media? That is something worth thinking about because I think those impacts have been profound. So, check out that book. It's a cool one. Check out my New Yorker piece about Technopoly as well because that's also a very deep book.

Balancing Deep Work and Leisure

19:12All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Roshan. I was wondering if you could square the theoretical four-hour daily limit on deep work mentioned in deep work and the pursuit of high-quality leisure mentioned in digital minimalism. Is it possible to pursue a high-quality leisure activity on a day you completed deep work professionally? Yeah, for the most part, it's not a problem. That four-hour daily limit, what that comes out of actually is people who are in states of more intense, deliberate practice.

19:43So, that number was first identified in a study of professional violin players. Four hours broken into two two-hour chunks was about, on average, the maximum a professional player could practice because when professional players practice, it's incredibly intense. They don't just play stuff they know how to play. They're instead systematically and deliberately trying to push their skills to the next level. pros can do that for four hours, but not much longer.

20:13We see that in other places as well. There's a type of software development called extreme programming in which you sit two people at the same monitor. It is very intense programming where the one person is looking over your shoulder and you're trying to build the best code with someone watching you do it. This is very intense because you have to have like a violin player practicing complete unbroken concentration. I write about this a little bit in my book A World Without Email. So what they found with extreme programming is that it's

20:43super productive. You would think, hey, we're doing two people per screen. We're going to get half as much done, but the code is so good and you get quality code so fast. It's incredibly productive, but they also learned it's you can only do it for a certain number of hours a day. People completely burn out. You know, you get like four o'clock in the afternoon. It's like everyone has to go home and take a nap. There is no notion of working late in an extreme programming environment because it's too exhausting. High quality leisure typically doesn't trigger this unless you your high quality leisure is

21:14intensely practicing your instrument. High quality leisure is not going to exhaust you in the same way as fully focused deep work. So you should be okay. If you feel like what you're doing is pretty exhausting, like maybe you're working on a novel on the side as a leisure project. And that really can like extreme programming, like practicing instrument that really can actually make a lot of demands. You know, do less of it and balance it out with other leisure activities that pull from different parts of your brain or less exhausting.

21:45There's a cool book on this from the early 20th century, Arnold Bennett's how to live on 24 hours a day. And one of his arguments is even if you're exhausted from your work, if you switch over to unrelated high quality leisure, your energy raises, not falls. Right? So he's arguing our brain, yes, our brain needs rest, but it gets that rest and sleep. So yes, we do have to sleep every day. But when our brain is active, like we are awake, it does not

22:17actually demand in the way that we imagine complete downtime where it just needs to sit there and do nothing or consume very low quality media. media, in the world of Arnold Bennett, sort of snobby, striving middle class that's middle class England in the early 20th century, he described as sort of low quality media that you're drinking and like playing cards and sort of just sitting around and listening to popular music. And he says, you don't need that. This idea that you need

22:47that's not true. Ponder poetry or whatever his definition of high quality leisure is. He said it'll re-energize you brain wants to do interesting stuff. So yeah, you might have to adjust a little bit, but you should be able to find on almost any day, unless you're actually sick, a groove of high quality leisure that is going to feel better and be more energizing than just falling back to let me do nothing hard at all.

23:11I actually have a listener sent me a first edition of how to live at 24 hours a day. I have it displayed in my library. Yeah, I think you've mentioned that before. Yeah, it's really cool. I'm really happy to have that. All right, who do we got next?

Managing Commercial Breaks During Sports

23:24Next question is from Sam. Hi, Cal. I'm working on digital minimalism and one of the high value activities I want to include in my life is watching sports on TV, but there are so many commercials throughout sports that I feel like I could use the commercial time better. Do you have any ideas on how to deal with activities that have inherent frequent breaks such as sports? What do you do, Jesse, when you're watching TV sports?

