How Do I Finish Meaningful Projects? | Monday Advice

Accomplishing meaningful things

0:00So here's an important question. How do I accomplish meaningful things in a world increasingly filled with meaningless distractions? Now, if you want to understand why this question matters, there are two key numbers that you have to consider. First, according to research out of the University of Scranton, only 8% of people accomplish their goals. Second, according to Gallup, 45% of young adults report lacking meaning, purpose, or both

0:35in their lives. These two numbers are connected. The more you fail to accomplish things that matter to you, the less meaningful your life will likely feel. So here's the reason why this problem is on my mind right now. I recently came across an article that I wrote nearly 20 years ago and had completely forgotten about. It was called The Einstein Principle. And as I came across this article again more recently, I began to wonder whether its core ideas could point us towards

1:06a solution to the problem of not finishing the things that matter to us. So clearly we have to look deeper at these ideas. And here's my plan for today. I want to start by better diagnosing the problem, looking at the factors that keep us from accomplishing things. Then I want to detail the core principles for my article and the core strategy I propose for acting on that principle, including a case study from my own life written 19 years ago. I'll then evaluate the advice, starting with how my readers reacted back in 2007 when I first wrote this, and then

1:40reviewing the changes I would make today in 2026 to make the strategy best suited for our current moment. All right. So I think this sounds like a good plan. We got a lot of cover. So let's dive in. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking

Why we struggle to finish

1:57depth in a distracted world. All right. So we're going to start by trying to understand why we struggle to finish important things. We'll begin with the explanation I gave in my article from 2007. I'm going to load this up on the screen here, and I'm going to read it. So here's what I wrote. We sow lots of project seeds. We email a lot of people, join a lot of clubs, commit to a lot of

2:31minor projects, set up lots of meetings, constantly send out feelers to our friends and connections regarding our latest brainstorm. We don't know which seed will ultimately take root and grow. So by planting many, we expose ourselves to enough randomness over time to maximize our chance of a big deal, interesting, life-changing success eventually happening. These numerous seeds, however, have a tendency to transform into weeds. While some of them clearly grow in the pursuits worth continuing and others die off quickly, many instead exist in a shadowy in-between state where they demand our time but offer little promise of reward in the end. Pretty poetic back then,

3:06Jesse, that was me writing as a 20-something grad student. So why do we do this, right? Why do we plant too many seeds? Well, there's obvious psychological reasons that I emphasized in that article from 2007. For example, we don't like to say no to other people, so it's easy just to take on things. But second, when you start a new project or initiative or task, there's a little hit of pleasure. Why is that? It's because your neocortex is actually simulating your completion of that task

3:38and the rewards that would come along with it. So your brain is literally simulating the good stuff that would come from completing this project. This is actually, if you look at how the brain works, this is actually what gives you the motivation in the moment to actually take steps on a project that's not going to give you an immediate reward in the moment. And so the more projects you start, the more you get these sort of pleasurable hits that come from simulating finishing them. So we become conditioned to take on or accept more projects to get those, we can call it the

4:09initiation feel-good hit. So these two psychological components together help lead us to plant way too many seeds in our proverbial project garden. Now that's what I focused on back in 2007 when I wrote about this issue. In the 20 years since, however, I think there's another force that's making this problem even worse. And not surprisingly, it has to do with digital technology. Now I think we don't talk about this aspect of digital technology enough. We talk a lot about how it makes us feel bad,

4:42distraction, how it keeps us from more meaningful things. But there's another aspect of digital technology that I think plays a key role in keeping this issue of doing too many things but never making progress on important things keeps it very relevant. And here it is. Here's the explanation. Digital technology gives us endless possibilities for lightweight actions that feel useful and enjoyable in the moment but ultimately lead to a lot more weeds clogging up our project garden.

5:14Let me give some examples of what I mean by these lightweight activities. Maybe you're an entrepreneur, for example, who's spending a lot of time endlessly tweaking vibe-coded apps even though those apps already exist in much more stable forms out there and there's a thousand versions of them. In the moment, it feels productive to be going back and forth with cloud code and trying to add new features to your unstable app. Or maybe you're a creative who's obsessing over every detail of your social media presence because fiddling with these optimizations feels more fun in the moment than actually trying to do the hard work of producing

5:48better art. Or you're an activist who's obsessively arguing on X or Blue Sky because it provides a simulacrum of political engagement even though in reality it's just you and 20 other semi-deranged people generating ad revenue for Elon Musk. Or you're an aspiring thinker and you're having long, low-friction, ego-boosting discussions with chatbots because they're helping you feel like you're brilliant and avoiding the hard work of actually having to get real feedback from real people. Or you're an aspiring executive who exists in a whirlwind of email conversations

6:19and slack chants because you always have something to say, you always feel like you're in the mix, but none of it is actually leading to accomplishments that move the needle. These are all examples where modern digital technologies, most of which did not exist when I first wrote this article, have really driven us to be busier and as an effect, as a side effect, actually accomplish less meaningful things. All right, so this is our problem. Our garden is clogged with too many initiatives for us to finish important things and we have both psychological and technological reasons

The Einstein Principle

6:54for why this is true. All right, this brings us to the next stop in our exploration here. I actually talked about in my original 2007 essay a story about Einstein and a particular productive period which is going to become the foundation for my solution to the problem of not finishing enough accomplished things. So let's pull up this article here. I'm going to read you this brief story from the article. Between the years 1912 and 1915, Albert Einstein was a focused man.

7:28His previous work on the special theory of relativity and the quantitization of light, among other topics, was starting to gain notice. Einstein left the Swiss patent office and after hopping from professorships in Germany and Prague, ended up in 1912 at Switzerland's ETH Institute. Once there, he met mathematician Marcel Grossman and became convinced that if he applied the new non-Euclidean math study by Grossman to his own work on relativity, he could generalize the theory to account for gravity. This advance would be huge, nothing short of overturning the single

7:59most famous law in the history of science. Einstein set to work. Between 1912 and 1915, he became increasingly obsessed in his push to formalize general relativity. As revealed by several sources, including his recently released letters, he worked so hard that his marriage became strained and his hair turned white from distress, but he got it done. In 1915, he published his full theory. It stands as one of the greatest scientific accomplishments, if not the single greatest, of the 20th century. All right. So what lesson can we take away? Was I trying to take away from Einstein's story there?

