Ep. 331: Money and the Deep Life

One of the most important but often overlooked elements of cultivating a deep life is the role of money. In this episode, Cal takes a contrarian look at this topic, arguing that the monetary cost of your vision is not actually the most important metric. He then answers listener questions and reacts to an article that many people sent him this past week. 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: Money and the Deep Life [3:17] - How can I tame my wandering mind when reading? [23:34] - How should I schedule time blocks as a real estate agent? [27:21] - How can I improve my quarterly planning? [32:33] - How can I balance intense motivation with finding inner peace? [38:29] - How can a jobseeker demonstrate actual productivity? [45:37] - CALL: Trying to do more with a newborn [53:34] CASE STUDY: A 39-year-old juggling school and work [1:00:18] CAL REACTS: ‘Brain Rot’ [1:12:51] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024/ youtu.be/mHU_K1o3B-4?si=Tsk1GEgzrhlCiaGw Thanks to our Sponsors: mintmobile.com/deep shopify.com/deep expressvpn.com/deep policygenius.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity 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.

• 0:11Cal Newport?

  I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined once again by my producer, Jesse. We missed you last week, Jesse. It's good to be back. Yep, we got the old gang back together. We got a good show. I'm going to talk about money, which we don't do that often. We got some good questions, we got calls, we got case studies, and I'm reacting to something cool from the internet in the final segment. A few quick pieces of housekeeping. First, as has become my habit during this end of year period, I like to update you

• 0:55Cal Newport?

  on the latest things that my book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, has won recently. So since our last episode, it was named to a Best Books of the Year list at The Spectator and the Globe and Mail. It also was selected as one of the best business books of 2024 in the Porchlight Business Book Awards and the Non-Obvious Book Awards, named it as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the year. So accolades continue. This gave me an idea. We talk a lot at this time of year about, of course, Christmas gifts, but I'm going to introduce a new idea, the idea of New Year's gifts, gifts you buy for yourself or

• 1:37Cal Newport?

  other people in the new year that you think will be helpful for any sort of self-improvement project that you might take on in the new year. Well, why don't we consider giving a signed copy of Slow Productivity to yourself or to someone that you think would be interesting in it as a New Year gift? You can buy copies signed by me at peoplesbooktakoma.com. That's peoplesbook, T-A-K-O-M-A, to come with a K, dot com. That is the store down the street from the HQ and the exclusive place where I sign, I sell signed copies. By the time this episode plays, it'll be way too late for you to get a signed copy for Christmas. The new year, no problem. So if you want to check out this book or get a signed copy for your collection, check

• 2:22Cal Newport?

  that out. I also want to pass along a shout out to Jerry Smith from the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Who just bought a whole bunch of Deep Work, copies of Deep Work for his team. So as always, I'm happy to shout you out if you bulk buy some of my books for your team. So, thank you, Jerry. Quick technical note as well, for reasons that are too boring to even enumerate, we've shifted the hosting platform for our podcast. This is going to create and has created a small number of technical snafus that we're working on. For example, it started automatically inserting pre-roll ads and archived episodes. So I think we fixed that now. There'll be a couple of these snafus as we sort of migrate to that new platform.

• 3:07Cal Newport?

  So send anything you notice to [email protected] and thank you for your patience. All right, I think that's it, right, Jesse? Yeah. All right, why don't we get started? The deep dive.

• 3:19Cal Newport?

  We don't talk a lot about money on this show, but today I want to touch on the topic. Why? Well, if we think about it, money can play a critical role when it comes to the goal of cultivating a deep life in our digital distracted world. Now, I want to focus here in particular on an idea that comes from my most recent book, Slow Productivity. In fact, I'm going to even read a little segment from this book and then we're going to analyze it because it's a small concept that I think could have a big impact on how you think about money and its role in crafting a deep life. All right, so let's start with the actual, I'm going to read to you and then we'll figure out what it means. All right, so this is coming from my book.

• 4:03Cal Newport?

  I am talking here about Paul Jarvis is his name. This is a case study. All right, Jarvis studied computer science in college, but also had a natural feel for visual design. During the first internet boom of the 1990s, these two skills proved to be the perfect combination for success in the emerging medium of website design. Jarvis produced several eye-catching sites on his own, which soon led to job offers. Look, Jesse, I'm holding up the book so that it's visible. They call that marketing. For those who are listening, not watching, I've realized if I hold the book up, you can see it on the camera because I'm a natural marketer. Anyways, back to what I'm reading. Jarvis produced several eye-catching sites on his own, which soon led to job offers. Before long, he was a busy web designer, living in downtown Vancouver in a "glass cube in the sky."

• 4:49Cal Newport?

  He felt the normal pressure to grow a small business. More revenue would mean a better apartment and more prestige, but even though his growing skills would support this well-trod professional path, his heart wasn't in it. "My wife and I had just had enough of the city," he recalled in a 2016 interview. "We did our time in the rat race and we wanted something different." Recognizing that his freelance design work could be accomplished from any location with an internet connection, they moved to the woods outside Tofino, on the Pacific shore of Vancouver Island, so his wife, who was a surfer, could enjoy the sleepy town's famed breaks. As they discovered, frugality is easy when you're living in the woods of Vancouver Island, as there aren't that many opportunities to spend money. "When you're remote, there's

• 5:33Cal Newport?

  nobody to do things for you, so you just have to do a lot for yourself," Jarvis explained. Freed from the need to increase his income to keep up with city expenses, Jarvis leveraged his growing skills to keep his work responsibilities flexible and contained. At first, he focused on freelance design contracts. Because he was in demand, he could keep his hourly rate high and his number of projects small. Eventually, tired of deadlines and client communication, he explored ways to further transform his notable skills and reputation to achieve even more slowness. All right. That is the story of Paul Jarvis. I want to pull a key lesson out of here. But first, let's all just get on the same page about the way, on this show and in that book, we think about cultivating a deep life.

• 6:17Cal Newport?

  My approach is what I call lifestyle-centric planning, which says, instead of just pursuing a grand goal that you hope will make everything better, like make a ton of money, break into this particular industry, become really good at this hobby, instead of pursuing a singular grand goal, lifestyle-centric planning says you should start by identifying your ideal lifestyle in all of its different elements.

• 6:44Cal Newport?

  What it feels like, what it looks like, what it smells like, what your daily routine is like, where are you, what's it around, what's the rhythm of your days, all of the elements of your ideal lifestyle, you then evaluate different concrete instantiations of this lifestyle. So different concrete ways you might seek a life that has more of these properties of your ideal lifestyle. You pick one that seems most feasible and you make a plan to work towards it. That's lifestyle centric planning.

• 7:10Cal Newport?

  Now, when evaluating potential instantiations of your ideal lifestyle, a common metric that people think about is how much would this instantiation, this particular concrete life, how much would it cost?

• 7:29Cal Newport?

  What I want to argue here, and this is where the Jarvis story is going to point us, is that asking how much a given instantiation of your ideal lifestyle costs is not quite the right question. And the problem here is that it doesn't take into account what's involved in acquiring those needed funds. So let me give you an extreme example to try to make this a little bit more clear. All right, let's say, you know, I'm a professor here in DC and I decide I want to move to rural, you know, Pennsylvania and I'm going to homeschool my kids and live on a farm like and write in a barn. And that's what I really want to do. But there's no university there. So maybe my plan is, okay, but I can just, I could write from anywhere. So I can be a freelance writer. I'll be a freelance writer

• 8:14Cal Newport?

  and we'll live in the, we'll live in the farm and homeschool my kids. If I'm just looking directly at the question of how much would this lifestyle cost, this particular instantiation of my, my ideal lifestyle properties, I might be very pleased. Like, well, this is cheap compared to living in DC. Maybe this is like half the expense of living in DC. But that would be the wrong question because it might turn out to earn that money, even though it's like half the money I would need to survive in DC, because I'm making so much less money doing freelance writing, I might have to work all the time. In fact, my working hours might be even larger than they are in DC as a professor. And so the fact that it's cheaper doesn't necessarily mean that that lifestyle is going

• 8:57Cal Newport?

  to get closer, the instantiation is going to get closer to my properties. Here's a more realistic example, because this is actually based off a real story. Imagine you're working, again, you're in DC and you're working at, you know, let's say the home office here for a big consulting firm. Right, so you're working for one of the big consulting firms here in DC. You get this idea, you have this ideal lifestyle vision that involves like more nature and slowness or whatever, and maybe you really want to do is move to like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, like your family's long had a cabin and you have this whole vision of what you're going to do up there. And you talk to your employer and they're like, "Yeah, that's fine, because if you move over to this group, the clients for this group are all around the country, so it doesn't matter where you're based." Right, so maybe when you're in DC, you're dealing with like political government relations

• 9:42Cal Newport?

  clients and they're all kind of local, they're like, "You know, if we move you over to like the energy group." These clients are all around, you have to be on site anyway, so it doesn't matter where you're based, so sure, if you want to move to the Upper Peninsula, move to the Upper Peninsula. Now, again, if you just asked, "Great, how much does this particular instantiation of my ideal lifestyle cost?", you could be led astray. Because, again, almost certainly, it will be cheaper to live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan than to live in Washington DC. But the issue with this plan is now you have to travel to all these clients. When you live up in the UP, you're not really close to an airport, you're going to have to take a puddle jumper to Detroit, and then from Detroit, you're going to have to take the longer flights, and you're going to actually be working way more than you were in DC.