23:50I, that's a good question. Yeah, I just like, for instance, during the Super Bowl, I had it on and yeah, I was just, it's just on, but a lot of times during NFL games, like on Sundays, I'll be at work. So the sun's on it anyway. Yeah. So you're sort of, you're kind of just checking in, but then on like a Saturday or sorry, like a Monday night game, I will, yeah, just have it on. One of the things I used to like, well, I still do. I wrote about this in my newsletter is reading a

24:20book while listening to baseball on the radio. That's a favorite of mine, maybe even outside on a summer day. You read a book and then you sort of put the game on when that, when it comes back and with baseball, you can kind of tune in and out a little bit, right? So you're like, okay, if something interesting is happening, I'll really listen, but now it's going to commercial break. I'll go back to my book. If they're in a pennant race, I could get more reading done because as we got towards later innings, I would turn the radio down when we were pitching because it was too much stress. So I, then you could get

24:50a whole half inning of reading because when it's your team up the bat, it's all possibility. You're like, Hey, anything good could happen here. Nothing that terrible could happen other than we just get outs. So I don't know if you're watching sports on TV, I would say it's fine to have some sort of leisure activity that you're going back and forth through. I would not make it work related because if you contact ship, like into your email and then back to the football game, your mind is now stuck between these two worlds and you're not going to get the sense

25:21of relief of doing something on work related. So don't make it work related. Also don't make it engineered to be addictive. So you mentioned in the longer version of your question that you're watching YouTube videos. I don't like that necessarily that tension between, Hey, look at me, look at me like addictive. If the content has these recommendations that are grabbing your attention and now you're competing that against the, the high quality activity, I would rather your, your secondary leisure activity be a little more boring.

25:51Be on like that same level of slowness as the, the game on TV itself. So I think a book is a good example. Some other sort of analog thing that you're working on, something that you're trying to fix. You're, you're, you're cleaning something while the game is on and you kind of clean during the commercials, maybe have a secondary activity that is on a equal level of slowness. It's not competing for your attention because then you, you really get the experience then of your brain down shifting to this medium, which itself I think is just clearing and useful.

26:23So I think it's okay to have something to do during the commercials. Just don't make it work related. Don't make it too addictive. All right.

Augmented Reality and the Screen Metaphor

26:32What do we got next? Next question's from Chris. How do you envision digital minimalists interacting with augmented reality once the technology has advanced sufficiently to replace all the screens in our lives as you have predicted? Well, first of all, I still think my prediction is not, not being discovered enough, not necessarily from me, but I don't see enough other people talking about that prediction in particular in their coverage of the new Apple Vision Pro. I don't know that everyone yet is still

27:03on the same page that I'm on, which says the whole reason why Apple is investing in the Apple Vision Pro, the whole reason why they're doing this is because you don't need to, once this technology is sufficiently advanced, you don't need to own separate screens. Once you can fit an Apple Vision Pro into a pair of Ray-Ban glasses, I don't need a phone and an iPad and a laptop and a TV and an office computer. I just need these glasses, which can put similar size screens wherever I happen to be,

27:34so why buy all those things? That's a huge industry. The consumer electronics industry is huge. Apple's profit comes almost entirely from building physical screens and nice brushed metal boxes. If those all go away, Apple's in trouble, so they want to own the virtual screen future, and I'm still convinced that's where we're going to end up. If I want to make a phone call, I put a screen in front of me projected by my glasses. If I want to watch TV, there's a screen put on the wall projected by my

28:04glasses. If I want to write, a screen comes in front of me at the coffee shop projected by my glasses. I don't need to own other bits of electronic. I just need whatever drives those glasses. So when people do hear about this future, their concern is, like Chris's concern is here in this question, are we going to be super distracted in a way that we don't even know now because there is no hard line between reality and the digital? Could our whole world be full of these distractions? Here's my current guess.

28:35No. I think even in a world of virtual engagement, so augmented reality engagement, we are still going to prefer the screen metaphor as the mediation with the digital. So even when these screens are not physical, they're being projected in the space by a pair of Apple glasses, we still are going to want our digital to be within some sort of screen, a clear demarcation between

29:05the digital and the real. It would be possible, of course, for the digital world to be fully integrated in a more obfuscated way with what's going on around us. I don't think we're going to want that. I don't think that's what the market's going to demand. I think the market is going to be very happy with, I don't have to buy screens anymore. My TV is awesome because I can just make a giant screen without having to buy one. I don't need a separate laptop and iPad or what have you because I can just have four monitors whenever I need it. This is great. I don't need keyboards and

29:36mice. It's just going to look at my hands. I think that is going to be a compelling pitch to the market, but the screen metaphor will persist.

