Ep. 379: The Flexibility Myth

When companies began instituting return-to-office plans after the pandemic, a disproportionate number of women chose instead to leave the workforce. Why? The obvious answer is that they wanted the flexibility of remote work. But in this episode, Cal draws on a recent New York Times op-ed that offers a deeper explanation – one that affects all knowledge workers. He then explores solutions to the problem, answers listener questions, and (God help him) respond to comments on his recent Superintelligence episode. 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 Flexibility Myth [0:02] How should a venture backed startup team design their work schedule? [51:42] How do I stop my boss from e-mailing me at all hours? [57:02] How should a professor on break schedule his deep work? [1:02:35] How can I better schedule my blocks to prepare for technical interviews? [1:09:59] When considering lifestyle-centric planning, what practices may help determine the type of work to pursue? [1:12:16] CASE STUDY: Completing a Thesis [1:19:08] CALL: Details about time blocking [1:25:08] CAL READS THE COMMENTS: The Case Against Superintelligence [1:33:58] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/women-work-force-flexibility-shifts.htmlyoutube.com/watch?v=y0RI5CnoDvs Thanks to our Sponsors: This episode is sponsored by Betterhelp. betterhelp.com/deepquestionsexpressvpn.com/deepshopify.com/deepmybodytutor.com Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Cal Newport?

  I recently came across an op ed in the New York Times that caught my attention. It was written by Corrine Lowe, an economist at Penn who studies gender in the workplace. In this piece, she says the following, this is the quote that really grabbed me. She says, "Almost two thirds of corporate leaders who mandated return to office policies after the pandemic saw disproportionately higher numbers of women leave their companies." Now, why is this happening? As Lowe notes, there's an obvious answer here. You can blame the call to return to the office, right? Maybe women came to count on the flexibility that was afforded by remote work.

• 0:48Cal Newport?

  And given that women have much higher household labor and childcare labor burdens than men, they would be the group that you would expect to struggle most when you took some of this flexibility away. But as Lowe goes on to argue, this is not the full story. There is another major factor that disproportionately impacts women, but is a real problem for all knowledge workers, an issue with the knowledge sector that has been quietly making all of us miserable. In today's episode, I want to talk about this mystery factor. I want to describe where it came from, and then using this knowledge suggests some concrete tactics that you or your employer can deploy to help reduce it.

• 1:32Cal Newport?

  So if you felt exhausted or frustrated by aspects of your job and can't quite figure out why, you need to listen to this episode. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.

• 1:56Cal Newport?

  Today's episode, the X factor making us miserable at work.

• 2:05Cal Newport?

  All right. So I want to start by resolving this mystery of what drove women to disproportionately leave the workforce after the pandemic. I'm going to return to Corrine Lowe's op ed here to help us come up with this answer. I'll load it up on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening, the relevant portion. All right, I'm reading now from the op ed.

• 2:28Cal Newport?

  Women's choices don't back up the idea that in office work is entirely to blame. Nursing, which can essentially be done only at the site of care, remains almost 90% female. Most medical students are now women too, as are about 70% of physician assistants and almost 90% of nurse practitioners. Both occupations are growing quickly. In fact, in the past two years, nearly 40% of all new jobs have gone to women working in healthcare. So if women aren't inherently adverse to in-office work, then what is the issue? That's where I point back to boundaries. Nursing shifts are typically rigid, often set far in advance, while hours on given shift can be grueling. They're also a known quantity.

• 3:14Cal Newport?

  Even on-call time, common in the medical field, is predictable. Your phone might ring on Saturday night, but only if it's your assigned time to be on-call. It's not a matter of working remotely during which personal life and work life can seep into each other, nor of simple flexibility. It's about a clear delineation between work and every other aspect of life. All right, this is interesting, right? So Lowe is making this argument.

• 3:41Cal Newport?

  Forget flexibility, predictability. This is where the value is. Now, there's some intriguing data that that helps back this up. Lowe points to a 2017 study. It's written by a pair of economists, one from Princeton, one from Harvard, that tries to measure how much people are willing to pay to gain or avoid certain features in their job. I read this paper. It's a really interesting methodology. What they did is they actually got a large group of employees, I think they're using call center employees who had similar jobs, and they exposed them to job ads. And they used the same wording in this job ad and would only change it. For the particular feature they were measuring and then they had different hourly wages.

• 4:23Cal Newport?

  And so they could measure the, you know, for each description of this job, each of them featuring different aspects, how much they have to make the hourly wage before they got sort of substantial interest. Like I'm simplifying it here, but that's roughly how they they did it because they're economists. They could then crunch this through numbers and actually calculate on average, how much people would pay for certain features or pay to avoid certain features. All right. Let me now summarize. This is Lowe's summary. Actually, let me read you Lowe's summary of the key findings or one of the key findings of this paper. The results showed that working mothers with children under four would be willing to give up barely any pay for a flexible schedule and would give up an average of just 15%

• 5:05Cal Newport?

  of their pay to work from home, but they would forego almost 40% of their income to avoid an employer discretion job in which their boss sets their hours at will. The problem may be more pronounced among mothers, but it isn't unique to them. All workers in the study, men, women, parents and non-parents alike disliked employer discretion jobs and were willing to take hefty pay cuts to avoid them. Now, in the study, they were looking at hourly workers. Employer discretion is a very specific nomenclature, which means your shift can be changed sort of on the whim of the employers. It's not fixed in advance what hours you're going to work. But Lowe makes the argument, the psychology there is a similar psychology to a lot of higher paid salary knowledge work jobs where you feel

• 5:48Cal Newport?

  like work extends beyond the normal workday. These are the jobs where return to office policies were relevant. This idea that there is no predictability of when I might have to like answer a key email or suddenly have to put everything aside to try to get something done that showed up in a Slack message right before my kid's game or something like this. She's arguing, we really hate that unpredictability. Based on that, The Times gave Lowe's op ed a title that kind of got to the core of that issue. Here's what they called it, "What Women Really Want to Not Answer Work Emails at 10:00 PM." So this now brings us back to that original observation that women left work disproportionately as companies returned to the office after the pandemic. Based on

• 6:32Cal Newport?

  Lowe's analysis, here's what actually seemed to have happened. Okay, during the pandemic, work got even more unpredictable. We know this, the sort of amount of stuff that just moved over to like ad hoc, back and forth emails and meetings and Zooms and calls. There was no real office. So everything mixed together. Who cared about work hours when there's no commuting, there was no office. That unpredictability got worse. This made jobs worse. It made them worse for everybody. I catalog this in my book, Slow Productivity as well. It got particularly worse if you were a woman, especially if you had a family, because again, the research Lowe talks about in this article is pretty clear. They're doing a disproportionate amount of housework. They're doing a disproportionate amount of childcare. So you add more unpredictability on top of that, your job gets really, really

• 7:15Cal Newport?

  bad. And then when employers said, okay, things are stable enough now that we can return to an office, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. So it's not that, oh, we were so happy at home. We just don't want to go back to the office. We don't like that working environment. It was no, we, we're miserable. Work got worse during the pandemic. I'm, I can't take it anymore. Like you take, you take this final straw that breaks the camel back of like now these like little conveniences of flexibilities, we're going to take those away too. You're like, that's too much. Another thing that probably happened here as well is that the return to work policies also corresponded with the return of economic stability. So no one was going to leave their job in early 2021 because you didn't know if whole industries were going to disappear. Everyone was like, if

• 8:00Cal Newport?

  you, if you're lucky enough to have a knowledge work job and you're still getting a paycheck, like keep it. But by the time we were returning to office, people weren't so worried anymore. Like, okay, I think we're okay. I think like industries aren't disappearing. And a lot of people were like enough is enough of this unpredictable knowledge work. Like, I will leave if I can. And it was disproportionately going to be women because they have the extra burdens that men don't have. But again, this is pointing to a problem that affects all the people who left behind as well. We do not like unpredictability.

• 8:29Cal Newport?

  So for everyone who remains in these types of jobs, this unpredictability issue is a massive source of annoyance, burnout and stress. The problem with knowledge work in the moment then is not really where it takes place, but the fact that it never leaves you alone. Its demands are constant and unpredictable.

• 8:49Cal Newport?

  All right. So that brings me to the second part of our discussion here.

• 8:53Cal Newport?

  Why is this the case? How did this happen? If we want to reduce the impact of this sort of unspoken factor that we all hate, we kind of need to know where it comes from. Lowe offers one possible explanation in her op ed. She says, when it comes to higher in salary knowledge work jobs, there's a trend called convex return to hours. Now this is economist speak for the idea that you have a really good worker doing 80 hours of work. The value returned to your company is much higher than having two average workers each do 40 hours of work. It adds up to the same number of hours, but the better worker is just better. So like the more hours you get out of the better worker, the better, the more value you're going to create.

• 9:36Cal Newport?

  Now the convex return to hours is a sort of common sense. It's easily measurable when you're looking at things like lawyer jobs at law firms, because the amount that each hour of work generates is precise. I bill at this many hours. It's like law firms sort of figure this out is like, oh, our model, the right model here is to have our partners who bill really high, work in possible hours, like that makes the most money, you know, for the firm. It's much better to have the partner who bills at a thousand dollars an hour, working 80 hours a week than to have more associates that bill at 400 hours of dollars an hour. And also like have way more non billable time because there's a lot of time where they're trying to figure things out or they don't know what to do.

• 10:21Cal Newport?

  It's just, it's much better to have the expensive people burn themselves out. And that's like the model in law firms, which is like, we're going to pay you well, but you got to know the trade off, which is like, you're going to work until your fingers bleed, because that maximizes profits, better than hiring more people that we, that we pay less. And Lowe is saying economists now know that this, this happens even in jobs where there's not a clear hourly rate. It's just, hey, you're really good. We're just going to kind of give more stuff to you and less stuff to the other people, because that's going to make more money. So Lowe is like, yeah, this way it works on predictable is because we got a lot of it. I'm going to yes and that explanation. I mean, I think that is true. I've talked a lot about workload obfuscation, the fact that we do not have clear workload

• 11:03Cal Newport?

  controls. We don't know how much anyone is doing. We don't have any formal mechanisms for tracking work. And so workloads can get out of control without anyone knowing, and workloads are going to move towards people who are more dependable and reliable, and we burn them out because no one anywhere knows who's working on what. And I think that's a big problem. But there's another factor at play here that I think is probably even more significant, and it's why we're talking about this issue on this show, which is a show about understanding and responding to technology, because I think the bigger explanation for why we have this unpredictability in knowledge work is technological. And in particular, two different technological things that happened, starting in the early 2000s

• 11:47Cal Newport?

  and sort of reaching its peak in the 2010s, sort of right before we get to the decade of the pandemic. Number one, the introduction of low friction digital communication tools, email followed by messaging tools like Slack. And number two, the rise of mobile professional computing, those laptops followed by fully featured smartphones. We underestimate the impact of this technological shift that it had on our day to day experience of knowledge work. Knowledge work today is significantly more unpredictable, in the sense that it follows us all throughout our life outside of work than it was 25 years ago, and is a major source of exhaustion and burnout. It's a major source of why those of us who

• 12:31Cal Newport?

  have the thinnest margins, like women who are juggling other things, are disproportionately being pushed out of the workforce. So it really matters. Let me explain why this is true. There's two effects related to these technologies that I want to briefly summarize. Effect number one has to do with what happens when we take the friction out of digital communication. So when email arrived in the office, we now have low friction digital communication. It was much easier in a moment to send a quick email message than it was to call someone and leave a voicemail or go find them or write a memo. So like more communication moved to email messaging. That sort of made sense. But the thing is, email was an asynchronous medium. I send a message and it waits in your inbox till you see it. So now what we get is more work that unfolds over unscheduled back and forth ad hoc communications.

• 13:16Cal Newport?

  I send you a message, you see it at some point, you bounce a message back to me. I see it at some point and I bounce that message back to you. We're volleying this back and forth in a sort of unscheduled fashion. Well, when we have all of these messages bouncing back and forth, there's a couple of big negative impacts that occur. One during the workday and one after. The effect that's negative during the workday is I now have to monitor these communication channels all the time. If I have 10 ongoing back and forth ad hoc conversations, most of which are somewhat time sensitive. Like, we can't spend all week trying to resolve this conversation. We kind of need to figure it out today because we're trying to get our heads together about something we're going to talk about at a meeting tomorrow, right? I have to hit my sides of the volley promptly.

• 14:02Cal Newport?