• 10:25Cal Newport?

  So the fact that the lifestyle instantiation's actual cost is cheaper, in some sense, doesn't matter that much. So what's the better metric to use? I'm going to argue it's what I call "our" cost, H-O-U-R, cost.

• 10:43Cal Newport?

  What this stands for is how many hours of work per week does a particular lifestyle instantiation require? That's actually the financial metric you care about when evaluating these different scenarios. When you use the hour cost in our prior examples, that's where you see, wait a second, moving to the farm in rural Pennsylvania has a really high hour cost. So maybe I'm going to keep looking at other instantiations to get that hour cost down, because the whole point of me moving to the farm is to spend more time outside and doing farm things, being with my kids, so I need to lower hour cost. You would have the same insight if you evaluated the hour cost of our Michigan example. You would say, man, the hour cost of my living, if we move up there, is going to like double. I'm going to be on the road all the time. What's the point of, again,

• 11:28Cal Newport?

  living in a place where I have access to these other things that are important to my ideal lifestyle if I'm going to have much fewer, many fewer minutes to actually take advantage of them?

• 11:38Cal Newport?

  So hour cost is very important.

• 11:42Cal Newport?

  Now, it's important beyond, however, just this particular application of making sure that a cheaper place to live doesn't actually make you work just as much, if not more. It has a more advanced application, which is what was demonstrated in the story of Paul Jarvis. So what Paul Jarvis discovered is that once you started thinking about hour cost, instead of just using this to help evaluate different scenarios for your life, it gives you a different way of thinking about your current work. And the insight that Paul Jarvis had is that as his skills got better, he had two choices. The common choice was I will make more money.

• 12:28Cal Newport?

  I'm in more demand. I can have a bigger list of clients. I can be a more prestigious firm. I can make more money. But that didn't necessarily by itself reduce the hour cost of living in Vancouver Island. And if anything, it could actually increase the hour cost because maybe he would have to travel more. So he said, my other option is I could just charge more money for what I'm already doing. I can get to the, the, the amount of money required to support this particular instantiation, my ideal lifestyle that I have in mind in Tofino on Vancouver Island. I can bring the hour cost of that lifestyle down. So instead of making more money, I'm going to work less to make the same money. I'm going to drive the hour cost down.

• 13:12Cal Newport?

  And you don't think about this dynamic when all you think about is raw revenue. Right? When all you think about raw revenue, um, in the worst case, you just begin trying to maximize that number. And now you're just in like the singular grand goal theory. In the best case, you just say, okay, I make enough to support this lifestyle instantiation. So let's go for it. But your hour cost might be much higher than it really needed to be. Jarvis's lifestyle, which really is cool. And I go on in the book and I detail like what it's like on his property and the greenhouses he has, and how he doesn't own an alarm clock and what their daily schedule is like. What made their, this instantiation really cool and close to the values that they, uh, they identified when going through their ideal lifestyle is that he brought the hour cost of this lifestyle down.

• 13:55Cal Newport?

  So that is kind of where the magic becomes. If you want to bring down the hour cost of your lifestyle, you can go somewhere cheaper, but that's only half the battle. You can also use your skills not to make more money, but to work less for the same money. That also drives down our cost. So that's why I think it's a cool metric is because it opens up approaches to thinking about money in the deep life that you might not have otherwise thought about. You avoid traps, but you also find new opportunities to, to, to build a life that's even cooler than you might have imagined as possible. And it doesn't require, you know, it doesn't require some grand windfall. It doesn't require like, what I really need is this book I write to become the next Atomic Habits.

• 14:39Cal Newport?

  And then with the riches I have from that, now I can finally like live on an island and like work on my gardens and surf and, and only work a couple of hours a day. It turns out if you care about hour cost, you find ways of getting those goals that don't require the windfall. It's wait, I'm really good now at web development. So I'm going to triple my hourly rate, cut my number of clients by a factor of four. Just have a few clients, but I have a really high hourly rate. Boom, I'm good. The hour cost metric really gets you to some interesting places. A key point about this, it requires hard work to do any interesting things here. This is not a bypass around my maxim from my 2012 book, "Become So Good They Can't Ignore You."

• 15:24Cal Newport?

  Bringing down your hour cost is something you can do if you keep getting better. It has to do with how you apply your career capital as you get better. It's when you make the choice, as you get more talented, to say, "I don't want more work. I want to do less work for the same amount of money. I want to go to three days a week and get two-thirds of the income." Like, it's using your skills to gain leverage. You still have to build up skills, but it helps you aim your skills in directions that you might not have thought was possible if you were just using standard ways of thinking about money, your job, and your life. Now, how does this connect? I like to connect this all back to the general theme of this show, which is more technology-centric.

• 16:08Cal Newport?

  As we talked about a couple of weeks ago in my Tao of Cal episode, the general unifying principle for this show is to look at ways in which our Paleolithic brain and Neolithic culture conflicts with our modern digital environment and then come up with solutions to those disorders. So how does this fit into that general theme? Well, we talked about this a little bit in the Tao of Cal episode. One of the big disorders that comes from these mismatches is that as work gets more digital and abstracted. So it's just moving information around on a computer screen. It's not tangible. It's not connected to a location. It's often what you're doing is like disconnected even from like a particular outcome. It's emails and Zoom and PowerPoint slides, like this abstract thing we all do.

• 16:50Cal Newport?

  And as our time outside of work increasingly gets colonized by algorithmically optimized distraction and diversion delivered through screens, life can turn into this like relatively dull slurry of just, I don't know, I'm manipulating the digital and being manipulated by the digital until it's time to go to sleep. In that circumstance, which is unique, or at least superpowered by our current digital conditions, in that circumstance, we've lost track of how to build an intentional life, how to figure out what's important to you and to pursue those. We're too distracted, we're too numb, our lives are too abstracted and screen-mediated. For us to be good at intentional living. So that's why we talked about the deep life here. Not just because it's a good thing to do.

• 17:35Cal Newport?

  You only get one run, right? You only get one run here on this planet. Might as well make it interesting. But because it is a direct response. We have to get much more systematic about lifestyle crafting because we've lost all the cues and wisdom that we used to have about how to do that. All right. So that's how we can connect things like our cost and lifestyle centric planning back to the central theme of this show, which is the disorders of the modern digital environment. There you go. Paul Jarvis, from the book I will hold up, teaches us about our cost. I'm thinking now, so Jesse, you always discover these things when you write and then you talk about what you write. Our cost kind of sounds like, oh, you are a cost.

• 18:19Cal Newport?

  You don't necessarily, on paper, it's perfectly clear.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:22Cal Newport?

  But when you say it out loud, and I have this issue, like the word minimalism, perfectly clear on paper. Actually, kind of hard to say without practice, minimalism. But our cost with an H.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:35Cal Newport?

  My latest, my latest catchy idea.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  What was the monster book before Atomic Habits? And the nonfiction?

• 18:40Cal Newport?

  The Subtle Art, Mark Manson's book. That, that's even bigger than Atomic. Atomic might catch up. But I think Subtle Art, if not giving a bleep word, is, it was like 12 million copies. It was insane. Yeah. You should see, if you like that book, check out my, I went on Mark's show. It's on YouTube. Yeah, he's got a cool YouTube show.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  I'll put a link in the show notes.

• 19:08Cal Newport?

  Filmed it out there in Santa Monica. It's nice out there, Jesse. Hanging out in Santa Monica in LA. And Rich rolls out in Calabasas and Mark Manson's in Santa Monica. Oh, God, who else was I doing out there? Anyways, it's nice out there.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Your hour cost might go up if you move out there though, because your expenses will go up.

• 19:29Cal Newport?

  I think the hour cost of, yeah, I would have to write, if I do the math, like to live in Mark's house, I think I'd have to write four books a year. Is that sustainable? I'm just, I'm just going to take the graph of my in, can I just extrapolate that up? If we just do four episodes of this show a week and I write like four books a year, it's a problem.

• 19:50Cal Newport?

  Can live by the beach. All right, we got a bunch of cool questions coming up to cover a lot of topics, but first, let's talk about a sponsor.

• 19:57Speaker 02

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• 20:26Cal Newport?

  And we'll talk about our longtime friends at Shopify. Look, nobody does selling better than Shopify. This is home of the number one checkout on the planet. The not-so-secret of shop secret, the not-so-secret secret of Shopify is that their shop pay technology boosts conversions by up to 50%, meaning way less carts get abandoned. The people I know, I'm gonna say this very clearly, the people I know who sell things, especially people who sell things online, they use Shopify. They don't even really think about it. It's the best tech. It's got the best checkout. It's got the most seamless integration. It's easy to use. It's a professional experience. It's safe. It's like everything you want, high conversions.