29:43I mean, think about this. This has been the dominant metaphor of media consumption for over 500 years. Basically, when we switched from the scroll to the codex, the bound codex as our way of conveying written technology, the idea of a constrained rectangle containing information has been what we've done. Movie screens, constrained rectangles. Televisions, constrained rectangles. Computer screens, constrained rectangles. Phones, iPads, video games, constrained rectangles in which

30:15information is found. So I think that that metaphor is going to continue, not because it's necessarily the best way. I mean, maybe it's, you know, it is better to have the things we're interacting with just sort of be in the world and we can't tell the difference between them and other things. Maybe it is better, but psychologically and philosophically, I think we prefer to have a clear demarcation between real and fake. So, yes, I think it's going to AR is going to completely up in the consumer electronics industry. Most of us will be engaging with a

30:46world augmented with digital elements just all day long, but it might not look as paradoxical as this might seem that different than our current world today. We might not be able to reach out and grab the screen we're looking at, but I think it's still going to be a screen.

31:03There might be some exceptions, some games, et cetera, but some pop out stuff. So, but I don't, you know, I don't even think so. Like, so Jesse, I see like a lot of these demos of checking email and AR, the demo videos, they like to have it sort of your, uh, like your messages fly out or like they're kind of in space and you're scrolling in space and, and then over here you're writing and you'll maybe, but I also think people will be happy with, no, I could just have a giant screen in front of me.

31:34So it's, you know, I can see my, I have two messages side by side. I don't need the messages to float in like little envelopes. I'm fine with what Gmail looks like. I just want to be able to access Gmail wherever I am and have like a really big screen where I can look at two messages side by side and drag things back and forth. So I think something like the screen metaphor, that's my new prediction, um, is going to dominate. Also, it's just technically easier. It's going to be the, that's going to be easier than trying to more complexly integrate digital elements to the real world. The easiest thing to do with AR is

32:05just try to anchor a screen in space as you move around. So we'll see, but that's my current, that's my current guess.

32:13I still haven't found a excuse to get an Apple vision pro. I'm trying to find like an article idea that's going to, that would require me to get one of those to mess around with. How much are they? 3000 bells. Oh really? Yeah. I think they're expensive. Jaron Lanair just wrote a good New Yorker piece on, on this. So I'll have to check it out. That might've burned the, my opportunity to convince the New Yorker that I really need an Apple vision pro. Are you just bar his? Yeah. Well, yeah, maybe I can. Jaron, come on. You know, he helped invent virtual reality. So I think he was well suited to

32:43write about this. He probably has too. I, yeah, I should. He probably does.

32:49He probably does. All right. What do we got next? All right.

Running a Creator Business Intentionally

32:53Laura, next question. How can I have a digital minimalist life when I have a online business based on social media? I'm a full-time YouTuber who struggles with keeping up with my subscribers in their actions. I have a channel with 30,000 subscribers that keeps growing at a very good pace. I've been trying to reply to all the comments on my channel, but lately it's been getting harder. Well, Laura, I think it's a good question because it emphasizes a common confusion about digital minimalism. You don't have a digital minimalism problem.

33:23You have an entrepreneur workflow problem. And I want to distinguish between these two because I think it's important. When people hear digital minimalism and they know that it has to do with having a more healthy relationship with your tools, they often change the second word in their head and say, yes, what we're talking about here is digital minimization. The goal of this philosophy is to use as little technology as possible. To remove technology from your life,

33:55more removal is better than less. And from the perspective of digital minimization, you say, I'm spending all this time on YouTube that goes against minimization because I'm spending time on YouTube. And so maybe this philosophy doesn't hold. Minimalism, though, is different.

34:12Minimalism says you figure out what's important to you in your life. You figure out what tools, if anything, support these things that are important because you know why you're using the tools. You could put rules around their use that dictates how and when you use them. So in this case, you run a you're a YouTuber. Your business is based on YouTube. Clearly, when you go through this exercise, you would say, yes, engaging with YouTube. Does support things I value, such as making money and keeping my job. My job requires me to use YouTube. There's no problem there.

