4min chapter

Lex Fridman Podcast cover image

#166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media

Lex Fridman Podcast

CHAPTER

Is There a Perfect Number of Minutes?

A key aspect of focus is not just that you're concentrating hard on something, but you do it without distraction. A big theme of my work is that context shifting kills the human capacity to think. So if I change what I'm paying attention to to something different and then try to bring it back to the main thing I'm doing, that causes a huge cognitive pileup. And as a result, your ability to think clearly just goes really down. Is there some kind of perfect number of minutes would you say?

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