8:32Well, here's what I wrote. Einstein's push for general relativity highlights an important reality about accomplishment. We are most productive when we focus on a very small number of projects on which we can devote a large amount of attention. I call this the Einstein Principle. And to summarize it, it says meaningful accomplishment means you need to focus relentlessly on only a small number of things and obsess over those things that you're focused on. Real accomplishment, in other words, requires real constraints. All right. So we have the problem. We're doing too many things for

9:08psychological and technological reasons. We have the solution at the big picture. If you can focus relentlessly on a small number of things, you're going to accomplish them. This is what actually leads to accomplishments that matter. So we have to clear out that guardian. But how do we do this? Einstein in the 1910s was a professor who was able to say, I'm just going to ignore everything in my life and just do this until my hair turns gray. But what about the rest of us that are students and parents or have jobs and other types of obligations? How do we get more focus on what

9:39we're working on so that we can actually get things done without having to be as monomaniacally focused as someone like Einstein? All right. That's what we're going to get to next. But before we get to this third part of this discussion, we have to take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. I think too much of the talk about AI these days is focused on abstract benchmark scores or attention catching stunts like winning a gold medal at an international math competition. But you know what?

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11:23context switching that we become used to in the computer age. No new tabs, no switching apps. You get what you need without losing where you are. So if you want to find out more about Superhuman Go, visit superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com for more information. All right, here's something I've learned running my media company. One of our most valuable assets is our knowledge about the best way to execute all the different things we do internally here. If we lose a key person, we lose their

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The productivity purge

13:29All right, let's move on now and get practical. In my original 2007 article, I introduced a method for simulating Einstein's focus in your own life, and I called it the productivity purge. Now, here's what I'm going to do here. I'm going to read through the steps of the productivity purge exactly as I described them back in 2007, so 19 years ago. Keep in mind, I will later return to these steps and fix

14:01some things that I no longer think are relevant. So we're going to do the 2007 version of the productivity purge here. Later, I'm going to update this to a 2026 version. So you might want to play along at home and try to guess, as you hear the 2007 method, where you think I might make some changes to update this for today. For those who are watching as well, I will follow through. I'm going to follow through these steps with an example that I will have up on the screen as I explain them to try to make it more concrete. And we'll also do a detailed case study that I wrote back when I was

14:32in my 20s about applying this method as well. So we're going to try to make this real concrete. All right, so let's start with our 2027 method. Here's the first step. I'm going to read this from my article. When it feels like your schedule is becoming too overwhelmed, take out a sheet of paper and label it with three columns, professional, extracurricular, and personal. Under professional, list all the major projects you are currently working on in your professional life. Under extracurricular, do the same for your side projects. And under personal, do the same for your personal improvement projects. So we have a sample table like this. We'll put it on the screen here

15:04where under professional, I have, these are all, by the way, examples that would have made sense back when I was in my 20s writing this article. So under professional, we have things like finish journal version of network simulation paper, develop multi-channel jamming idea in the paper, finish conference sub-reviews. These are the type of things I would have been working on as a grad student. Extracurricular has things like learn guitar, finish book proposal. Personal has things like update wardrobe and get in better shape, right? So we made these three columns and we put all the stuff in

15:35them that we're currently working on. All right. Step two of the productivity purge. Under each list, try to select one or two projects which at this point in your life are the most important and seem like they would yield the greatest returns. Put a star next to these items. All right. So let's do this on our sample here. Under the professional, I'm going to put a star under develop multi-channel jamming idea in the paper. I'm going to put a star next to finish book proposal under extracurricular and I'll

16:10put a star next to get in better shape under the personal column. All right. So simulating 20, whatever, 20 something me back in 2007, this might've been, you know, I might've said, oh, professionally that paper is the most important thing for me to work on. Uh, I need to get my new book proposal out and like, uh, if I'm in bad shape, everything else falls apart. So I really want to make that a priority. All right. Step three of the productivity purge. Next, identify the projects that you could stop working on right away with no serious consequences. Cross those out. All

16:44right. So let's go back to my sample list here. Um, maybe I'm going to cross out the develop weakest CD to solve consensus idea into a paper. Um, I'm going to cross off learn guitar and extracurricular. Like I want to do it, but nothing bad would happen if I put that off for now. Um, and maybe I'm going to put off increased reading to one book per week. It's have enough work going on. Like I don't need that product in my life right now. If you're wondering, by the way, when I say develop weakest CD to solve consensus idea in the paper, and you're wondering, is this something about compact disc? I will just give you a little bit of Cal Newport background. This is

17:18actually a white whale paper of mine. Uh, it was the weakest collision detector to solve consensus. Uh, it was based off of a sort of famous paper, um, by Chandra Hazulakis and two egg called the weakest failure detector to solve consensus. And I really worked on this for a while, but the results just weren't that interesting. Um, so I actually, that's a real good example of something that at some point I did really take off my list. All right. Enough of that nerding step four of the productivity purge. Finally, for projects that are left unmarked,

17:50come up with a one to three week plan for finalizing and dispatching them. Many of these projects for which you owe something, uh, before you can stop working, many of these will be products for which you owe something before you can stop working on them. Come up with a crunch plan for the near future for shutting these down as quickly as possible. Like, so if we go back here and look at this, um, so maybe, okay, I have this journal version of a network simulation paper. It's like, that's due. I'm going to come with a plan to just like really crunch on that and get this done. These conference sub reviews are due. I need a plan to get that done. So maybe all I'm