• 21:09Cal Newport?

  So if you're selling things, like this is a no-brainer. I don't even know who the competitor would be that I would even recommend as number two. You should just be using Shopify. And the cool thing about it is, look, it's known for e-commerce, but they have great point-of-sale solutions as well. If you're trying to sell something in person, Shopify technology will be there for you as well. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that basically everyone I know who sells online uses. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period of Shopify at Shopify.com/deep. Type that URL all lowercase to get the deal. Go to Shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com/deep.

• 21:49Cal Newport?

  I also want to talk about our friends at Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile allows you to get wireless service for 15 bucks a month when you buy a three-month plan. And it is really easy to do this. If you talk to people who have made this switch, they'll tell you the hardest part, logistically speaking, is actually breaking up with their existing phone company. Setting up the new account with Mint Mobile couldn't be easier. No hoops, no BS. To get started, you go to mintmobile.com/deep. That's Mint, M-I-N-T, mintmobile.com/deep. There you'll see right now that all three-month plans are only 15 bucks a month, including their unlimited plan.

• 22:31Cal Newport?

  All plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text, delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan and bring your phone number along with all your existing contacts. Find out how easy it is to switch to Mint Mobile and get three months of premium wireless service for 15 bucks a month. I'll tell you one thing I've been recommending to people. I have a middle schooler now, so we know people with slightly older middle schoolers who want their kids to have some sort of phone so they can reach them. And I've been saying to people, go buy a dumb phone off Amazon. Mint Mobile account, 15 bucks a month. They can call you or text you in an emergency, but they can't look at pornography on YouTube till their eyes bleed. It's the easiest way to get a quick wireless account set up for your kid, or you want

• 23:13Cal Newport?

  a burner phone at home if you leave your kid at home while you go off to a restaurant so they have a way to call because you don't have landlines anymore. Mint Mobile is there to get you cheap service. To get this new customer offer and your new three-month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com/deep. That's mintmobile.com/deep. Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com/deep. $45 upfront payment required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Speeds slower above 40 gigabytes on the unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Who do we got first?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  First question is from Joseph. Whenever I try reading a book, within a couple of minutes, my mind drifts off to something slightly relevant or completely irrelevant. Is experiencing this, this just part of a process for a person who is cognitively cognitively out of shape and trying to cultivate his ability to focus?

• 24:10Cal Newport?

  Yes.

• 24:12Cal Newport?

  You telling me, and I'm quoting you here, my mind drifts off to something slightly relevant or completely irrelevant within minutes of starting to read. That's the same, from a cognitive perspective, that's the same as you telling me, I get winded when I walk up the stairs. I'd be like, yeah, you're out of shape. No surprises. Also, the solution is easy, get in better shape. There's, you're gonna have to eat better, you have to exercise. That's all that's going on here, right? You're out of practice with reading and you're doing the cognitive equivalent of smoking by being on your phone all the time. So you gotta practice, practice, practice to get better at it. There's the obvious things to do. The biggest thing you can do is rewire your phone when you're at home. Treat your phone like an old fashioned, hardwired landline by plugging it into an adapter in

• 24:56Cal Newport?

  one place in your house when you get home. If you need to look something up, you go to where your phone is. If you need to check your text messages or do a text conversation, you go to where your phone is. If you want to listen to something, well, you can put on wireless headphones. So like, if you want to listen to my podcast while you clean the dishes, that's fine. Use wireless headphones, but keep the phone wired. This means when you're at home, it cannot become a default distraction crutch. So you're watching TV or you're reading a book and you have that twinge of boredom. It's not there for you to pick up. And the friction of getting up and walking to another room and picking it up where it's plugged in, that's too high for you to do that. So you overcome that moment. And in doing so, every time you overcome that urge and keep doing what you're doing, that's like doing another push up in the physical space. That's like walking another quarter mile. It adds up.

• 25:42Cal Newport?

  You're going to get into better shape. All right, so rewire your phone. That's a big one. Two, keep pushing yourself to read books. Start with books that you absolutely are fascinated by, right? So whatever that is for you, it could be sports, nonfiction. Like I just read the Agassi memoir, Open. Yep, that's fun. So if you're in like sports, nonfiction or like techno thrillers, I've read three so far for Thriller December, just dumb, fun techno thrillers, just don't read Eruption.

• 26:14Cal Newport?

  By Michael Crichton and Patterson. Don't read that one, but whatever it is, or maybe it's like romance fiction or business advice books or self-help books like David Goggins, whatever it is, start with books that you love and you're most likely to keep reading, because all you're practicing here is just the literal act of keeping your eyes on the page and going. So whatever makes that easier is going to be better. You can read Ulysses later. Let's just get used to books. So read more, but start with stuff that you really like, and then spend more time doing thinking walks on a regular basis. Go for a walk without a phone. You have no choice but to get used to your own head. What's in the world around me? What am I thinking about? Having thoughts, exploring thoughts. You just get more comfortable

• 26:57Cal Newport?

  in your own interior cognitive space. It's going to make it much easier to tackle hard thoughts later in books. All right. So do those three things. You'll get better. It takes time, but you'll get better. Rewire your phone, read more books, but start with fun ones, and do thinking walks. You'll get stronger, Joseph.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  The ghostwriter for the Agassi was J.R. Mooring, right? He wrote The Tender Bar.

• 27:17Cal Newport?

  Oh, really?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Pretty sure. He wrote an article about it in The New Yorker not too long ago either.

• 27:21Cal Newport?

  Oh, yes. But was that the article about he also goes, the ghostwriter for Prince Harry's?

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:30Cal Newport?

  It's the same guy?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:31Cal Newport?

  Interesting. So he's good at capturing like emotional realities.

• 27:36Cal Newport?

  It's an interesting book. Man, Agassi had a...

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Did you read The Tender Bar?

• 27:41Cal Newport?

  No, I heard it's great, though.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  It's good. There was a movie, too.

• 27:44Cal Newport?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, anyways, what do we got next?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Next up is Adam. I'm a real estate agent, receive calls, emails, and texts randomly throughout the day. The faster I respond, the happier the client. What is the best process to be effective in my work if I still need time blocks for non-distracted work?

• 28:03Cal Newport?

  Real estate is a good case study. Funny story about real estate and distraction and deep work. When I bought, when we bought our current house in like 2018, we bought our current house in Tacoma Park. I remember because at some point when you're buying a house, you have to like disclose assets and like income that's coming in. And it's obviously for me, that looks different than most people because I make a lot of money from like books. So it's not, here's my W2 and here's how much money I make a year. It's like, I just got this huge check the other day because it's like the advance payment for like some new book or whatever.

• 28:45Cal Newport?

  So my, my real estate agent figured out, oh, this guy writes books. He wrote a book called Deep Work. After we handed in those financial disclosures, then she began talking to me about how distracted she was with clients always trying to contact her and what her life was like and what it's like being a real estate agent. So it was Adam, I understand, I've heard this story before. My, my rule here, my general rule is that clarity trumps accessibility.

• 29:12Cal Newport?

  The problem you're solving for your clients is that they, they encounter something that they need your input on. Like what about this listing? Is this something we should be looking at? Or is this price, I'm thinking our price for the house we're selling is too low. Like, you know, you have something that you want their, their feedback on. Because this is outside of like your normal cycle of work. It's also something that you're going to pretty much be keeping track of on your own in your own head until you get an answer back. So you kind of would just like an answer right away. So you don't have to worry about this anymore. But you can solve their problem just as easily if they have clarity about how they're going to hear back from you and how they're going to get information. And if they have clarity, they know what to expect and you meet those expectations, they'll be just as happy.

• 29:57Cal Newport?

  So in the lack of any expectations, just get back to me right away. Because otherwise I don't, I don't know how long it's going to take till I hear from you. And what if you forget? And what if I forget? Just get back to me right away. So I don't have to think about this. But imagine instead you have like a really clear, very optimistic forward policy where you say, I'm here for you. Here's my number for texting, in fact, like you have a question, you see a listing, you think I should care, send it to me by text, that's even faster. Every two hours, I clear out my text inbox, so you will, I guarantee you'll hear back from me within two hours, at the most, when you text me. That actually solves the same problem, because there's clarity about the policy here.

• 30:36Cal Newport?

