Combating the Whirlwind with a Single Sheet of Paper

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport addresses the modern experience of feeling 'flat' and overwhelmed by relentless digital overload, which he terms the 'whirlwind.' He introduces a short-term

Key takeaways

• Newport coined the term 'whirlwind' to describe how relentless digital intrusions suppress future thinking, gratitude, and presence, leading to emotional flatness.
• The short-term fix is a one-page 'two plus five plan': two daily non-urgent practices and five optional projects/tasks to maintain psychological autonomy during overload.

Main topics

• Digital overload and the whirlwind effect
• The two plus five plan for mind management

Notable quotes

"When that is gone, your world flattens."

Conclusion

Listeners gain a practical psychological framework to maintain depth a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) If I'm being honest, the month of September wasn't that easy for me. I was overwhelmed with those sort of schedule-busting, time-sensitive obligations that can really make it feel almost like you're drowning. The way I actually described how I felt last month was flat. Like I was very busy but not actually getting anywhere. Like I was existing more than I was living. Now, this is what I want to talk about today, because actually, I think that that feeling, that experience I had last month is one that more and more people are having, and technology is actually making it worse. And so I want to try to understand what is going on when we feel overwhelmed and flat. And then once we have this understanding, use that to figure out how best to escape that negative state. And what I'm going to do is explain to you exactly what I did to get out of the sense of flatness I was feeling. It was a strategy that's so simple that it could fit on a single sheet of paper. And I will explain to you exactly how to do it in your own life when you end up in the same type of situation that I was just in. It is a strategy to get out of flatness and back into a deeper rhythm of your life. And in our current technological landscape, it's a strategy that I think we all need in our back pocket. So let's get right into it. Speaker 1 (1:25) All right, I want to get started by looking closer at the problem. What was it that I was feeling and that other people are feeling increasingly today? Well, it came out of overload. As I mentioned, I had an unusual amount of stuff that was landing on my plate and it was time sensitive and it was busting up my schedule. There's a lot of reasons for this. Some of it has to do with AI. I've sort of reluctantly, as you've probably seen, be dragged into a national conversation about AI and the AI labs and what's really going on and why it's going on and what we should do about it. And I feel like it's my duty, but it generates a huge amount of last minute urgent things that really dominate my schedule. But I also had other things going on as well. The back to school season is often something that puts a lot of nonprofessional obligations into my life. And I happen to have some other projects that were either ending up like my book or just starting like our studio renovation. So it's just all too much. But overload is not new. People have always suffered through periods where they had more going on than was probably reasonable to handle. What I have realized is that technology makes overload worse. Now, a big reason why this is true is that all of these things that are on your plate no longer just sit there until you're ready to work on them. create these sort of constant digital intrusions into your life. I have a whole list here. Email, Slack, WhatsApp, text messages, calendar invites, video conferences. These are all digital intrusions that each of these things on your plate starts generating. And they require this constant vigilance because you never know when the next message comes in that you have to answer quickly or the next quick meeting falls on your schedule. And now you have to rush from here to there and then from there back. And now two hours have been completely eaten up. So the The digital vector that these obligations use to intrude into your cognitive reality are incredibly numerous and incredibly relentless. This, I think, is the real problem. Because if I'm analyzing, again, my own experience in September, what happens is once you're completely in the state of responsiveness, Your brain starts to, it's a defense mechanism, your brain starts to actually slow down other types of natural ways of being. In particular, this is what I experience, that tendency or instinct to envision the future, to get excited about something that's coming up, to work on projects that are optional but are deeply important to you. That becomes subdued pretty quickly. And then when that becomes subdued, you also begin to lose your ability to just be present or have gratitude. This is where I think the flatness comes from. You just fall into a mode of I'm just trying to stay on top of all of these digital intrusions that are being generated by my overload. It never ends. My brain goes into self-protection mode. Suddenly, I'm no longer excited about the future. Suddenly, I'm no longer having those just moments of isn't this great? I just enjoy it's nice weather out walking through my town. This weekend is going to be exciting. When that is gone, your world flattens. Now, I want to give a name to this. I'm going to borrow this from Greg McKeown. from his book Essentialism. I call this force that creates this flatness the whirlwind. Let's use that as our name because you're surrounded by all the digital intrusions that your overload creates. Whirlwind is a bad state