18:23doing all day, multi hours a day, I'm working on, you know, editing my journal paper and finishing these conference sub reviews so I can get them off my plate. Um, improve blog to attract audience over an extracurricular. I might've had a couple ideas here and like it type ideas. Like let's just get those done. Talk to my web developer, update some things, get those done so we can take it off my plate. And then maybe over in personal update wardrobe, like that needs to get done because maybe I was giving more talks back then, which I was and it mattered. And it's like, look, that's a day. Go to just put aside afternoon, get that done. Right? So you're trying to come with a crunch

18:57plan one to three weeks to take off these things. You can't just stop right away. All right. Now, what are you left with? Now you're left with your star projects. And this brings us to step five of the productivity purge. Once you complete your crunch plan, you'll be left with only a small number of important projects. In essence, you have purged your schedule of all, but a few contenders to be your next theory of relativity. Here's the important part. Try to go at least one month without have, uh, without starting any new projects or resist at all costs committing to anything during

19:27this month. Instead, just focus with an Einsteinian intensity on your select list. So if we bring this table back up one more time, this means I would try a month just working on this one paper idea, multi-channel jamming, um, trying to work on my book proposal and, uh, exercise routine to balance it out and just focusing on those things to make that paper as good as possible, that book proposal as good as possible, get in better shape. If other things come up, no, I'm obsessing over these things that push them through to completion, which is what matters in completion at a high

20:01level. Jesse, that multi-channel jamming idea, that was also a long series of papers I, I wrote starting around that period. Um, uh, so all of this is actually, I was going back on memory lane that the network simulation paper, I actually was, this was work for my undergrad that I had to sort of clean up when I became a grad student, conference sub reviews were constant. So these are, these are vintage tasks from, uh, circa 2007 Cal Newport, MIT grad students life. So it was nice

20:32to go back there, um, and remember those things. All right. So that's the productivity purge. So again, just at a very high level, you create columns for the different aspects of your life. You write down everything you're working on or want to work on in those areas of your life. You star in each column, one thing that's, you want to really make a focus, make your general theory of relativity, something you're going to really push on to do well. You just take off the list, everything you can, you dispatch everything else aggressively in a couple of weeks, and then spend a good month to six weeks, just working on your star projects to see what it's like to be

21:02obsessed and focused on just a small number of projects. Things actually get done when you do it this way. Like what this is optimizing is not starting. This is what this is optimizing is not the total quantity of things you're working on. This type of approach optimizes the number of things you finish. And that ultimately is what mattered. Finish things have much more impact than things that are

A 2007 case study

21:26just started. All right. So I want to make this a little bit, um, more concrete. Uh, I wrote in the article, uh, I gave a case study. So back in 2007, I gave a case study that was labeled my most recent purge. And I actually walked through me doing a productivity purge on my life at the time. So just to make this more concrete, let's talk about it. Um, okay. So I, first of all, I say, uh, I've been

21:58looking for forward for a long time for a focus month spending mid-October to Thanksgiving during which the Einstein principle can be, uh, in full effect. Here's how the purge is taking shape. So I'm describing me actually doing a productivity purge back in the fall of 2007. All right. In my professional life, I'm clearing some lingering research projects off my plate. This includes among other things, finishing some revisions on papers on their submission and finalizing some proofs for some close to being finished new work. My crunch plan has me pushing to finish this

22:31linger, this linger, lingerers, these lingerers with rabid intensity. I didn't have a copy editor back then, Jesse. My focus for this upcoming period is on two research projects. Oh, I chose two instead of one that I think hold great promise. I look forward to spending 90% of my academic time racking my brain on these pursuits, which I think will shape the direction of my first year or two after graduation. Bring it on. All right. In the extracurricular column, I'm finishing up the final articles in a long series of those I owe to various editors through various pitches conducted over the summer.

23:03I should clarify, Jesse, those were non-computer science articles, which I would treat as extracurricular back then. With the slate cleared, I can spend my focus period on exactly two things. The first, producing quality user-tested content for this blog. The second, finally completing the preliminary research for my second book idea. I need to either officially abandon it or get my agent's blessing and start to work on the proposal. I don't know what I mean there, Jesse, because by 2006, I'd already published two books, so I must have meant my third book. That's when I was

23:38working on my third book idea. All right. Finally, in my personal life, I'm turning my focus back to some lifestyle improvement issues that have fallen fellow recently. It's time to throw out clothing I bought before college. Oh, come on. What's wrong with that? I'm also planning to push into overdrive the variety of interesting things I do each week. I have a long list of products I'd love to tackle, but they can wait. All right. So there we go. That was a productivity purge that I was actually doing around the time I wrote that article back in 2007. So choose your focuses,

24:15purge the stuff you have to do but is in the way, stop, pause, throw out everything else, and say, I'm going to spend this month, or I said there, like October through Thanksgiving, only working on the star projects to see what happens. All right. This brings us to our next

Reader reactions from 2007

24:32part. Before I get to how I would update this advice for 2026, I went back and actually looked, what did my 2007 readers think about this advice? So what was the mood in 2007 around these issues and this type of solution? So I have one, two, three, four. I got five quick comments I'm going to read you here that actually were sent to me by readers in response to this particular article. Michael said, in purging projects, I'd also see where two projects could perhaps be merged or the

25:03work effort on them strategically combined. For example, I'm trying to get a project started at my workplace that could serve as the seed of my master's project. That was a really good addition. Sometimes that is what you're doing is you're taking a few things on your list and combining them into one starred project. Is there a way I could have one project that serves several of the purposes right now being served by multiple different projects? It's a good way to focus your attention. A reader named Asama, hard name to have back in the early 2000s, but a reader named Asama wrote in

25:34and said, focusing on major goals in life instead of being distracted in many tasks and projects would certainly get us more productive. So this resonated with him. Gahondra said, very nice thoughts. I will apply on myself before reading. I don't know how many projects I am working. When I list out, there were more than 25, but when I crossed them, it left three only. So it will definitely help me and all who apply. So look at that. See, you don't realize sometimes how many weeds there are clogging

26:06your project garden. He didn't realize there's 25 different projects that he had committed to in his mind and was sort of making half-hearted progress, trying to make half-hearted progress on. Einstein's not going to solve the theory of relativity if it was one of 25 papers he was working on. Focus, focus, focus. All right. Tesla wrote in and said, this is seriously hard. I must have 30 plus personal extracurricular goals. I'm only 18. No wonder I'm such a live wire. So many lead connect with one another. Of course, I know that if I can get down to four, life will be much easier.

