Pod Insights Deep Questions with Cal Newport Ep. 329: The Tao of Cal About this episode We cover a lot of advice on this podcast, covering a lot of different topics. In today’s episode, Cal takes on the challenge of summarizing every big idea he promotes in less than five minutes. He then provides some theoretical connective tissue to explain how they all connect. This is followed by reader questions and a rant about “productivity.”
Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo
Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia
Deep Dive: The Tao of Cal [2:53]
- Why is time blocking more demanding than using a weekly template? [25:04]
- Is moving to the country a bad idea? [29:54]
- How can I consolidate my email accounts without being stressed out? [34:47]
- What’s the best approach to read for general knowledge? [36:20]
- How do I apply Slow Productivity without losing career capital? [43:12]
- CALL: Should I adjust my deep life lifestyle? [45:58]
CASE STUDY: Cultivating the deep work muscle [56:38]
CAL REACTS (e.g., Rants): “Productivity” Tracking Software [1:05:58]
Links:
Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow
Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/
Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?
reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1gwg7rk/employee_monitoring_software_has_gone_off_the/?rdt=41693
Thanks to our Sponsors:
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Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering.
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Transcript 14,608 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:11 Cal Newport? I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.
0:24 Cal Newport? So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, we've got a good show coming up. We got a challenge. You'll hear about it soon, but we got a fun challenge I'm going to try to pull off in the deep dive. I've also got a rant coming up later in the final segment for stay tuned for that one. Good announcement, book announcement. I like having these book announcements about slow productivity. My book, Slow Productivity.
0:50 Speaker 01 What do we got?
0:50 Cal Newport? Name to The Economist, Best Books of 2024.
0:55 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
0:56 Cal Newport? So there we go. These best of lists are coming. We got the best books of 2024 for The Economist. Best Books of 2024 for Amazon. Goodreads has as one of the nine most popular self-help books of 2024. So a couple of other places as well.
1:11 Speaker 01 My mom told me she saw it on the NPR list.
1:14 Cal Newport? Oh, yeah, I think it is on NPR list as well. Yeah, that's right. So there we go. So it's getting out there. You know, it really helps. Here's what I've noticed about these, these year end lists, because I think the book is doing well on them. There's two different ways that organizations do year end list. One way is like the New York Times, Washington Post way, which is just here's 50 nonfiction books we like. And here's 50 fiction books we like. The problem with that is almost all of those are going to come from biography and memoir or cultural commentary, where we tend to do better is where they have a few categories. So like The Economist had three categories for nonfiction books, biography, memoir, culture and arts, and a category they called business, economics and technology, 10 books in each, 30 total books. And so we were one of the 10 books in business, economics and technology.
1:59 Cal Newport? Amazon does something similar. They have a few categories and in like the business category, we're in that book, we're in that list. So I think the key is what I'm realizing is business idea books are their own beast. So if there's a place doing list where they, they understand business idea books and what they're like and are sort of focusing that, that territory, we do well. If it's just here's the, the 50 best nonfiction books, like we might do less well because if you're not used to business idea books, they tend to confuse book types. Like what, what is this? You're giving advice?
2:33 Speaker 01 Do those folks just read books all day, the reviewers?
2:36 Cal Newport? I guess so. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I've done a book review off and on for like the New York Times, like some of them are outsourced and then they have professional reviewers as well. Yeah, they read a lot of books. They gotta get through them. All right. Anyways, we got a good show. So let's get started with our deep dive.
2:53 Cal Newport? So I've given a lot of advice on the show over the past three and a half years. I've given 329 episodes worth of advice. So I thought it might be fun to try to do something sort of crazy today to try to summarize most of the main ideas I talk about in five minutes or less. I'm going to call this the Tao of Cal. Okay. To be fair, I'm not going to get into specific pieces of advice, right? Like we're not going into the details of particular ways of doing X and Y. It's going to be the big ideas, the high level ideas that almost all of the specific advice I give comes back to it. So I thought this would be fun. After I do the list, and I'm probably going to have Jesse time me here. So be ready for
3:36 Cal Newport? that, Jesse. After I do the list of the main ideas I've talked about over the last three and a half years, I'm then going to step back and try to provide some theoretical connective tissue that will pull them all together. So take this list that might seem pretty disparate and I'm going to try to give you a grand unified theory of Cal that makes sense, makes sense of all of these ideas. But first I want to get through them. Jesse, you got your watch ready?
3:58 Speaker 01 I have my Casio.
4:00 Cal Newport? Yeah, I was going to say, I admire all the money you've invested in your watch.
4:03 Speaker 01 Whenever the band breaks, I just get a new watch because they're only $16.
4:06 Cal Newport? I had that watch in 1987.
4:09 Speaker 01 My fourth iteration.
4:10 Cal Newport? Okay, well, well played. So we'll be accurately timed on Jesse's highly expensive watch. All right, here we go. Ta wakow. All right, let's roll. First, I want to summarize my big ideas when it comes to advice about knowledge work. Number one, treat context shifts and overload, which I define to be working on too many things concurrently, as productivity poison. These are the main things you want to limit to keep your work sustainable and your results impressive. Number two, spending a good amount of time focusing without distraction is like a knowledge work superpower. But it will require you to both train your ability to concentrate and tame your schedule in ways that makes time
4:54 Cal Newport? to do this type of concentration, and neither of those things are easy. Number three, organize your obligations and time carefully with smart systems. Because the human brain cannot easily on its own handle the volume or velocity of tasks that are encountered in most modern knowledge work jobs. Number four, remote work requires more structure than in-person work to function sustainably. You need in particular to be careful about how you assign tasks and communicate about works in progress. Smaller workload, less unscheduled communication and more accountability is key when it comes to remote work. And finally, when it comes to using your brain to create value, your spaces matter. If possible, your deepest work should be done in intentionally designed locations.
5:39 Cal Newport? All right, here's my advice related to the internet. Small trumps big when it comes to online activity. Self-governing niche communities online function much better than massive global conversation platforms and have much fewer negative side effects on its users. Distributed news media such as podcasts and newsletters offer better ways to make a living doing creative work online than trying to become an influencer on a major platform.
6:06 Cal Newport? Internet advice number two, keep kids off smartphones. Their brains aren't ready for unrestricted access to the internet.
6:13 Cal Newport? Advice, internet advice number three, don't use social media if possible. Instead prioritize things like reading books, spending time outside, becoming a leader in your relevant communities and developing hard and interesting skills. And finally, your phone should not be a constant companion in your life. Final category here, advice related to living a deep life. Plan backwards from an ideal lifestyle instead of forward toward grand goals.
6:43 Cal Newport? Beware in particular of the idea that just accomplishing one grand goal is going to make your life better. It's better to work backwards from the lifestyle that you have more evidence will succeed. And my final piece of big picture advice, Jesse, in general, sticking with something over a long amount of time, working sustainably but steadily wins out in the end in terms of both enjoyment and reward. How'd we do?
7:04 Speaker 01 Two forty-four.
7:05 Cal Newport? Look at that, not even three minutes. Most of the main ideas I talk about on this show. I'm obviously missing things, like most notably, I'm not including on this list, my older work on student related advice. I have a lot of big ideas about, you know, how to be successful as a student. Beyond that, I don't know, what am I missing, Jesse? Is anything coming to mind like a major idea we talk about a lot? I gave this some thought, but not a huge amount of thought.
7:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, because you all, you just go deeper into the other things in terms of like the specifics of each of the overall broad concepts. So I thought it was good.
7:37 Cal Newport? I looked at a lot of old episodes. I didn't really, almost everything fits under, outside of like tech explainer episodes, but that's not really advice.
7:45 Speaker 01 I'm glad you're going to go into a deeper conversation about them all because I was a little sad that the deep dive was only going to be five minutes.
7:52 Cal Newport? Ah, be great. Five minute deep dive, do a couple of minutes of quote, we could be out if you're in a tight seven minutes.
7:56 Speaker 01 Well, all my favorite podcasts, if I look at the timestamps and they're only like thirty-seven minutes, they usually go an hour. I'm usually kind of sad.
