IN-DEPTH: Architecting a Deep Life (w/ David Dewane)

In this episode of IN-DEPTH, Cal is joined by David Dewane, the architect responsible for the “eudaimonia machine” featured in DEEP WORK. In this wide-ranging conversation, Cal and David talk about the challenges of finding depth in a distracted world, and the results of David’s personal experimentation in creating a deep life of his own. Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia INTERVIEW: Architecting a Deep Life (w/ David Dewane) [04:06] Links:https://www.calnewport.com/slow https://donedaily.com/ Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the theme 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.

• 0:06Cal Newport?

  I'm Cal Newport and this is In Depth, a semi-regular series in which I talk to interesting people about the quest to cultivate a deep life. I'm excited about today's guest. It's my longtime friend, David Dewane. Now, if you've read Deep Work, you might recognize this name. David, who is an architect, is featured in that book for his idea of what he called the utimodia machine, a design for a theoretical office that maximizes deep work over distraction. So after my book came out, this idea, this design of the utimodia machine, became a bit of a sensation. As David talks about in our interview, he got

• 0:49Cal Newport?

  a lot of press about it. Eventually, someone even built a version of his utimodia machine, so it had a life of its own. Since then, David has gone on to make these type of buildings a reality. He works with a cutting-edge firm that tries to design the offices of the future for knowledge work. So keep it in mind, not just the physical spaces, but how they interact with how people think and distractions. Probably one of the most creative thinkers out there about the interaction of space and the ability to do things with your mind. So we talk about this in my interview. We get into it, this sort of interaction between offices and spaces from a massive office to how you design your home office to be more conducive to deep work. But the other reason why I have David on the show is that among the people I know,

• 1:33Cal Newport?

  you spend as much time as he does systematically thinking about what he wants in his life and how to make his life deeper. He is very good at life engineering and engineering his life towards depth. So we get into that journey as well in this interview. We talk about his current life right now, which is really cool, the way he has it set up and how he got there, including key turning points and the specific tools he used and has invented to help make his life better. Keep a particular eye out for our discussion of the Collins Score, which is something I learned from him and he uses to great effect in his life. So anyways, if you're interested in either more focus in your current spaces or more depth in your life going forward, I think you're going to love this wide-ranging conversation that I had with David Dewane.

• 2:19Cal Newport?

  But before we get into it, I want to mention our presenting sponsor who is making it possible for us to present this interview with no commercial interruptions. And that is our friends at Done Daily. Done Daily helps you break free from the noise of shallow tasks and focus on the deep, meaningful work that really matters. Now, I know the people who created Done Daily, they were behind another company called My Body Tutor, which has been a longtime sponsor of the podcast. They're experts at online coaching. So having real people coach you, but using the internet to try to keep things affordable. And that's what they're bringing to the world of productivity. With Done Daily, you're assigned a coach to work with. But this coach is going to work with a proven productivity system.

• 3:04Cal Newport?

  So they will help you build a quarterly plan, lay out your weekly plan, and then organize a daily plan to stay on top of what matters most. You check in on your plan daily with them for accountability and then debrief on your plan every week to see how things are going. I don't work for this company, but they, they know my ideas. And a lot of the type of ideas I talk about on this show, like multi-scale planning, are integrated into their system. And I was happy for them to do that because I've known them for a long time. And I think it's really cool to bring the idea of online coaching to the types of productivity ideas we talk about here. I think that's probably the future, especially for very high performers, is to have a coach onboard and online coaching is much more affordable than trying to have like an executive coach actually show up at your office.

• 3:47Cal Newport?

  So anyways, I thought this was a cool company. I've known these guys. I said, look, I want to tell people about it. So Done Daily, just go to DoneDaily.com, D-O-U-N-E-daily.com to find out more. All right. With that, let's get into our interview with David Dwayne. All right, I'm here with David Dwayne. David, I think you're best known to my audience, as I mentioned in the introduction, for your idea of the eutomonia machine, which was in my book, Deep Work. Now, my memory is, correct me if I'm wrong, that began as an architect's sketch. You literally sketch this, no cliche, on a napkin.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  At a bar.

• 4:28Cal Newport?

  At a bar.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Deep on circle.

• 4:30Cal Newport?

  What's the backstory there?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  So the backstory is that... You know, I found out about your stuff between So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work. And if I remember right, you're blogging chapters out to Deep Work, right? Or like you were talking about the concept in some way, shape or form.

• 4:48Cal Newport?

  I used to use the term hard focus. And then at some point, I evolved that over to the word Deep Work, yeah.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  So a mutual friend of ours, Brian Chappelle, was deep working to accelerate his dissertation. And he turned me on to the concept of Deep Work because I was teaching architecture at the time. And I was trying to accelerate my paper output. And so Brian and I were just having lunch one day. And he's like, well, you're architect. Like, well, it would be the ultimate space for deep working, you know? Because we were each doing all these workarounds. Like, I don't know if I described this to you before, but I actually had to get an office in a different school on campus so that I could focus. Like, I got an office in the Religious Studies Department, even though it had nothing to do with me and nobody knew who I was.