26:39Therefore, I'm keeping a masterprojects.txt file to ease the leaving of these projects. It won't feel so permanent and like I'm giving up. It's just that I'll do them later. 30 projects, not even including professional. We don't realize how much we add to our plate because we like how it feels in the moment or technology makes us busy in ways that's not really that productive. We just feel it when we're focusing on a small number of things. It's completely different. Keep that idea of a list of projects that you might work on one day as a way of getting some psychological sucre for reducing

27:12your list. Keep that idea in mind. That's going to show up in my updates that I'm about to give you. But one last comment from a reader. Vijay says, this is one of the best advice I've ever read on productivity. Even though I was thinking to focus on one thing, I don't know how to do that by closing others. I didn't know how to do that by closing other small projects. I got the idea in the definite plan and thank you for this. All right. So we can see that even back then, even back in 2007, we felt like we were doing too much. And the idea of just taking on one or two

27:43things was really appealing to people once they actually had it. And people weren't, they weren't clear. I guess one of the innovations here is like people weren't clear about how other things you're working on can prevent the things you care about. If you clog too many plants in your garden, it blocks the light and nothing can grow. Now, I think that this time is not surprising. If you look at like Leslie Perlau's research, or if you look at Sophie Leroy's research or others, you really see this like late nineties into two thousands was this period where the technological distractions really picked up and where this front office IT revolution really led

28:17people to feel like they were way busier than before and probably made it harder. It changed us from an era in knowledge work where previously it might be, here's my project I'm working on. And I have a meeting on Friday with the managers to tell me my progress to I'm jumping back and forth between 10 projects and sending emails about all of them all the time. So I think this was, this article was written as this wave of busyness and the corresponding frustrations were just beginning to rise up out of

Four updates for 2026

28:44the ocean floor here. All right. This brings us to our final part of the discussion. What would I update today about this advice, right? The Einstein principle is solid. I still agree with it. Relentlessly focusing on a small number of things. So you finish is the way to do successful things, to accomplish things that matter and accomplish things that matter. It makes all this big difference, but there are four updates I would add to the productivity purge strategy that I just described that try to make it work better in 2026. All right. So I got four updates here.

29:18So update number one, I think the columns, professional, extracurricular, and personal was way too specific to my idiosyncratic situation in 2007 when I happened to be a grad student who was also running the second job of writing books, right? So extracurricular was just code for second job, which actually for most people kind of defeats the idea of focus on smaller things. And it's not generally, if you're not a student or a student who has a second job,

29:49I don't think that's very generally applicable. It was also missing other areas of life that you'd want to focus on that might be really important to you that might not have occurred to my 20-something brain. But now in mid-age, I'm like, wait, you got to have that on here. So if I wanted to keep this list at three, I would probably make it professional, community, and personal. So all of your work stuff is under professional. Community is about serving the people in your life that you care about. And personal is about the non-professional things that you are doing

30:22individually. All right. Update number two, I think the idea of starring projects to focus on for one the three months, that's good, right? Okay. I want a small number of projects that are getting most of my attention. I think purging projects that aren't really vital is also good, right? We heard from those readers that have 20, 30 different things going on. You probably just need to get rid of most of those instead of trying to get them all done. I also like the idea of for the things that you have to get done because you owe someone something, having a purge or crunch plan to get those

30:56off your plate. Like, I'm going to focus on clearing my plates for a couple of weeks before spending a month on doing new stuff. That's good as well. But I would add something in addition to this, autopilot scheduling. Because what's going to happen, I had this less back then as a grad student, but what's going to happen for a lot of people is that some of the things on these lists are not one-time projects that are done when they're done. A big part of your time or distractions might be things that are ongoing. I always have to be prepping and delivering lectures as a professor.

31:28I am responsible for the marketing reports for our clients that gets produced each week. There are certain things we do that are not a project you can cross off or crunch, but are ongoing efforts. We don't want the ongoing efforts to get in the way of your star projects. So you should add, I would add to my plan, an autopilot scheduling plan for each of these ongoing efforts. This is when, where, and how I always do this work each week so that it's contained. And you can say the non-autopilot

32:01time, I'm now trying to focus on the stars. So I do think we need autopilot scheduling for ongoing efforts within those columns. All right, update number three, and this goes back to Tessa's suggestion, we need some notion of pending projects. So these are projects that you think are really important and don't want to forget, but you can't be working on all at once. To just cross them off, your brain's going to say, but I don't want to cross them off. I actually do want to do this. It's not the thing I need to do next, but this is important. Or if you're in the

32:35middle of your month-long focus on your star projects and a new idea comes up, you're like, oh, this is important. I'm not going to do it right now, but I don't want to forget it. You need a place to store things that you want to one day do, even if you're not working on it now. And that requires adding a pending category under each of these columns. Now don't overuse this. Don't just put everything in pending. It should only earn its way to pending if you're like, I really do want to make this a star project in the future. And when you're doing your purge in the

33:07future, look at that pending list and purge off there as well, because something that seemed really critical six months ago might not seem so critical anymore. So you can purge off that as well. But I think we have to have a pending list in there. All right. My final update I think was missing from the productivity purge discussion was I didn't get into having a specific ritual for when you check in and update these plans. And I don't have a specific practice for how you integrate this plan into your

33:40daily life to make sure that you're actually following it. So I think you need those two things. You know, a student, you might check in on the plan at the beginning of every semester. If you're in business, maybe at the start of every quarter or every season. But you need a time to do the productivity purge. You also need a way on a much more smaller timescale of checking in on this plan to see what should I be doing right now? How do I put it into action? That's probably at the weekly scale. Each week, I want to make sure that I have a lot of time put aside for obsessing over my starred project. So we need that ritual and practice piece to how do we actually integrate

34:14this into the rhythms of your planning and execution on all sorts of different scales. Now, I will say, I'm in the process right now of copy editing my new book, which is called The Deep Life, A Structured Approach. It comes out in March. When I was looking at the plan in that book, because the whole point of that book is to take a really lofty aspirational idea like having a deep life and then combine it with lifestyle algorithms, like a very linear technical approach to how does one actually make changes in your life. And I have a very concrete system in that book.