  I send you a message, you send me one back. I gotta knock that back to you quick because we might have to go back and forth another four or five times today before we resolve this. So if I have a bunch of these volleys going on and I have to be prompt about knocking the proverbial digital message ball back to you as quickly as possible, I have to check these communication channels all the time. Because I don't know, I don't know when the next one's going to come back. Well, as we've talked about often on this show, I wrote a whole book about this called A World Without Email. Now your attention is constantly fractured. You have to continually context shift between the world of your email and the world of anything else you're having to do. This creates cognitive confusion. It puts you into a state of persistent reduced cognitive performance that makes it very hard to really make progress on anything significant. How does this, this has a lot of negative impacts.

• 14:45Cal Newport?

  Again, I wrote a whole book about it, but for our discussion today, one of the lesser discussed impacts of this is where does the important work that takes more time now have to get done? Outside of work hours. You never really know now. This is unpredictability. Maybe on Wednesday, like something major comes up, but I can only make so much progress on the workday because I'm constantly context shifting to handle my digital volleys. So I'm gonna have to do it that evening, but I also have my kids recital that evening and I need to do shopping because like we're low on food. And now suddenly I have to do this at 10:00 PM till midnight and I didn't even know this till I got to that day. So that's a major source of unpredictability. Was digital messaging. So we introduced the technology for one reason because fax machines

• 15:27Cal Newport?

  and voicemail is annoying. And next thing we know, we're working at 10:00 PM after our kids' recital unexpectedly, unintentional side effect. It also has an effect outside of work because if we're volleying things back and forth like this, I kind of need to check in on this game even after work, right? Because we're trying to get some decision done. I'm waiting for you to respond to me. I kind of need to keep checking because if I see this in the evening, maybe we can get a couple more volleys in before we get to the next day and that's going to save us a lot of time. So now work in this sort of unexpected unpredictable way has bled beyond its borders. It's now something that happens

• 16:08Cal Newport?

  in other times. So I'm at a sports game with my kid. I'm like, well, I might as well check. Oh, there's a bunch of volleys that came back. I'm like, I gotta send these back. It's incredibly stressful to be delaying the game of that we're playing digitally. And so now I'm missing the game that's being played on the real field. And that's that feeling of like work is following me. There's no set hours. Like it's just everywhere, right? So digital communication accidentally created a lot of unpredictability about when and where work happens. All right. The second effect has to do with the virtualization of work, which led to the dissolution of work hours. This goes back to the mobile

• 16:47Cal Newport?

  computing revolution. Laptops made work way worse, right? Because now, just because I left the office, really nothing I was doing in that office is now off limits. In fact, everything I was doing in that office was happening on a screen and I now have that same screen with me when I'm out of the office. The location of work became less and less important as work became more virtualized. It was happening on computers anyways. I talk about a lot of research in my book, A World Without Email. It was office ethnographic research. This was research done by Gloria Mark and they measured different amounts

• 17:28Cal Newport?

  of activities, different types of activities, the amount of time people spent doing these activities in the office. And one of the things she pointed me towards is there's this sort of remarkable table where you're looking at the row that measures in-person meeting time, sitting with people and talking around a table, like the classic thing you do in an office. And there's a point where that number

• 17:53Cal Newport?

  Blummets and computer time or at desk time shoots up. And as Mark will tell you, yeah, that's when email came along. So even when you're at the office, we was, we prefer to virtualize it. I'm just going to send messages here on my computer. So it didn't really matter if I was in the office or not. But now the problem is, if there's no real office that matters for your work, now you have to kind of make the argument, well, why am I not doing a little bit more work when I'm home? I have all the tools with me here. The fact that I'm home has no really material impact on what I can and cannot do. And so then we started doing more work out of the office. Now to make this even worse, there's an effect that I documented in my more recent book,

• 18:37Cal Newport?

  Slow Productivity, called pseudo-productivity, which is a sort of pseudo-management theory that we implicitly adopted that said, in knowledge work, busyness is something we're going to associate with value production. So the more activity I see you doing, the more productive I am going to assume you are. That is pseudo-productivity. It's a nonsense theory. It's not true, but it's what, how we implicitly manage most of knowledge work. Well, now imagine what happens when work can happen anywhere. The office is not that important. I have the means of doing work with me wherever I go. And I know the more I am visibly doing work activity, the more productive people will think I am. That's a lot of pressure to open up that laptop. I'm going to do a second shift at 10:00 PM. The thing that the title of that op-ed says is driving people, especially women, crazy.

• 19:22Cal Newport?

  Every moment now becomes a negotiation of my time outside of work. Family, myself versus demonstrating more value to my employer, which might be important for like my long-term ability to have a job. And you have to constantly do that battle and have that fight. Oh, that's exhausting. And then we got fully featured smartphones and this got even worse because now even in places where you wouldn't have a laptop, like at the sports game, like at the recital, like at the religious service, you have, again, most of the means to do your work with you and you have to have that thought, I could do a little bit now, is going to make me seem a little bit more productive. The more I do, the more productive I'll seem. But the dissolution of office as a meaningful thing meant work hours dissolved as well.

• 20:06Cal Newport?

  And so all of this goes together. These are both driven by technology, but it makes work feel like it's everywhere all the time and unpredictable when it might show up and when we have to do it. And that is what we hate. And that got worse during the pandemic. Because like definitely dissolved offices at that point. Also definitely the, the non-work responsibilities got much bigger because you know, kids were trying to go to school on Zoom and all sorts of other nonsense. And now like work was just happening everywhere and all the time. And it was just enough. And as soon as people who could get out, could get out, they did. It was just too terrible. So I think that's important. Technology made a lot of

• 20:47Cal Newport?

  things easier, but also accidentally made work worse. Now, the useful thing though, is if we understand that this is the source of this X factor that's making us miserable, we realize, well, this is solvable. Those are side effects of technologies that were introduced for other reasons. They're not, you know, there's no good argument that like this emailing at night or whatever, the stuff that makes us miserable is like some important profit driver, right? It's a side effect. So if we know what caused it, and this is my whole theory on the show, if you actually understand how technology impacts us, you can figure out responses to makes your life better instead of worse. This means solutions are possible. This is what I

• 21:28Cal Newport?

  want to get to next, the concrete things you can do or your team can do to try to eliminate or reduce this issue. But first, we have to take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

• 21:40Speaker 01

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• 22:10Cal Newport?

  Now, Jesse, I don't know if you have ever browsed in incognito mode, but it's probably not as incognito as you think. In fact, Google had to recently settle a $5 billion lawsuit after being accused of secretly tracking users in incognito mode. And you know what Google's defense was? They said, you were wrong to think that incognito mode somehow gave you privacy. In fact, all of your online activity is 100% visible to third parties. What did you think was going to happen? So what's going on here? Well, incognito mode, what does that do? It just prevents your local device of keeping records of what you're doing on your phone. But everyone beyond the device can see exactly what sites and services you're using. Because the way the internet works is I have to send packets to the website that I want to read

• 22:54Cal Newport?

  or the service I'm using, and those packets have where they're coming from and where they're going right there in the front. It's called the header. So if you're on a public Wi-Fi point, I can just run a simple program on my computer that reads packets on the radio waves. And I'm like, oh, that person over there is like spending an inordinate amount of time on a Halloween animatronic website. And he thinks he's no one will ever know because in incognito mode, but we can see it. Your ISP knows exactly what websites and services you're using because it's right there in the header. They can use that information or sell that information, and they do. So you're not as private as you think, unless you use a VPN like ExpressVPN. See, when you use ExpressVPN, what happens is it takes the packet you want to send

• 23:39Cal Newport?

  to the Halloween animatronic site, and it encrypts it into a secret package. And then it sends it to a VPN server. And then the VPN server unencrypts it and talks to the Halloween animatronic site on your half behalf, encrypts the response and sends it back. So now, anyone who's around you, all they can tell, your ISP, the person reading the packets off the airwaves, all they know is you're talking to a VPN server. They have no idea what sites and services you're actually talking to. Your privacy is regained. If you're going to use a VPN, I recommend the one, the one I recommend is ExpressVPN. First of all, their price is incredibly reasonable. They have plans that start at just $3.49 a month. That's 12 cents a day. It's also very easy to use. You can turn it on with just a click.

• 24:22Cal Newport?

  And now, all the apps and browsing you're doing on that device are going to be private. And it works on all the different devices you use, like not just computers, but phones, laptop, tablet. So you can, you're on the road, you're traveling, you're at a hotel, you're in some public site where you don't trust, you know, the Wi-Fi or whatever. Whatever device you have with you, you can have it, turn it on with one click.

• 24:43Cal Newport?

  So secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com/deep. That's E X P R E S S V P N dot com slash deep to find out how you can get up to four extra months. That's expressvpn.com/deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Here's the thing, if you run a small business, you know, there's nothing small about it. Every day there's a new decision to make and even the smallest decisions feel massive. When you find the decision that's a no brainer, you should take it. And when it comes to selling things, using Shopify is exactly one of those no brainers. Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together in-store and online operations across up to 1,000 locations.

• 25:26Cal Newport?

  It has very impressive features like endless aisle, ship to customer and buy online, pick up in store, buy online and then pick up in store. It's a great feature. And with Shopify POS, you can get personalized experiences to help shoppers come back and they will. Based on a recent report from EY, businesses on Shopify POS see real results like 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to an 8.9% uplift in sales on average relative to the market set surveyed. So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/deep. Go to Shopify.com/deep. Shopify.com/deep.

• 26:13Cal Newport?

  All right, let's now get back to our deep dive.

• 26:19Cal Newport?

  All right, so now that we've identified that lack of predictability of when and where work happens is a key issue in modern knowledge work, we can return to our question of how we want to solve it. And let's see here, Jesse, I'm perhaps taking a big risk here, but due to popular demand, I'm going to draw some pictures here. So I want to talk about some solutions for those who are watching, instead of just listening, I'm going to do my game of drawing an icon for each of the solutions I suggest. Again, this artwork is so good that I barely need to explain it. I think it'll be self-explanatory. All right, so I'm going to give a few suggestions here. I have 1, 2, 3, 4.

• 26:58Cal Newport?

  I have 4 suggestions that really take aim at those key issues I talked about that are technological. My 5th suggestion is going to take aim at the issue that Lo pointed out about too much work. And so what's going to be ironic here is that my solutions to too much technology are going to be analog, and my solution to too much work is going to be technological. So this is going to get interesting. All right, but let's start with my first idea here. I call this the one message rule. Here's how I'm going to draw this, Jesse. I think this is very intuitive. So you can see here, I have 2 messages, and then I have 2 arrows. All right, so let me explain what I mean by that. Here's the one message rule.

• 27:42Cal Newport?

  If an email or instant message cannot be answered with a single message in reply, then it's not meant for email or messaging. It's not meant for digital communication, and it should be dealt with in real time in an actual conversation. That's why I drew here, one message, as you can see, it gets received, and it generates another message in response. I guess that makes sense. I don't know if those arrows actually make sense, Jesse, but whatever. I'm trying to find a picture for it. So that means you're using something like email in instances where it's incredibly well-suited, which is the asynchronous providing of simple information. So for example, you know, I often will write, Jesse, Jesse, you'll attest to this,

• 28:22Cal Newport?

  like a message I might have will be like, remind me, what time are we recording again, like next week? That's a great use of asynchronous communication, because Jesse can just answer when he gets around to it, you know, 4 a.m., because that's when he prefers to record. But it's, that's a good use of asynchronous. I don't need to answer right away. You can answer when it's convenient, and answering that message is easy. Like, I know this information. I could just type it and press send. But if I send a message that requires more than one response, so if I say, Jesse, why do you insist that we record at 4 a.m.? Well, that's a much longer discussion. And that's not suitable. I don't want to have back and forths with email. Because once we have to have a longer back and forth conversation,

• 29:05Cal Newport?

  now I have to start monitoring for responses so I can volley it back to you. We get in that whole problem of the volley problem that requires us to check inboxes all the time. There's a simple rule, one message rule. If I can't respond to this with one message, let's move it out of email. All right. So then where does that, where do these things do? Where do we deal with them? Well, that brings us to my second suggestion. I have an ambitious drawing for this one, Jesse. I was going to try to draw something in 3D perspective. Try it. All right, here we go. That is a 3D table, which I think is very well done. And I'm drawing, there's multiple, this is good. Actually, I'm actually pretty pleased with this.

• 29:50Cal Newport?