to be in. I was not happy being in the whirlwind last month. Many of you have probably found yourself at the center of a whirlwind as well recently. And you have felt that same type of numbness or flatness where you're living instead of just existing. All right, so that's the problem. That's kind of a bummer. But once we know the problem, we can come up with some solutions. And I think this is a key division. And this is something that I've missed before in my life, but I'm getting better about now. There's the short-term solution and there's the long-term solution. So the short-term solution is what do you do when you're in the middle of the whirlwind? You can't stop that tomorrow. Speaker 1 (5:41) Long-term, yes. We'll talk long-term solutions here in a second. But when the whirlwind sneaks up on you, you're not going to get out of it right away. How do you avoid being flat during the worst of one of these whirlwinds? How do you avoid avoiding future thinking and excitement and gratitude and presence? So in other words, how do you keep your life? livable during the worst of these moments while waiting to execute or complete whatever long-term solution you have. So I want to talk about each in turn. I want to start with the short-term solution and then the long-term. It's the short-term solutions where I have been innovating more recently. The long-term solution, you can probably predict where I'm going there. I've written books about this. But short-term, in the whirlwind, what did I do last month when I was in the middle of it? This is my one-page strategy. I call it a two plus five plan. All right. The idea is, and I'll show you an example in a second, but the idea is you're going to capture two practices that you're going to do daily and five projects or big tasks that you're working towards finishing as quickly as you can. Your goal is to get through that whole list and then you can reset or do something differently. That's it. Two practices, five projects and tasks, and you're going to keep up with those practices. and just myopically focused outside of the stuff you have to do of just, I want to knock things off of this one list of five, and that is it. Let me show you an example here about what I mean by practices and projects. I'll write it up here on my trusty tablet. So, okay, so this white page I'm showing up on the screen, you can imagine that is a blank sheet of paper. So you would start with... Speaker 1 (7:28) Your practices, so I'll just write the word practices Right on here Speaker 1 (7:34) Right? Okay. So you start with practices. I'll give you two sample ones. Maybe you'll do... Ping one person. And I'll explain each of these in a second. Speaker 1 (7:48) And then two. Speaker 1 (7:50) Reading lunch. Maybe I should add three practice calligraphy because I'm... Speaker 2 (7:55) Jesse, it's not looking great. Speaker 1 (7:56) Okay, so these are examples of the type of practices I'm talking about. I put down two under the word practices. Ping one person reading lunch. What are these examples? Ping one person means, in this example, reach out to one person. Call them, talk to them if you see them in person, or send them a text message. But it's an example of a daily practice that's not incredibly time-consuming. You can fit it in. It takes five minutes in the worst-case scenario, if not less. but it's a thing that is important to you. It's not mandatory. There's no deadline. I want to stay in touch with people, with my friends and my family. Reading lunch, that's a simple idea. The idea is when you eat lunch, don't look at your phone, try to read a chapter or two of a book. Again, a simple practice. You could do it almost every day because you're going to eat lunch most days anyways. So you can accomplish it even in the middle of the whirlwind, but it's something that is optional and connects you to something that you think is important. In this case, developing your mind and getting lost in a world of either ideas or fiction. We're going to take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Now, some of my proudest moments from earlier in my life were hitting key financial milestones, whether it was buying my first home or finally paying off my student loans. But you know what I wish I had back then? Monarch, the personal finance app that goes beyond just telling you what you've spent to also help you set goals. map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. 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I also want to talk about our friends from Superhuman. Too much of the talk about AI these days is focused on abstract benchmark scores or attention-catching ghost stories about experiments gone rogue. But you know what I want out of AI? I want it to reduce the time I spend on administrative and logistical efforts so I have more time to focus on the deep things that really move the needle. This is why I'm so excited about Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly, which is different from many other AI products that I've seen out there on the market. So let me give you a specific example that I found exciting. Let's say you're writing an email to your boss about the status of an automation project you're leading, and you realize you want to include a status report based on the current state of this project in JIRA. You want to do this without having to leave your email client. Well, now you can do it. Without leaving Gmail, you can pop up a Go window, type in, add quick summary from JIRA at the end, and boom, off it goes, reads the information, composes the summary, adds it back into your email. You never had to change your attention, never had to change your focus. Here's why I like Go. It lets you focus on the things that matter without all the brain-destroying context switching. No new tabs, no switching apps. You get what you need without losing where you are. To find out more about Superhuman Go, visit superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com for more information. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so let's give some examples for what I mean by projects. So I'll write the word projects here. Speaker 1 (12:07) And I'll put some example ones. Now we got room so that we can have a sense of the scope I'm talking about here, right? Because the project is not going to be start a business and move it to $100 million of revenue. We're going to be way more narrow than that. So I'll put down some sample ones here. Speaker 1 (12:26) All right, Peloton split program. This is very specific, Jesse. Speaker 1 (12:32) You don't know about these, but for those who have Pelotons, they have weight training videos on there as well, not just biking. And they have these programs called split programs, which they'll often be over, you know, four or five weeks. And it's like a normal type of workout where they'll have three different workouts to do in a week and they're working on different muscle groups. So you're splitting like you would do with like a normal. So when I put Peloton split program here, I mean, hey, try to get through one of these four-week programs, four weeks' worth of these classes. Okay. Here's a clichéd one that everyone has done at some point in their life. Halloween spotlight program. Speaker 1 (13:12) I actually was working on this last weekend, Jesse, but it's a project, in this case a hobby project. What this means here is I have a program to synchronize various computer-controlled spotlights to a soundtrack. So we can do like lightning or other types of effects. But it's an example of a project that maybe takes a couple hours. And it's not instrumental. It's not critical to my job. There's no deadline. But it's, you know, hey, it's something I want to do because I'm going to enjoy doing it. Let's say I'm just writing. These are things I've thought about before. Some of these, uh, hike to Wheaton. I've long wanted to do this. There's a, this Sligo Creek trail near where I live. If you walk on it long enough and then are willing to go through some neighborhoods at the end, you can get all the way to this large park called Wheaton regional park that I liked. It has some cool trails and gardens. It's like seven miles or something like that. Just be a thing to do. Figure that out. Find an afternoon. You have to have someone come pick you up. Um, But just do it because why not do it? All right. Here is a. Speaker 1 (14:14) I went to the eraser. The tablet is trying to erase that one. It doesn't like that idea. Speaker 1 (14:21) I'll put something else on here that is like a little more professional. I'm putting down author photo rights. These are all actual, some of these things are things I've done recently. So I recently acquired the rights to some photos, some author photos that were taken for a profile of me in an international magazine. And I love the photos and I contacted the photographer and bought the rights to use so we can use them going forward. Not that my existing author photos are problematic, but they do make it look like I'm 24 years old. So we had to kind of. be more reasonable. But again, it's like a project. It's like, hey, I should do this. It's not, no one's forcing me to do it, but this would be like productive. It'd be useful in a non-urgent type of way. And then I'll put a cliched one down, like replant garden. So maybe you have like, I don't do this, but maybe you have like a garden box. And it's like, hey, why don't I get that set up for the fall season? All right. So what do these type of examples have in common? I have five projects. What's special about these projects? Doing like a Peloton split program, a hobby project, a hike, like a one-time thing, kind of a productive non-urgent thing in your professional life and like a hobby household type of project, right? None of them are urgent. None of them have a deadline. They're all things you would enjoy doing and or would make you feel like you have autonomy or efficacy. You're making progress on things that are important to you even when you're not being forced to do it. So with this two plus five plan, you would say, great, I'm going to try to do these two practices every day. They're designed to be done every day, even if the day is busy. And I'm going to try to get through these lists. When I'm thinking about, you know, my week or the weekend or each day, is there one I can make progress on or get done? They're not super hard. You can knock off one in a week, even if you're very busy, but you make progress. You don't refill them. You just like, I want to try to finish this list. All right. So what do you do with your two plus five plan? You print it and you put in your sock drawer. That's kind of the key here because that's the one place where it's safe, right? It's not out on a surface where you're going to lose it, but you'll see it every day. Every day that you wear socks, you'll open that drawer and be like, oh, yeah, yeah, there's my two plus five. Let me remember to do those practices. Can I do one of these? Can I do one of these today? All right. So why does this work? What's the importance of this? Well, the key is that even when you're in the middle of the whirlwind, you feel like you have autonomy. you're still getting a minor but regular dose of doing things that you think are important or you're excited about, even though it's not something that's being demanded of you. And that resists the flatness. These are easy enough that it's not