34:48I'm realizing it's a sort of an elaborated, polished version of the updated version of the Productivity Purge I just gave there. So stay tuned for that book because a lot of these ideas made their way into my lifestyle-centric planning method that I talk about in that new book. So these ideas must have been percolating in the back of my mind as I was working on the Deep Life book over the last few years. So that connection is pretty cool to see. All right. So there we go. That was my 2007 article. Jesse, I used to write three of those articles a week.

35:21Yeah, you said that before. Yeah, that's how I got started. It was three of those articles a week. There was no podcasting back then of any note. It was all about blogs. And I would do Monday masterclass, which would be something like this. And then maybe I'd have a Q&A or a profile. For a while, I had text-based reality shows. It was called College Chronicles was one of them. And I was actually following real college students as I was giving them advice for how they were going to update their study habits and their

35:51life habits or whatever. I really was trying to do a lot of different things with that medium back then. So yeah, I wrote a lot of blog posts as a grad student. But anyways, there we go. That's the productivity purge and the Einstein principle. All right. So now we've just covered a question

Listener inbox: Cell phones and kids

36:08that I chose. It's time to open up the show's inbox to see what questions or comments you have to add. But first, before we open the inbox, we need to take another quick break to hear from some of the other sponsors to make this show possible. But we've got some great messages coming up, including one about AI and jobs that might push me into the rant territory. So you got to stay tuned for those and we'll be right back. Do you want to get in better shape but struggle to follow through? Here's my solution.

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37:10corner who can help you adjust your plan to whatever life throws your way or notice where you're struggling and offer you timely help. So if you want to get healthier, you need to go to My Body Tutor today. And if you do, mention that I sent you and they will give you $50 off your first month. That's MyBodyTutor.com. You know, people often talk about the holiday season as what knocks them out of their healthy eating routines. But you know what does it for me? Summer travel. All of those roadside

37:42lunches and restaurant dinners make it hard for me to consistently stay healthy. Now that we're in August, I want to start reclaiming my nutrition. And let me tell you what my secret weapon will be. Factor. Factor makes chef, chef crafted, dietician design, ready to eat meals that you feel good about eating. Every week, you'll find over 100 nutrient dense menu items to choose from, and new options like salmon burger, shredded pork, collard greens, and more. And with over 175 banned ingredients,

38:13you can trust that factor meals are offering your body what it needs and not junk. Now the key thing is that these meals are easy to make. Most are ready in just two minutes and require no prep or cleanup. So even on days when my schedule is completely out of control, I know eating well is still achievable. It's no wonder that 97% of users agree that factor meals help them live a healthier life. Now let's talk about how I use factor. I use it to automate lunch. This is the meal that we often have the least time and energy to think about. So simplifying these decisions to just grabbing a

38:47factor meal, it'll be ready in two minutes, that'll taste good and be good for you makes it easier to stay healthy. All right, so let's eat real head to factor meals.com slash deep 50 off and use the code deep 50 off. That's the word deep, the number 50, the word off to get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year while supplies last until October 31st, 2026. That's code deep 50 off at factor meals.com deep 50 off at factor meals.com see website for more details. All right, let's get

39:22back to it. All right, so let's get our inbox opened here. Remember, if you have a question for the show, or you want to share a reaction or something you think I'll find interesting, send it to podcast at calnewport.com. All right, Jesse, what's our first question? Our first note is about a new study out of UCLA. Well, you know, I like studies. Let's see. This is from Willa. She says, my colleagues at UCLA have released a study showing that elementary age children who own cell phones have poor reading comprehension scores than those who don't. Whether or not the child brings the phone

39:56to school and the age at which they received the phone doesn't seem to matter. Simply having a phone correlates to lower scores. We'll probably have to check this out, Jesse. By the way, let me ask you a question about this. This just came up. I'm copy editing my deep life book. And the copy editor, and I'm sure they're right, but this was a surprise to me, they noted I was talking about a kid in the first chapter of the book. And at one place I described her as kindergarten age. And in another

40:28place I described her as elementary school age. The copy editor's like, well, this is confusing. Which is it? I always thought that kindergarten is the first year of elementary school. But maybe in the sense the copy editor was giving was like, no, no, no. Elementary school's first grade and on kindergarten is its own thing. I think he's right. That's how you would think about it? Or she's right. Yeah, she. You misogynist. I never knew that, but now I do. It was actually confusing because the chapter started, when the chapter started, it was talking about while the student

41:03was in kindergarten. And then when, as the chapter continues, and I refer to her as elementary school age, it was in the summer after she had graduated. By the way, our solution is I just killed one of the descriptors. So we just don't use both. All right. So let's look at the study here. I'll bring up on the screen. I'm going to look at a press release instead of the real study for now. We'll get into the study later, but just to see what's going on here. The headline of this press release, kids who own cell phones have poorer reading comprehension scores than those who don't. Let's just look at the key takeaways so we know what we're dealing with here. The widespread concern about the effect of

41:37cell phones on reading comprehension in elementary school children has led to surprising little experimental research. New research by UCLA psychologists found a statistically significant relationship between owning a cell phone and lower reading scores. So you have to have like the alarm bells. Children who owned cell phones had poorer reading comprehension than those who did not. In fact, simply owning a phone correlated with worse reading comprehension, whether or not the phone was brought to school. I'm not surprised. I mean, I think there's a lot of mechanisms that could explain this. One, if you're a kid with a cell phone, you're going to look at that thing until

42:09your eyes bleed. And guess what you're not doing during that time? Reading. And if you're not reading, you're not forming those reading networks, which means you'll have a hard time comprehending text when you're being tested on reading comprehension later. There is a more controversial arguments that maybe you're actually, even if you are reading, you're sort of undoing some of those benefits with excessive phone use because it uses your brain in a different way. And it's sort of making competing circuits with the circuits you would be growing with reading.