8:03 Cal Newport? Well, don't worry. When it comes to padding, like just talking longer than we should, you don't have to worry about me. I'm an expert at that. All right, well, so let's see if we can do some deeper connections here. So I had these categories, knowledge, work, internet, and sort of more general advice related to good living. Within these are a lot of different topics, productivity, phones, email, lifestyle, design, career issues, et cetera. All right. Are these all just disparate advice? Or is there a way to connect it? I'm going to argue that most of this advice, actually, we can find a connection to them. If we go back to my fundamental background as a technologist. Obviously, I'm trained as a computer science. I'm a full professor of computer science at Georgetown University.
8:47 Cal Newport? In addition to my many papers on distributed algorithm theory, have increasingly become involved in thinking about technology and its impact on our world. I'm a founding faculty member of Georgetown Center for Digital Ethics. I also direct our new Computer Science Ethics in Society academic program. So I'm a technologist who thinks about technology's impact. Now, you might be thrown, how is that connected to all of these issues? Because some of these issues are not explicitly technological. But I'm going to argue that they are almost all connected in a pretty direct way to technology-related issues. All right, so let me explain this. I mentioned some of this terminology briefly in last week's episode.
9:30 Cal Newport? I'm going to lay it out here a little bit more clearly and concisely in today's episode. Here is the way I think about the world and a lot of the source of a lot of my advice. We currently live in what I call the modern digital environment. It's an environment where we have many digital tools, mainly network-connected, that create a technology ecology that have a big impact on our day-to-day life. Many elements of this modern digital environment, which is very new, conflict with both our paleolithic brains and our neolithic culture. So what I mean by that, our paleolithic brains is our brains as wired over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. When I say neolithic culture, I mean the culture that evolved after the Neolithic Revolution,
10:12 Cal Newport? when we first began to live in larger groups connected by abstract concepts. So as we transition from small tribes, hunter-gatherers, to living in cities and city-states connected by larger affiliations, cooperating at much greater scales. Culturally speaking, the Neolithic Revolution is sort of the foundation of life as we know it. It's a big difference, neolithic living versus paleolithic living. See Yuval Harari's book, Sapiens, for a really good discussion of what enabled neolithic culture. So we've had more or less this slowly evolving neolithic culture, where we have countries and cities and etc. That also conflicts with the modern digital environment. These mismatches create what I think of as disorders.
10:56 Cal Newport? Mismatches between the modern digital environment and our brains and culture. Those disorders cause issues that need to be addressed and they can be addressed by individual action, they can be addressed by community or organizational action, and sometimes they have to be addressed by larger sort of national legislative, perhaps regulatory, action. We have a lot of ways we have to react to those disorders. They also create sometimes opportunities to leverage new technologies and new ways that open up exciting new possibilities for thriving ones that did not exist even 20 or 25 years ago. So I see a lot of my program as understanding these mismatches between the modern digital environment and what our bodies and cultures are used to, figuring out where they create
11:40 Cal Newport? problems and trying to get around it, figuring out where they create opportunities and seeing what we can leverage and how we can do it. Now, the reason why this can sometimes seem disconnected from technology is that I have learned over time that in particular, when it comes to the disorders of the modern digital environment, the problems are caused by digital technology, the solutions are often analog. So it sounds like analog advice. We're going off and we're, we're, we're reading books or we're, we're pen and paper planning of what we want our life to be like, but the underlying problems that led us to that actually are digital in origin. So digital problems don't always have digital solutions. So let's go back, I was gonna go back to some of the advice I talked about and sort
12:22 Cal Newport? of walk through this exercise of tracing back the advice to one of these mismatches with the modern digital environment. So let's think about some of my advice around knowledge work, for example. The core disorder back here is we have this neolithic culture, okay, we get together, we have organizations. In this context, we develop this idea of pseudo-productivity. So knowledge work emerges as a new type of work. We evolved this idea of pseudo-productivity, which I talk about in my book, Slow Productivity, as a way of coping with management of work that uses the mind, because we didn't have widgets to count. Pseudo-productivity says, let's use visible effort as our main proxy for you doing something useful.
13:05 Cal Newport? My argument is we kind of have this non-technological cultural adaptation, I guess we'll manage activity instead of results because it's too hard in knowledge work to actually point towards results. Then that mismatched with the arrival of digital computer networks.
13:20 Cal Newport? So, once we had low-friction digital communication, and it was very easy to communicate with people, and then that communication became mobile, first on laptops, then on smartphones, so now I could communicate with basically zero cost or time cost at almost any time, in almost any location. That combination with pseudo-productivity gave us the hyperactive hive mind. A new style of working in which you're constantly communicating, figure things out on the fly. This completely conflicts with our neolithic brain, which can't shift its attention between so many things back and forth so quickly. It's just not capable of doing that. And we get a big source of the over-distraction burnout problem that is afflicting modern knowledge workers. So, you get a lot of my advice about taming the hyperactive hive mind, and context-switching, and how to restructure work
14:05 Cal Newport? to have more structured communication rules. It all comes back to that fundamental disorder.
14:12 Cal Newport? All right, here's another example. We talk about, you know, leaving social media, so that's digital, but we can go to an underlying, what is like an underlying disorder? Well, one of the underlying disorders that has been exposed in the modern digital environment with respect to social media is the issue of global conversation platforms tricking our paleolithic brains. So, our paleolithic brains are used to organizing social units into like tribal communities. It's a group of people that I am around physically, and in totality really affect my success as an individual, right? I mean, I need to be on the good side. I need to be respected. Ostracization would be tantamount to death.
14:57 Cal Newport? I need to be in good with my tribe. It's 50 people, it's 20 people, it's 100 people. We live in the same cave, right? That's how we organize. We think about the main unit of group. Then you get global conversation platforms, where you might have, an example like Twitter X, 600 million users. Well, clearly, this is a number that is so astronomical that we can't even approach dealing with sensical interactions with that many people. So, what do these platforms do? Using various sort of curation that's algorithmic and cybernetic, they sort of pull from this massive collection of people all talking about various things, and it sort of pulls out for each user.
15:39 Cal Newport? Interaction experience that feels like what we're used to. It's I'm talking to people in my tribe, I'm talking to people in my community. But they pull it out to be like the most interesting, engaging, emotional conversations possible. So it's never boring. Again, our mind gets tricked by this. Like, okay, I'm talking to my tribe and also my tribe is like fantastically angry with everyone and with me. And all the alarm bells go off. So it's a mismatch, a global conversation platform. It's a digital technology that mismatches with the way our paleolithic mind works. And that creates problems. Let's do a more abstract one, lifestyle centric planning. This seems to be very non digital. Working backwards from a vision of ideal lifestyle instead of forward towards a grand goal.
16:23 Cal Newport? But why is this such a problem? Why do we need advice about how to construct a life of meaning and satisfaction? Why do we need this advice? Well, I think it is digital knowledge work. Digital knowledge works, knowledge work that's done largely at computer screens. Had a couple of attributes that again are a real mismatch with us. One, work itself became highly abstract. Moving bits around on networks, it's messages going back and forth and files being attached to things. Work becomes very abstract. So we sort of lose that connection that our mind has between having an intention and seeing it be made manifest concretely in the world. I built this thing and I can hold it and it has mass and gravity.
17:07 Cal Newport? When we remove that from our efforts, it dislocates and disembodies us from our efforts. And that can be really alienating, to borrow a term from Marx in that context. Very alienating to be like, um, just this work is like this abstract thing. It also homogenizes. Give me almost any knowledge work job. What are the key tools going to be? It's going to be an email client and some variation of Microsoft Office. So work is just now this like homogenized. It doesn't really matter what the job is. It's you're moving messages and attachments back and forth and making slide decks and, and going on Zoom and seeing people in Windows. It's, it's homogenized, all jobs are the same. The actual activities are sort of isolated now from the actual world. You don't see concrete results.
