Cal Newport

I don't want to feel busy thinking that's the goal versus I'm making time for things that are important to me.

And it seems like one of the big ideas from your book is that it's more the positive things you do.

If you're actually able to make regular time for things that are important, your sense of your life will be more expansive.

And that's different than saying I need massive amounts of free time.

Otherwise, I'm going to feel busy and can't do anything.

I think it's so interesting.

So you're saying when your time is getting eaten up by like low quality sort of default type distractions, you don't really register it in your memory.

So then when you look back, like, oh, I had no free time because you don't remember, oh, I spent 30 minutes going down a Twitter rabbit hole or watching random YouTubes.

You just were like, oh, I just worked all day and I was busy and took the kids around and then it was evening.

So what you do with your time matters, right?

Or how you think about what actually happened in it.

So I want to get into this a little bit more.

You have this idea of being a ringmaster of your own life as a psychological shift you make in how you think about your time.

So just at the high level first, what do you mean by this concept of seeing yourself as being a ringmaster of your life?

Well, I want to get into these pieces.

The first I want to say, I don't know, I think putting the lions in the ring with the clowns.

It could be interesting.

I just want to say, I don't want to tell the Ringling brothers how to run their circuses, but they probably would get even more attendance.

I want to get into those points you talked about, but just to hit on the conceptual point about this ringmaster approach, make that differentiation for me between chaos and complexity, because the words sound similar, but their effects are very different.

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