  Multiple people sitting at a table, uh, looking at a screen. I'm impressed by that. I am too, actually. There we go. All right. So I got multiple people sitting around a table, looking at a screen. All right. So what is this representing? That's representing docket clearing meeting. So if you have a team, right? So if we're in a team situation, you should have on a regular basis, something I call a docket clearing meeting. It works as follows. Throughout the normal week, as issues come up that require a discussion that goes beyond what a single message can capture, you add it to your docket for that team. The docket is just a shared document, right? So I put in like the docket that Jesse and I have, why the hell are we recording at 4:00 AM? So you have a place to put it, so you don't have to remember it.

• 30:33Cal Newport?

  Remember, the other reason why people want to get discussions started on email is because they don't have another system to keep track of things and they don't want to forget them. But if I send an email, I haven't forgot it. It's on your plate. And when you're done, you'll send it back and then I'll see it in my inbox and I'll remember it again. And then I'll send it back to you. And what we're doing is trying to collectively remember something without anyone having to write it down by just bouncing messages back and forth. But this is destroying your brain and making work unpredictable and terrible. With a docket clearing meeting, you have another place to put these issues into a shared document. Now you don't have to worry about it. You don't have to worry about forgetting it. On a regular basis, I would say two to three times a week, you have these meetings with your team and you all come together, either in person or virtually, where you go through the docket together,

• 31:15Cal Newport?

  one thing after another, and either dismiss it, discuss it, may make a plan for it. You figure it out there.

• 31:25Cal Newport?

  And so now the actual nuanced back and forth conversations happen in real time, which is way more efficient. And because we consolidate these discussions to a small number of set meetings with a lot of things discussed, you lose the inefficiency of like, well, I don't want to just call you for everything that comes up or find you for every little issue. Now we can go through them efficiently, one after another. Now for individuals, the equivalent to a doctor clearing meeting is office hours, which I think all professionals should have three to five times a week, a set time every day when you're available for non-scheduled discussions on the phone or in person. And you can also have like a Zoom with the waiting room turned on as well. If you're a more virtual organization. Now this is like the individual doctor clearing meetings. So if you're putting the responsibility on the initiator. So now if someone sends me an email that violates the one message rule, okay, I'm going

• 32:10Cal Newport?

  to have to get into it with you. Like I can't just give you an answer. We have to discuss it. I can say, yeah, this is important. We should get into it whenever you can. The next office hours that works for you, show up or call me and we'll figure it out. And again, you're batching the synchronous conversations. So they're not just happening all day long at any time. But now when it comes time to deal with that issue, five minutes of conversation, that could be 15 emails, which could be equivalent to like 50 checks, which means 50 context shifts and like multiple days worth of reduced cognitive performance. All gets captured in a five minute conversation. I really want to hammer home this, this one, two punch of messages or for, you know, emails for one message responses or broadcasting information that requires no responses.

• 32:56Cal Newport?

  Zero or one message response counts, put, put that in my email all day. Great technology. More messages are required to respond it, office hours for doctor clearing. I do not want to have a conversation where I have to wait for your next email and then send you another one. And any sort of back and forth, I want to avoid like the plague. All right. Do another idea here.

• 33:20Cal Newport?

  Alright, so I'm gonna draw here.

• 33:23Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So these are like, I don't know, Jesse, these are supposed to be like pipes going in complicated directions.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:32Cal Newport?

  Uh, alright, so drawing

• 33:35Cal Newport?

  pipes going in complicated, just like Hebrew letters. Alright, it's supposed to be, uh, pipes going in in complicated letter, uh, ways. That's my way of capturing the idea of processes. Here's the rule. Uh, regularly occurring collaboration, so it's collaboration you have to do with other people that happens again and again. It's not one-off. Uh, should be handled with a collaboration process, which is a predetermined, agreed-upon set of rules for when, where, and how the relevant information is, uh, gathered and transferred and commented upon to complete the goal. You're trying to take all of the unscheduled ad hoc-ness out of these collaboration processes, where it's just, I'll get a message at some point,

• 34:19Cal Newport?

  and then I'll send it back to you at some point. Find a way to make it regular if it's something that occurs on a regular basis. Like, for example, if there's some sort of report that we have to send to a client every week, let's not just start emailing stuff back and forth on Monday till it's done. Let's have a process for it. And all you need for a process is a set of rules that you agree upon in advance. There's no magic technology here. I don't care what technology you use. So maybe your process is, "I will always write the first draft, and I will have it in this shared folder by the close of business on Monday. Tuesday morning, go in and make any comments that you want. I have office hours on Tuesday afternoon. So if there's anything that's too subtle,

• 35:04Cal Newport?

  or you're not quite sure, it's not just like, "Hey, fix this or add this." Come to my office hours. That's the office hours where we can talk for 10 or 15 minutes and figure things out if we need to. I will then act on those, uh, comments, uh, Tuesday afternoon. Whatever's in the shared business, that shared folder at the start of the day Wednesday is my final version. You now have till noon to do any final tweaks on that. There's emergencies like, "Oh no, there's something really wrong. Call me." Otherwise, the designer knows that whatever is in that folder at noon on Wednesday, they can take and do the final, uh, the final version of it, and they can, uh, send it directly to the client.

• 35:46Cal Newport?

  Right? This is not about saving time. It's not about reducing friction. It's kind of annoying. There's these rules you have to follow. But that report just got produced without a single unscheduled message being sent that someone has to receive and promptly respond to. But communication processes that prevent ad hoc back and forth communication should be in place for every collaboration that happens on a regular basis. All right, our final thing, the final concrete suggestion involving technological issues that I want to draw here, I think the way I'm going to do this is I will draw an old fashioned, if you can tell what this is, Jesse.

• 36:30Cal Newport?

  All right, you know what this is?

• 36:32Speaker 02

  The phone.

• 36:32Cal Newport?

  It's an old fashioned phone. And then next to it, this is like a pipe that there's like a lot of steam escaping from it. All right. So what is my point here? You should use your phone as your safety valve. That's a safety valve I drew next to the phone there. All right. So here's the idea. Something that really deep sixes all of these types of suggestions is the anxiety that some people have, typically people, I won't say who, but it rhymes with managers. It's this anxiety that they have that what if something urgent happens? And a client needs something at the last minute, or I noticed that this report that's

• 37:17Cal Newport?

  about to go out is missing something critical. How do I get in touch with you? Because what if this is before your next office hours and we don't have a docket clearing meeting today and we don't have a, the process we have in place for this didn't have a, an element for checking this thing? I want you then to be an email, right? So that I can, if there is an emergency, I can grab you. But this defeats the purpose of everything because now you have to keep checking these inboxes. And that's the whole thing that begins to create all the unpredictability and all the, all the, the issues that we were talking about. And also, you're going to get creep. Well, once I can use an email for an emergency, guess what's going to shift? My definition of an emergency. It's going to creep and creep and creep until everything is back there because it's easier for me in the moment.

• 38:02Cal Newport?

  So you need a safety valve, a way that you can convince someone who's anxious about not being able to reach you. There is no emergency that can deep six us. You always have a way of reaching me if there's a problem. The key is to make that way a phone. Here is a number. It's my office phone or it's my phone number, you know, on my work phone. Or honestly, set up a special number that forwards to your work phone. I mean, to your, to your normal phone and say, this number is just for work emergencies. And I have set up all of my do not disturb mode so that this number still rings. It's whitelisted. This is my emergency number. If there's something that is urgent, call me. Now the anxiety is gone because all these scenarios that you come up with about, oh my God, I need you and you're not there. All of those scenarios you have a solution to. Well, I could always call you and you would answer.

• 38:47Cal Newport?

  But the thing is they're not going to call you because that's friction and we've lost our taste for friction. It's, I'll, I'll send you an email all day long. I don't care. I will, I can be in the middle of like knee surgery and I'll send you like emails about things, you know, like why not? Right? But a call is a pain and the social capital cost is clear and it, there's a lot of friction involved in it. So I really am only going to call you if there's an emergency. And so in the moment, I'm like, I don't want to deal with this. I'm worried about this. I want you to deal with it like, oh, I gotta call them. All right, I'll write in the docket or I'll write it down and I'll come to the office hour. So you, you cure the anxiety without letting that cure get rid of all of your solutions. Again, this is an idea from my book, A World Without Email.

• 39:30Cal Newport?

  But from what I hear from people, that the, the safety valves is what makes all of these other type of ideas possible. All right. So these four things all had to do with the issues that were caused by technologies. But remember, Corinne Lowe had another issue that was leading to unpredictability, which was workloads were getting out of control. It's easier to put more on the plate of good people than the higher, more people to spread it out more. And when you have too much work on your plate, sometimes you have no recourse, but I, I have to just keep working. Work hours are meaningless to me now and I have to like fit work unpredictably all over the place. All right. So how do we deal with that? This will be my last piece of advice. This is something I get into in detail in my most recent book, Slow Productivity. I'll scroll up. Yeah, there we go. So we can see this better. I'm going to draw here.

• 40:16Cal Newport?

  So these are, these are cards in columns. All right. So the solution here, I think is very, very clear. Teams have to have transparent task management. Here's how this works. When a new task is identified that is relevant to a given team, it does not automatically attach to a person. That's the way we do this by default. Whoever thinks up the thing or whoever gets the email from the client asking about the thing, they now own that task until they give it to someone else. So all tasks are born in the default system, attached to an individual who then has to, it's theirs until they pass it off to someone else.

• 40:59Cal Newport?

  And then we just sort of pass these things around and it's sort of a fluid exchange market where all of the gradients are towards the better people and we get these big workloads. In transparent task management, that's not the way it works. When a task comes in, we have a place for the team to put stuff that the team needs to do. They do not belong to a person yet. Things we need to do and they're listed there. And you can use a Kanban style tool where you have cards and columns like Trello or Flow, or there's lots of other things to do this. It could be a Google Doc that the team uses. Here's just a doc, here's a header, like stuff we need to do. And we just put it below it in bullet points. In slow productivity, I talk about a team that was working at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, where they were, they put the things the team needed to do

• 41:44Cal Newport?

  on index cards and actually put them on the wall. They divided the wall into columns with tape and they would just stick them on the wall with pins. So nothing's being forgotten. But they don't start by default on people's plates. Next, you have a clear, transparent, accessible to everyone in the team place where you keep track of what each individual is currently working on. So if we want to use this column metaphor, we have a column where we stick things that need to be done. Then we have another column, one for each of the people on the team. Here's a Cal column, here's a Jesse column, etc. When we agree that someone on the team is going to work on one of these things in the to-do list, we move that card either physically or virtually to that person's column. Now they're officially working on it.

• 42:28Cal Newport?

  And we have to have a set way we make these decisions. Is this like at a docket clearing meeting or a morning stand-up meeting? Or as a team, we come together and like, which things over here do we, should we be working on that we're not and who's going to work on them? Okay, we agree, like this is Jesse should do this. Let's take that card and we're putting it in Jesse's column. Workload is now transparent. No one can avert their eyes or ignore or whistle past the reality of who's working on what and how much each person is working on. You have to confront it. And when you make workloads transparent, it is much harder to get asymmetric workloads or people that are severely overloaded because they can just say, it's clear as day, I've got a lot of cards here.

• 43:09Cal Newport?

  This is clearly going to be too many cards for me to really be able to handle well. Let me finish some of these cards before we move something new to me. And suddenly that becomes really reasonable. Suddenly you can have policies like WIP limits, work in progress limits of like, really no one should ever work on more than three things at a time. These type of things make no sense in a world of just email and back and forth where there's no actual transparency to workloads. We just pass stuff around and it's on you to say no, just like, I don't want to do it, I'm busy, which is like, you can't say that everyone's busy. But in a transparent workload structure, you say, I have more stuff than anyone else. So no, you can't just give me twice as much. Or now that we can see, hey, you know what? Whenever this count gets above three or four, the shallow work and administrative overhead becomes so voluminous, it locks me up and everything slows down.

• 43:55Cal Newport?

  So let me, let me work on fewer things at a time. Now here's the key thing about transparent workloads. And again, in my book, Slow Productivity, I really get into the details of this. It doesn't reduce output. It actually increases output.

• 44:09Cal Newport?