17:52 Cal Newport? You're kind of alienated from your effort. It's this sort of weird game you do. And then finally, because it's all digital, location matters less. We're less likely to go to a particular office. We're less likely to be, um, our work to be tied to a location. I make shoes and the shoes are for people who live in this town. That type of concrete regionalization of our efforts has also dissipated. Well, this really upsets our ability in our Paleolithic mind or for our Neolithic culture, which is still built around building these communities, like cities and towns, and being part of these larger communities. All of this is upset by this much more abstracted, digital, non-embodied style of work.
18:37 Cal Newport? And so people are adrift. They're living in this disembodied digital world, playing digital games and not feeling as if they're a part of a place, a part of a group, or producing things they can even see, and their mind doesn't know what to do with this. And we become adrift. It makes us feel sort of numb and dislocated. And so we pursue grand goals because we think the chemical hit of pursuing that goal at least will make us feel alive. And so we make these kind of drastic moves to try to put some energy back into our lives. Or we get lost in the online, just like, let me just plug it in my veins. I'm just on the phone and it's, oh my God, look at like the thing Elon just posted and
19:22 Cal Newport? it kind of, it's pressing primal buttons in a muted way and we just kind of get lost in this. As long as our work is so abstract, we just get lost in an abstract world. And that also doesn't end up well. So we get something like lifestyle centric planning. It's like taking back control of our life in a way that wasn't as automatic as it used to be in a pre-digital world. The modern digital environment made that a necessity that we now have to think much more about how we construct a life and meaning as opposed to just laying our location and work sort of do that for us. So we go through this again and again, but almost all those ideas I talked about comes back to fundamentally to a mismatch between the modern digital environment and our brains and culture.
20:04 Cal Newport? All right. So that's kind of the Tao and Tao of Cal. And really, the big idea, maybe this is the big idea of my style of advice, is you don't have to stay in the world of digital to deal with the issues that digital creates. You can be a technologist who's giving advice, and that advice doesn't have to be limited to parental controls and how you set up your iPhone, and thinking about doomsday scenarios around AI. The modern digital environment touches many aspects of our day to day life. And so the advice we give from a place of technology, criticism, is advice that can go much broader than the world of technology. So there we go. Tao of Cal. I'm sure I missed some things. We'll hear about it, Jesse.
20:49 Cal Newport? But I think that covers a lot of the main things.
20:51 Speaker 01 I liked it.
20:52 Cal Newport? All right. So we got some questions coming. They're pretty broad, since I covered, there's literally no question we can get, almost. It's not going to be relevant to this deep dive, because I covered everything we ever talked about. But first, let's hear from a sponsor.
21:08 Cal Newport? This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. So we're in the holiday season. For many, that's great. You know, I do Thriller December in the holiday season, where I read purposefully stupid books, often by a fire. I've already finished my first Thriller December books, other people. It's about the family. It's about the holiday traditions. But it can also be a really hard time if you have a troubled relationship with your own mind. For a lot of people, the holidays can be really tough in this situation, because it just emphasizes the pain you're feeling, or the discontent you're feeling, as you think about, remember when I used to just enjoy the holidays, and now I have all these other things going on.
21:51 Cal Newport? So it is a great time, a great motivator, to make sure that your relationship with your brain is in good shape. And of course, one of the best ways to get that relationship better is through therapy. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. You can find comfort this December with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/deepquestions, one word, and if you will get 10% off your first month.
22:33 Cal Newport? That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com, slash, deepquestions. All right. I also want to talk about our friends at Zocdoc. Look, as you get older, as Jesse and I are realizing, you need more doctors in your life, no matter how we try to avoid it. Jesse and I were actually just joking. We both have, oh my God, I won't get into the details, Jesse, for medical privacy reasons, but let's just say we're seriously considering podcasting from like side-by-side beds in the hospital. We have different things we have to get taken care of. You need a lot of doctors for stuff you'd even know you need doctors for. You know, there's feet doctors. You don't know this until like you get to your 40s, right?
23:17 Cal Newport? You don't know that like I need a ear, nose, and throat specialist. I need a dermatologist. Oh my God, there's so many doctors. How do you find them? I suggest you use Zocdoc. Zocdoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high-quality in-network doc or doctors, choose the right one for your needs, and click instantly to book an appointment. We're talking about in-network appointments with more than 100,000 healthcare providers across every specialty from mental health to dental health, eye care to skincare, and much more. Oh yeah, my eye doctor just left too. Shut down his practice.
23:51 Speaker 01 Retired?
23:52 Cal Newport? Yeah, I guess. He was right down the street from the HQ. Zocdoc time. That's what I want to make Zocdoc a verb. I think that'd work well. I'm not worried about my eye doctor leaving. I'm just going to Zocdoc that problem. Zocdoc the hell out of that. Don't worry about it. You can filter for doctors who take your insurance, who are located nearby, who are a good fit for any medical needs you may have and who are highly rated by verified patients. You can also see their actual appointment openings. Choose a time that works for you and click to instantly book a visit. Zocdoc appointments happen fast, typically within 24 to 72 hours of booking. You can even score same day appointments. I have used Zocdoc to look for doctors. I also have
24:36 Cal Newport? various Medicare providers who use the Zocdoc to handle like paperwork ahead of time. So I'm familiar with the app and I I enjoy it. I think you will too. So stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to zocdoc.com/deep to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's z o c d o c dot com slash deep. zocdoc.com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.
25:03 Cal Newport? Who do we got first?
25:04 Speaker 01 First question is from Max. Can you provide an example of how time blocking your workday is different than using a weekly template? Can you also explain why time blocking is more demanding?
25:15 Cal Newport? Well, weekly templates don't specify every hour of your workday. So for those who listen to my weekly template episode from a few weeks ago, the idea of a weekly scheduling template is basically placing some either big rocks or big constraints on your schedule in a way that's going to apply week to week, right? So you might say, for example, no meetings in the morning, no meetings till 11. I'm always writing in the morning. That's a weekly scheduling template. Or you might say, okay, on Tuesday and Thursday, I'm on campus to teach in the morning. I have office hours midday. I'm leaving those afternoons free. This is when I want to do my, my meetings with people on campus. Those Tuesday and Thursdays, I'll keep those afternoons free. So it's these big rocks or
25:57 Cal Newport? consistent scheduling constraints that you want to put in place. And you can just write these in your weekly plan. So you see them, they'll probably, I guess, would live in your strategic plans, your, your quarterly plans, and you, you see them each week when you make your weekly plan and apply them to your week. And then you remember them too, as you're scheduling other things that you want to obey your weekly template. It's just a good way of adding some structure to each upcoming season in a way that respects what your goals are for that season.
26:24 Cal Newport? If you don't use weekly templates, the problem is if you're just tackling each week or even each day as it comes, stuff gets busy, stuff gets suboptimal. Time block planning, you're planning every hour of the day. So your weekly template will help you shape your day, but it's not telling you everything you need to do in the day. And knowing that you're writing in the morning, for example, still doesn't tell you how you're dealing, like when you stop that and how you're dealing with the afternoon. When you have meetings, when you're doing to-dos, what you're doing with the time that's free, that's still going to require time block planning. All right, but let's connect this. Here's what I'm going to try to do today, Jesse. Connect every question back to the modern digital environment. So how does this connect back to what we talked about in the deep dive?
27:04 Cal Newport? Well, this very issue of having to do complicated scheduling, I think, comes back to the intersection of the digital with knowledge work. So we talked about briefly in the deep dive is digital and digital networks from knowledge work led to a lot more communication. It also has led to a much greater workload because it's so easy to, A, assign work to someone, like anyone can just email anyone else and in like nine seconds have placed a major obligation on their plate. It was like free assignment of work. The technology that we have to execute this work, so network computers are so powerful, the total number of things you could conceivably doing has also exploded.
27:48 Cal Newport? So this is a whole separate issue. This is sometimes called the curse of specialization or of despecialization, rather, and this is well documented. I talk about this in my book, A World Without Email, and a little bit in Slow Productivity. But basically, when we gave people these productivity machines, computers, they made a lot of things that we used to divide the labor on. Here's people who type. Here's people who schedule trips. Here's people who work on presentations, the graphic department. The stuff we used to specialize all became easy enough, we could put it on the plate of individuals, just do everything. And so instead of having 30 employees, maybe 10 of which were the sort of trained frontline
28:31 Cal Newport? executives, like working on the direct things to make value and 20 of which were sort of support, we went to like 20 of the frontline executives and no support.