  Your client knows, if I send this text, like I send this listing to my agent, I can trust, I'm going to hear back from the agent, and I'm going to hear back from the agent really soon, right, like within an hour or so, so like, really timely, I can let this go. I don't have to keep track of this anymore. I'm going to hear from you in like, an hour or so, that's fine. So if you have clarity, you don't have to be completely accessible. And now, you've built yourself like, a nice system, like, yeah, every two hours, I sit down, and I go through my text messages, and I answer them all in one batch, and I'm less distracted, and in between, I can work on the other things I'm doing, without having to be distracted, and most people end up okay. The 5% rule applies here, what says about any policy like this, about 5% of people won't

• 31:21Cal Newport?

  like it, that is a fair tax to pay, for reclaiming your attention. For those of you who are not real estate agents, this same thing applies, if you have any sort of client situation, or even a situation where you're dealing with a boss. People only want you to reply immediately, if they have no other structure expectations for when they're going to hear back. With no other structure expectation, it's up to them to keep track of this in their head, until they hear from you, so they'd rather you be as quick as possible. If they have other, they have other expectations, oh, I'll hear back at noon, this is when they, they don't do email in the morning, they have an office hours that afternoon, I can just call them, and I know they'll be there, and I'll get the answer, you're solving their problem of, I know what to do with this, and I don't have to keep track of it. So, expectations, often trump accessibility, or clarity, that is, often trumps accessibility.

• 32:11Cal Newport?

  That would be, actually that'd be a bad shirt, I think, if we put that on a shirt.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  You could make it an acronym. It could be like one of your Russian spy acronym.

• 32:19Cal Newport?

  An acronym would be better. I think if I put it on a shirt, the problem is accessibility also means, you know, like from disability studies, like making more services accessible to a wider range of people. So saying like clarity trumps accessibility, it kind of seems like an anti, like an anti-disability statement or something like that. But yeah, acronym. See, clarity trumps CTA. That means a lot of other things. Call to action. Yeah, I don't know about that. CTA all day. CTA all day. All right, what do we got next?

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Next question is from Vishal. I'm a knowledge worker and a young father. I started my journey with David Allen's Getting Things Done framework and successfully emptied my mind into a digital tool. It's working. However, I'm having a hard time coming up with quarterly goals as I'm so focused on getting things done week over week. How do I think in terms of a quarter as it relates to my personal and professional life?

• 33:13Cal Newport?

  Well, this can be the danger of getting things done is it feels like it's a totalizing system, like it's an approach to productivity. But I often argue that it's just one piece of many that you need to actually fully take control of your time and your obligations and time.

• 33:32Cal Newport?

  So what Getting Things Done gives you is this notion of full capture. This is its biggest idea. It was an idea that David adapted from Dean Atchison, who was a business consultant who Allen knew and had pioneered this idea. And then Allen then developed it further into the Getting Things Done methodology. Full capture says, and it's correct, do not keep track of obligations only in your head. If it's only in your head, it's going to generate stress because your mind worries about forgetting it, and it's going to take up cognitive resources. Because your mind is so focused on not forgetting it that those are cycles that can't be spent doing something else. So everything you need to do needs to exist in a system that your mind trusts. You're going to check on a regular basis and it won't be forgotten. This gives you peace.

• 34:17Cal Newport?

  This reduces stress. And that, I think, is the brilliance of Alan's system. But then Alan goes on and says, "Let me tell you now how to control your attention." Which is, what you need to do in your day is basically have this list of things you need to do, organized by context, like places you might be. And then whatever context you're currently in, just pull up the list and start executing things. And there's this real, sort of like, he calls it mind like water. This almost like factor, factorization of knowledge work of like, you're just cranking widgets. Executing next task and you don't have to think about anything. Just execute, execute, execute. It was a way to reduce the stress generated by overload

• 35:00Cal Newport?

  that Alan was correctly pointing out in the early 2000s was becoming a real issue. As we had the email revolution and it got much worse with the mobile and then smartphone computing revolution that followed. That's not, however, a sufficiently advanced system for controlling your attention. So what I argue is, you need full capture for all the reasons that David Allen says, but you need to couple this with multi-scale planning. So you've got to make decisions about what to do with your time at multiple scales. What's my goal for the quarter? How does this influence my plan for the week? How's that influence my plan for the day? How's that influence what I'm doing right now? So you have this link of connections that expands in scope.

• 35:41Cal Newport?

  So your actions right now has at least some sort of tangential connection to your bigger picture goals. So you need something like time block planning in the day, but time block planning has to be supported by a weekly plan that you do every week. And that weekly plan has to be informed by your quarterly plan. That combined with the full capture of David Allen's system is what I think is table stakes for sort of non-trivial complexity knowledge work today. I wish it wasn't the case, by the way. I had this conversation with Oliver Berkman. I wish it was the case you didn't have to do that in most knowledge workshops. I'm jealous of the fact that, you know, him, for example, just doing writing full-time doesn't have to plan like that. That's probably more natural. But in a standard job where you have a desk and an email inbox and more than a few Zoom invites

• 36:26Cal Newport?

  coming at you every day, this is sort of table stakes for not losing your sanity and for building career capital. So if you're struggling with your quarterly planning, that's just practice. What I would argue is what's more important is that you're actually following the framework of multi-scale planning is more important than the content of those plans at first. That will come if you build some sort of quarterly plan. And it really could just be, "Keep up with the big contract I'm working on this quarter." Right? It could start simple. And then you build an actual weekly plan and look at that quarterly plan when you do so. And then you build a daily time block plan and look at your weekly plan when you do so. The rhythm of working at multiple scales is what matters. Those plans will become more complicated and more meaningful through experience. I wouldn't worry about it. But if you don't have the full framework in place, it's not

• 37:11Cal Newport?

  going to be, it's not going to work very well. If you're running a David Allen system of just churning through next actions based on your context and you're somewhere else like, "I want to write a quarterly plan," there's no connection between those two. And so that's not going to be as successful. So use multi-scale planning, care about the mechanics at first more than the content, and the content of those plans will improve with experience.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  I need to look at my quarterly plan more.

• 37:36Cal Newport?

  You look at it every week. Yeah. And then, you know, we have a big update coming up. I mean, I recommend people do an update during the holiday at the end of December because you have like a week off at least, which is like a good time to think about the winter quarter. So like, if you're hearing this podcast, you should be planning to do a big update of like your winter quarterly plan within like a week or so after hearing this.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  And you have a personal and a professional one, right?

• 38:01Cal Newport?

  I do. I've been messing around recently with combining them. So we'll see how that goes. So I'm doing a big update right now. And in the current addition of the update, so the drafts of my new plans, I'm combining the personal and the professional. So we'll see how that goes. Part of the way, so this is, all right, this is kind of in the weeds. I often have, it's like hypertext plans. So like in my, I call them strategic plans instead of quarterly plans, but in my strategic plan, there might be a link to another document that elaborates like a piece of it. So I was like, as long as I'm doing that, I probably should just have one, one unified plan, because I can just link to

• 38:43Cal Newport?

  another document if I want to have more, like a more detailed strategy laid out for like our media empire or something like that. So I am, I am thinking about combining them. But yeah, traditionally I've had a personal and professional.

• 38:56Cal Newport?

  All right. Who we got next?

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Next question is from Sirtak. My sole focus has been to work hard and build a career in aviation. The idea of achieving, achieving more constantly occupies my mind. No matter how hard I push myself, I feel like it's never enough.

• 39:11Cal Newport?

  Well, Sirtak, it's a common, it's a common issue. And it's an issue that comes out of using as your philosophy or strategy for constructing a good life, the grand goal strategy. The grand goal strategy says you pick something that's important to you, you put all of your energy into mastering that thing. And in that success, your life will become good. That's what's going on now. You've implicitly put all of your eggs in the aviation basket. And because of that, your mind is like, well, this is going to be the key. To us, feeling like our life is meaningful, is succeeding in this goal of aviation, then why are we doing anything else? So of course, your attention keeps coming back to this. And you're having a hard time enjoying or being present for anything else, because

• 39:54Cal Newport?

  you have set this up in your mind as the key, the thing you were doing to make your life better. What is the contrast, as we talked about in the deep dive, is lifestyle centered planning. Where you say, what I want to build is a vision of my ideal lifestyle and all of its elements, not just professional, but in all of its elements, what is the general properties of my ideal lifestyle?

• 40:16Cal Newport?

  And then you work backwards, asking, how do I get there? And you do that by coming up with different instantiations, like different concrete scenarios that move you closer to that, and you see which of these is most feasible. And then you begin pursuing the one you choose very systematically. When you do this, almost certainly aviation will be a big part of the instantiation that you care about. Is that my phone, Jesse? Guys, I gotta take a phone call. So I'll be back. Would that reduce the quality of the show if I took phone calls and checked social media in the middle of it? Now, the reason why my phone, there's actually a reason why my phone is on. I was expecting a call back from my doctor's office about something, and I forgot that I had it. I had it with me and on so that I could take that call when it came, and then I forgot

• 41:01Cal Newport?

  I had it with me. People don't know that like in front of me right now is a screen that I've split between it's TikTok and YouTube Shorts. And the whole time I'm talking to people, I'm just furiously swiping. That's where the money is made, watching TikTok videos. Now, going back, aviation will probably be a big part of whatever instantiation you hook into, because you really like it, there's elements you like of it. So probably your lifestyle-centric plan, the instantiation you come up with will involve like an aviation career. But when you look at all of the properties of your lifestyle that might control, for example, or influence how that aviation career looks like because of the other properties that are important to you, where in the country are you flying out of, what type of flights are you doing?