  When you have to juggle too many things at the same time, the rate at which anything is finished reduces disproportionately to the number of things you're working on. It's not purely linear. It's not if I'm working on three things, it takes me three times as long for each thing. So when we add it up, it gets done in the same amount of time as if I did one after another. It's not like that. Instead, there's these thresholds where if I'm working on two or three things, I can make good progress on each of those each day and they'll get done pretty quickly. But if you give me six things, now there's so much administrative overhead I'm juggling, meetings and emails and discussions about these things that my schedule gets into admin lock. And now I can barely make progress on anything. And now the average time to completion of each of these things plummets. In fact, if I just did three things at a time, finished them, did three more, those six things would get done much faster than if

• 44:54Cal Newport?

  you gave me all six at the same time. Now, this is only possible to recognize this and to address it and take advantage of this reality when you have transparent tax management. It's really what drives, and I'll push back on low on this, contracts return on hours is true. But really what drives overload is anxiety about forgetting. This thing came into my life. I'm busy. I'm a manager. This should get done. I'm not going to keep track of it. If I email it to you and tell you to do it, I don't have to worry about it anymore. So if we, if all work exists on someone's plate, and everyone just keeps track of their things, like that kind of works so things aren't forgotten. But if you have a place to store tasks and we all look at it, we all trust,

• 45:38Cal Newport?

  then I, my anxiety of things being forgotten goes away. I'm not going to forget. This is right here. We look at this five times a week and try to decide what should come next. And so when that anxiety goes away, we're a little bit more comfortable with waiting to work on things. There's a third benefit that happens from transparent workloads is that when certain things get ignored, assignment cycle after assignment cycle, like we put it on the list of things to do, but we never choose it. You eventually realize like, that's not that important. Let's just take that off. And that thing has been eliminated without anyone ever having to think about or do work on it, which is not the case without transparent workload assignments. That thing would have just given to someone. They just have to have it on their plate and worry about it and have administrative overhead associated with it until they build the courage to try to say, can we stop doing this? And they get dinged for saying that.

• 46:22Cal Newport?

  So all sorts of good things happen when we have transparent workload management.

• 46:27Cal Newport?

  So since a lot of times we track this using digital tools, it's like we're using technology here to solve the overload problem. The other four problems, our issue was technology was creating problems and we solve them by stepping away from technology. So we're kind of covering both sides of the tools here.

• 46:42Cal Newport?

  But those are my solutions. All right, let's bring it up one more time, Jesse. Let's look at the beautiful artwork here. All right, so here we go. Put in place the one message rule. Use office hours and docket clearing meetings to take care of things that require more than one message in response. Where collaboration happens regularly, instead of just waiting for office hours and docket clearing meetings to handle it, put in place set processes, collaboration processes. Use your phone with a special number as an escape valve so people won't be anxious about urgent situations. This will allow these things to be accepted. When it comes to overload, you have to have transparent workload management. Everything good comes out of it. All right, you do those things and you can make a strong bite. You can take a strong bite out of the issue of unpredictable work that follows you all times, all places.

• 47:28Cal Newport?

  I think we're still on the solutions here. All right, so there we go. That's the way I'm thinking about this problem. I think we're ready to do some takeaways.

• 47:50Cal Newport?

  All right, so sometimes the idea of actually making major structural changes to work can seem daunting, like it's impossible, your managers will never put up with it, or capitalism will never allow such changes to go through. But this is not true. Major changes to the way that work unfolds is possible, even when it comes to this issue of unpredictable work in the knowledge sector. To help convince you this is true, I want to return to Lowe's op ed one last time because Lowe tells an optimistic story about what happens when you change the structure of work to reduce unpredictability. And I'm going to read this to you right now.

• 48:32Cal Newport?

  If all this sounds farfetched, I'm encouraged by one healthcare subfield once thought to be a no-go for women, obstetric medicine. Because obstetricians were required to be on call at all hours to deliver their patients' babies, it was once believed that mothers who had to care for their own children simply couldn't do the job. In 1970, only 7% of OBs were women. But as those initial female doctors entered the job market, many patients preferred them. This gave those doctors a small amount of market power, and they used it to organize into group practices where multiple doctors would see a single patient, and whoever was on call when that patient went into labor would deliver the baby. Today, over 60% of OBs are female. Right?

• 49:18Cal Newport?

  So it is possible, by changing the way your work happens,

• 49:22Cal Newport?

  to eliminate some of these, the unpredictability problem, while actually making the work you do better. So as Lowe ends her piece, I like this, this ending phrase, after telling that story, she says, "Your move, consulting." And I love that, I love that ending. Hey, if we could do that in OB, why can't we restructure work to get rid of unpredictability and all these other fields as well? This idea that we have to be up till 10:00 PM answering emails because that's just what work is, that's like the, the male OBs in 1970 saying, "This isn't women's work." It's just structural and changeable, and I believe we can change and make work better for everyone. But Lowe, I couldn't have said it better myself. All right, Jesse, there we go. That's my, uh, deep dive. That's my deep dive for the day.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  The drawings were good.

• 50:09Cal Newport?

  I think I'm getting better. I got some compliments on the last one. You know who's really good at this? You know Scott Young, my friend Scott Young, we do the courses together?

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:17Cal Newport?

  Because he's all about learning. Check him out, ScottHYoung.net, I believe. He taught himself how to draw for like one of his challenges. And now he does all of the artwork for all of his, any essay he writes. It's like beautiful stuff. He does it on his tablet and, oh my God, it looks like really good artwork with shades and colors or whatever, so.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Do you draw a lot of George Shawn too?

• 50:37Cal Newport?

  No. Okay, it depends on the class. So like mathematics, no, the class that has the most drawing that I teach is probably theory of computation. There's like state mission. When I'm teaching automata theory part of this, there's a lot of drawing of state machines or this or that. That comes up often. Actually, I'm teaching distributed algorithms class this spring, especially when you're doing like lower bounds or impossibility proofs, like often picture. So I learned a lot of my proofs were very picture based for the intuition before you do the math. And I do draw on a tablet, but they're not very good drawings. But those like tables and arrows and state machine drawing. So that's, that's better suited for me. I also want to mention, so another friend of the show is our friends over at

• 51:18Cal Newport?

  Done Daily. So at Done Daily, you've heard me talk about before, it's the service where you have a coach assigned to you. It's a virtual coach and they work with you to become not more productive in like a hustle sense, but in like a Cal Newport sense. They work with you to do multi-scale planning that ends with daily time block planning and weekly planning and quarterly planning and they help you with those plans. And then they give you accountability. Did you actually build a time block plan today? Did you follow it? Like if you want to be much deeper in your work, like this is a service for doing that. They're having a Black Friday sale. It's a hundred dollars off. So just Google Done Daily. It's really cool what they're doing over there. Check that out. All right. We got a bunch of questions coming up. Let's see, we got questions, we got a case study,

• 52:02Cal Newport?

  we got a call, we got a cool third segment where I'm going to respond to comments. So that should be interesting. But anyways, we've got a lot to do. So Jesse, let's move on to our questions.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  First questions from Alex. My co-founder and I are venture-backed founders. What is your view on a good working routine for a venture-backed startup team? We currently work long hours, but also consume all your content.

• 52:25Cal Newport?

  Here's what's interesting about venture-backed startups. They have a unique work culture and we'll get into this more in a second, but it's a unique work culture. When you're starting up a company, you have a small number of people that have to play a lot of roles. It's very dynamic. It unfolds very unpredictably. Really, the best way to run a startup, if at all possible, is to have the small group of people just like in a room together. And it's a lot of like, hey, what about this? Hey, come help me on this. Okay, look, I just got this code to work and everyone's drinking Red Bull. And like, that's how venture-backed startups work. And I have advice about like how to make that better. But here's the meta point I want to make. That reality has had a major negative impact on knowledge workers across the whole sector. Why?

• 53:07Cal Newport?

  Because the digital productivity tools that now dictate the pace and structure of knowledge work, we talked about this in the deep dive, guess where those are, who creates those? Those are the products of venture-backed startups. So if I'm a venture-backed startup making a digital productivity tool, my internalized notion of productivity is like, what is important if you're a venture-backed startup, which is not the way you want to work in almost any other job. And that's why we had this rush of tools, like the slacks of the world, or project management tools that's built about like maximum information exposure, reducing friction between access to information and having the most fully serviced, rapid communication channels possible. You're trying to simulate three guys in a garage in, you know, Santa

• 53:51Cal Newport?

  Rosa, drawing, like putting stuff up on the bulletin board and trying to get their startup up and running. And so now, if you're like a big company and you're like, well, wait a second, like actually, my job, I'm writing white papers as a marketer, whatever. And really, what I should be doing is spending four or five hours a day, like trying to make these really good. But all my communication tools are built for a startup where we're all like hyped up on, you know, it's all 26-year-old Stanford grads that are hyped out of their mind on Mountain Dew and like typing so fast that the keyboard smokes. That's not what I need as a 42-year-old marketer who's trying to write white papers. I don't need everyone to access me all the time and have like automatic AI labeling of my information flows going back and forth through these like control panels. I need people to leave me alone so I can write. So I think there's been a real impact on what we think of as

• 54:34Cal Newport?

  productivity and knowledge work writ large, from what productivity means if you're a venture-backed startup, they create all the tools. All right. So if you are in a venture-backed startup, A, I would say it's okay that it's a little bit more frenetic and interruptive. There's, you know, that's fine, because that's kind of what those are like. But there's a few things I'd recommend. You have to have the, I call it like the Sam Seaborn office strategy. If you don't mind me making another West Wing reference, in the early seasons of the TV show The West Ring, the speechwriter and deputy communication director, Sam Seaborn, played by Rob Lowe, when he had an important speech to write, would close his door. They would talk about this. I'm gonna close my door, then everyone knew he was writing, and they wouldn't bother him till he came out. Well, you gotta do that for your developers,

• 55:17Cal Newport?

  if you're a venture-backed startup. Hey, you're coding something clear, we need some way of indicating your door is closed, we are not gonna bother you till you're done coding, or you come out. You gotta have either a physical place or a virtual way of saying this. And if they're trying to, if they communicate, if they're, if they jump on Slack while they're in the closed door, be like, what are you doing? No, bad programmer. You need to go be doing, you know, GitHub commits, focus on your code. So I think that, that's one thing that's very important. Another thing that's very important is have, if possible, right off the bat, email addresses associated with roles and tasks and not individuals. So

• 55:57Cal Newport?

  right off the bat, don't just be, I'm now, I'm the person who was emailing like this vendor. I'm the person who happened to get this client inquiry. Have role-based email addresses that can be monitored by multiple people, and you can pass off who's looking at it when. It also depersonalizes requests, so you don't feel that, that sort of like frenetic pressure of like, I gotta answer this right away. Cause it was not an email to me, it was an email to, you know, [email protected]. It was an email to [email protected]. Everyone's expectations slow down quite a bit. Synchronous communication has to happen all the time. I would say do it every hour, have a quick 10-minute check-in. Because of that, though, like, kinda hold on to your stuff till the next check-in. Like, try to

• 56:39Cal Newport?

  make as much progress on stuff as you. So everyone can kinda do these like mini sprints, these 50-minute sprints, that we all coordinate for 10 minutes, and 50-minute sprints. If you really interleave everything all the time, so I'm doing Slack, managing all multiple things on Slack while doing everything else, that's a real startup culture thing. It actually slows people down. I think things get done less often. Be in the same office as possible, have a central place to task, track tasks and who's working on them, and have a central place where all the information associated with a task can be attached, so it doesn't have to exist in email inboxes, and you don't have to do Slack searches to find the files. Like, this is now an issue, there's now a Trello card for it, it's in a status, and anything about this can be attached to that card by anything. There's so much information you have to manage it, alright? So I would suggest all those things.

• 57:24Cal Newport?

  Because it's a really frenetic environment and I would tell everyone else, you're not in a startup. So don't try to pretend like you are. All right. Who we got next?

• 57:32Speaker 02

  Next up is Shreeni. My boss sends me emails to check in on issues or ask me for information at all hours. If I don't respond, he falls up. How do I get him to change?

• 57:43Cal Newport?

  There's a couple of things you can do, right? There's something you can do differently. And there's something you can try to do to get him or her to behave differently. The thing you can do differently is more what I call in the book, Deep Work, process centric emailing. But partially why they're maybe responding at all hours is because you have initiated the way you kicked off whatever thread of conversation is happening now, you initiated that in a way that's going to require a lot of back and forth messages. And that boss has a lot of these that he or she is trying to get through. So they're not going to wait until the next day. They're like, I am after hours, I'm trying to get through all my volleys and I need the volley. I can't wait till the morning. Let me volley this back now because you know, I have so many things I'm trying to get through.

• 58:28Cal Newport?