28:42 Cal Newport? Is what it turns out, and there's a cool paper by this, I talked about it in A World Without Email. It turns out when you fire all the support, the number of non-support mainline people you need to get the same amount of work done increases. Because now they're having to do on their computers, a lot of the work that the support staff was doing. So you need more of the non-support people to get the same amount of work done. Well, they typically are more expensive salaries than the support people. So now you're employing less total people, but your salary costs are the same, if not higher, and everyone's more miserable. So the sort of overload that necessitates solutions like weekly scheduling templates and time block planning to make tractable, were actually caused by
29:26 Cal Newport? these modern digital environment innovations like the putting of the productivity revolution with huge air quotes in the front office. All right? So it sounds like an analog work thing, productivity thing, but it comes back in the end to digital.
29:39 Speaker 01 So when you do, when you're in your summer schedule and you do a writing block, that's the same though, in terms of intensity as like when you're working during the year, right?
29:46 Cal Newport? Yeah, writing blocks are writing blocks. I mean, I'm always writing. Yeah, sitting down and working on whatever's next and what you're writing.
29:52 Speaker 01 Got it.
29:53 Cal Newport? All right, who do we got next?
29:54 Speaker 01 Next question is from Michael. Earlier this year, my wife, my six-month-old baby and I moved across the country to a beautiful new rural house. In hindsight, it turned out to be a terrible idea. We got swept up in the idyllic vision of owning a big wooded property. We neglected to consider the other aspects of life that are important for a young family. It's been a lesson that focusing too much on one component of the deep life can sometimes push other important areas into the background, often without us even realizing it.
30:21 Cal Newport? Well, I think it's a great, it's a great case study, like a little brief case study. And it comes back to the idea we talked about in the deep dive of lifestyle-centric planning versus grand goals. Right? So the problem with the grand goal method, which is the idea that if I fixate on a grand romantic goal, its pursuit and accomplishment will fix my life and make my life better. The problem with the grand goal theory, and I actually have already written this chapter in my new book I'm working on about the deep life. So I've been thinking about this. There's two major problems with the grand goal approach. One, when you focus on a grand goal, you're typically focusing on just one aspect of your lifestyle that's important to you. So in this example, they're thinking about nature,
31:06 Cal Newport? quiet, the sort of slower stillness of being outside. It's like, this is a thing we want in our lifestyle, right? Like, this is important. By fixating on just one, the two bad things that could happen is, one, at best, you are ignoring other things that are important to your, to a successful lifestyle. So they don't get better. So these other things you need to have a sustainable ideal lifestyle aren't being addressed. At worst, they can actually make those things worse. Like, you're actively hurting other things. So like, in this case, by focusing just on this environmental idea, I want to be in nature, I want it to
31:46 Cal Newport? be calming, you probably were like actively making worse connections to other people, like being a part of a community. I've known other people who have left the city to do something like this, who didn't realize how much they valued intellectual life, you know, events, there's seen interesting movies, being around interesting people who are working on interesting things. So maybe even if there is community where they're moving, it's not writers, it's not people who are, whatever your artist, or whatever it is that you're interested in, or high-tech entrepreneur types, if you're in that world. And they didn't realize how much they valued that. You know, there's, there's other like convenience things, people really, in their ideal lifestyle, maybe it's, it's, they want to be able to
32:30 Cal Newport? spend time, you know, reading and doing what they're interested in, not realizing moving to the farm means they have to spend most of their time working on farm things, and they don't really care about those, but that's going to get in the way of these other things. And you can kind of create these big mismatches. Probably the most common one of these is pursuing income and professional respect. You say, well, this is very important to me. So then you go and take, the cliche is, you go and take that job that's going to give you the big raise and more professional respect, but now you have like an hour-long commute, you don't see your kids as much, you don't like the town that you're in, like all these other things that are important get actively pushed down. So you really have to think about, in lifestyle-centric planning, you're looking at all the things that matter,
33:14 Cal Newport? and trying to do generally good on all of those. You're coming up with more bespoke, sometimes complicated ideas or plans.
33:23 Cal Newport? That are really helping multiple different things you care about. And for the ones that your these lifestyle centric plans don't directly affect, at least they're doing no harm. You're not taking this something that's important to you and making it much worse. Or if there is a trade off, it's being made really clear. And when you see it's a trade off, you can say, okay, we're going to do some weird or over the top interventions to try to go to this thing that's getting worse. We make this lifestyle shift and try to bring that back. We might have to do that in unusual or weird ways. This is like the classic that moving to the city, but like really going out of your way to set things up so that you can spend three months in the summer in the country because there's certain compromises about being in the city that you're worried about. And that's how you balance that out.
34:08 Cal Newport? Whereas it's a great example of lifestyle center career planning being the way to do things as opposed to grand goal theory. We talked about connecting back to digital. We talked about this in the deep dive, so I won't repeat it in detail. But the weird abstract nature of work in the digital age leaves us sort of bewildered about finding meaning in our life. A lot more of that is placed on our plates. And because of that, we tend to fall into easy patterns like grand goals. Let me just like drastically change where I live as a way to try to change our life. But the whole idea that we have to grapple with all of this, I think, is really amplified by the digital.
34:46 Cal Newport? All right, what we got next?
34:47 Speaker 01 Next question is from Elliot. I'm working to reduce four email accounts to one personal and one business email account. Each consolidation step often leads to an additional tasks and complications. Do you have strategies for simplifying this transition or managing the incremental steps without feeling constantly bogged down?
35:05 Cal Newport? I mean, it sounds like to me, Elliot, you're making this too complicated. If you're going to make a change with your email setup like this, be okay with for a while, you're going to miss some things and upset some people. And then just do it in the easiest possible way. I mean, I think that's the way to do it. I think we blow up in our head too much. Like I have to be super incremental and careful about this because what if someone that I sometimes talk to doesn't get the note? And then I might fall out of touch with them or it might take them some work to find me again. That's okay. Like be okay with upsetting some people. Be okay with you miss some things. It'll pass in a few months. You know what? Maybe it'll actually lessen your load. You're like, oh yeah,
35:48 Cal Newport? some people didn't find me on the new email address. Maybe that's not the worst thing. If it really was important, they really would find me. So I would simplify how you're doing this. You know, put an autoresponder on for a month and then just be like, I'm assuming the bad stuff that happens when I turn off these other two accounts will be survivable because it almost certainly will be. I'm not even going to bother connecting that to digital because it's just a digital question. Email. How do we deal with email? That's obviously a modern digital environment question. All right. What have we got?
36:20 Speaker 01 Next question is from Matt. When reading to improve your general knowledge, is it better to read a few books and take lots of notes on them and revise the notes, quiz yourself on the book, or read more books and take fewer notes? How do you strike a balance?
