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Chapter 1: What strategies can help me press pause in my busy life?
I'm not recording this from my normal studio in Washington, D.C. I'm actually in Asheville, North Carolina. I'm staying here in a mountain lodge where F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly wrote part of The Great Gatsby. Now, for those who are interested, here's what it looks like.
I'm here to finish edits on my next book and to visit with some writer friends to help figure out our future in the publishing industry. Now, there's a name for this strategy. I pressed pause on the busyness of my normal life to find space to think deeply about what comes next. I actually do this on a regular basis. It's something that has been immensely important in my life.
So here's the key questions you might be asking.
Chapter 2: How can a morning coffee shop loop create a mini-pause?
Is this something that you should be thinking about doing?
Chapter 3: What does scheduling a 'doctor's appointment' mean for taking a break?
And if so, how is it possible to press pause if you don't actually have the ability at the moment to just drop everything and escape to the mountains?
Chapter 4: How can a 24-hour escape benefit my mental state?
Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which makes this the perfect opportunity to go seek some answers.
Chapter 5: What are the advantages of flying to a new location for a break?
So here's the plan. I'll argue why pressing pause has become so necessary in our current moment of digital distraction. Then I'll explore some ideas for how to achieve the benefits of this general strategy, even if you're not able to go on an epic trip.
So if you feel like you're stuck, always busy, always distracted, but not really making progress towards a deeper life, then this episode is for you. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.
Chapter 6: What should I consider for my upcoming sabbatical?
All right, so I'm recording this in the evening. Let me tell you what I did today up in Asheville. I woke up early.
Chapter 7: How does the 'think' component of read-think-write enhance understanding?
The entire mountaintop at the lodge where I was staying was shrouded in fog. So I brewed some coffee and I went for a walk to do some thinking. There's a nice little footpath at my resort that winds up on a nearby hillside. I then did some work on my book in a, I don't know how else to explain this. It's like a rock-hued atrium. overlooking the mountainside with an artificial waterfall falling.
So it's an interesting place to get something done.
Chapter 8: What types of books should I read before bed for better sleep?
After that, I met up with some of my writer friends at a local gym. where a trainer that some of us know, shout out to Zach of Strength Ratio, put us through a workout that I'll be honest with you, still has left me sore. Don't even talk to me about pendulum squats. It's too soon for me to go there again.
Then we relocated as a group to an office to brainstorm and chat about what's going on in our careers, the things that worry us about publishing, our plans for continuing to thrive in this industry. In some sense, let's step back, in some sense,
This day was remarkably unproductive in the sense that I didn't actually finish a lot of work or answer a lot of messages or otherwise, as they say, get after it. But in another sense, today was remarkably productive. I've had a demanding semester and it really wore me down. I was wearing a lot of hats. I was really busy. I felt stuck on a lot of the bigger things I cared about.
This trip is helping me get unstuck. The three days I spend down here will yield benefits to for many months to follow. These are the types of rewards you get from pressing pause. The big issue here, of course, is that most people don't have the ability, as we said, to simply drop everything and step away from their jobs and their responsibilities to regroup.
So to figure out if it's possible, this is our challenge here, to figure out if it's possible for you to achieve most of the benefits of pressing pause without major disruptions in your life, We should start by trying to identify more precisely exactly what it is we're trying to achieve.
And then we can step back and say, what are some alternative ways, some alternative strategies for getting the same benefits? All right. I got three benefits of pressing pause that I want to identify here. Number one. Your brain struggles to think when it must be constantly context shifting, right?
So when you are in a busy normal day, you constantly have to shift your cognitive context from one target to another because we're busy, especially in the age of digital. There's text messages, there's emails, there's Slack messages, there's social media. there's news streams, there's podcasts. All of this is pulling out our attention all the time. We're jumping back and forth.
A brain that is constantly switching its context has a hard time thinking well. There's terminology I use in my books where I say context shifting leads to reduced cognitive capacity. It's a way of saying when your mind is busy, it gets dumber. When you press pause and you get away from this busyness, You, in a quite literal sense, get smarter.
Your IQ goes up because you are not reducing your cognitive capacity with all that context shifting. All right. The second specific benefit from pressing pause. New physical context can support new ideas and insights. When you're surrounded by the familiar... your brain is firing familiar circuits. When you're in a novel situation, other parts of your brains turn on.
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