34:42Digital Minimalism say there's a reason why you're using YouTube. It would also say, of course, have rules about how and when you use it to make sure that you do the stuff that's important, but not pain on necessary side effects. And this is where I think this becomes a business workflow problem. Your issue is your channel has grown and it takes a lot of time to interact with subscribers. Like that's your problem. That's a business problem that your your your rules for engaging with YouTube as your channel grew was I'm going to try to answer user comments because that leads to more engagement and will help the rate at

35:15which my channel grows. I guess this is like a common YouTube strategy idea. And now your channel is up to a given size that these interactions become more difficult because of scale. So what do you have to do is a business workflow problem. All right. Either I have to put aside more time for doing this or move on to the next stage of my channel growth where I no longer try to interact directly with subscribers. I mean, all YouTube channels will eventually go through that stage. Once you get to a certain size, you're not interacting with your commenters. I mean, we just had Ali Abdaal on the show.

35:45He's not sitting there. He has five million subscribers. He's not sitting there trying to answer every comment. So there's some point where that no longer makes sense. And maybe you're at that point, which would mean you stop doing that. And if you're not at that point, my suggestion would be to lean into the how and when attributes. The digital minimalism says you should place around any technology in your life and be much more structured about it. I have one hour here and a half hour here every other day where I go through and reply very quickly to comments. I don't look at them otherwise. So I've put fences around it.

36:17That's where you are. You either need better fences, wider pastures fenced in for this behavior, or you need to move on from this behavior. But this is a business workflow problem more than it is a minimalism problem. Minimalism is not about stop using technology. If you have to use technology, give up on it. It's about being intentional. So just be very careful about your intentionality here with YouTubers and comments and say, is this necessary? Is there another way I could do this? Let's rethink how I want to engage with these tools. But that's a business work workflow

36:48issue. I mean, I remember going through this with my newsletter and blog. Very similar, Laura, to what you're talking about. Here, early on, we're talking 2007, 2008, when I started this, I answered every email that people sent me. And I was I was talking mainly to students back then. And so I would get these emails from students with specific problems. And I really liked trying to give them advice. A, it felt useful. And B, it helped help me better keep up with what are the specific issues that students right now are facing. As I talk about often on the show,

37:19however, there was this point where I had to stop doing that. There was just too many readers, therefore too many emails. It was taking up too much of my life. It was stressful. I couldn't keep up. I was spending hours working on it. And eventually I had to evolve to the next stage of my media career and say, OK, I no longer have a sort of open email address where I just answer questions. Um, it's just not sustainable. And it was weird. And then I got over it. So, you know, maybe you're there. But I like this question because if you

37:50use your, your business is based on social media, you could still be a digital minimalist. Just have to be intentional. If you're having trouble with your work, it might not be a technology problem, but just a workflow problem.

38:03We don't talk to our subscribers on YouTube. Is that something people do Jesse? Like, is that help your channel grow or something? I think it might, but it seemed like it would be pretty. I don't think I would know how to do that. Like what? I don't know how comments work on YouTube. You just go to the YouTube studio and then you do it in like the back end. Yeah. And then it would show up as coming from like the channel itself. Uh-huh. Audience, I'm unlikely to do that. So if you're, if you're watching this on YouTube, I am unlikely to go in and start, uh, responding to the

38:34comments. But there you go. YouTube is a weird beast. I want to take another quick break to hear from a sponsor that helped make this show possible. Look, some of my proudest moments from earlier in my life are hitting key financial milestones. I still remember the day I finally paid off all of my student loans from college. You know what I wish I had back then? Monarch, the personal finance app that goes beyond just telling you what you've spent, but also helps you set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's

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Monetizing Creative Skills Without Social Media

39:57All right, do we have a call this week? Yes, we do. All right, let's do that. All right, here we go. G'day, it's Logan here. I am a Kiwi currently living in the U.S. working as a financial consultant. I have a question around decentralized social media. I've spent the last five years developing my artistic drawing skills to a proficient level and feel that I could now generate some real revenue. I'm not about to quit my day job. My question is more about how do I share my content with an audience? How do I monetize it? How do I do this and still maintain control over what I create while not

