Escaping Your Screen: How to Reclaim Your Focus with Professor Cal Newport
A New Way of Being
Simon Mundie
4.8 • 523 Ratings
🗓️ 11 October 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Find out why it’s the time spent on screens, not just the content, that’s affecting your well-being – and how you can start reclaiming your focus with Professor Cal Newport
In this bitesize episode, I sit down with Cal Newport to chat about how smartphones and social media are messing with our well-being. Rather than focusing on what sort of content we’re consuming, the bigger issue is the sheer amount of time we spend glued to our screens. Cal explains that what really makes us unhappy is all the missed opportunities – the high value things we could be doing instead.
He shares some great tips on how to reclaim our time and focus on what truly matters, like spending time on high-quality activities, having real conversations, being present, and finding moments of awe and gratitude. Cal also dives into some strategies to sharpen our focus - including what he calls 'focus interval training' – to help us get better at doing deep, meaningful work and regain our ability to find flow.
Full Professor Cal Newport episode - on Distraction, Anxiety and Deep Work: https://pod.fo/e/16fa26
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Momentum is definitely growing currently about the impact that smartphones and social media is having on people, |
| 0:12.1 | particularly young people with movements like smartphone free childhood. |
| 0:16.4 | But much of the focus is about what people are seeing. |
| 0:20.2 | So the, in many cases, dodgy, unregulated, |
| 0:24.5 | unsuitable content, whether things like porn or misinformation. And that is definitely an issue. |
| 0:30.7 | But actually, when it comes to people's overall well-being, there really is a strong case to be |
| 0:35.5 | argued that it's not so much the content, |
| 0:39.1 | but just the sheer amount of time that people are spending stuck to their devices. |
| 0:44.5 | One person I spoke to who argued this was Professor Cal Newport, author of the brilliant |
| 0:49.0 | books, deep work, digital minimalism and slow productivity. So here he is outlining his take on this issue |
| 0:57.0 | and suggesting some better ways of spending our time and also how we can regain our ability |
| 1:04.0 | to focus. And anyone who listens to this podcast a lot knows that I talk about flow and how we |
| 1:09.6 | love flow. Flow is inherently enjoyable. Well, |
| 1:12.5 | flow follows focus. So our ability to focus is fundamental. The more we are training ourselves |
| 1:19.1 | to be distracted, the more we are depriving ourselves of the very thing we like most, which is |
| 1:24.3 | to forget ourselves in flow. |
| 1:29.8 | When I was studying people who were unhappy with their digital lives, it was much less |
| 1:34.7 | about what they were actually doing with their tools and much more about what those tools |
| 1:39.7 | were getting in the way of. |
| 1:42.2 | It wasn't what I'm looking at Instagram makes me unhappy. It's that I'm looking at Instagram when I'm trying to spend time with my kids. And this was like a very consistent note from actual people out there. Right now we have this different backlash against social media. And when this started to arise, people were like, oh, you must be happy, right? Because now suddenly, you know, I used to be branded very eccentric that I was very skeptical about social media. I would be |
| 2:05.9 | attacked for that and sort of mainstream news publications. And then once everyone kind of turned |
| 2:10.5 | against Facebook and turned against social media, they said, oh, you must be happy. But I was very |
... |
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