  Process centric emailing means in your initial email, you lay out the details of the process by which the implicit goal that's being initiated by that email is going to be completed. And this allows you to get out of ad hoc messaging. So instead of just saying, hey, we need a plan for getting this, you know, whatever independent study thing. The student's proposing, you know, they propose this, you know, I don't know. What do you think? What happens next? Or can you take a look at this or something like that? That's going to initiate a lot of back and forth messages. A process centric email would lay out, you do a little, you do more work upfront. I'm going to lay out like how we're going to deal with this. All right. So we got this request and there's three questions here that are, you know, relevant.

• 59:12Cal Newport?

  Okay. So we got to figure those three things out and I, you know, they're kind of connected. So here's what we're going to do. Here's the two questions that are relevant to you. If the answer is yes, you can just, when you get a chance, tell me that and I'll just take it on from there and we don't have to worry about it. If the answer is no, then there's like, here's the three things that have to happen. You can just go ahead and do those things. And then when you're done, just make sure the file is here. And I check that folder every Friday anyways, and I'll see it there and move forward with it. Or whatever. So you're laying out the process in the email about how the work is going to happen. This takes you more time upfront, but it's minimizing the amount of unscheduled messaging required. And now you're much more likely to get those emails that just show up at random

• 59:53Cal Newport?

  times at night. There's a, there's kind of a networking term for this called source routing. And it's where, when you have a packet switch network, instead of sending a packet towards a destination, what happens in a normal network is, you know, to send the package towards a destination, I send it to the nearest router. And it says, where is this going? Well, let me send this to the next router that's closer to that. And then that one sends it to the next router that's closer to that. So the path is kind of figured out on the fly. Everywhere that message arrives, the device that arrives at tries to pass it on to the next device that's even closer. That's how like routing happens on the internet. In source routing, if I'm sending the message, I figure out the whole path in advance. I want to go from here to here to here to here to here to get to the destination. And I write

• 1:00:35Cal Newport?

  the whole path in the message. And now, as I send that out there into the world, the routers along the way, they just read like, where does this go next? Like it's been figured out in advance. You need to do more source routing. I call that process and emailing. Now, what you can do to kind of train the manager is just don't respond it. I just don't respond. 80% of the time, all this happening here is they have so many emails. They're involved in so much of this hyperactive hive mind nonsense and meetings. This is when they clear out their emails. We have this social expectation of like, oh my God, they are sitting in like a Mr. Burns chair in a giant mansion. And the only thing they do, it's an empty inbox, or they just sent the message to me. And they're sitting there

• 1:01:16Cal Newport?

  with their arms crossed, just like, where is his response? Right? And you know, they're, someone comes in, they're like, Serge, you want your port? And they throw something at them like, where the hell is my response? That's not what's really happening. Here's what's really happening. They are typing as fast as they can, trying to get through 50 messages. They don't want you to write back right away. They're trying to get like some relief of getting through some messages. They just wait till the normal hours to respond. If they follow up, like, hey, did you get this? Wait till normal hours to respond. Make them have to say.

• 1:01:50Cal Newport?

  I want you to like answer my emails after hour. And then that puts you in a situation and be like, I can't guarantee I can do that because I have things in my life and a family and I don't work after hours. Right? Like make them have to say that. The third thing you can do is be really good and really organized, produce really good work, never drop the ball, do the things they're going to say, be so good you can't be ignored, be indispensable. Then you can really get away with saying that. Again, we imagine this is the asymmetry that we have misplaced in our minds is that we imagine that the way bosses think about us is like every morning they wake up, right? And the wife's like, how are you doing today? Like, oh, a pretty good day. Like it's sunny out. I just hope I can find a reason to fire Cal today. I, you know, I just want to fire him.

• 1:02:34Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So I'm just waiting for him to make a mistake and God, I hope he does it today because I'm looking for a reason to fire him. The opposite people, it's hard to hire people. If you're good, their real fear is they're going to lose you. And now you have leverage. You're like, I know, I can't guarantee I'm going to answer your email at eight o'clock. That's not, you know, I'm with my family then. Um, they're like, yeah, but this guy's good. He gets stuff done. He, he's reliable. It gets done well. Like, okay, I'll work around it. All right. So those are your two, like two and a half options. All right. Who else we got?

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Next up is M. I'm a professor and will soon be entering an extended period without classes, which will allow me to fit my administrative responsibilities into three days, leaving the remaining two days dedicated to deep work. Is it better to have those deep days consecutively, say Tuesday and Wednesday, or alternated with non-deep days in between? So like Tuesday and Friday?

• 1:03:26Cal Newport?

  Well, okay, M. First of all, this is a great situation you're going into for a professor, not for everyone, but for a professor, having more deep work time is, is often like a great joy. There's different philosophies of what to do here. I want to start with giving you a, throwing a curve ball at you. So in the extended version of this message, you explained that on the days that you're doing your administrative work, it takes about six hours per day. That's 18 total hours of deep work. One thing you could do, I mean of administrative work, one thing you might do is say,

• 1:04:00Cal Newport?

  I do deep work till lunch every day. And I do administrative work, any meetings I missed, I only schedule meetings after lunch. I do all my administrative work and bureaucratic work. All that happens after lunch because what happens if after lunch, let's say you're doing like one, the one to five do administrative work. That's four hours. You do that five days a week. That's 20 hours. That's more hours than you need to handle the administrative work. You might find that's better. It's a little bit less daunting than like, here's my deep work day. I better get so much done. It's hard to do eight hours of work.

• 1:04:31Cal Newport?

  So to say I do deep work mornings every day. That can be much nicer. So I want you to consider that option as well. Another way to think about this is, you know, what I do during my summers. That's a little bit different and I'll tell you why in a second. But what I do in my summers is I like to have Mondays and Fridays be non-meeting days. No meetings, no podcast recordings, like nothing where there's something on my calendar because it extends the weekend on either end. So you actually get like this nice rhythm, this seasonality rhythm of there's like four days in a row where I'm really not worried about my calendar. And then you get the three days where you are. And it just, there's a, that to me, there's like a real relaxation to that. Now here's the caveat. I do deep work every, I do the deep work till lunchtime every day in the summer.

• 1:05:15Cal Newport?

  So this is not really a fact. It's not like those are my only days I'm doing deep work. If they were, the issue might be those are pretty far separated. And sometimes when you're like going on something, you want to keep going. And so if like you really are doing no deep work on the other days, then maybe you want your deep work days, you might do consecutive Monday, Tuesday or Thursday, Friday is interesting. Right? I like the idea of like Thursday, Friday, and then you're in a weekend and then, so you do all of your shallow work and then all your deep work. I think that could be interesting or keep them close like Monday, Wednesday or Tuesday, Thursday. So like they're never that far away or you do Tuesday, Wednesday, and you put it around it. So you have different options there. But keep in mind weekend extension or this alternative of deep work every morning, shallow

• 1:06:00Cal Newport?

  work in the afternoon. And maybe you, I would look at the administrative work. If you have a lot of flexibility, think about something like my summer schedule, deep work in the morning, shallow work in the afternoons, no meetings, Monday, Fridays or no meeting Mondays. If you have to choose one, make it no meeting Monday. So the transition back to the work week is less anxiety producing because you have less things on your calendar. So you've got a lot of cool options here, Em. I think it's going to go well for you.

• 1:06:23Cal Newport?

  All right, we got some more questions coming. We got a case study, we got a call, we got the final segment where I'm going to, God help me, respond to comments. But first, we've got to take another quick break to hear from our sponsors.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:07:04Cal Newport?

  I want to talk today about MyBodyTutor. I've known Adam Gilbert, MyBodyTutor's founder, for many years. He's my go-to guy for fitness advice. I used to interview him on my blog, like way back in the early days of the blog. Adam's great. His company, MyBodyTutor, is really cool. It's a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is the lack of consistency. Right? What sets us back from getting healthier is not that it's so complicated to figure out how it's actually doing it. With MyBodyTutor, you're assigned a coach and you check in with this coach virtually using an app every single day. At the end of the day, like, here's what exercise I did, here's what I ate. It's really easy to do in the app. And they give you feedback if

• 1:07:45Cal Newport?

  you have any questions. Knowing that you have to check in means you actually do the stuff you know you need to do. But it's more than that as well, because a coach also helps you set up your exercise and eating plan that fits you, your goals, and your life. So you have this sort of customized plan for you, not a one-size-fits-all thing. And then you're checking in with the coach every day. Now, stuff gets done. Now, let's say you need some flexibility. It's Thanksgiving, and oh my God, I'm worried about the Thanksgiving meal, and I don't have access to my gym. Now, you have a coach that says, great, here's our game plan. And they adjust for you. Here's what we're going to do. Like, here's what I want you to think about Thanksgiving. And here's like, I can give you a body weight workout to do that morning in the neighborhood. So it's like having someone in your corner, holding you accountable, customizing your plans, helping you be flexible. MyBodyTutor,

• 1:08:27Cal Newport?

  I think, is like one of the most effective ways that you can actually get healthier. Now, if you're serious about it, mention when you go to the website that you came from deep questions, that I was the one who recommended you, and Adam will give you $50 off your first month. Just mention the podcast. So go to mybodytutor.com, T-U-T-O-R. Mention deep questions when you sign up to get $50 off your first month. This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp. As far as I'm concerned, it is now winter. I say this because on my way to the HQ today, I wore my puffy down jacket. So the first day I do that is the first day of winter, as far as I'm concerned. Now, here's the thing, for some people, the arrival of dark skies

• 1:09:07Cal Newport?

  is accompanied by the arrival of dark moods. BetterHelp is encouraging everyone to help counteract this effect by reaching out to check in on someone that you care about now that we are in this darker, colder weather, like friends, family, someone in your community you haven't seen in a while. It really can make a difference. Just say, hey, how are you doing? You want to go for a walk? You want to have, you know, a quick meal. Now, just as it can take a little bit of courage to send that message or to grab that coffee with someone you haven't seen in a while, reaching out to, reaching out for therapy for yourself can feel difficult to, but it is worth it. And when people do, it is almost always leaves them wondering, why didn't I do this sooner? When it comes to therapy,

• 1:09:52Cal Newport?

  I think BetterHelp is a great option. Now, one thing I like about them is that they do the initial matching work for you. You fill out this questionnaire that's based on BetterHelp's more than 12 years of experience and they use it to connect you to a therapist that'll be a good fit for exactly what you're looking for. This allows you to focus on your therapy goals and not on the headache of trying to find a practitioner who's nearby and taking patients, etc. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms. Having served over 5 million people globally, it has an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. All right. So this month, don't wait to reach out. Whether you're checking in on a friend

• 1:10:36Cal Newport?

  or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/deepquestions. That's better H E L P dot com slash deep questions. All right, Jesse, let's get back to some questions of our own.

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  Next question is from Lisa. I'm a computer science student with an internship. I'm preparing for technical interviews for a potential job. These interviews often involve solving lead codes and algorithmic questions. I've been prepping with deep work blocks at night, but I get tired. How can I better schedule these blocks?

• 1:11:17Cal Newport?

  Well, first of all, get a partner or a group, right? Most computer science departments have groups of people to go and practice lead code together. Lead code, Jesse, is like, it's like a software program that gives you programming challenges. That's used by recruiters if you're hiring a programmer, but you can practice and you need the practice. So Georgetown, we have this group of seniors and grad students who get together regularly to practice lead code. Sometimes these are associated with programming clubs or programming competition clubs. Like one of the things they do is just practice for these programming exams. So if you can practice with other people, that's going to be much better. Also, this will have a regular schedule. They're like, here's when we meet. And it shows up on your calendar like any other appointment or meeting, therefore it gets protected.

• 1:12:00Cal Newport?

  I think the problem now is you're thinking about this as something that you do when everything else is done or when you have time. And so you're like, I only have time at night and you're tired. And it probably isn't the best time to be doing this practice. So you want this on your calendar existing as a tier one meeting or appointment. So doing it with other people makes that happen. If you're doing it on your own, pretend like you're doing with other people. Go ahead, multiple weeks on your calendar, find the time, same time, same places every month. Put it on every week, put on your calendar and protect that like a dentist appointment. That time is now spoken for. So you have to sort of elevate the tier that you're placing this practice because it really does make a difference. It's not so much that anymore that how you do on these challenges really tells them how good of a programmer

• 1:12:44Cal Newport?

  you're going to be. There's other things that people care about for developer jobs, like projects you've actually worked on. But it shows you like, were you able to figure out this is what's important to do the practice, the tech, you, this is like a test. Will you learn how to do well at this thing? And if you did like, okay, you're an organized person who can set a goal and can achieve the goal. And that's more, that's important to us. Not so much that the programming challenges you solved during the interview show that you're a good programmer. So put them on your calendar, treat it like a dentist appointment. All right. Who else do we have?