40:28handing over the reins? These things and my audience to a large social media company. Ideally, I would only use social media as a tool to funnel viewership into some other thing. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I've heard you talk theoretically about this idea, but don't really know how you imagine it to work in practice. Cheers for all the hard work. Al. Well, I got two ideas here. One, let's just talk fundamentals. You want to sell something online. You're monetizing a rare and valuable

41:01skill you have online. There's a fundamental principle here which says you need a home where like a home base for this material, this content, the drawings, music, artwork, whatever it is, you need a home base that you can control or allows you to control what you're selling. You also want to have control over how it's sold. So never let your home base for what you're trying to monetize online be something owned by someone else.

41:33Right? So this is what would happen, for example, if your main place where you hold your contents on a social media platform, that's their content, you're working for that platform to help them harness eyeballs. They decide how they show it to people. They decide how the selling works. They can do what they want with that material. This is very different than having your own website, for example. It's very different than selling things using the Shopify store. It's your stuff. Shopify is just helping you sell it. It's very different, let's say, you

42:03know, a podcast. Yeah, you'll have a hosting service somewhere, but this is just a server that hosts your MP3 files, which are your MP3 files and all these other players like Spotify or Apple iTunes players are just getting copies from the server. You own it. It's yours. So you want to own, have a home base for whatever you're trying to monetize online. The more you can have your own home base that you can control and that you own, the better. You can then use, as you mentioned, various platforms du jour to try to

42:35draw attention to this home base. So for writers, for example, their home base might be an email subscription newsletter and they use other social media tools to try to pull people towards it. But what matters is their list. Artists might show some of their artwork on Instagram, but they have a website where their art lives and where you can actually order limited edition prints to their own Shopify store. They can control it. podcasters like me. We put video versions of these podcasts on YouTube. There's a whole new audience. They're a younger audience that can

43:05learn and find these on YouTube. And some people just like to watch it. But the show itself lives. We own it. It lives on our own, you know, third party podcast server. Like that's what matters to us is the show itself is something we own. You can shut down YouTube tomorrow and it doesn't matter because we have this show with an audience we've built and and we owned and so on. So I think that's a good principle to go into this idea of using existing algorithmically recommendation driven platforms like social media to promote

43:36your work. Go into that with your eyes open and care. What I often tell people who are wondering, okay, I have this old fashioned skill. How do I promote it in the new media world? I say, start by seeing what you would have done 12 years ago. 2012, we think of that roughly speaking as the point where social media tipped into becoming something that was generally assumed to be used. That's when it really grew to cultural ubiquity. All right. So what would you have done in 2011? How did people who drew get attention

44:07to their work and sell their work? How did people who wrote books used to get attention to their work? How did artists get attention for the work? How did musicians find and grow in audiences in 2011? Ask yourself that question and start there because what often turns out is those are still the main ways you should do it. That social media, sure, you can go on there. Maybe there'll be some break, but more likely it'll just be you are dedicating your time to help generate

44:39attention for these companies so they can monetize it more. I think the reason why we get so it's so appealing to think I want to promote this work on on social media is because there's this lottery ticket feel to it. Hey, you never know. These tick tocks might go viral and I'll be the next Justin Bieber that could happen, but it probably won't know the platform will string you along, give you a little burst of views every once in a while. So you think that you're just around

45:09the corner, but for 99.9% of the people that's not how it worked. The old-fashioned way is what really matters. I'm a musician. I get better at playing. I start performing. I build up my own audience and mailing list. My skills get to a place where this begins to attract the attention of A&R executives who are desperate to find actually really good musicians. Now that I'm connected with the AR representatives, I go on tour. I'm opening for bigger bands. They've set me up to do that puts me in front of a bigger audience. This gets me ready. It probably takes about 10 years, but now we're ready to actually have an awesome album. We have the whole mechanisms of this

45:40record label behind the album. That's complicated and boring. What's better is I'm on YouTube and next week Kim Kardashian or Mr. Beast is going to mention one of my songs. The 10 million people are going to view it and then I'm just going to have a lot of money. So there's a lottery ticket feel that I think new media, social media gives to us. There's also a scariness with the existing traditional methods of getting an audience in many creative fields. There's a scariness because it is rife with rejection.