42:39Long story short, you know, kids shouldn't have cell phones. They shouldn't have smartphones. Just they shouldn't have smartphones. Find another way. If you need to, they need to call you from school, find another way. You're super anxious. There's going to be some sort of disaster at your school and you need to know where they are. Get some Xanax, right? This is a big deal. We are making kids dumber. Their brains, I mean, our brains can't handle algorithmically curated content. A kid's brain, come on, give me a break. So maybe we'll look at that study in more detail

43:10in the future, but it was interesting to see. All right. What else do we have, Jesse?

Deep work in healthcare

43:14Our second message comes from a nurse practitioner in search of deep work. All right. So I made this person's name anonymous because I don't know if she wanted me to identify her or not. I found your book at a local library and I want to say thank you, thank you, thank you. I feel so much less alone in my professional endeavors now. I am a pediatric nurse practitioner and self-proclaimed introvert struggling in the current office culture. My boss recently said I have one speed and that is intense. I'm tired of lowering my expectations in the workplace. I just want to go to work and actually work and connect with my patients and don't

43:48even get me started on AI. I think there's something here about the lack of deep work in healthcare in today's work environments, and this is having a domino effect on the quality of care we deliver to patients and families. I am actively searching for a new position that does not cause me such moral injury. You know, there's a divide that I think this message is pointing out that I've heard about before, which is there seems to be a disconnect between managers, administrators, and other workers, especially in these type of knowledge work-esque contexts. Managers and administrators are much more comfortable in a highly connected,

44:23on-demand, hyperactive, hive mind work style. It makes them feel busy. It makes them feel important. It's very predictable. They have full visibility into what other people who are under them are up to. It's a mode of work that they're comfortable in. It's very sort of extroverted. We can always be moving things around, talking to people, type of exciting way of work. But people who are actually doing, not managing, but doing the value-added work, especially if they're more introverted, say, this is terrible. Not only does it distract me and make my mind muddled and therefore

44:53me dumber, it's exhausting because I don't want to be in fractured conversations all day. I want to do my job. So I think one of the reasons why these things persist is that managers and administrators are the people who would have to drive these changes, and they don't always see this as a problem. So a good point is put out here. I call this like cognitive-aware productivity. It's got to be the future of thinking about knowledge work. We have to take into account the way the human brain functions when we talk about productivity in some sort of office-style environment. It cannot just

45:24be the humans are black boxes, and it's all about tasks in, tasks out. And when we think about how the brain actually functions, these sort of on-demand, extroverted, always-connected type of collaboration strategies, we realize like, oh, this is just about making extroverts and managers feel comfortable, not about producing the best work. All right, what else do we got?

AI and the barbell structure

45:44Next, we have a proposal for how to think about using AI to improve both your work and your life. I get sent a lot of these sort of AI articles, and I thought we should look at a couple of these. People are trying to do good work here. The article we got was from Paxton, who said, I spent several years working on AI startups and recently started my own company. I've been blogging about the future of the techno-analog barbell that combines deep work and in-person connection,

46:16AI agents to automate the shallows, non-burnout low-screen community outside of work. I know you get a lot of inbound, but if you do see these, it'd be great to hear this barbell structure resonates with your own vision. So let's see here. I'll load up this article, and let's go to this barbell that Paxton's talking about. I'll put this up on the screen here. All right, so this is the barbell he's talking about. One end of the barbell is actual productivity, where it says more creativity, deeper work, purposeful conversations, meaningful learning. The other end is labeled richer life,

46:49and it says less time small screen maxing. So what that means is spend less time on small screens. It's kind of a confusing way of saying it. And in the middle, the bar in the barbell is labeled automating most shallow work, presumably with AI. All right, so yes, I would say the ends of that barbell do resonate with me. Doing real productive activity, balanced by a lot of focus on a deeper life that's not lived on a screen. Yes, I want those two ends of the barbells. That's

47:22what I'm looking for. Automating most shallow work with AI, is that how we actually support having those two ends of the barbell become the dominant features of our life? There, I'm a little bit less convinced just because of all the work I have spent looking at knowledge work productivity in a digital age. And here's the issue. I think most of the things that are keeping us away from that barbell image, especially the actual productivity and work, are not these sort of like standalone shallow tasks that take up time but could be automated. The issue tends to be coming from two

47:55things. One, we have too much administrative overhead because we're working on too many projects, right? So this is the key insight on my most recent book, Slow Productivity, which is when you're working on a project, it's going to bring with it administrative overhead, right? You have to talk to people in a meeting to answer emails and think about it. That's not actually bad, right? So in isolation, yeah, you need that. If we're working on this project, it's not just me. There has to be a mystery of overhead. I have to talk and coordinate with other people. It can't be automated. It's not

48:28a bad thing we need to get rid of. It just is a built-in feature of working on projects past a certain size. So the real issue becomes doing too many projects. Because if every project brings with it a fixed amount of administrative overhead, it's non-compressible and non-combinable, as I add more projects to my plate, I add more of this administrative overhead to my schedule. And the administrative overhead that follows projects is often out of your control. You can choose, like, I'm going to put this project to the side and come back to it in a couple weeks,

48:59but the emails about it, other people involved in the project setting up meetings about it, that's still going to happen. That's not outside of your control. So as the number of projects that are on your plate that you've actually committed to grow large enough, the amount of your weekly schedule that gets taken up with administrative overhead passes a threshold where it becomes untenable. And now you're spending most of your time servicing projects without enough unbroken focus to actually make real progress outside of, like, early morning or on the weekends. So there, the issue there is not, can we automate something with AI? Or can we add, like, a little bit