36:32 Cal Newport? I mean, I think in general, just read more. If you're going to take notes, you can just do my page marking method. Mark the corner if there's something you're gonna, that looks interesting and then just sort of bracket out those sentences or paragraphs that have really caught your attention. That way, if you ever want to go back to that book, you just flip to the pages that are marked in the corners and then read the sentences that are marked with the brackets. You can typically grok the big ideas of a nonfiction book in like five minutes that way. That's usually how I read. Now, there's two exceptions where you're going to want to actually take notes outside of the book itself. One is, of course, if you're working on a specific project that requires that information, an article, a report, or what have you, a podcast episode, then that's fine. If you have a specific project that needs
37:17 Cal Newport? the information from a book, it might be worth slowing down or moving notes from that book out of the book and into another medium. If you're someone who needs to draw from a lot of books for projects, I'm thinking about Ryan Holiday here, because he talks about his method. He's constantly copying notes from most of the, especially biographies and history books he reads. He's constantly copying notes onto physical note cards. Then he files these note cards. I've seen them, these like giant boxes. But that's because like almost every book he reads is producing information that he will at least potentially use for a future book. But for most people who don't have a particular project or a plausible particular project that needs the information, just read. Read more is better than less. The other exception is
38:01 Cal Newport? going to be if there's a particular topic you care a lot about. And it doesn't have to be professional, right? Maybe it's just, here's something happening in our culture right now. I really want to know more about it. It impacts me. I want to be informed on it. You can consider creating a idea or information document. You just create like a text file. I use Google Docs. Where you actually say, I'm going to go through, I'm going to read four or five books on this topic. Maybe I'm going to take an online course, like a great courses course on this. And I'm going to pretty painstakingly copy my, the main ideas from all these into a big document, then make sense of them. Cause when I can see all the ideas in one big document from four or five books, I can
38:43 Cal Newport? sort these around and sort of get a sense of a deeper understanding of that idea, just because I want a deeper understanding of that idea. Like I'm doing that now. I began reading some books that have to do, you know, post-election. I'm much more interested in the idea and putting air quotes around it of wokeness, like where it came from, its impact on American culture and American elections. And I am creating a document, I think is relevant to my life as an academic, I think is relevant to my life as someone who does cultural commentary. I want to know more about it because it seems to be having a big impact on all of our lives. So I'm reading books. I just finished a great book, we'll talk about in the November book summary, We Have Never Been Woke. That was a very good book. Sociologist from Stony Brook wrote it.
39:28 Cal Newport? Anyways, that's an idea where I have four or five books I've chosen. It's going to take me a while to make my way through because I'm working on other stuff. I'm taking notes. And then I'll sort that document around and out of that's going to come like a more refined knowledge about that idea. Now that'll be something I have like a quote unquote take on, like an intellectual foundation that I can use when talking about something else or build on or have some confidence. So you could do that as well. Like basically create a project for yourself and capture notes into a shared document. Otherwise, just read, mark it in case you want to come back years later, but more books in general is better than less.
40:01 Speaker 01 Do you ever use active recall for general personal stuff?
40:05 Cal Newport? No. No, but I, for me, I mean, I say no in the sense of I don't test myself. Like when I think of active recall, I think of like my book, How to Become a Straight A Student. And I think about note cards and I'm testing my knowledge on certain things. What I do do, however, when I'm like creating an idea document for a topic is I'm thinking it through in my head. Like I'm as if I was writing an essay about it or doing a podcast monologue on it. And I'm trying to make sense and fit things together. So in a sense, that is sort of like active recall. I'll try out my ideas and conversations or I'll test them in some writing. That in sense is also active recall. So the more I play with the ideas and try to make sense of them in my own mind, the more it's becoming ingrained.
40:50 Cal Newport? And there's this idea I have where if you've worked with connected ideas long enough, they eventually just get added to the internal infrastructure of ideas, your intellectual infrastructure. It's just part of that scaffolding for the knowledge in your head. And now it's something you can forevermore draw on. Just like now, I can draw very fluently thinking about the neuroscience and psychology of context shifting and distraction and its role on cognitive processing. I've just worked with this information enough that it's just a part of how I understand the world. So creating a document, playing with the ideas, trying to summarize the ideas. So when you play with these documents, you like you write summaries of the ideas above the notes. That's kind of like active recall. So maybe I'll say playing with the ideas is like a lightweight active recall
41:33 Cal Newport? that does help you not only understand them better, but integrate them into your, into that sort of intellectual scaffolding.
41:41 Cal Newport? This would all stuff to go in my, you have that book idea in defense of thinking. We don't talk enough about just the mechanics of thinking. We don't do enough of that. We look at our phones, but the mechanics of thinking and the joy to come from thinking, working with ideas, increasing your understanding of the world, a different, you know, this is like a really rewarding human activity. We know this all the way since Aristotle talked about in the ethics. But we don't talk about that much anymore. We talk about content, like what you're learning. And also we just don't spend that much time. We're not that familiar with our brain. It's a weird thing how our brain works and how it takes information. But we don't talk much about that. We know a lot more, like the lay public knows a lot more about how muscles work. Than they do about how the brain works, right?
42:24 Cal Newport? Like, anyone who's like an amateur weightlifter knows a lot about like, oh, roughly how muscles work and how they grow and then progressive resistance. We know very little about the brain, but it's at the key, not just of many of our jobs, but of like a fulfilling human life. So I'm very interested in that topic.
42:42 Cal Newport? All right, what do we have next?
42:43 Speaker 01 We have our corner.
42:44 Cal Newport? Slow productivity corner. Let's hear some theme music.
42:54 Cal Newport? So the slow productivity corners where we designate one question per week to be specifically about my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. I now can refer to it as one of the economist's best books of 2024. Check it out if you have not already. All right, Jesse, what is our slow productivity corner question of the week?
43:16 Speaker 01 It's from Eric. I've worked in a fast paced environment for the past seven years and I'm tired of running. I recently read Slow Productivity. My company and industry, for that matter, does not work at a natural place and focus on quality. There's less people willing to do this work and it's simultaneously becoming more complex and time consuming. Therefore, I'm considering a career shift to better align with my values. How do I apply slow productivity without losing career capital?
43:42 Cal Newport? Well, it's a good question. It helps to know what you're looking for when you're looking for a shift. So you're looking to make a career change. You don't want to throw out excessive amounts of career capital, which again, is just my terminology for your, your rare and valuable skills that you've already developed. What I would look for, typically the best way to leverage your capital to get more slow productivity is to find ways to trade accountability for accessibility, to try to change your situation in such a way where you're being held accountable for what you produce. But are given extreme freedom and latitude for how you do it. So sometimes this means, for example, moving out of a organizational role where there's like
44:25 Cal Newport? a lot of people that you work with and therefore lots of expectations about communication, how work unfolds, moving out of one of those roles into more of like a freelancer consulting role. Right? Where it's, hey, I've signed a contract to do this. We'll check in once a week at this time on a phone call and otherwise I'm just rocking rolling. So now I've, I no longer have accessibility.
44:50 Cal Newport? Understandings or expectations about, hey, I'm always going to answer emails, it'd be on Slack, but I got a lot of accountability. Cause if I don't bring it, I don't get a new contract. You know, I'm going to eat what I eat, what I hunt, eat what I kill. Right? That's probably what you should be looking for. You have skill now. How can I leverage this? So that it's going to be quality that I live on. It's quality and make my reputation. I'll be accountable for what I do. But how I do it, I'm going to have a lot more freedom. You're probably in a good position to start thinking about taking those trade offs. When successful, they really can be life changing because it allows you to embrace so much more slow productivity in your professional life. All right. What do we got next? Oh wait, we're going to hear the theme music again, right?
45:34 Cal Newport? Yeah, we always close with the theme music. There we go.
45:41 Speaker 01 We're like 50 50 on whether we close with it or not.
45:44 Cal Newport? Now, I, I think we should because I like it. And it reminds me of the more you know, music from NBC.
45:50 Speaker 01 Sometimes you're going and I don't know if I should play it or not. So.
45:53 Cal Newport? All right. I think there's never too many times to play that theme music. All right, what do we got next?
45:59 Speaker 01 We have a call.
46:00 Cal Newport? Ooh, let's hear it.
46:04 Speaker 02 Hey Cal, long time reader and listener. I'm 28 year old software engineer working remotely from Western Colorado. I grew up here, moved away for a couple of years and developed the career capital to move back with the purpose of lifestyle centered career planning. While I love the outdoor opportunities and ability to participate in my small town, I'm lonely working from home, especially as a single person. I visit the office once every couple of months, which re-energizes me and facilitates collaboration. Don't know if I'm more productive in the office, but I definitely am happier. My boss said I can get a decent pay raise if I move to Denver to be closer to the office, but then I'd have to start over with my community and deal with heavy ski traffic.
46:49 Speaker 02 It's totally optional and I can move back if I'm unhappy. As an extrovert, at least according to pseudo-scientific BuzzFeed quizzes, I enjoy physically being in the office, but I also love my lifestyle after work. There are a few other benefits to moving to Denver. I'm single and the dating pool is lacking in my small town. There'd be a higher potential for career growth in a tech hub. I also speak multiple foreign languages and would eventually like to apply that skill to my job.
