Dr. Cal Newport

I want to learn how to do this.

It is pretty isolating.

Yeah, so not everyone.

I mean, they don't all have to be as intense as you and I were, but caring about your brain, it gives you a lot of options.

Yeah.

Well, I mean I think burnout in – if we're thinking knowledge work, like people with office jobs.

My diagnosis there, it's not exactly quantity of work that does play a role.

It's the kind of work because I think what's happening, what's been deranging actually for people in these jobs is –

Workloads are getting larger, right, in part because communication is low friction and we always want to be demonstrating activity because of pseudo productivity and people are always asking us to do things and we say yes.

Everything we say yes to brings with it administrative overhead, which is talking about the thing but not actually doing it.

So it's like emails about the commitment.

It's meetings about the commitment.

Because our workloads are larger, what happens then is more and more of our time has to service this administrative overhead because everything we say yes to brings with it its own overhead.

It adds up.

It aggregates, right?

So now more and more of our day is spent talking about work.

and not actually doing the work.

And to make it even worse, it's not like this overhead is all batched together.

It's sort of spread out throughout your day.

So it's also putting you in that state of constant distraction, which makes it hard to do work.