49:30of efficiency on the margins of this administrative overhead? Like, well, I can automatically have the transcript of this meeting summarized so that when I send an email to the participants, it takes me less time. That's nice, but it's not solving the major problem that you had that meeting. You had to talk to the people afterwards, and it took time, right? The solution there is explicit workload control so that you have fewer projects that you're working on at once. Therefore, you have less mystery of overhead, more time to execute, things get done faster, productivity goes up. The second issue that really plagues modern knowledge

50:03work is actually collaboration strategies themselves. This hyperactive hive mind strategy that we have, as I detailed in my 2021 book, A World Without Email, which is on-demand, unscheduled communication through email and chat like Slack, is the main way that we sort of all organize. Like, what about this? Did you get this? I'm thinking about this. That's sort of like we're a hive mind that we're all collaborating with. The major source of distraction, because we have to keep context shifting to keep up with these various different conversations, which makes it impossible for our brain to actually go deep on any one thing. Again, the collaboration has to happen,

50:39right? So this is not something to automate with AI. AI cannot automate the conversation I do need to have, because I need input from you to make this happen. I need information from you to make, like, this has to happen. The issue is the strategy. On-demand, unscheduled communication causes the issue. So we need better communication strategies, protocols, office hours, docket clearing meetings. My whole book, A World Without Email, is full of these. So, like, read that book for more.

51:05But to me, those are the two big culprits. And if we see those as the two big culprits, there's not a magic bullet that, like, I can have a startup where I've written a wrapper around some sort of LLM API that also can connect into your Google Calendar API. And I probably vibe-coded it with cloud code anyways. And this is going to deliver you into a productivity nirvana. It's just not going to work. We got these deeper issues of workload management and collaboration strategies, which are management team issues. It's how we run companies. It's the specific processes and protocols we need. So the bad news is there is no startup that's going to give you the left side

51:38of that barbell. The good news is we know how to solve it. We don't even need a fancy new tool. But we do need conviction from actual executives. The other side of that barbell, the richer life, less time on small screens, that's like the other half of all the work I feel like I'm doing these days. That's like my book, Digital Minimalism, is all about how do you get off that small screen. And again, AI has nothing to do with that. That's more about adding more meaning to your life, right? Working on more meaningful activities, high quality leisure, retraining your brain to

52:09not crave that dopamine. We talk about this stuff constantly on the show. So we have solutions for both sides of these good news. They're all hard. I guess that's the bad news. We've got time for one more. What do we got here, Jesse?

AI and white-collar hiring

52:23Jesse. Our final message is from Raphael, who was just one of many people who pointed us to a recent Wall Street Journal article about AI and jobs. Oh, yeah. I got this one a lot. All right. Let me read the message here. Raphael says, Hi, Cal. I thought you might be interested in this recent Wall Street Journal article about how large firms are seeming to realize that AI will not and cannot replace human workers. The headline of this

52:53article was, Big Companies Are Starting to Hire Again, Defying Predictions of AI Wipeout. All right. That sounds interesting. I took out a couple of key quotes here that I'll read to you from the article. All right. Here we go. Major employers largely held back on adding people due to economic uncertainties or a belief that artificial intelligence could shoulder more tasks on the job. But some executives say the cost and limitations of AI now demand that more people are added. Others want to hire people back following layoffs. For much of the past 18 months,

53:26big employers were convinced fewer workers meant faster growth. U.S. public companies shrank their white-collar workforces. Now layoffs are shrinking. The most recent week of U.S. jobless claims was the lowest on record since 1969, according to federal data. Part of the change in hiring also reflects a recalibration among employers about what AI can do, said Sarah Franklin, CEO of the human resources platform Lattice. Many companies stopped hiring entry-level employees, thinking AI agents could pick up the slack. They have since realized that humans are necessary to work alongside AI. All right. I got some thoughts here. I mean, first of all, it's really important to see jobs are doing fine.

54:03Hiring's up. Nothing changed in AI, like to make AI less capable or, oh, the companies went out of business. And yet, despite three months of articles we got in Q1 2026 about no one's hiring, jobs are going away, the AI economic revolution has begun, it's like, oh, no, it's never mind. Actually, hiring went down, hiring's back up again. I think that's really important when you think about the certainty with

54:34which we were seeing reporting on how AI was driving job losses. But we're still suffering from this issue in reporting on AI, which I guess I would just describe as people saying what feels right. I think we're getting a lot of this in the business community. People don't know what they're talking about and they say things they think makes them sound smart. And I'm going to posit this explanation given by whatever consultant in this article of companies stopped hiring because they thought AI

55:08was going to replace all these entry-level workers. And then they got wary of that and they're starting to hire them back. I think that story is made up as well. Here's my alternative story, which I think makes much more sense. Jobs move in cycles. All right. We had a down cycle. Post-pandemic, it was driven by the tech sector, which as many people have talked about in recent months, vastly overhired during the pandemic, especially like cloud-based services were riding high and there's a lot of

55:41ill-fated acquisitions and merging that was happening. Post-pandemic, we're talking 2023 and the 2024, 2024, we have the inevitable correction. You stop hiring new people. You lay off people to try to right-size back to a more reasonable middle ground. Interest rates jump up during the same time as well, which also causes – now we also have to contract, right? Because as interest rates go up, you need even more growth to hit your targets. And so if you can reduce temporarily the expenses of

56:11salary, you're basically adjusting for the interest rates. You can still hit the target on your existing trajectory. That hit companies kind of across the sector. There's a lot of economic uncertainty that was happening with inflation and then with international conflicts around the world. And now some confidence is growing and we're kind of leaving that cycle and hiring is happening again. And it had nothing to do with AI. I just don't believe that companies were like, I don't know how AI is going to replace my entry-level workers. We're not doing it now, but let me just

56:43preemptively start firing them and not hiring them because I'm sure sometime soon that will happen.