47:21 Speaker 02 There would be more exposure for my side hustle as a musician and finally my family moved to the front range, so I'd be closer to them. I eventually want to settle down here, but am I too early in my career and life path to choose my current lifestyle? What would you do in my situation? Thanks a ton.
47:43 Cal Newport? All right, well, Josh, it's a good chance to practice lifestyle centric planning. So the key with lifestyle centric planning is you have multiple different things that go into your ideal lifestyle. We have to be careful about this terminology, for example, because I see you, for example, referring to a subset of things that matter in your lifestyle as your quote unquote lifestyle. So living in Western Colorado in a more remote place, connected more closely to outdoor activities, you're calling that your lifestyle? I was like, no, that's, that's part of the attributes of your ideal lifestyle. You're also mentioning many other attributes of an ideal lifestyle that are incompatible where you currently live.
48:27 Cal Newport? So you talked about feeling more energy when you work in your office, the dating pool, family proximity, like being around family because they live in the front range, more things going on, like the, these are other attributes. You've mentioned those things and you mentioned liking the communities because you, I guess you said you grew up there in Western Colorado, liking that kind of quiet vibe and, and the easier access to outdoor activity of avoiding some sort of outdoor traffic. So we have multiple attributes. And there's not an obvious winner in terms of location. This is a very classic setup for lifestyle centric planning. There's not like a location that satisfies that all.
49:07 Cal Newport? So now what we're looking to do is come up with a plan that is going to improve as many of those as possible. And then maybe look for compensation for those that are neglected by the plan. So often a situation like this place, this idea is going to help more as many of my lifestyle things directly as possible. And I'm going to come up with perhaps even outside the box planning for how to deal with the, the, the remaining important things that this, that this plan doesn't actually satisfy. So for example, I'll go both directions. You might say, you know what? Denver is, if I do Denver right, move to Denver.
49:52 Cal Newport? There's so many of these lifestyle things that are going to affect me day to day and long-term day to day, like what my work experience is like long-term, like finding a mate, someone to marry down the line, uh, being around family during this period where like before they, there, there's these things that's going to affect so often that are going to be, you know, these are very important to me. So, so going to Denver is going to affect those. All right. So now how can I compensate for the small number of attributes that will be negatively impacted, which is like the quiet, the outdoor activity without all the traffic, that, that sort of aspects of life I like. You start thinking out of the box and be like, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm, I'm younger. I am going to find a way to have some sort of simple property.
50:37 Cal Newport? I might have to save up for a year, but some sort of simple property, you know, out in Western Colorado, it's going to be like a cabin that I'm going to work on and make better. And I'm going to set up my work in Denver because they don't seem to care. In office or remote. So maybe I'm going to set it up. So it's like three days in office or two remote or like Fridays I do remote or Mondays I do remote or something like this. And what I'm going to do is like on a lot of weekends, I'm going to head out to that property, kind of make that drive, work from there and be in the countryside for the whole weekend. Okay. So I get that quiet. I get that outdoor activities. I'm connected to that community.
51:19 Cal Newport? You get a lot of weekends I'm out there and I'm fixing up this kind of cool cabin I go to. And it's my center for mountain biking in the summer and my for skiing in the winter. And, and it's this sort of like cool project I have going on, but I'm spending most of my days in the city and I'm in the office most days, like most weeks, I'm getting that advantage. I'm seeing my family and I could go out and like hang out with people, especially on like weekday nights, or if there's like a date, maybe I don't go out to the cabin that weekend. But I also have a place like for my friends I meet in the city to go out to. And now what you're doing with this lifestyle planning, this is not like an obvious off the shelf solution, like, oh, like the standard solution of working four days a week in Denver with a cabin in western Colorado that you work on most weekend. It's not an off the shelf solution. It's a solution that's bespoke to your particular list of lifestyle attributes
52:02 Cal Newport? you care about. And now you know, that's what you're doing. Then you begin looking for opportunities. And this is where you find out like, okay, here's what I want to do. And it's where you find out like, actually, this friend of my family, we used to live there, you know, he's always mentioned they have this big property and they have a cabin on it. And they would probably rent that to me because they'd like it to be fixed up. And this is really not going to be that expensive. And my other buddy lives out there still and does custom home building and, and maybe he could, suddenly these like super bespoke plans begin to emerge. And there might be another way, you could go the opposite way. I could imagine a way where you go all in on the, on where you're currently living. And the way you would probably do that is figure out how to much more aggressively invest in non-professional community.
52:46 Cal Newport? Maybe there's a coworking space you go to, but also maybe you just get really on the ball with your work using my type of techniques to free up much more time so that you're sort of technically done without people knowing by work by two. And so you can be involved in all these like really aggressive outdoor activities and communities. My brother used to be very good at this when he worked for the government would shift his schedule would start, you know, at 5am and that freed up the afternoons for outdoor activities. So you had big community that was sort of unrelated to work to like there's shifts you can start to make there. And then maybe you say, I come into Denver for three days every other week. You know, I have like a place, like an Airbnb I like that I
53:27 Cal Newport? rent and I'm there half a week every other week. Or you do the thing where like, yeah, I go into the city for Monday and Tuesday and then I'm back for Wednesday through Sunday in the country, right? You figure out a way to do that. Maybe you buy a cheap apartment that you sort of fix up and I don't know, right? But you start thinking about these not off the shelf sort of bespoke solutions. Once you know the game, these are the attributes that I want to try to help them all and some I can help directly and some I have to do something unexpected to. This is what lifestyle centric planning looks like. And it's very different than grand goal thinking, which would be like, if I just make one big change, everything else is going to be better.
54:10 Cal Newport? That's like what I want to emphasize here is that when you have this list of attributes you're working on, they can't just all be helped by one decision. You get creative and it's why the deepest lives often have a relatively complicated structure. Cause that's what happens when you're working to satisfy multiple attributes at the same time. It's actually kind of a fun game and you have way more opportunities and things you would never even think of until you know exactly what you're trying to do. So you got a couple of cool options here, Josh, but I think the key is, Do real lifestyle centric planning. All of this, Jesse, is what I'm, I haven't got to this part of my book yet. But that's why I'm kind of looking forward to this deep life book and just having like a manual for this type of lifestyle thinking. It'll be like the least technology seemingly related book I've written, though again, it's motivated
54:55 Cal Newport? by technology because the very fact that we have to think so explicitly about how to shape our lives is something that came from the digitization of work. It's like one of the side effects of it, but I'm going to be glad when I can actually sort of just hand this book to people. I'm still in part one, which is preparation. The, the hard work of preparing to change your life, because that's my other argument. And Josh, I guess I'll throw this to you as well. The first big idea in my book is sometimes it's hard to jump straight into transforming your life. You have to prepare for it first. And then part two is lifestyle centric planning and how you actually do this type of planning. So I'm in the final chapter of part one right now in my writing.
55:34 Speaker 01 When it's finished, we'll fall in the same category as social productivity?
55:39 Cal Newport? You mean in terms of like how a publisher would think about it or best awards? I guess it's going to be considered more traditional self-help. It is not really about business or the world of work or technology as directly. So I guess it'll be seen as a more traditional self-help book, I suppose.
55:57 Speaker 01 And then do we know any of the books in 2024 on that list this year? I should look.
56:02 Cal Newport? It's often not its own category. Yeah. I mean, so where I have been on lists like that was Goodreads did their nine most popular self-help books, which covered like all advice books. And I was on that list, but like if you look at the economist list, they don't have a category for that. I guess it could be under cultural and the arts. It's probably not going to, I guess it could be under business, technology, economics, but probably not. And it's not going to be under history or memoir. It's like that area is a little bit less, less represented in some of these lists. So we'll see. It's been a fun book to write, though.
56:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:36 Cal Newport? Yeah. Taking my time. All right. So we got next a case study where people send in their accounts of putting into practice the type of advice we talked about on the show. So you can see what it looks like in the real world. You have a case study, send it to [email protected] . Today's case study comes from Brooke. Brooke says, "Prior to reading Slow Productivity, I had honestly been just scared to start to create a pursuits I was interested in. Everyone else seems to be able to crank out a book in six months or produce a work of art with a seemingly minimal, natural effort. Since I was just a beginner in everything, my art would take forever and suck. And wouldn't that be the worst thing to ever happen?
57:18 Cal Newport? Then I read Slow Productivity, and immediately after I read Deep Work, the framework of Slow Productivity and concepts of Deep Work really resonated with me, and I decided it was finally time to start writing the book I'd been thinking about. It took forever, who cares? I would create something I was happy with, and that's all that matters. To keep going past the initial spark of inspiration, I built my writing schedule around the idea that Deep Work is a muscle you cultivate. Since my Deep Work muscle was probably weaker than a newborn kitten, I set aside only one hour on weekdays to work on my book. I started a ritual to get in the writing zone, then wanted to finish out my deep writing session, which broke down writing a whole book into easily achievable chunks. I also got a small field notebook to record other random ideas that came to me outside of my Deep Work sessions.
58:02 Cal Newport? I don't think this notebook would be all that helpful, but it turned out to be pivotal in developing the plot. While I haven't written oodles of chapters as a beginner, this is a pace that is natural and sustainable to me. My ability to work deeply has improved along with my writing sessions to get longer. Critically, I'm so happy with what I've written, which provides major motivation to keep going." All right, well, Brooke, I appreciate that case study. A couple of ideas to underline for people. One, the idea of Deep Work as being cultivated. The more you train it, the better you get. So if you haven't really been spending a lot of time focusing intensely without distraction, don't be upset that when you go out to that writing cabin you rented for a month,
58:46 Cal Newport? you have struggled to produce anything useful.
58:50 Cal Newport? This is not some flaw in your wiring. It just means you're out of practice. Just like if you went to run a 5K, having not done any running in a while, it's not going to go well, right? You'll be winded, your lungs will hurt, your legs will hurt. You wouldn't say, "I don't have a running body. I'm just not meant to run." You say, "Yeah, I haven't been training. If I did some more training, I'd be better at this." So you have to think about deep work that way. I appreciate that. I also appreciate you embracing the idea of working at a natural pace. From my book, Slow Productivity, yeah, take your time. No one cares. A lot of great stuff took a really long time and no one knows that. No one knows how long things take. We invent these timelines in our head about how long we want something to take. And then we convince ourselves of two things. One, this is how long it takes for other people.
59:34 Cal Newport? And two, wouldn't it be great if this was true? And we fall in love with that story. We tell ourselves everyone writes books in six months. And we imagine what it would be like to be done in six months. And then that becomes a story that we want so much to be true that we try to force it to be true. But if you spend three years instead, what might have been impossible might become very tractable. Slow and steady. I talk about this a lot as the compound interest of productive effort. You work on something, not randomly, but like productively. When I work, I have a structure. I'm working deep. I'm trying to make progress. But only a little bit of work at a time on a regular basis, but maybe not a crazy pace. That adds up. Over time, that adds up. At first, you're not seeing the benefits.
1:00:20 Cal Newport? You're adding up pages, but you can't really tell the difference. You've written a bunch of stuff. But eventually, that turns into like a manuscript, if we're going to use the book example. Now you have a thing that can get feedback on and ideas about that you can be revising, right? And then at some point, that leads to something that gets published. And now like you're really getting rewards. Like, well, I'm a published author and I have the opportunity to publish other books. And the rewards begin to aggregate. And once you published a few books and you've had one of them has broken out and been successful, you look at the rewards per effort and you see it's like flat, flat, flat. And it starts moving, moving, moving faster, faster, faster. But you can't jump to the top of this curve from scratch. You have to sort of work your way on the slow curve before the exponential really begins to pick in.
1:01:02 Cal Newport? The compound interest of consistent productive effort is a really important factor.
1:01:08 Cal Newport? So just take more time is fine. Right? You're going to build up good work. Building up good work is building up good work. And who's to say three years is better than, is worse than two years is better than six months? Alright, so I love it, Brooke. Great case study. Keep going, go slow, keep obsessing over quality. Read the obsess over quality. Section of slow productivity. Work on your taste. I have all this advice in there for how to work on your taste. How to be around people who are doing it well? How to create your own inklings? How to get non-bias feedback? You want to be obsessing over quality here? But you can couple that with taking your time. You can kind of read the story about Juul will be a good story for you here as well. So yes, slow productivity is the bible for what you're doing right now.
1:01:53 Cal Newport? Go slow, take your time, obsess over quality. Good stuff will likely come.
1:01:59 Cal Newport? Alright, we have a final segment coming up here. But first, let's hear from another sponsor.
1:02:05 Cal Newport? Want to hear about our long time sponsors at Grammarly? What's been cool about Grammarly is that in the time that they have been one of our sponsors, it's now been four years. We have seen their already great product. Grow in leaps and bounds in terms of its capabilities. And particularly, it has been their embrace and integration of AI that has really pushed forward what Grammarly can help you do. So Grammarly helps with any writing from brainstorming to sounding more confident and persuasive at your work. You can write and edit quickly with context aware suggestions everywhere you write. It can help you change the tone. It can help you reword things. It'll help you, of course, with just like grammar as it always has.
1:02:50 Cal Newport? It can even help generate ideas or text for you to work with from scratch, all using this new, this increasingly sophisticated embrace of AI.
1:03:01 Cal Newport? So for example, maybe you're like, okay, I have to write up a marketing message because we're going to send out an email for like some new product. You can now with Grammarly actually use its AI prompts to help you come up with like some few ideas for what to say or a good metaphor to use, then you could write that quickly and then use its tone detector. Is this too professional? How do I make the, can we rewrite this to be a little bit lighter and it helps you like rewrite your text? So it's like having a professional editor who sits there over your shoulder now, plus a professional researcher who can give you ideas and write rough drafts of text. It's really, the tool has really been coming along. It has enterprise-grade security and a business model that doesn't sell your data.
1:03:44 Cal Newport? So you do not have to worry about that. It works across, what is it now? 500,000 apps and websites? That's what's cool about it. You're not flipping over to a website where you're typing stuff into a text interface. It is there in the apps you're already using to do your writing. 93% of professionals report to Grammarly helps them get more work done. They've been at this for 15 years and it keeps getting better and better. So get more done with Grammarly. Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com/podcast. That's grammarly.com/podcast. I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify.
1:04:29 Cal Newport? This is the home of the number one checkout on the planet, including their shop pay feature that boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way less charts, carts get abandoned, you get way more sales going forward. I can't tell you how many different people I know who sell things, who swear by Shopify. It makes it so easy for you to have an incredibly professional commerce experience, whether we're talking about like e-commerce on a website or even point-to-sale solutions in an actual bricks and mortar stores. You get this super easy checkout experience and people are much more likely to follow through and actually complete their purchase. And it's, it's easy on your end as a consumer, as the business owner.
1:05:11 Cal Newport? So this is kind of like the poorly kept secret of the world of people who sell things is Shopify is what makes them seem so effective and so professional.
1:05:23 Cal Newport? So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that so many people I know use to sell things online or in person. You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period. If you go to Shopify.com/deep. It's important that you type that in all lowercase letters. Go to Shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today. That's Shopify.com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment. So today I want to react to something that I saw online. I'm going to load it up on the screen here for those who are watching
1:06:06 Cal Newport? instead of just listening. This is actually someone reporting something they just encountered in their workplace. They're reporting about it on Reddit. So this is from the rsysadmin Reddit thread from just a few days before we are actually doing this recording. All right, I'm going to read some of this here. "Had the pleasure of sitting through a sales pitch for a pretty big productivity monitoring..." I can't say this word, monitoring. It's not a hard word. I'm not trying to say like zocdoc.com. "Productivity monitoring software suite this morning. Here's the expected basics of what this application does. Full key logging
1:06:50 Cal Newport? and mouse movement tracking takes a screenshot of your desktop every interval between 10 seconds to five minutes. Also part of every RMM I know. Keeps track of the programs you open and how often. This is also standard. Creates realtime recordings and heat maps of where you click in any program." All right, then he says, "Here's where it gets fun. It allows your manager to group you into a work category along with your coworkers. It then uses AI to create a productivity graph from all your mouse movement data and where you click, how fast you type, how often you use backspace, the sites you visit, the programs you open, how many emails you send, and compares all of this to your coworkers' data in the
1:07:33 Cal Newport? same work category." And it goes on and on. All right.