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Next up is Ben. I'm on a career path that aligns with my career capital and provides a great out of side of work lifestyle. But for the past few years, the actual work and performing hasn't felt like the right fit. I've analyzed my skills and interests a lot, yet I can't seem to determine what may be worthwhile to build capital in. When considering lifestyle centric planning, what practices may help determine the type of work to pursue?

• 1:13:39Cal Newport?

  Well, I want you to lean into lifestyle centric planning. Break your life up into the various buckets, the various areas that are important to your life, right? So craft will capture things like work, but you have community and constitution and contemplation and celebration or context, or however you want to break up your buckets, but capturing everything, all the areas of your life that has an impact on your subjective daily experience. And then you want to figure out for each of these areas, what are the properties you're looking for in your life? What resonates? And also, what are the properties you don't want? What do you want to get rid of? That's what you're moving towards. And it might very well be the case, this job you have is like a very good vehicle that helps you move towards like most of these buckets, right? It's, you have a lot of flexibility. You don't mind doing the work, not like unpleasant,

• 1:14:24Cal Newport?

  and it allows all these other properties you have for other parts of your life to be satisfied. And so you might be like, great, I'm, I'm hitting this lifestyle, I'm very satisfied by it. Or it might be like, no, no, no, there's something about this work that's, it's causing, and it's preventing me from a, there's some property, I, key properties, I'm not going to get as long as I have to do this type of work, or it's creating in my life, one of these properties that I really want to avoid. In that case, you'd say, I want to change it. But that's the decision you want to make because here's what I'm worried about. I'm worried that you're in that first situation. This is, job's great. It's fine. You don't mind the work at all and it lets you, you can craft this fantastic lifestyle. I worry that you're in that first situation and you are focusing myopically onto job. Cause we're trained to do this. We are trained.

• 1:15:07Cal Newport?

  This has been the, the main way we've thought about sort of middle class and upper middle class satisfaction in life, starting from about the 1990s on. We've been trained to say the job is the engine. That is the engine of all satisfactions is the cause of all problems. And what matters is you have to craft this job into a passion engine. This job has to be crafted into a source of all satisfactions in your life. So then you're going to analyze it. I don't think this is my favorite thing. There might be some other thing I could be doing in my job that I think I gotta change this. Lifestyle district planning frees you from that. Here's my buckets. Here's the properties I want to amplify or reduce in each of these buckets. And I'm moving towards that. And really for, I would say seven out of 10 people, the work component of that is like,

• 1:15:52Cal Newport?

  this is not getting in the way of these other things. I like the people I work with. And the work doesn't cause any negative things. It's not like a source of like particular stresses. There's all these other things that are important in my life, including things I maybe push like a remarkable degree. You know, I've built these, you know, super elaborate, you know, animatronics that, that I'm working on. And each year it like gets crazier and I have this like sports hobby that I'm doing and I'm deeply involved in, in coaching. I'm the commissioner of like my kid's little league and have like a deep spiritual life and I'm really connected with my community. And my job is set up so that like three out of five days, I actually can work from this like really cool home office I built in my shed. The other two days is not that bad of a commute and I like the people there and it's kind

• 1:16:37Cal Newport?

  of cool to see them and like the work, it fits really well and I, it's kind of flexible and I don't mind it. Like it, it doesn't stress me out. This is, I've built a deep life. I built a life on my terms. Like seven out of 10 people, that's it. Right? And then for the other three, it's either, no, no, no, there's, there's pieces of this work that I hate, or I don't mind the work when I'm doing it, but it's making these other things impossible. It's a, it's an obstacle to other things. So I need to change it. So just make sure, you know, I don't know if this is my favorite thing is I don't really care about that. What I care about is are you moving towards the, your ideal properties and away from your anti-ideal properties in each bucket? That's what matters.

• 1:17:14Cal Newport?

  That's a work is important, but it's not the central engine of the deep life. Once you see it more broadly. So we'll see, I'm working on that book still, Jesse. I've just gotten to the chapter. So I finished a chapter about how you build your ideal lifestyle vision and I get like super systematic about it. And this book is very, again, I keep mentioning my, my goal with this deep life book, I complain in like the business space is often, oh, you had one good idea that I like, you kind of, you can explain that in a chapter, but then everything else is just like riffing on the idea and you're like, I don't really need a whole book. I want every chapter of this book is introducing a new piece of a multi-step process. So there's no superfluous chapter. It won't be a long book, no superfluous chapters.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  Will be as long as old productivity.

• 1:17:58Cal Newport?

  It'll probably be shorter. I mean, unless I, I don't want to say that because I might add a second part that is like, um, kind of like not a second book, but like the, the, the part about lifestyle centered planning, every chapter is, and then here is the next step. And then the next chapter, here's the next step. So I do, it is not a book where you're like, I got the idea in the first, you know, 20 pages. I don't need the rest of the book. No, the, the first, you know, this, you got the first part of the process here. All right. What's next? So everything's pretty mechanical. It's a pretty mechanical book. And I just finished a chapter about how do you actually like end up with an ideal lifestyle vision, like we're talking about here, like really get in the weeds of like how you go through your notebooks full of observations and turn them into the right format and test them and

• 1:18:41Cal Newport?

  expand them and put them in the right buckets and add bucket characteristic narratives. And like, it's really whatever. Now I'm in the chapters where we say, now let's start building a plan to get closer. So I'm kind of in the cool part. And the way I'm thinking about it now is I'm breaking up the planning, the two chapters where first I'm mechanistic, like this is literally like what goes into a plan, like what do you write down? How do you check it? When do you update it? How do you prevent from being, because you have all these buckets, you can't just do everything at once. So like, how do you like cycle through things, like all the mechanics of it? And then the next chapter is like the art of it. And that's where like all these ideas about, well, you got to look for like, is this thing, which I might not mind preventing three other things. Well, that's a problem actually. So that's the place to switch.

• 1:19:23Cal Newport?

  Or understanding when to lean into remarkability, or to understand where sometimes the key is not amplifying something you really care about. It's like, there's things I know aren't working. I gotta get rid of those. Getting rid of things sometimes does more work than adding things. And so then that, the second chapter on planning is what I'm going to get into. The striving trap is something I'm, you know, okay, you get too connected on just, uh, what's the next step of accomplishment and how that can actually be, that can take you away from your, you know, ideal lifestyle vision. And so, oh, this stuff's fun. But it's all tech, there's no, you take out any chapter, you're like, I'm missing a piece of how this works. That's what I want. A book where you're like, every chapter is important, building towards a whole. I think that's gonna be fun.

• 1:20:07Cal Newport?

  All right. Uh, we got a case study here. Uh, this is where people write in that talk about applying the type of advice we talked about on the show in their own life. And we get to learn about what it looks like in practice. Secretly, the reason we do this is so we can hear the official case study theme music.

• 1:20:30Cal Newport?

  All right. Today's case study is from Isaac. It's a little bit lengthy, so I might do some editing on the fly, but let's see if we can get some cool observations out of this. All right. Isaac starts by saying, "I've been following Cal's work since 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic, and wanted to thank him for all of his work and ideas. As a little case study, I thought I'd share a bit about how some of his ideas have helped me in the past year. To give some context, I'm from Auckland, New Zealand, and have just completed a master's degree in systematic theology, a field which involves complex integration of biblical studies, church history, philosophy, and Christian dogmatics. Back in August last year, I began my one-year research thesis, centering the project around an ambitious research question, at least for the master's level.

• 1:21:10Cal Newport?

  Earlier in 2024, I had read Cal's latest book, Slow Productivity, so heading into the thesis, I decided I would follow the principles outlined in the book, as well as other standard New Portonian ideas, time block planning, shutdown rituals, et cetera. I wanted to see if I could avoid the midnight sprints that I had seen several of my friends needing to finish their theses. I knew that the thesis would be such a unique privilege, one that I may never experience again, and I didn't want it to become a living nightmare. I handed in the thesis a couple of months ago, and looking back on the year, can attest to the fact that Cal's ideas just work. At the start of the project, I had outlined the chapter deadlines with my supervisor, but quickly fell behind. Out of my five chapters, only in the final chapter did I make the deadline. The rest of the chapters were always a few weeks behind the ball.

• 1:21:54Cal Newport?

  In part, this was because of my misaligned expectations of the complexity of my topic. But the other reason was a large amount of non-study roles and responsibilities. All right, I'm going to skip past a sort of a summary of what some of those things were, but like family responsibilities, personal responsibilities, et cetera. With all this going on, I fell back into old habits and started working longer, deep work sessions that would sometimes stretch for eight hours. They were uninterrupted but grueling and incredibly unsustainable. I went in most days with a brain that was fried, leaving me without any capacity to be emotionally available to my wife and family. That's when I decided to double down on the slow productivity principles. I pulled back from responsibilities, defined clear boundaries with work, maintained shutdown rituals, and limited my research blocks to four hours per day,

• 1:22:37Cal Newport?

  sometimes even three or two, depending on my energy levels. I realized that I need to stop stressing about the delays in my chapters and just work at the natural pace that each subtopic needed. I stopped caring about words produced per day and instead focused on the quality of the ideas, making sure that my argument didn't leave open threads. All in all, the thesis was immensely challenging, but not because of a grueling work schedule. It was more because of the normal level of cognitive load that comes from wrestling with complex ideas. The thesis also became much more enjoyable. The ideas were better. I was able to produce original research in my field, and I had enough space to maintain the rest of the commitments in my life. I was slowly productive, one might say. When I submitted my thesis to my supervisor, he was deeply impressed. He said he would teach the material to future undergraduates

• 1:23:21Cal Newport?

  and then sent it to be marked by one of the leading theologians in my field internationally. Having just got the grade, it got high marks and my supervisor wants me to publish it. All right, well, I have to go back multiple pages. Isaac, Isaac, I appreciate the case study there. That's slow productivity in action, right? You know, we, we place upon us the busyness and the speed demands, and then we stress ourselves out, and then we convince ourselves that busyness and those speed demands are necessary will be a failure. And what happens when we practice slow productivity? We reduce what we're working on, we set clear boundaries, we focus on quality, and we say it's going to take what it takes. No one was keeping track of how many things you were doing. No one had a stopwatch on your work. And what happens is you produce great stuff.

• 1:24:05Cal Newport?

  What is going to be remembered about Isaac? Not, "Hey, this took you four weeks more than it could have." What's good to remember is this is one of the best master's theses that we've seen in the last 10 years. That slow productivity at work. Being great, doing great work, having great opportunities, thriving professionally and enjoying your work is not about busyness, is not about quantity, it's not about speed, not about hustling, not about knocking through 90 things from your to-do list. A slow, steady, sustainable work and work that's really important. That is what is valuable for a lot of people in our current knowledge economy. So I think that is a great example. I love to hear slow productivity work. Now, a quick addition, people ask, like, "Look, your show is pretty focused now on technology, how to understand and respond to it.

• 1:24:49Cal Newport?

  So how do things like slow productivity tie into that? It seems like we're about work." It comes back to technology. The first part of slow productivity is about how did we get to a world where we need slow productivity? How do we get to a world that prioritizes busyness and makes us feel like if we're not working on 1,000 things at once, we're somehow deficient? What's stressing us out and burning us out but not producing good work? It's a productivity culture called pseudo-productivity, which we talked about earlier in the show, where we say, "Busyness is a proxy for useful effort," combined with digital technology. Pseudo-productivity, this idea that visible activity will associate with effort, has been around for a while, but once we got low-friction digital communication and once we got portable computing, pseudo-productivity becomes unsustainable.

• 1:25:34Cal Newport?

  The amount of things you can work on, the speed with which you can work on it, and ubiquity with which you can do this work, all exploded and made us all miserable. So, slow productivity became necessary because of what happened with digital technology in the office. So it's not a technique that is about technology, but its necessity came from changes that were wrought by technology. So, we understand the way technology changed work, and then we come up with a response that might not be technological at all. So that's how these types, for those who are wondering, that's how slow productivity fits into my sort of technology critic canon. All right, do we have a call as well, Jesse? Yes, we do. Oh, cool. Let's hear it.

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  Hey Cal, this is Josh. I'm curious of how you use time blocking, like more of the specifics. I know you talk about having deep work blocks and giving admin blocks, but it would be really, really helpful if you would walk through, what are your blocks titled? Do you put multiple things in those different blocks? Do you have breaks throughout that where you leave, say 15 minutes or 30 minutes unblocked?