46:12Well, an agent might say, I don't want your book. You perform and they don't call you back because your music's not that good. You try to move your drawings in a gallery or sell prints at the market and people don't like them. Social media kind of hides you from that type of rejection. It's like, no, it's out there and it engineers like a background hum of attention. So if you're on social media, you'll make sure that you're going to get some people are going to see you. You'll have some followers.

46:43So it gives you that simulacrum of people care. And then you have this lottery ticket mentality in the background. Hey, this could take off any time. It's just psychologically easier. So I think we get seduced by these new channels because it gets around everything that made succeeding as a creative hard just 12 years ago. We get seduced by these new channels. That being said, you might find when you do this exercise that no, no, no. There is a particular now market for this stuff that didn't exist before. And there's a way to get there through a

47:13particular social media channel. So sure, go in with your eyes open, execute that plan carefully, but be careful about just this general seduction that somehow everything that has always been hard about trying to make a living in a sort of interesting, creative, autonomous field that you can bypass all that through social media.

47:33The person who's winning that equation is Mark Zuckerberg, right? The person winning that equation are the people that can monetize all that time you spend doing this, uh, this sort of like easy low return activities online, monetizing your attention. Um, be very careful about how you use that world and why you're using that world.

Digital Minimalism Case Study

47:55All right. So I want to do a case study before we get to our final segment. We found a case study that has to do with digital minimalism. I don't think I got a name on this one actually. So let's call this person anonymous. Uh, all right, here's what he wrote in May of 2022. I read a post on less wrong.com called do a cost benefit analysis of your technology usage. I immediately read digital minimalism, completing it in June of 2022 and beginning

48:27my digital declutter. Then gradually removing more and more apps from my phone. I also eventually picked up deep work and spent time on improving my time blocking and multi-scale planning game. It's been 1.5 years since I read digital minimalism and started applying its lessons since then. I have one drastically increased how much I read to drastically increased how much I exercise three incrementally increased how

48:57much I sleep and four significantly increased the amount of movies and video games. I have actively and consciously consumed in contrast to passive or regretful consumption. After one and a half years of saying to my wife, let me tell you what Cal Newport says you should be doing. She has gone from rolling her eyes and making fun of my hints and razor to forcing me to listen to her read out loud passages from so good. They can't ignore you.

49:28Well, uh, there's a good and a bad in there. The negative lesson there is don't bother your wife about Cal Newport stuff. Trust me, there's thousands of wives and girlfriends around the world who are tired of hearing about Cal Newport. My empathy goes out to your wife, but the good in here is that digital declutters and digital minimalism works, right? He got intentional about his technology usage. He added things into his life that was more meaningful to him. And look at these changes. He's reading, he's exercising, he's sleeping

50:00more. He's much more conscious about how he engages with media. This is someone who I can tell you is probably a lot less anxious, a lot more engaged than he was before, probably a lot more productive in work as well.

50:11It's like the heavy drinker doesn't realize the impact this is having on their lives. The hangovers, the lack of energy, the lack of other pursuits until they move on. And then they realize, oh my God, life is in technicolor before it was in a sort of fuzzy black and white. So I love hearing those case studies. You can completely change your relationship with your phone. It's not as hard as you think. And the results when people do can be pretty cool. All right. So now we've made our way to our final segment where I react to something I've seen in the

50:42news. Interestingly, we are combining this final segment with another segment, which is our weekly slow productivity corner.

51:00So slow productivity corner is where we do answer a question or tackle a segment each week. That's related to my upcoming book, slow productivity, which you can pre-order now. Go to calnewport.com slash slow to read an excerpt and find out more. I usually use a question, but I had this final segment, which put me in a slow productivity mood because it featured someone who is featured in the book.