• 41:46Cal Newport?

  Is it, you know, working your way up at one of the big airlines? Or is it doing like some private jets? Or is it doing like your navigation of the possibilities, even within the world of aviation in your career, will be influenced when you're thinking about the impact of your various paths through that career, their impact on the other properties you care about in your ideal lifestyle. So lifestyle-centric planning is the approach.

• 42:10Cal Newport?

  Now, once you've done the lifestyle centric planning, a couple of things happen. A, you're just much more likely to pursue and enjoy the other stuff that's part of that plan right away. You're not going to push the stuff aside that you've just identified as important just to focus on this one thing because they're part of what you want in your life. That time with friends, the outdoor hobbies, the community leadership, whatever it is, like, well, that's part of my plan, so I'm going to give that attention now. Makes no sense for me not to do that just to work on this one thing because this one thing, the aviation career, is just part of my bigger vision. The other thing it does is it reduces this pressure from, "I gotta just crush this," to, "I want to succeed in implementing my plan."

• 42:53Cal Newport?

  And what you need to do in aviation to implement the particular instantiation you care about might be challenging, but not crazy hard. And so you're very comfortable with a reasonable amount of work towards it. The final thing you can do is, once you know what the particular target you're aiming for in aviation and why, is you can care about process. Once a quarter, when you're doing your quarterly plan, go back and review my process for working on this career, like how I'm studying, how I'm training, how I'm trying to, like, how is that going?

• 43:20Cal Newport?

  Just like I advise students do at college, where I say, my famous advice was to study like Darwin. Always go back and evaluate all the things you're doing as part of your academic activities. Get rid of the stuff that's not working and prove the stuff that is. You evolve your study habits over time. Do the same thing with your process. Okay, here's a good process that I think is going to keep me on track for my goals in aviation, which is part of my bigger lifestyle vision. Let's try this for a quarter. At the end of the quarter, I will evaluate and maybe we'll make some changes.

• 43:49Cal Newport?

  Then during the quarter itself, you can just execute. Yeah, I'm just focusing, I have the process, I execute here, so much time it takes. I just trust this is right. If it's not right, within a few months, I'll notice that and we'll change it. It's not, the stakes aren't so high. And again, you're able to pay attention to things outside of it. So you become more process focused as well. Lifestyle centric planning is really at the key. Of navigating this tightrope that we talked about in the in-depth episode, I guess it was last week and my time might have been the week before. Jesse, when was the in-depth episode with Kendra? Did that come out last week?

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Um, yes.

• 44:24Cal Newport?

  Okay. So last week's in-depth interview episode with Kendra Adachi, we're talking about-

• 44:29Speaker 01

  When they hear this, it's going to be Monday.

• 44:31Cal Newport?

  So two weeks ago.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Ten days ago.

• 44:33Cal Newport?

  Ten days ago. That's right. That's right. Ten days ago, the in-depth episode with Kendra Adachi. Uh, oh, we have another one of these coming out, too. I like these in-depth things.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:42Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Um, we have another cool interview coming up. Anyways, I keep diverting myself because I'm looking at TikTok on my tablet right here. We got into this tension between greatness and everything else and the pursuit of greatness and why that can be very motivating, but also the other stuff that matters in life. Navigating that tension is critical for cultivating a deep life. Lifestyle centric planning helps you do it. Singular grand goal theory doesn't.

• 45:08Cal Newport?

  If you say this, this is all that matters is succeed in this career. How are you ever going to do anything else? It's illogical. But when getting to this place in this career by this point as part of this overall vision for a lifestyle, you're much more likely to say, well, I have a process I trust for getting there. And this process says I'm done working now. So let me go to enjoy something else tonight. All right. So Surtak, give lifestyle centric planning more of a focus in your aspirations. And I think you're going to find, I don't want to say balance, but you're going to find something more sustainable. All right. What do we got next?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  We have our corner.

• 45:42Cal Newport?

  Ooh, excellent. This is where each week we play a question that is related to my book, which I'll hold up because I'm an awesome marketer. Slow productivity. We call it the slow productivity corner and we do it so that we can play this theme music.

• 46:03Cal Newport?

  All right. Go ahead. What's our slow productivity question of the day?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  It comes from Howard. I'm a product manager who was laid off in September. In light of how many, so many businesses use pseudo productivity to measure work, how do I as a job seeker show actual productivity?

• 46:18Cal Newport?

  Well, Howard, that's a good question because it addresses pseudo-productivity as introduced in the Globe and Mail's, one of the Globe and Mail's best business books of 2024, Low Productivity. I don't know if I'd focus on that as my main accolade I give the book, but I'm trying to give it more accolades. Let me, first of all, give a key reminder for the audience who didn't read the book. Pseudoproductivity is the idea that visible activity is a proxy, a reasonable proxy for useful effort. It's what most knowledge work managers actually manage for because it's too difficult to manage in the moment for actual productivity. They focus on pseudo-productivity. The more activity I see you doing, the better. And I argue in the first part of the book why that became common and why

• 47:03Cal Newport?

  it's actually also a disaster. All right. But here's what's important about this question. What's happening to Howard now, and Howard, I'm sorry to use you as like a cautionary tale. But what's happening to Howard now is something that you should keep in mind every day of your current knowledge work job. You look at what you're actually doing. What you should ask is, is what I'm doing right now going to help me get the next job? Because this is the reality of pseudo-productivity, and it's what makes it sort of insidious. In, that's not how you say that. Is that how you say that?

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Insidious?

• 47:39Cal Newport?

  That's not right.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  I was just gonna look it up.

• 47:41Cal Newport?

  I pronounced that, I pronounced that dead wrong.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  I was literally just about to look it up.

• 47:46Cal Newport?

  I mean, I can spell it. Again, I'm a writer, not a speaker. That's what makes it dangerous. Let's use simple words here. Insidious. That's not how you say that. Well, anyways.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Insidious?

• 47:58Cal Newport?

  Maybe. Insidious? No. Oh, my God. We're going down a rabbit hole now.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  We're gonna get a lot of emails on this.

• 48:04Cal Newport?

  Oh, my God. We have to distract people from this so they don't email us about this. Brandon Sanderson wrote Name of the Wind. So I'm trying to distract the audience so they forget about insidious gate.

• 48:18Cal Newport?

  I just flocking on things. But here's what makes pseudo productivity dangerous is that within a current job, it feels like what's giving you good attention. It feels like this is what matters. Visible activity. My boss sees I respond to those emails so quickly. I am on that Slack channel so fast. Like you're not even done sending your Slack message and you see the dots that indicate that I'm typing back in response. Right? In the moment, this feels like the most important thing you can do to help your career. But as soon as you're left that job and someone says, why should we hire you? None of that matters. Pseudo productivity doesn't actually directly create value.

• 49:00Cal Newport?

  You are not going to impress an employer if you say, my average interval between inbox checks is only four minutes. I was a Slack champion. I was on Slack all the time. I forced us, I was the employee that forced us to have to upgrade our Zoom package, enterprise package, because I did so many Zoom meetings. None of that actually matters to an employer that you're trying to get hired by because none of that directly produces value. So that is what's dangerous about pseudo productivity. In the moment, it feels like the most important thing you can do for your career. But from a distance, it's meaningless. Right? So the stuff that is going to make it easier for you to get a job is less comfortable in the moment. Because it's the, I'm not answering this email right away. I've said no to more things.

• 49:45Cal Newport?

  I keep an active waiting list, so my active projects are much reduced at any one moment. But I'm finishing stuff that has objective value. The stuff I can put on my resume and talk about. I finished this project. I introduced this new technology. I innovated the way that we do this approach and it increased customer conversions by 15%. That's the stuff that matters when you're trying to get hired for your next job. And that stuff has nothing to do with how fast you answer emails, how quick you're on Slack, or how many Zoom meetings you do. So there's like a lesson in this, right? Is that pseudo productivity is empty calories from a business value perspective. Feels good in the moment, but doesn't give you what you need in the long term. All right, Howard, now that I'm done using you as a cautionary tale, let's get to your actual question.

• 50:28Cal Newport?

  The key is to focus when you're trying to get hired on concrete value that you're going to add to their life. There's this cool book written by Jeff Fox years ago. Jeff Fox, who wrote How to Become CEO, which was the inspiration for my first book, How to Win at College, which I pitched to Jeff's agent, or no, it was Jeff, the editor who bought that book for Jeff, who became an agent, Lori, my longtime agent. I pitched to her, I said, I want to write How to Become a CEO, but for college kids. He then wrote a follow-up book called Don't Send a Resume About Getting Hired. And he had this sort of extreme idea that's more relevant to sales than other places, but I think the core of the idea is critical. He said, here's how you get hired. If you get your resume, quantify how much money you're going to bring in above your salary.