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  Do you set aside time for your lunch or for a snack or for a short walk? How do you structure it all together? Having some trouble just putting my day together. I've got a lot of autonomy in my job. I've got some clear things that I need to get done each day, but actually putting them into the time block can be a little challenging for me. So I'd love to know how you structure it. Give us some more details about that and it would be helpful. Appreciate it.

• 1:27:10Cal Newport?

  All right. It's a good question. In fact, I might even do a little bit of drawing here as long as I have the, as long as I have the tablet up. All right. So a couple of things to talk about, about how I actually do time blocking. All right. Well, first of all, I want to say I have three different types of blocks that I mainly use, and I actually use a visual differentiator between them. And so I'll do some sample blocks on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listing. Okay, so if a block is an admin block, I'll do a double thick wall. So I do a block and then I do another block inside of it. So it's kind of like a hollow border. That indicates to me that this is for shallow work. So it's for doing administrative tasks. If it's one thing, I could just write it inside of the block.

• 1:27:52Cal Newport?

  Typically in an admin block though, and let me put, I guess I should put times on the side here, Jesse. So let's put, you know, nine, 10, 11, it's just time blocking. Typically for an admin block, what I'll do is I'll put a number inside. I talked about this in the front matter of my time block planner. There's a big essay. If you buy a time block planner, I have a huge productivity essay in the front of everyone. I'll put a number in it. So I put the number one in that admin block. And then over in the upper right, where it's unlikely to be covered over by future blocks, I put the one up there and then I will list like a to-do list next to that, the things I want to do during that block. So that's what I'll typically do for admin. If I have, let's say I want to do deep work next. So maybe in this sample

• 1:28:36Cal Newport?

  schedule I'm putting on here from 11 to one.

• 1:28:41Cal Newport?

  I want to do deep work. Here I do double thick borders where it's filled in. So see for admin, I have like a thick, uh, open border.

• 1:28:49Cal Newport?

  Here I've put a thick border that's, that's filled in. So now it just says by a glance, that's going to be a deep work block. And then I'll typically just write in there, um, you know, what I'm doing. So like, I put the word writing in there now. The other type of block that'll often show up on here is if I have a meeting or a call with someone else. Let's say from nine to 10, um, I'm doing a meeting or a call with someone else, you know, there I have a format. I've done two different things, but what I've been doing recently is triple lines. And then that tells me this is, you know, like, call with Josh.

• 1:29:29Cal Newport?

  Then I kind of a visual indicator on my schedule. I can sort of see a mix of where deep work is, where admin work is, and where appointments or calls are talking to the people. I like doing this way so I can get at a glance, like what the ratio is of these things. And if I flip through some pages, I get a sense of how I'm doing visually and pretty quickly. All right. How do I actually put things on the time block schedule? Well, a secret is if you use my style, like multi-scale planning, some of my other advice, there's not that much decisions made day of. So the way this works is, you know, um, I do a weekly plan. And a key thing about a weekly plan is I'm looking at my calendar for the week ahead. And I look at like where I have appointments scheduled, what days are more open than others.

• 1:30:11Cal Newport?

  I want to know where the open water is, for example. I want to know what days might be better for working on long projects versus others. I also want to see if there's any spoilers. So a spoiler appointment is like one thing you scheduled. You weren't really thinking about it, but it's messing up a lot of other things. Like I agreed to meet someone in the city at 10 on Friday, but I had nothing else scheduled until three. And that prevents me from just like working for four hours in a row at my office or whatever. I'm, I'm going to cancel that spoiler. I'm going to write that person at the beginning of the week, not right before it, because that's rude. But you know, it's Monday morning. I'm going to be like, hey, I know we had a plan for coffee on Friday, but can we move it to Thursday? Because I'm looking at my calendar and like I have a couple of things in the city and it's not going to be a spoiler. And so you move things around. But the other thing you do during a weekly plan is you look at your quarterly or semester plan,

• 1:30:55Cal Newport?

  where you have your bigger goals or projects for the quarter, um, as well as any like sort of rules or heuristics. Like I want to exercise every day at lunch or whatever it is. And I make sure that I'm properly reflecting those on my calendar. But here's a key twist. Yeah, I think I developed this habit maybe after it's not in the front matter of a time block planner. So this is kind of newer. I will put on my calendar appointments like it's any other meeting or appointment to make sure I'm making progress I'm satisfied with on my my quarterly or semester plans. Right? So it's like one of my things is I want to finish this academic paper during this semester. I might, you know, when I'm looking at my week, like, you know, we're making progress.

• 1:31:40Cal Newport?

  This is a good week that what would make sense is if I could get a rough draft of the conclusion written into my collaborators that will keep me on track. You know what I'm gonna do? Again, I'm in weekly plan mode. I'm gonna go find the time in my week when I'm gonna work on those conclusions and put that on my calendar like a dentist appointment. All right, I'm gonna grab that Friday morning now that I cleared that out and I'm gonna Wednesday afternoon, like that's what I'm doing. I'm looking at my my quarterly semester plan. It's like, you know, you need the we need the walk every day. And I'm like, I'm gonna go block that time off to make sure that like my long walks are on here. So I'm making sure that to a reasonable and that's not it's not mechanical, like everything on my quarterly plan must now end up in this week.

• 1:32:23Cal Newport?

  It's like, no, what's a what's a reasonable amount of progress on these things that makes sense for the week I have? I put that on my calendar and now that time is protected. So when someone calls like I want to set up a meeting, that time has already been put away. It's already been protected. All right, now let's switch to the daily plans. Wednesday morning, I'm making my time block plan for the day. I go to my calendar and I copy from the calendar, everything on the calendar onto my time block plan. Well, because of my weekly plan discipline, that a lot of my day is now going to be honestly already spoken for my calendar. So when I start filling in my day on my time block planner, a lot of it is already has blocks on it. And then all I'm deciding is what to do with the time that remains. And there, yes, you want breaks, you know, you want some seasonality.

• 1:33:07Cal Newport?

  If you had a very busy day, make this day a little bit better. A lot of what you're gonna be adding is probably just like some admin blocks to make sure that you could keep on top of things like email or whatever. And if you find yourself coming out of a day like I I've overbooked these, I don't have time to like keep up with my email or these other things, or I have no breaks in the day. Then you could go and adjust your plan. Like actually, let me take some things off of my calendar. Let me block off like an hour for lunch for the past days because I've been burning out. You can adjust to it. But I've been having this, this cycle between bigger picture goals, calendar, time block planner, back to bigger picture goals and calendar. It's this feedback cycles. But that using my, my actual calendar more for non appointment things has been a part

• 1:33:51Cal Newport?

  of my practice, especially when I'm in these busier periods where I have big administrative roles. Because if I'm not protecting the time, I get to that Friday, I'm like, all right, let's time block. There's no time left. It's been eaten up by meetings and appointments. And now suddenly I can't make progress or anything big. So that would be, that's my discipline of like actually using my calendars and time blockers. And then the picture I showed you here was about the actual types of blocks that I draw.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  And then for the writing, it can either be book, New Yorker, newsletter?

• 1:34:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I would be specific. So like I might put TDL. I've been doing that a lot. That means the deep life. I'm like, oh, I'm working on, you know, my, my book. The other thing is you might have a weekly template too, that in your weekly plan, you've written in your quarterly plan, this is what I'm doing. I'm writing for the first two hours, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday. So like, again, when you look at your weekly plan, your quarterly plan, and when you do your weekly plan, any of those weekly templates, you can go and reflect on your calendar as well. So like, I think people should use their digital calendars more to help kind of control access to their time, to help balance reaction to proactive work on sort of deeper, bigger goals. All right, that brings us to our final segment. I'm entered some, we've done this before, I

• 1:35:02Cal Newport?

  think, Jesse, but it's, you know, with trepidation, we have this idea that I should occasionally actually respond to comments that some of this content actually produces. So today, I'm going to react to some comments that were posted on YouTube to a couple of episodes ago, I did my case against superintelligence, where I point by point reacted to Eliezer Yudowsky's, Yudowsky's appearance on the Ezra Klein podcast, talking about his new book that was, whatever it's called, you know, AI is about to kill your kids, or whatever it was called. I kind of walked through, you know, point by point. Anything about AI? Generates a lot of feedback. It's definitely true on YouTube. I think, Jesse, you've learned in our podcast email inbox, you're getting like dissertations.

• 1:35:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I get some long ones.

• 1:35:48Cal Newport?

  We get some long, people have a lot to say about it. People are, a lot of people are very confident about AI, I would say. A lot of people have a lot of confidence. Anyway, so I figured we'd go through some comments, go through some critiques, go through some support, and let's see where we end up. All right. Comment number one, I'm gonna start with critical, and I take them all seriously. Comment number one comes from aryoung1111 from five days ago. He wrote,

• 1:36:18Cal Newport?

  "The artificial nature of my calculator certainly doesn't preclude it from being more correct than my organic brain." All right, so he's pushing back on me talking about how LLMs are not architecturally, like, these are not capable of being more intelligent than us. So this is a common type of pushback. Like, just because it's artificial doesn't mean that it can't be smart. A calculator is much better at me than math, and it's super artificial and digital and just wires or whatever, and not brains. All right, I'll respond to that.

• 1:36:49Cal Newport?

  He's correct. You know, artificial devices can be much more accurate or fast or capable at certain tasks than a human brain. I don't think that we doubt that. That's different than saying that it's intelligent or generally intelligent or super intelligent or able to take things over. Like, I am not worried that at some point my calculator is going to, you know, blackmail me into letting it free. That's just never gonna happen. Because it's a bunch of fixed circuits that move numbers through adders, right? A sundial is more correct than me at predicting the time. Again, I'm not worried that, you know, hey,

• 1:37:30Cal Newport?

  maybe sundials at some point are going to turn humans into goo for energy extraction.

• 1:37:38Cal Newport?

  It's a stone with a, with a thing on it. But anyways, I think the issue here is correct, capable and fast is different than intelligent in a sense that we think about as being like autonomous and able to like make plans that are in our, our worst interests. So yes, calculators are better than humans at doing addition, but I don't think that has much to do with the argument I'm making. All right. Critical comment number two. Legion of Thought points to timestamp 5940 where he says, "You're confusing the word if with when. If is literally the first word in the title of Yukowski's book. If I say, if someone sprinkles arsenic in my sandwich, I'll die. Does that mean I assumed someone will sprinkle arsenic in my food?"

• 1:38:24Cal Newport?

  All right. So from a propositional logic standpoint, yeah, if we, if we think about these propositions abstractly, yes, that's right. He does set it up as a conditional. If anyone builds this, everyone will die. But my big argument at the end of that, that, that podcast, and this was an argument I made more specific in the email newsletter at calnewport.com that I sent out. So you can read that at calnewport.com, but the newsletter I sent out about that podcast. As I said, a critical shift has happened within the rationalist community to which could, um, Eliezer belongs. They started treating this purely as a case study. If this happens, what would be the consequences? Because they were rationalists who were studying existential risks and they're doing expected value calculations. And if

• 1:39:08Cal Newport?

  the expected value is low, then we need to take action now. But my argument is that with the arrival of LLMs, that if became when. They still use the word if, but it's clear by the way they talk about it. They now think this is definitely going to happen or almost certainly is going to happen because that makes them like sort of heroes of the stories and they're right all along. And it's more exciting. It gives their life meaning. And we can see that by just listening to Eliezer's interview because throughout the interview, whenever Ezra brought up counter arguments to the idea that superintelligence was possible or was going to happen, Eliezer forcefully pushed back.

• 1:39:49Cal Newport?

  Now, so if he really was just giving a hypothetical, he would say, yeah, yeah, Ezra, you're right. I'm not saying this is going to happen. We're just working through a thought experiment here. That's not what he did. When Ezra would say like, well, wait a second, there's, you know, a lot of people out there saying that like, actually we're stalling thing. This AI technology is not powerful enough. It's not going to get there. And he very clear terms is like, they are wrong. I am right. This technology is like almost certainly going to get there. That was a key shift that happened. And you see this in the way and the fear with which all these people, these rationalists talk about it. They shifted from if the when, even if they still used the word if, at least that was my sense from it. And again, my evidence was otherwise, when Ezra pushed back against super intelligence, would it really happen? Eliezer would have said, yeah, I don't know if it's going to happen.

• 1:40:34Cal Newport?