1:07:40 Cal Newport? This represents like a natural trajectory of quote unquote productivity monitoring software in the current world of knowledge work. All of which tends to be based on this idea. That what matters is activity. And the boogeyman that you have to chase down and get rid of is people doing nothing. This productivity monitoring software creates a world where if you're doing lots of stuff on your computer, it's great for the company. And there's a lot of freeloaders who like sit there sipping slurpees and you got to figure them out with the software. If you can just get rid of those, you're going to be productive. This is, in my opinion, ridiculous. And it is what happens when we let software companies dictate to us what productivity
1:08:25 Cal Newport? means. The definition of productivity that they're dictating to us is productivity that can be helped and monitored by their tools, which cost money, by their SaaS tools. But if we step back with even just a little bit of objectivity, this shift towards digital productivity monitoring in most jobs is crazily misguided. It would be the equivalent of going to like the Ford factory in the early 20th century and saying, okay, we want to be better at producing Model Ts. And here's how we're going to do it. Like we've created this apparatus that looks at like the arm movements of the different people involved in building the cars. And then here's how it works. We've put bells on people's arms and they have different tones and we've, we've trained
1:09:10 Cal Newport? people to recognize the different bell tones. And if we hear a particular bell, is it ringing enough? Well, maybe that person is just not helping to build cars and we can identify them. So everyone's going to have to make sure their bells are ringing all the time. This would be a crazily indirect way of trying to increase Model T production. What works better?
1:09:34 Cal Newport? Why don't we measure how fast we're producing Model Ts? And then let's have a process we use to produce Model Ts. And then if we change the process, see if that produces more Model Ts. That's what led to the continuous motion assembly line, which is 10x more effective than the methods we're using before. Not this sort of like vaguely indirect, let's make sure people are moving more. And the reason why, and this becomes crystal clear when we think about this analogy to car manufacturing. Is that in car manufacturing, it becomes clear, oh, it's completely misguided. What you're trying to do here is not figure out a way to do something better. You're trying to figure out a way to eliminate some narrow negative case you're worried about. You're worried about the person who's on your car manufacturing floor, who's just sitting there taking a nap.
1:10:17 Cal Newport? You have this negative boogeyman you're really worried about, and you're putting all of your energy to track that down. Hey, if you're just doing nothing, I'm not going to hear your bell, then you're going to be in trouble. But what it doesn't focus on is the positive of trying to produce more stuff, which is ultimately the thing that more directly matters. I don't care as much about as someone taking a nap. What I care about is are we producing Model Ts at a fast rate? That's what matters to me. I don't get paid by car purchasers for lack of naps. I get paid for Model Ts. But in knowledge work, we have this like terribly indirect way of doing things. Where we say, well, visible activity is going to be our proxy for useful effort. So let's just make sure there's no one doing like very little visible activity.
1:10:58 Cal Newport? But as I argue in my book, Slow Productivity, this is a disastrous way to think about actually getting things done. In knowledge work, we have to figure out how to measure the stuff that matters and the processes we use to produce that stuff and see if those processes work well or not. It's nothing to do with putting the proverbial bells on people's elbows just to make sure that their body's moving. Now, what about that negative? What about the freeloader problem? Almost anything you come up with for actually like directly improving the quality of what you produce, almost as soon, almost anything you come up with as soon as you get very systematic about what should the processes be for how we produce stuff, almost any of these solutions
1:11:41 Cal Newport? make freeloaders really obvious. Because once you actually think about process, like here's the stuff we do, we tend to do things like external tracking of workload. We tend to do things like clarity and communication. We, every other day, we sit down, you are working on this, where are you, where are you stuck? As opposed to just receiving a bunch of emails about a bunch of stuff. I know what you're working on, I want to know what you need, what you did, what you need. Like that is a situation, for example, in which it's very hard to be the car worker not moving their arms. I don't need to be tracking your computer or seeing if your mouse is movement. It's where's the goods? You didn't do this. It's clear 10 minutes before this meeting, you put some crap together. So when you get more
1:12:24 Cal Newport? systematic, the freeloader problem goes away, but you also free people from this counterproductive surveillance culture approach, which is more about like managers being really mad and matching some negative than it is about trying to get more things done. So the equivalent of the assembly line and knowledge work is like, let's get more focused on what we produce, let's have external workload management, let's structure communication so people aren't context shifting, and let's trade accessibility for accountability. This is what the software industry did when they moved towards agile methodologies. They don't just email each other, like, hey, could you work on this feature? And what about that feature? And who's working on this? No, they, they track what features need to be done. Who's working on what? You're working on this. Only work on this. How long do you need? Two days? Great.
1:13:08 Cal Newport? Get it done in two days. We'll check back in and figure out what you should work on next. Huge flexibility in how work is executed, very little surveillance. But on the other hand, very few freeloaders, because it becomes obvious pretty quick, you've gotten very, you've been very nonproductive. You're not getting these things done for us.
1:13:25 Cal Newport? So what we need to care about is real processes that take into account how the human brain actually works and are more focused on results than they are these crude proxies for useful effort. The type of productivity monitoring software talked about in this Reddit thread is exactly the wrong direction to go. It's putting the bells on the Ford workers instead of innovating the assembly line. It is missing the forest for the trees. It's not going to make your company more productive. It's just going to make people more miserable. I'm not surprised that software companies are pitching this because this is something you can write software from and throw some AI at it. So it seems like it's a value add and you can charge $12 a seat with your SaaS solution. The companies themselves say it's not the software. The software companies aren't going to tell them about productivity
1:14:10 Cal Newport? as we know our business. Let's get serious about producing stuff that matters, even if structuring work is going to be a pain. It's better than all this nonsense. So there you go. It's a little bit of a rant, but productivity monitoring software is going in the absolute wrong direction. And of course, let me connect this like we're doing all episode back to digital. This is all a problem of the digital environment around knowledge work where there's so many different things you could be working on and there's such ease in just passing stuff on along. We get into this sort of pseudo productive, hyperactive hive mind environment where everyone just rock and rolls and emails everyone. And in that world, what else can you do except for say like, well, let's just get rid of people not participating. But this is all a side effect of the of digital knowledge work. We it caught us off guard. We didn't
1:14:53 Cal Newport? know how to handle it and we need better tools than something like monitoring software.
1:15:00 Cal Newport? All right. All right. There we go. That is our episode for today. We covered, I guess I could say everything, Jesse, because in theory I've touched on almost every major topic I've talked about. I did leave out a whole section of advice about skeletons. I do have a lot of thoughts about that. I also had another whole section of advice about Brandon Sanderson.
1:15:21 Cal Newport? And his book Name of the Wind. This is a good time to tell people, by the way, if you have corrections about things I've said, like misattributing authors to books, [email protected] . He loves to hear about them.
1:15:31 Speaker 01 I do.
1:15:31 Cal Newport? I got a couple. I get those emails. We must have mentioned Brandon recently, because I got another Brandon didn't write Name of the Wind email kind of recently. My favorite type of, favorite type of emails. All right. That's all of it for all we have for today. We'll be back next week with another episode. We didn't, I guess this is coming out early December, right?
1:15:50 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:15:50 Cal Newport? All right. So we'll do the November books. I forgot to bring them today. We're recording this pretty early in the week in November, so I didn't think about it. But I will do the books I read in November. We'll do those at the end of next episode. Okay. Keep up with your thrillers if you're doing thriller December, and we will see you next week. And until then, as always, stay deep.
1:16:10 Cal Newport? Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.
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