• 51:14Cal Newport?

  Right? I'm going to cost you this much money in salary. I'm going to bring in this much money. That's the second number is this much larger. So by hiring me, you're getting this much money. That's ultimately what matters. Now, in sales, you can actually do that calculation. You can say, I expect to bring in $3 million in sales per year. Here's my salary. And so that this is how much profit you're going to make off. I'm going to increase the bottom line by this much. But you can hint at this in non-sales jobs as well by focusing relentlessly on the things you can do that directly brings in value to the company.

• 51:51Cal Newport?

  That's what matters. Not generic skills, not your people skills, not your character, not what you're owed. None of that really matters to them. What matters is, does our bottom line number, our profit number, get larger or smaller? Once we have you on board? We have to take away the expense of your salary? Is the value you bring push us more the other side? Right? Money is a neutral indicator of value. So that's what you want to focus on. I can, here's what I did at my last place. Here's what I can do here. Uh, this, let's see, Howard is what a product manager? Alright, so here is how, um, I have a product management methodology that like increases the value of what we produce. I can handle these types of projects, which you need.

• 52:36Cal Newport?

  These are higher, these are, these types of projects are higher profit margin. I know how to manage those, so you could immediately expand the pool of your projects that are here. Uh, you know, I can expand this business you have on this side. Uh, I know how to, you know, double the speed with these things get done because I use like Newportonian, uh, non-overload style workload management, whatever it is. What you want to pitch when you're trying to get hired is how much more money they will have after they hire you.

• 53:05Cal Newport?

  And you want to remember that. How much money am I bringing in? And how is this current activity helping the bottom line I bring in? That's really the right meta mindset for evaluating how you're spending your day. And it goes back again to the dangerous nature of pseudo productivity is that it feels so useful in the moment, but it does nothing in the long term that really matters. So Howard, I appreciate your question because it gives us an excuse to talk about that bigger principle about the real subtle danger of pseudo productivity.

• 53:37Cal Newport?

  Alright, should we play a theme music again?

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:47Cal Newport?

  Alright, sufficiently relaxed from insidious gate. That's just how I'm going to pronounce it from now on. I don't care. That's how I pronounce that word. I'm old enough now that I can decide how I want to pronounce words. Alright, what do we got next?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  We have a call.

• 54:01Cal Newport?

  Ooh, let's hear this.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  Hey Kel, last time we chatted at your meetup in Washington this past March, I mentioned that I had my first child on the way and he's here now. Not gonna lie, it was a lot to handle at the start and I even took your advice from an earlier episode to take some time off. I actually took a month off work and business to help with the new transition. Now that I'm back at work, how do I continue to work on being so good I can't be ignored whilst raising a new son? I have a feeling your main advice might be to just scale back and go a lot slower, which I started to do, um, as per slow productivity, but... I'll be honest, going this slow makes me feel like I'm not moving at a fast enough pace that I'm used to. And maybe I need to be more patient. I'm not sure.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  Any advice you can offer a new father who wants to be both an excellent husband, excellent father, and a skilled data analyst with multiple business goals ahead of him? Looking forward to your answer and keep up the amazing work you do.

• 54:59Cal Newport?

  Well, good to hear from you again. I guess he's probably talking about, we had a couple of meetups in Washington. We had the politics and

• 55:04Speaker 01

  He came down from Toronto. It's Kobe.

• 55:07Cal Newport?

  Oh, from Toronto. Gave me a copy of Michael Crichton book. Yeah. Hey Kobe, good to hear from you. Okay.

• 55:16Cal Newport?

  So I would say new kid at home. First of all, there's two different phases. The first four months in my sort of three time experience here, the first four months is basically all hands on deck, right? So first four months is kind of survival mode, scale back. It feels like in the moment forever. Like I guess I have just stepped out of the world of work. I guess I have given up all ambitions. This is it. My life has changed, but four months is nothing. In retrospect, it's nothing. So just give yourself a break and be much more useful to your partner for about three to four months. All right. After four months, you're not in survival mode anymore. I typically use that threshold because it's the point at which you have consistency and schedule,

• 56:00Cal Newport?

  especially if you're careful about it. This is like when in the US context, a lot of maternity leaves have ended, sleep training is done, you have your childcare, your childcare set up for the next couple of years is kind of in place and you can begin to build like, oh, this will be my routine for a while. In those first few months, you're not in your routine that you're going to have for a while. So it's, that's why I think of that as like all hands on deck. Okay. So after three to four months, I do recommend, yeah, you scale back longer term, slow down for a bit. This is a big transition, but I think this helps people who struggle with this. Don't just messily do less. Use this as an excuse to clean up what's going on. So after you get out of that first all hands on deck, period. Say, I don't want to go back to super busyness.

• 56:45Cal Newport?

  Let me start cleaning out the stuff I don't, I don't want to be doing in general. Maybe it's a good time to say, no more X, no more Y. Like, I want to take this off my plate to focus more on this. Maybe I want to tighten up my processes a little bit more. So that the work I'm doing is more contained or more predictable or a little bit less interruptive. Has less of an overlap with the other stuff that matters in my life. This is an important transition that most people go through with their working life when you're younger. Like, why am I demanding, you know, to have other people have more structure in how we work together? I have time, I'm around, I just want to be useful. I'm on my way up. But then, once you have your first kid, now you can start to say, okay, I also care about me as well. And how like work affects me. So clean things up.

• 57:29Cal Newport?

  Get rid of the dead weight. Uh, get in place like better processes. The other thing I recommend, so that that, that ambition itch doesn't turn into like an all out metaphorical rash. As part of sort of cleaning things up and simplifying what you're working on and getting your schedules tighter and, and not taking on too much work. Make sure you have a, a slow but steady project in there. That's just straight up ambition. Slow but steady. So something where there's not a deadline, no one's waiting for this. It's not a source of stress, but that you're making regular progress on some sort of bigger timeframe goal that you're excited about.

• 58:11Cal Newport?

  And maybe prioritize that like first thing, like first thing I do every morning after we, you know, get the kid to daycare or whatever's going on, is I spend this like first hour working on learning this new skill. That's going to be part of my vision for two or three years from now of like mastering the skill and completely changing my work life. Or we're going to move to Vancouver Island and this is going to be a thing it's built off of. So have this aspirational thing you're working on. That scratches your ambition itch in a way that's going to be much more sustainable in this moment. Then just trying to take on lots of stuff. You don't want to be overly busy. You want to avoid overload for at least the first year if possible. All right, so let me put all this advice together. First three to four months, all hands on deck. It's okay, it's going to go faster than you think.

• 58:56Cal Newport?

  Rest of that first year, you still want to be going slower than normal. It's a huge adjustment. You're also, you're changing you. You're a dad now, that's like a completely different type of role you're adding to your life. But to help support that, so you don't just feel like you're giving up business or being irresponsible, clean up, get rid of dead work, dead weight work that you've been meaning to get rid of, clean up the processes for what remains and keep that ambition itch scratched by having a slow but steady, non-urgent but exciting project that you're working on regularly. Those things all together, that's the right way, I think, as like a new dad, to go through this sort of period of new, new kiddom. I mean, I remember this with all three kids, but especially the first two.

• 59:38Cal Newport?

  In that first three to four month period, like walking my dog and having this thought, like this is chaotic now, but don't extrapolate now is what your life is like. Think ahead to four months, the four month mark where we are going to have our, we're back to a new routine. And that new routine is going to be different but sustainable. We're getting there and it's going to be better when we get there and it always was. So I remember clearly thinking about that. I don't really remember our third at all. By that point, it was just too chaotic. Two other boys who were older that I was thinking, I don't, it's all a blur to me. I don't know. I know he was a baby at some point. And I know, I mean, COVID came, I don't, I just.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  He started a podcast.

• 1:00:22Cal Newport?

  Yeah, well, that was, he was older then. He was older, well, I guess he went to, oh man, I just, I just, I was so busy with the other two kids by then that the, the baby stuff was going on, but I was just like driving toddlers places. And then COVID came. All right, got a call, oh, we have a case study. All right, so case studies where people write in to talk about how they have applied the type of ideas we talked about on the show in their own life. If you have a case study you want to share on the air, send it to [email protected]. Today's case study is from Sarah. Sarah says, I hope this message finds you well. My name is Sarah and I'm a commercial photographer based in Texas.

• 1:01:09Cal Newport?

  All right. As a photographer, the freedom of working for myself has its perks. No tedious busy work or endless meetings like when I worked for a company. I've been able to set a high enough rate that a few shoots a month keep me afloat. The flip side, though, is that without a boss or external structure, I fall into the habit of only doing the bare minimum to get by. I hardly market myself, never pitch, and don't prioritize networking. While inbound inquiries have kept me going, I know there's potential for so much more, probably double what I'm making now. With my current workload averaging just 15 hours a week, I have so much free time that I can take month-long sabbaticals going on meditation and therapy retreats. While this might sound like a dream setup, I often feel like I'm at the mercy of whatever comes my way rather than actively shaping the life I want.

