Hi, everybody. We are thrilled to have Cal Newport on the show today, known for his groundbreaking work on deep work and digital minimalism.

Now, Cal has revolutionized the way we approach productivity and focus in the digital age.

And basically, you are what you focus on, and today we focus on you, Cal, and your work. So, big welcome.

Well, thank you for having me.

I've been looking forward to this.

Now, first of all, what is deep work?

Well, deep work is the state you're in, in which you are giving full concentration to a cognitively demanding task.

So the two aspects to it is what you're doing requires a lot of concentration,

and you're giving it concentration without any distraction.

So it's actually getting your full

attention. Those two things together means you're doing deep work. And why is it important?

Well, this is the number one way you produce valuable things using the human brain. If your goal is,

I want to create something valuable using my brain, the most promising cognitive state for

accomplishing this goal is one of undistracted focus.

Now, in your books, you talk about the fact that we've kind of forgotten to differentiate

between deep work and shallow work. Tell us about it. Well, I think what happened is we got

the front office IT revolution. So suddenly we have network computers in the office,

we have low friction digital communication. It's easier than ever before to move information

back and forth. And we accidentally created a work culture in which we were prioritizing the

communication, but by doing so we were fracturing time into fragments too small to actually

give sustained concentration to anything.

We devalued unbroken concentration as an activity that mattered in knowledge work.

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