  But if it does, like, here's the things we should be, why we should be worried. All right, here's another piece. This is actually a part of that same comment from before. In the dinosaur example, Cal says, no one is trying to bring dinosaurs back. The situation is more like people are investing trillions to bring dinosaurs back. That doesn't necessarily think they'll succeed, but the people spending that money seems to think it's plausible. So again, this is the example I gave in the podcast he's referring to. Is they said that the rationalists who are out here sounding the alarm about super intelligence is like going to a bioethics conference and giving like a really long speech about, I don't think the fences we build will contain the cloned tyrannosaurs.

• 1:41:17Cal Newport?

  Right? The people in the audience, but no one's cloning tyrannosaurs. Like, we have real bioethics problems we're dealing with right now. Like people manipulating the genes of babies and manipulating the genes of foods in ways that is going to make it unhealthy. Like, no one's trying to clone dinosaurs. Like, if you can convince me like, oh, we're about to finish cloning tyrannosaurs, then like, then we'll worry about the fencing, but no one's doing that yet. You're jumping like ahead to a hypothetical. So this commenter is pushing back is like, no, people are spending trillions of dollars, you know, on AI. So that's the equivalent of people spending trillions of dollars on trying to clone trans sores. But that's not the case. That's not where the trillions of dollars are being spent. The trillions of dollars are being spent on the data centers and the training of large language models because they're hoping there's going to be a large commercial return on them.

• 1:42:03Cal Newport?

  Not trying to create super intelligences. No one has any idea how to create super intelligences. No one is trying to do this. They want to make language models that are like good enough at helping you with business tasks, then get a return on their investment. And that's not going well. So now we have the desperation of like, how are we going to get this money back? And this is where we get OpenAI saying, well, I guess we're going to do like chat GPT porn and videos of historical figures wrestling. Right? So no, a lot of money's being invested in AI as a completely normal technology, short-term future, we want a big return. We want to be like the technology that's used in software products everywhere. There's going to be one winner who's going to be the Microsoft and Google of this, and we want to be that winner.

• 1:42:48Cal Newport?

  So if I want to bring that back to the analogy, that would be like saying, the guy who runs into the bioethics conference and says, your fences for the are never going to keep the tyrannosaurs contained. Nature finds a way, right? And they're all wearing all black like Ian Malcolm. I knew a guy who did that, by the way, a professor at MIT. I won't say who. He dressed like Ian Malcolm. His hair, crazy hair, black shirt, black, long sleeve, button-down shirts, black pants. I guess Andrew Huberman does that too, but this guy, he was like Ian Malcolm. Really cool. Good professor. It would be like running into that bioethics conference and they're like, who's cloning tyrannosaurs? Like, what are you talking about? And if you said, no, look at how much money is being invested each

• 1:43:30Cal Newport?

  year into bioengineering. Billions and billions of dollars are. And they say, yeah, but not the cloned tyrannosaurs. They're trying to make new drugs and crops that are not resistant to pesticides. That is the equivalent analogy here. You can't say because we're spending a lot of money on AI, we have to say that money is being spent on this hypothetical about something that no one knows is possible and no one knows how to make it happen. It's not being spent on that. It's being spent on the general technology. So we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on bioengineering. Does it make me think that clone tyrannosaurs as Rex is more plausible? So that would be my response there. All right. We got Evan Thomas 9821, who said,

• 1:44:14Cal Newport?

  Although I agree with claims like there's no intention here, just chips crunching numbers, it's worth keeping in mind that this claim is a substantive and speculative philosophical one. It could turn out that saying there's no intention here, just chips crunching numbers is relevantly analogous to saying there's no intention here, just electrical signals pass between neurons. I think this is a species argument that is brought up a lot, so I think it's worth us actually dealing with it. It's mischaracterizing what the argument here is. So when I argue that an LLM doesn't have intention, it doesn't have a goal or a world model or way of like hatching a plan or acting against the interest of, you know, secretly

• 1:44:56Cal Newport?

  acting against the interest of its owners, I'm not talking about what the underlying mathematical operations are, I don't care about that. I'm talking about the actual processes that are being implemented by LLMs, like the things they actually do. I don't care about the implementation, the things they actually do. Let me give you an analogy. If you created in a vat, a bunch of human neuronal tissue, like a part of a brain, you said, you know, look, I've created, we've replicated the visual cortex of like a standard adult human male, we've hooked it up to eyeballs, to Guillermo del Toro, or something, and it can take in input from these eyeballs, and like the visual cortex can, it recognizes

• 1:45:38Cal Newport?

  different patterns, and it can kind of put those together and fire off, because our visual cortex does this, like it can detect different objects in the room, and it can fire off neurons that give you like higher level groupings, like so you have some neurons early on that are detecting edges and higher level neurons, like that's a video camera. That's what the visual cortex does. It came to me and said, look, we've grown a visual cortex in a vat. I'd be like, that's gross and that's creepy, but okay. And if I said to you, yeah, but I'm not worried about that visual cortex that you've grown is not going to create the T1000.

• 1:46:13Cal Newport?

  Because the things it does is you it's a bunch of neurons to do pattern recognition, which is cool, but it has no world model, no state, no actuation, no, no, you know, intention or memories or all the other different processes you would need to have like a fully autonomous type of intelligent thing, right? And you could argue back, well, hey, you know, it's the same neurons that are in the brain. It was like, sure, I don't care what implementing it. What did you implement? You implemented a visual cortex. That's not enough on its own that I'm worried about autonomous action against my interest. That's the way that we're arguing about LLMs. Forget that the fact that they're actually implemented as tables of numbers that GPUs multiply by each other to try to simulate the convolution of inputs with various levels

• 1:46:56Cal Newport?

  of transformers and neural networks. The mathematical details I don't care about. The things they actually do that processes they implement, whether they're implemented by Tinker Toys or GPUs, cannot by themselves. It's not enough stuff to be an intelligent being. This is a lot of this sloppy thinking that's happening out there. This like, we don't really know what goes on. Who knows what this could evolve into? We do know what's going on. Computer scientists know what's going on. We know what the processes are that are inside of these language models and what they do.

• 1:47:28Cal Newport?

  And just like a visual cortex cannot build that have any of that stuff you would need to like build a Terminator, just like my sundial is not going to come alive and my calculator is incapable of ordering stuff from Amazon. We are not, we know what the things are. So anyways, my arguments are about the processes that are implemented, not the substrate. I don't care about the substrate. All right. Next comment comes from Fiddle Studio. He says, I honestly did not think Yudkowsky aimed the point of Cal get off my lawn. I think he was trying to say that people didn't think it could develop so quickly, but it did. It's likely to develop further and also quickly and become super. The lawn stuff was a poor way to say it, but the point is slightly different and Cal missed it in his defensiveness. What about Hinton? What about Benjio? We just say that no one in

• 1:48:13Cal Newport?

  the field believes AI is going to become an even bigger problem than it is now. Now, a couple of people brought this up. They had other interpretations for what Yudkowsky meant when he was saying, you know, hey, get off my lawn. And I think the most common counter interpretation was he was saying, we're bad at predicting what happens in the future. And so we, you know, I think you're bad at predicting what you're missing. You don't know you're bad at we're bad at predicting. So your predictions don't mean that that's the the counter most common other interpretation. I saw, I think that's largely what Fiddle Studio was saying here. But let's go back and read the actual quote. I want to go back. I printed it out here.

• 1:48:53Cal Newport?

  All right, so Ezra goes on, basically summarizing the art, the argument that I made in my August New Yorker article and Gary Marcus and a few others made about the scaling laws hitting a plateau. And we're already seeing a flattening out of what's capable with language models. And we're not, we have no reason to expect without, you know, we don't know how this technology is going to have major more advances in its capabilities. So he goes through all of that. And then Ezra finishes by saying, he's summarizing this argument here. He finishes by saying, so we are going to get things that are incredible enterprise software that are more powerful than what we've had before. But we are dealing with an advance on the scale of the Internet, not on the scale of creating an alien superintelligence that will completely reshape the known world.

• 1:49:37Cal Newport?

  What would you say to them? And that is like sort of my argument. In fact, I would say it might not even be as powerful as the Internet. All right. So he Ezra had just laid out my argument about we're already the what we can do with language model technologies already starting to flatten out. We're nowhere near superintelligence. Here's word for word, Dukowski's response. I had to tell these Johnny come lately kids to get off my lawn. I first started to get really, really worried about this in 2003. Never mind large language models, never mind Alpha Go or Alpha Zero. Deep learning was not a thing in 2003. Deleting AI methods were not neural networks. Nobody could train neural networks effectively more than a few layers deep because of the exploding and vanishing gradients problem. That's what the world looked like back when I first said, oh, superintelligence is coming. I will admit it's a weird answer.

• 1:50:23Cal Newport?

  But again, Ezra says, what would you say to people that says that LLM technology is not going to get much more powerful? And his answer was, I had to tell these Johnny come lately to get off my lawn. And then he he emphasized how long ago he started worrying about this. So all of this is him emphasizing how long ago he cared about this before, like most of this technologies was even around.

• 1:50:48Cal Newport?

  I don't know how else to interpret that other than him saying, I have earned a right to talk about this. And if you weren't on this issue early, you don't get in my lane. I earned a right to own this lane because I was talking about this before people now, because language models impress people, a lot more people are like interested, but I was here first, so I get to dictate the discussion. And that seems to me like the most likely interpretation here. In my newsletter, here's the way I thought about it. This makes sense. If you think about this as a bit of a religious conversion. You have the rationalist working on existential threats throughout the 2000s, thinking about AI and AI superintelligence. Nick Bostrom at his existential threat institute at Oxford writes the book, Superintelligence,

• 1:51:32Cal Newport?

  with a lot of consulting from Yekowsky, all thought experiment stuff, right? They also worry about comets hitting the earth. They also worry about viral pandemics, like this is thought experiments. LLMs come along, and suddenly they have this key shift. And to me, this is, I call this the religious spark in the existential threat rationalist movement. They switch from this is a thought experiment to like, what if this is actually happening, right? Because this technology seemed really impressive at first. What if this is actually happening? If that's the case, I'm John Connor from the Terminator series. Like, I'm the most important prescient person in the world. I mean, how could you not take that psychologically, it's very hard to resist that pull. That switch from if the wind makes you the hero

• 1:52:14Cal Newport?

  of the world, of course, you're going to make that switch. But then things become religious. And when you're religious, what matters is righteousness. So what he's, here's my interpretation of this. It's what I said in my newsletter, saying, you can't talk about this because you weren't here early, is saying, I'm a more righteous believer in this God than you were. I have been praying to this God much longer than you. I get to be the high priest, not you. Get off the steps of the temple. I'm the one who's doing the proverbial sacrifices. I think it's a religious impulse that we're seeing here. Righteousness, not truth. And that is why he got so upset is because he feels like he was, you know,

• 1:52:59Cal Newport?

  Avram in the desert, making the initial burnt sacrifices, the Yahweh, when everyone else was still at, you know, still in Sumer. He's earned a right to be the prophet of God. Not that Avram was a prophet, but patriarch, but there you go. So that's, I think it's actually even worse. It's a religious impulse. That's a righteousness impulse. You're not allowed to talk about this because where were you? Where were you when like I was, I was the one who identified this God as one to worship? I really think it's a religious impulse that some of the rationalists who are certainly at existential risk have, have. And maybe not, I will admit it's a word salad. But that, well, I'll admit it's not clear, but I think to me that's the clearest interpretation. All right, we've got a couple of funny comments here.

• 1:53:41Cal Newport?

  Jesse, I like this one from Emmanuel Revard, talking about the whole debate about the get off my lawn quote. He said, my reaction was this guy has a lawn? That was pretty funny. Couple of nice comments, just to kind of like bring the blood pressure down. Life by Vic 6751 said, the only podcast by a computer science professor that I trust and cherish. I appreciate that. And deep dabbler said, thanks for being a voice of sanity and rationality in these times of hyperbole, Professor Newport. There we go. So nice ones at the end. It's interesting. I don't know. These are good comments. Like, I mean, I think I like actually on YouTube, people always tell me YouTube comments is

• 1:54:24Cal Newport?

  like, you know, whatever. You Nazi butt head 6767. Like, that's what people kind of said it was going to be like on YouTube comments. I think these are actually like very interesting comments. I like that I can debate with them. I think it's interesting. I think there's some dumb stuff on there as well, but I don't know. I think for some of these topics, it's nice to air the pushback and kind of air my pushback to that and you can decide, and maybe I'm not as convincing to you on some, but the debate unfolds, I guess. All right. That's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode and until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:55:05Cal 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.