Tolkien and Slow Productivity

51:27So the person I want to talk about today is J.R.R. Tolkien, author of other things, among other things, of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In particular, there's a quote that was sent to me by a curator of medieval manuscripts at one of the libraries at Oxford. So I thought that was just so cool that I was like, I'm going to take seriously whatever, whatever you send to me. You know, when you're getting a message from a curator of medieval manuscripts at Oxford, they're probably not writing you about kettlebells or bow hunting.

52:01Or TikTok videos. They're probably not. Hey, do you see this fire TikTok video? At first, I thought this guy was sus, but now I know they're Audi 9000. I'm mixing late 90s lingo with modern lingo. No, it's very dignified. So he sent me this quote from Tolkien. I'm actually going to bring up an article on the screen for those who are watching that also includes this quote. There's an article here from the New Criterion called The Constellations of Fantasy that is talking about this

52:33really cool Tolkien exhibit that was put on by the Morgan Library and Museum a couple of years ago. What I like about some of this artwork, so you can see for those who are watching on the screen, an illustration that Tolkien did himself of for The Hobbit. You sort of see this fantastical English landscape. I assume this might be the Shire done in pastel colors. Here he is working, picture of him working. All right, here's other illustrations he did. This is from a series of stories he did for his children

53:05about Father Christmas. It's a fantastical picture he did about Father Christmas going to his snow palace. Here's a collection of graph paper from the exhibit that had been pasted together. And on here, Tolkien has drawn out a map of Middle Earth. This was his first map of Middle Earth. This caught my attention because, you know, I know a lot about Tolkien. I read the Raymond James academic biography a couple of years ago.

53:36He's living his life at Oxford where he's being overwhelmed to some extent by the administrative, by the details of being a lecturer at Oxford in the early 20th century. The stresses of being in a field, philology, that was transforming into modern linguistics. And he was on the old-fashioned side of that. He was grading a lot. He was preparing a lot of courses. You know, he was really busy and feeling overwhelmed.

54:06He also worried about money. Meanwhile, look what he's doing. He's drawing these almost childlike fantastical images. His imagination was soaring. When Lord of the Rings began to do well, he finally saw that he had a chance to spend less time with all of these grinding activities that he just sort of felt were put upon him and more time in these fantastical worlds that are revealed through his artwork. And this brings us to the quote that was sent to me by this curator of

54:38medieval manuscripts from Oxford. It's a quote in a letter sent from Tolkien to Stanley Unwin. So here's the quote. Writing stories in prose or verse has been stolen, often guiltily, from time already mortgaged and has been broken and ineffective. I may perhaps now do what I much desire to do and not fail a financial duty. So what he's pointing out there is that he had, he had been stealing time from these other

55:11professional grinding activities to which it had already been mortgaged to work on these fantastical images that really spoke to him. And once his book started doing a little bit better, he finally had time to actually, without guilt, focus on this thing that's really important to him. There's a slow productivity lesson in there. Tolkien, as an exemplar of fast productivity, of all these things I'm doing and juggling as a professor and doing all these things, wasn't that happy.

55:42Where did he find real peace? Being able to return to these fantastical worlds that he was creating, working on fewer things, slowing down on the work, obsessing over the quality of the few number of things he did. This is hard to get to. Not all of us are going to get there completely. Not all of us are going to write Lord of the Rings. I give a lot of advice in my book about how to move towards this world, but I just thought it was a great example of the joys of slowness. This is what Tolkien wanted to do, was engage in this slower, more engaging world to get away

56:15from the fast productivity of his time. So the issues we face today in our world of slack and email were issues that Tolkien faced in the early 20th century in his age of academic responsibilities. And so I just thought it was cool to see that quote and to see these examples of the fantastical worlds that really drew his attention. Here's another one here. Here's an ink drawing he did called Eeriness. I mean, he had like this childlike imagination, but it was sophisticated. That's what he wanted to do. And eventually he would slow down enough to be able to do it. And there he found this real contentment.

56:47So perfect example of the promise of slow productivity. And a great excuse, Jesse, to hear once again, our slow productivity theme song.

57:03All right. So that's all the time we have for today. We'll be back next week with a new episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.

Newsletter Sign-Up and Outro

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