56:49The way these type of things happen is you get the new tool. Like, this is doing really well. You're realizing now that you have superfluous workers and now you lay them off because you have the new automation there. That's how automation works. Ford in the 1960s didn't say, hey, I think pretty soon we're going to have robots on the assembly line to automate a lot of these steps. Let's start firing and not, you know, assembly line workers now because, you know, someday soon we're going to get those robots. No, you wait till you have the robots. Oh,

57:23these work really well. Now we can fire these sort of people. So I just think that I don't trust anything that people in business or business consultants or management consultants or executives, when they give these quotes to the newspapers, they're just making it up. And in their mind, they don't know much about AI other than it's the very important thing. So everything's always tied to it. And I think whoever this person is, they're quoting here from this consulting firm probably was someone, if I had to guess, had a megaphone on top of the Chrysler building talking

57:53about all these jobs are going because AI will never come back. And now it's like, oh yeah, that was true. But then everyone changed their mind later. So I was right. And you still need to hire me. So I just really, we got to be, I need a phrase for this probably, but this idea of maybe we'll call it like AI anchoring or AI latching every news cycle, every business cycle, every business story has to be anchored in dramatic tales about AI and its impact. Not everything is being driven by it. We only really have one major sector right now, economic sector in which AI tools are

58:27causing a disruption, which is computer programming. It's the best case scenario for these tools because it's the production of highly structured language that can be verified by people who love complicated tools and are happy to learn them. And even then it's a mess to try to figure out, well, we haven't really figured out in the industry how these tools are going to be integrated into a long-term employment lifecycle. They require, you have to be really good at programming to use these tools, but how do you become good at programming if you use these tools earlier? They're requiring more overhead and fixing

58:57and brain distractions that people are really admitting right now. And that's our best case scenario. And that's it three years in. So we need to stop AI anchoring. Not everything is being caused by AI stories. It just makes sense to you in your mind. And so, you know, not the ramp, but I actually gathered Jesse real headlines, real headlines from this spring, right? So the news is out now. I was like, no, hiring is fine. There was a down cycle. It's up. But here's, these are

59:28headlines from major publications, or I think some of these are from LinkedIn or other types of discussion online. AI is killing entry-level jobs. AI is replacing entry-level jobs faster than expected. Are we ready for a world with no beginner roles? How AI is killing entry-level jobs and what comes next? AI is killing entry-level jobs, but colleges could change that. Everyone was so confident that, of course, this is what happened because the vibe felt right. And then several months later, that's it? Like, oh, never mind. It's not. That was just a cycle and it came up. So we got stop AI

59:58anchoring. Not everything is caused by whatever story about AI that makes sense to you in your mind right now. All right, that's enough AI ranting. We like to end the show by briefly updating you with

July reading list

1:00:12what I am up to. So I promise, because we've been traveling a lot, Jesse's been traveling a lot, so we've been kind of mixing in some classic episodes this summer with real episodes. And it's throwing us off our rhythm of me being able to report each week what books I read. So I promised at some point that I would just summarize the full list of July books all at once because our July episodes were too chopped up and pre-recorded, et cetera, for me to really do that. And so that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go back and I'll give you the complete list. I read six books in

1:00:43July. Two of them, right, Jesse? Two of them we did talk about on the show earlier in July. The other four we didn't. So I will just give you, for transparency's sake, the full list of books I read in July 2026. The first was Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong, which we talked about in an earlier July episode. The second was Lost by Rachel Harrington, which we talked about in an earlier episode. The ones I don't think I mentioned yet, I finally went back and read, because I don't think I'd ever really read the full book before. I read Sapiens by Yuval Harari. This is part, along

1:01:18with the Walter Ong book, this is part of my, I'm in a big research effort now to really understand thinking and the evolution of the human mind. With that in mind, I also read in July A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett, which is, it's like sapiens, but just about the brain. And it talks about the evolution of the brain from the very first single cell organisms up to homo sapiens today. We did a podcast episode that I recorded on vacation a couple weeks ago that talked about one idea about the brain function I got from that book that I then applied to our phones.

1:01:52I also read More Everything Forever by Adam Becker, a fantastic 2025 book about the role of weird futurist philosophies in the rise of Silicon Valley, and in particular, the AI companies and figures like Elon Musk. I have a writing, an article in the works that may be out by the time you see this, I'm not sure, but I have an article in the works that draws heavily from this book and tries to make the case to a broader audience that don't sleep on the fact that a lot of the

1:02:23people at the head of the AI revolution right now are heavily involved in pretty weird futurist cult-like thinking. Finally, I read, I mentioned this book on the show at some point, Jesse, I don't remember anymore, but I read a book called Disneyland and the Rise of Automation by Roland Bethencourt, an academic book about the role of automation technology in the operation of Disneyland rides and how it supposedly, at least Roland's claim, has helped acclimatize or normalize the idea of automation for the American public. I completely geeked out on that book, Jesse. I don't know how many

1:02:57people are going to read it, but I loved it. So those were the six books I read in July. It was hard-firing an image for the Disneyland Rise of Automation. Yeah? Come on. I found it. Well, I found it, but normally when you search a book, there's like a million, but for this one, there was like one little one like of a photo. It's going to be the Let Them Fear. It's going to be the Atomic Habits of 2026. You've heard it here first. Surprise breakout. I found it actually randomly at Politics and Prose. They had a bunch of copies face out and I was like, yes, I'll buy that.

1:03:27You should tell the Acquired people about it so they can add it to episode two. Oh, they haven't put that out yet. No. They haven't put it out for an episode all July. I think the automation technology in Disneyland might be more detail even for, too much detail even for Acquired. Not for me, however. I got a 17-part podcast series in the work. The use of relays and programmable logic controllers in Disneyland rides. So stay tuned for that. We are going to get detailed. All right. That's all the time we have for today. Again,

1:04:01in the summer, these Thursday AI Reality Check episodes are off and on. So there probably won't be one the week this comes out. But as the summer winds down, those will become more constant. But these Monday episodes, advice episodes, of course, will always maintain. So at the very least, we'll see you next Monday. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you've 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

1:04:33Monday. You can sign up at calnewport.com slash ideas. And when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today, calnewport.com slash ideas. And when you're in the first place, you'll be ready to join me. So you'll be ready to join me. So I'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.