I'm Cal Newport, and this is DeepQuestjuice Episode 196.

I'm here in my DeepWork HQ, joined by my producer Jesse on a beautiful day.

Jesse, when it's beautiful outside, I always say we need to get inside quickly into a windowless, small room surrounded by black curtains.

So mission accomplished us. We're getting no advantage. I mean, for you, you're a golfer.

You probably see a day like today and think, what a waste that I'm not out there with a glove in my hand.

I agree. I am golfing tomorrow, though, so I'll be okay. It works. It's a hard life we live here.

We were a little late getting started on our schedule because, as Jesse knows, I was stuck on a proof.

So I was working on a theoretical computer science paper. I was getting some momentum in a proof,

and it was tricky, and I couldn't quite make it work, but I figured I could get around the obstacles

a little bit more concentration. That is a circumstance in which it is very difficult for me to stop.

It's a very similar circumstance to be on a role when you're writing a section,

like a book chapter or an article. It's very difficult to stop mid-writing. But anyways,

I was thinking about that given what we talk about on this show because it underscored the degree to

which concentrated mental works of deep work efforts on really hard cognitive problems

is something we don't really understand. I mean, it's very intense. Once you get all of that

context loaded into your brain, it can be very hard to stop. I mean, I couldn't help but think as we

were winding down the record of this episode, the ideal setup for working on something like a

math proof or working on a book would literally be just to do that. I'd do that all day long,

and then you do nothing else. That would probably be the ideal setup if we just want to say what's

the best way to get value out of a human brain, and that of course is so far from what we actually

do in almost any knowledge work jobs. So to me, this was just a parable about how little we understand

when it comes to extracting value from the human brain, and because of that, how bad we are at setting

...