• 1:01:54Cal Newport?

  I lack the discipline to work on my business rather than just in it, and I know there's so much untapped potential. With all this extra time, I decided to go back to school to pursue a degree in mental health counseling. I'm about halfway through my three-year program. I'm passionate about healing and want to make a slow transition into this field. While commercial photography feels like it has a limited shelf life for my age, I can see myself running a private therapy practice well into my 50s and beyond.

• 1:02:23Cal Newport?

  All right, so I'm going to cut that there because there's some observations I want to make about this. So Sarah, thank you for sharing. There are some positive things I want to say about this and some lessons/ advice to give. On the positive side, I love the idea here of there's intention, how Sarah's crafting her life. I like that she's thinking ahead, right? She's thinking about in her 50s, in her 60s, okay, being a commercial photographer might not work then, but if she gets a therapy license now, that is highly autonomous. And I know several people my age are going through this now. That could be highly autonomous because once you're licensed,

• 1:03:06Cal Newport?

  you can decide how many clients you have. And so it's one of these, there's only so many jobs in which you can transmute like education, like an undergrad degree and a graduate degree, into something with a high hourly rate and a lot of autonomy. Therapy, mental health counseling is like one of those things. So I like that way that you're thinking. I also like the fact that your lifestyle, you have a lifestyle right now where you're working, you know, until you went back to grad school 15 hours a week and showing that's, that's a possibility, depending on where you live and what your expenses are and if you're careful. All of that's really cool. The thing I would add, like the lesson I would draw out of this and the advice I would give is that I would lean in more into a lifestyle

• 1:03:47Cal Newport?

  centric planning approach. It sounds like to me from the reading this that you're, it's, this is more ad hoc. Like this is, photography is fine. I like doing it. It doesn't take too much time. It seems to meet my expenses. So you can go and you're able, it's flexible enough. You can do other things like these retreats, but you also have this vague unease of, I should probably be doing more of this. I could probably double this. I feel guilty that I'm not like in, in, in creating this business or making it longer. I'm going to grad school because like, I think maybe it'll be better to be a counselor in the future. All of these instincts can be structured and understood better in the framework of lifestyle

• 1:04:29Cal Newport?

  centric planning. Like figure out now your ideal lifestyle in this sort of decade that you're in right now. Do this same exercise for your 60s and 70s. Like what are the elements that matter? This will give you a lot of clarity about things like the, the, the therapy practice that you're thinking about creating that allow you, for example, like, does this make sense? And if so, I know exactly what I need out of this. Let me talk to real people and see is that possible? And if it is possible, what do I have to be doing now to set that up for 10 or 15 years from now? So make sure that you have evidence-based pursuits here, not just dream-based pursuits where I just sort of, I don't, a lot of people in this situation don't want to talk to real people because they don't want to know the reality because the reality might mismatch with their dream of what's possible. Get the real information.

• 1:05:11Cal Newport?

  It will also help you better make sense of what's going on right now. Is it a problem that you're working 15 hours a week and not 30? I mean, what, what are you not able to do in your lifestyle centric place? Is there something you can't do that that would unfold? Like you might turn out like, actually this is great. The amount of money I'm making now is enough because it's my instantiation of my lifestyle centric plan survives on it. Or maybe you realize, oh, I'm really held back if I made this much more.

• 1:05:39Cal Newport?

  Then it would unlock all of these other things. I could move to this part of Texas from this part, and I could start doing this thing that matters to me and be closer to family. Maybe you'll realize like if I had this much more dollars, I could have a much better instantiation. It would give you clarity. And with this clarity could come clear plans.

• 1:05:57Cal Newport?

  So if you found out like, actually, if I can make this much more money, I could shift to this instantiation of my ideal lifestyle, which is going to be much better. Now, harkening back to our deep dive from today, you could start doing hour cost computations. Well, with the current rate I do in professional photography, the hour cost of this is pretty high. But if I increased my rate, I could get the hour cost down to this, which would make this lifestyle instantiation much better. How do I get my rate up to this? Oh, I gotta learn this skill and that skill. I gotta invest in this equipment. Good, I have a plan to go after. Or, okay, I have this instantiation of my ideal lifestyle vision, which I'm not gonna be able to get to with commercial photography. I see a way with counseling I could get there. And I have hard evidence. Like if I had this practice with this many clients, I did it this

• 1:06:42Cal Newport?

  way, I could do it. Okay, this will work. Now I have my crystal clear vision. How do I get to this type of practice as quickly as possible?

• 1:06:50Cal Newport?

  On the other hand, if you're like, this is fine what I'm doing, it gives you structure for what else to do with your time, because you've identified the other things that matter to your ideal lifestyle vision, so that you can, with confidence, do these things with your time that you're not working. And not just feel generally like, I guess I should work more or go on a month-long meditation retreat. You can have a structure to your everyday life that's meaningful and intentional. So you're in a perfect position, Sarah, for lifestyle centric planning to take this great setup you have and all these options you have, and structure them and get the most out of them, both right now and in the future. So fantastic case study, but also a fantastic example of where lifestyle centric planning can make a big deal going forward.

• 1:07:30Cal Newport?

  All right. Well, we got a final segment coming up where I react to the internet. But first, hear from another sponsor.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

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• 1:08:06Cal Newport?

  Look, the holidays are here, as if there wasn't enough to worry about, as if this wasn't enough to worry about, rather, did you know that there's a heightened risk of data theft and fraud this time of year? Hackers know you're shopping in a hurry during the holidays, so it's easier than ever to hijack your connection and steal personal information like your credit card numbers and bank passwords, especially on unsecured public wifi. But here's how you can cross online security off your list. Do what I do: use ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is an easy-to-use app that encrypts and reroutes all of your online traffic through secure servers, making it virtually impossible to hack. So what happens is your real traffic gets encrypted on your

• 1:08:49Cal Newport?

  computer, that unbreakable encrypted packet gets sent to an ExpressVPN server, and then ExpressVPN server unencrypted and talks to the site or service on your behalf, encrypts the answer and sends it back, so people who are watching your local connection learn nothing, except that you are talking to a VPN server. That's the magic of VPNs. ExpressVPN, therefore, can keep your online activity private from third parties like your internet provider and scummy data brokers who want nothing more to bombard you with even more targeted ads during the holiday rush. With ExpressVPN, not even Santa will know what you've been browsing. Well, we don't know for a fact, Jesse, that Santa doesn't

• 1:09:29Cal Newport?

  have a 2048-bit quantum qubit computer that could break factoring problems at a sufficient scale to break public key encryption.

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  He probably has one.

• 1:09:38Cal Newport?

  He probably does. I am going to assume Santa might have a 2048 qubit quantum computer with which he can run Shor's quantum factoring algorithm, therefore foiling the public-private key encryption of Ravesh Shamir and Edelson.

• 1:09:58Cal Newport?

  Which is to say, we gotta take down Santa. All right, but outside of Santa, no one will be able to actually observe what you're doing when you use ExpressVPN. I like ExpressVPN because it's easy to use. It takes just one click. You can use it on up to eight devices simultaneously. So you can protect your whole family on your laptops, phones, tablets, and even your smart TV. It's no wonder that ExpressVPN is consistently rated the number one VPN on the market by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge. Plus, there's never been a better time to stay safe than the holiday season because right now, you can use my special link to get three extra months of ExpressVPN for free. Just go to expressvpn.com/deep to take advantage of the special deal.

• 1:10:39Cal Newport?

  That's expressvpn.com/deep for three months absolutely free. Our next sponsor is, uh oh, Santa Claus. He's upset because we talked about his quantum computer. Only during an ExpressVPN ad do I feel okay being sufficiently nerdy to talk about Qubits and Shores' algorithm. My people out there who know what both those things mean know what I'm talking about. Now, but I also want to talk about our friends at PolicyGenius. The heart of holiday traditions is family, but what happens when you're gone? If I disappear and there's some candy canes crushed nearby, look to the North Pole.

• 1:11:22Cal Newport?

  I'm just gonna put that out there and say that in public. But no, seriously though, look, you gotta protect your family's future and peace of mind with PolicyGenius because it makes finding and buying life insurance simple. We've talked about lifestyle-centric planning on this show. Here's an aspect of that you really gotta keep into account. Do you have enough life insurance? If the unfortunate happened to you, would your loved ones be taken care of? A lot of people in my situation, you know, approaching middle age, young family, realizes they don't have enough life insurance. And why not? It's not expense. Term life insurance is not that expensive. It's because of complexity. Where do I even start? Who do I even talk to? That is where a service like PolicyGenius enters because it makes it

• 1:12:06Cal Newport?

  simple to cross the get the amount of life insurance you know you need to get that task off your list. PolicyGenius makes that simple. With PolicyGenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for $1 million of coverage. Some of these options are 100% online and let you avoid unnecessary medical exams. PolicyGenius combines the efficiency of digital tools with the expertise of real licensed agents. It allows you to compare quotes from America's top insurers side by side for free with no hidden fees. Their licensed support team is right there, help answer your questions and get you what you need fast. They'll handle your paperwork,

• 1:12:49Cal Newport?

  they'll advocate you throughout the process and help you get that policy in action as painlessly as possible.

