Cal Newport

Maybe you like doing high-intensity weight training.

You would add up your points and try to get to 30 in a week.

And it would take a non-trivial.

You really had to be putting aside time and training in order to hit the 30 points.

So that was a good way of conveying it takes a lot of exercise to get as much as you need.

I think we could use, here's my idea, we could use an equivalent point system for cognitive fitness.

That we could have a collection of assignments of points to different types of cognitive fitness activities and then following Cooper's model, say your goal is to get 30 points a week.

as a way to get you past just doing some basic activities and actually doing a lot of the stuff you need.

Now, I came up with a sample point system.

I'll read a few of these ideas off here.

Maybe you get one point for 20 pages of easy reading, two for 20 pages of moderately complex, and three for 20 pages, just say pages, not minutes, of hard reading.

Maybe two points for a 30-minute thinking walk, two points for 15 minutes of deliberate practice, five points for 20 minutes of writing.

five points for 20 minutes of programming, no AI, maybe do three points for 30 minutes of being immersed in a craft-based hobby, and so on, right?

So we can imagine a system like that.

So if we use the sample system I just talked about, here is an example of a collection of activities that would get you to 30 points in a week.

Reading 100 pages of a moderately complex book, which gets you 10 points, taking a 30, I think I'm thinking here, two different 30-minute thinking walks,

I have to have six points.

An hour total of deliberate practice on guitar, eight points.

And an hour spent working in the garden, six points.

I might not have got that exactly right, but something like that adds up to something like 30 points on my scale, right?