I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.

So I'm here in my deep work, HQ joined as always by my producer Jesse. We're doing a Friday afternoon

recording Jesse. Yeah. So, end of the week. We have the music. Yeah. Yeah. So if you get late enough on, late enough on the day, on a day where the restaurant below

us is open, we get a thumping baseline as the backbeat. You won't hear it on the recording

hopefully but it's back there so we can bob our heads to it. Something I did

before we recorded I think is like a good case study of something we talked about on this show

As you know Jesse I was like give me a minute what I was doing because we're recording at two o'clock on a Friday

I wanted to shut down before we started recording.

So I built my day around having these pockets to catch up on things.

And I had a few things left, and I was like,

let me get those completely shut down, final checks on my inbox, final

text message planning this going on, final check on my calendar, checking that

shutdown complete box. And you might say well what's the difference like you could just check in after you

record and kind of make things done but there's a big psychological difference

to being shut down or not from your work and I wanted to come into the podcast

shut down so I have a completely different mind state now that if I even

have very little to do after this podcast if there is still something my mind

would still be thinking we have work to do. So it's sort of an interesting case study,

Jesse, of the shutdown psychology at work. You know,

being shut down versus not shut down

is a clear binary psychological difference.

And it's very different than just, I don't know,

...