• 1:12:59Cal Newport?

  PolicyGenius is the country's leading online insurance marketplace. Even if you already have life insurance, the work, it may not protect your family's needs or fall if you leave your job. I had to add a lot more life insurance when I figured out what I was getting through my work. It's kind of negligible. So you really want to make sure you have enough. Join thousands of happy PolicyGenius customers who leave five star reviews on Google and TrustPilot. So, secure your families tomorrow so you can have peace of mind today. To do so, head to policygenius.com/deepquestions or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com/deepquestions. All right, Jesse, let's go to our final segment. So, one of the final segments we like to do here on

• 1:13:43Cal Newport?

  the show is me reacting to stuff that you, my listeners, have sent me that have been making the rounds on the internet. Here's something that many of you sent me, which is that Oxford has named their annual word of the year for 2024. Jesse, you might be surprised to learn that word is insidious.

• 1:14:06Cal Newport?

  And they say that's how it's pronounced. That anyone else who says is wrong. Now, the word of the year is brain rot, which actually created some controversy because grammar people are saying that's two words.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  I thought it was two words.

• 1:14:20Cal Newport?

  Two words. But I guess the word of the year can be two words. Whatever. This is interesting. Let me read a little bit about it. I have the article up here on the screen for those who are watching instead of just reading. Here's from Oxford University Press. "Brain rot is defined as a supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material, now particularly online content, considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also, sometimes something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration. Our experts noticed that brain rot gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media.

• 1:15:03Cal Newport?

  Its usage has increased by 230% between 2023 and 2024." That's a cool concept, brain rot. It's a good way of describing what I argue you have to avoid en route to cultivating a deep life in our modern digital environment. This is one of the biggest disorders of the modern digital environment, is that these empty-calorie, highly-alluring, algorithmically-optimized digital diversions that have billions of dollars of market capitalization invested behind them being irresistible conflict with our paleolithic brains. And our brains rot in some sort of symbolic way when we immerse them in the world of

• 1:15:48Cal Newport?

  the digital trivial. And it's not just a bad habit. It changes your brain. It rots your brain. I love this term. It rots your brain. It makes your experience of the world worse. It makes your understanding of yourself impoverished, and it makes the subjective feeling of your day-to-day degraded. So what is the solution to brain rot? I talked about it earlier. Rewire your phone. Plug it in when you get home. If you need it, go to where it is. Don't have it with you as a default crutch. Read more books. Spend more time walking and reflecting outside with no digital-connected devices with you.

• 1:16:31Cal Newport?

  Do those three things in 2025. So instead of brain rot being the word of the year, it can be like brain recovery, which is absolutely possible when you disconnect from the constant drip of the digital. So brain rot, what would you have chosen for the word of the year? I was thinking about this. Brain rot's pretty good. Now, what do you think?

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Slow productivity is two words.

• 1:16:57Cal Newport?

  If we're gonna do two words, I'm in business. If we're, if we're able to do two words, I'm in business. I'm the king of two words. Yeah, slow productivity. Or as we now refer to it, Globe and Mail's best book of the, what is the award it got? The, one of, one of the Globe and Mail's best business books of 2024, Slow Productivity. That should be a word of the year. I agree. I like that.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Actually, there's a term that a lot of young kids use, sigma. What does that mean? I give a young kid a lacrosse lesson. He always talks about that, like it's sigma. Do your kids use that term?

• 1:17:31Cal Newport?

  You tell me sigma? And I'm thinking of the Greek letter, like I'm thinking capital sigma, which I'd use for summation or lowercase sigma, which I'm thinking about standard deviation. Is it possible that the student you're giving lacrosse practice to was referring to a statistical standard deviation? The people I give lessons to, that's, that would be what they're, that might be what they're.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  He uses it all the time. I was like, and he said it's used by everybody.

• 1:17:58Cal Newport?

  What's the content? Give me like a context.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  It's kinda like cool.

• 1:18:01Cal Newport?

  So you would say, for example, here's a new way to hold a lacrosse stick. And he would say like, that's sigma.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  Kind of, yeah.

• 1:18:09Cal Newport?

  All right, hold on, I'm looking it up. If we use more slang, Jesse, people will think we're much cooler than we are. All right. Sigma is a slang term used by generation alpha to describe a person or thing as cool, confident, or independent. A sigma is a lone wolf who prefers their own company and isn't trying to be the most popular. They are confident but humble and earn respect through their actions rather than, than words. But we could start using this.

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  It's used a lot in the younger generation or generation alpha.

• 1:18:39Cal Newport?

  I'm a sigma, right? I'm gonna call myself a sigma. Is it sigma to refer to yourself as sigma? What I'm gonna refer to myself as is sigma squared. Right, because if you if you square sigma, well, then you're super sigma.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Cal Newport?

  So that's how you know I'm sigma is because I'm gonna put my, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna put my sigma designation in a power law. I'm like, yeah, man, I'm like

• 1:19:04Cal Newport?

  two to the constant factor times sigma, sigma. Lone wolf, am I right, buddy? And then we do like you do a wolf call. I'm glad we're figuring out how to be cool. All right, here's another article about it.

• 1:19:17Cal Newport?

  Reddit, what does sigma mean in middle school slang?

• 1:19:25Cal Newport?

  Ooh, look at this answer, interesting. Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, right wing machismo BS. Laugh in their face and tell them to can it or get it written up. Oh, so there's like a controversial interpretation. This is a fun discussion. Now, now I'm into this. If eighth graders are comfortable enough around you to use ironic goofy slang, or respect you enough to be nervous to tell you that the Urban Dictionary definition of it, you've hit that sweet spot, carry on, shoulder. Nah, this is toxic little boy BS and needs to be addressed. JP and AT does these at work. Someone else says, I swear to God, this Tate guy is some folks. Oh, my God, look at this, they're really getting into this. Here's what I'm learning from sigma. And someone else is like, it's a harmless ironic joke. And telling eighth graders not to say it is most def not going to make it work.

• 1:20:11Cal Newport?

  Oh, so I bet.

• 1:20:14Cal Newport?

  Okay.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  It's even before eighth grade, because the kid I get a lesson to is in sixth or fifth.

• 1:20:17Cal Newport?

  Here's what I think is happening. So I think there was like originally a way it was used sort of like manosphereically, somewhat like straightforwardly, like maybe it's better than being an alpha is being a sigma. Right, so that's like the Andrew Tate reference, right? Like guys our age with like big biceps doing videos about like whatever. And that younger kids are ironically using the term because it's cringe worthy, the way that it was being used. So you can kind of like reappropriate it and be like, I'm sigma. Is that what maybe that's what's going on here?

• 1:20:53Cal Newport?

  But this is complicated enough, I guess we shouldn't call ourselves Sigma.

• 1:20:57Cal Newport?

  We will invent our own, can we invent our own term? I know all the Greek letters, I do a lot of mathematics. Well, I think we should be, it could be epsilon.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  That's my fraternity in college.

• 1:21:07Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it could be gammas. Psi, PSI, hey man, that's really psi of you. Alright, we're gonna invent our own term, so it doesn't have all this baggage. We are epsilons, which means like, a small degree of improvement over a term. Alright, so forget Sigma, the new thing, Generation Alpha, is to be epsilon. And that's our word of the year, I guess. And what I'm really learning, reading Reddit about this, is how much brain rot you get, reading Reddit about things. This is like people fighting about Andrew Tate and going back and, "Go do something useful! Be a leader in your community, read a book, learn something hard." This is crazy, the internet's crazy, brain rot indeed. Alright, that's enough nonsense.

• 1:21:53Cal Newport?

  Thank you everyone for listening. I guess next week, wow, this is gonna be like a Christmas Eve episode? What's a week from Monday?

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, the 20th.

• 1:22:05Cal Newport?

  Alright, we're recorded the week before. We'll have to, maybe we'll have to get a, we'll get some decorations in here for that one. We'll go crazy on that one, no one listens to the Christmas episode, because they're all off on vacation. So like, we're gonna go crazy on that one, I'm gonna think of something interesting to do. We are gonna get Sigma in here, with our Christmas episode. Which I guess means like, we'll be shirtless and doing preacher curls.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  With lacrosse sticks?

• 1:22:28Cal Newport?

  I wanna start every podcast with me doing preacher curls and looking up and saying, "Oh, I didn't see you come in." "Oh, hi there, I didn't see you come in here."

• 1:22:36Cal Newport?

  Alright everyone, thanks for listening, we'll be back next week with a crazy episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:22:46Cal 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.