• 5:31Cal Newport?

  Just to get away from distraction.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 5:34Cal Newport?

  And Brian was writing his dissertation in his basement, right? And he had that like super regimented 5:00 AM.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  4:00 AM or something.

• 5:41Cal Newport?

  4:00 AM, something crazy, yeah.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  And so we were, we were kind of in like a little bit of a support loop. And then I just sketched it out at lunch. And he had the idea, I think he emailed to you without even telling me. And then you were blinding, you're like, yeah, let's get together and talk about you to money. And, and I remember like really distinctly taking this seriously and being like, okay, here is, here's like a description of how this should work, you know? And I put it on one page and sent it to you. And that was like, it was very impactful in my, in my whole vector since then.

• 6:18Cal Newport?

  I mean, it showed up in a lot of places. It would come up in magazines or I would see it and you reference like, I don't know that world well, but it seems like it had a bit of a half life.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  A little cult following there.

• 6:29Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, somebody built a version of it in Chelsea in New York.

• 6:35Cal Newport?

  I didn't realize this. Okay, in Chelsea. Okay.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:38Cal Newport?

  Full size?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  It was a store. It was like a retail store, but it was

• 6:41Cal Newport?

  That's what I remember.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Reorganized like, it was organized along these lines. And then, um, yeah, it was there that, you know. A couple of people, like Seth Godin was there, Chip Cutter from the Wall Street Journal was there, and that was a consequential one because he wrote up in the future of work, the Wall Street Journal does this every year, they have their future work.

• 7:00Cal Newport?

  Yep.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  That section, and that's where my current CEO read about it, and he's like, boom, here's my guy.

• 7:06Cal Newport?

  So you would say now, I think that's what's interesting, is back then it was a sketch, you were teaching architecture, now your day job in some sense is making these type of spaces a reality. Do I have that more or less right?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yes. So, I'm an architect, and the chief experience officer of a company called Genient, and what we do is, we try to build workplaces that help people have great experiences and do their jobs better, you know. I was like, the whole project grew out of, I think your critique was that the whole world of work is in a way, suffering, because we're so distracted all the time. I was looking at it purely from the slice of the experience of the physical space architect, and thinking like, the space is damaged, and the, or the space is faulty, or whatever, lacking. And there are other people looking at it from

• 8:00Speaker 01

  like, the technology standpoint. And so now, like, where I'm privileged to be in a position where, like, that's my job, is try to figure out how to enable companies to take a totally different approach, like totally elevated, evolved approach, and it keys together, like it reinforces in a ton of ways, your whole gestalt, you know?

• 8:23Cal Newport?

  A question I'm often asked, is people who are doing a lot of remote work, so they're setting up their own space at home, they're wondering, okay, if I wanted to get, take advantage of my physical space, have something like the Udemonia machine type of advantage, but it's not an office for a lot of people, it's how I think about the physical spaces when I work, when I'm at my own home. Have you thought about this? Like, if you really wanted to go, not radical, but you really wanted to get into it with someone who was working from home, into changing the various spaces you work in, having multiple spaces, what's possible here?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Okay, so, I think about this every day, you know, I think about it a lot.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  I think that we've become so used to languishing. You know, flourishing is the highest state of well-being.

• 9:10Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  Depression is the opposite. Languishing is the middle. I'm just getting by.

• 9:13Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  You know, and I think that the open office kind of just generic world out there is largely about languishing. And so when you compare that to my house, I like, where would I rather languish? In my house or here? It's easier to languish at home. I don't think a lot of people are flourishing at home because I think in order to flourish, you have to be exposed to other people. You have to give resources. You have to like, you have to, for a lot of knowledge workers, I think you really need to engage in some sort of reciprocal, like energizing dialogue. And Zoom is a poor proxy for this.

• 9:54Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  The reason I'm sitting in the HQ right now, talking to you in person.

• 9:57Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Is because if this was on Zoom, I don't think the conversation quality would be as good.

• 10:03Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So where you're going here is actually the key is to making the non-home office better. That we'll prefer remote work if all we're doing at the office is we're in a cubicle on email. Like, I might as well be at home because I don't have to commute and I have other, I can go to do my Peloton over lunch. But if you build an office.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  If you want to make something remarkable.

• 10:24Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  With other people.

• 10:26Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  I think you have to do it in an environment that is set up in such a way that stimulates that kind of creativity, you know, and that kind of, that triggers our kinds of relationships. So this is the whole switch from functional to performative. You know, like if there's one kind of just switch I want to flip in your head.

• 10:44Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Is that like, and I'm stealing this from Rem Koolhaas, the greatest living architect, probably Dutch guy. Is that like. Almost anything can function as a, let's say a school. A trailer can function as a school.

• 10:59Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Right? If your school's too crowded, you can put people outside. But like, what performs as a school? You know, what, what, what gets the students in the right mindset? What like connects you to like history?

• 11:11Cal Newport?

  This is like the Georgetown campus with its ornate buildings and the greens with the old trees.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  They don't need it. Georgetown could function on any, in, in a commercial office building downtown. You could put every single student, every single professor in a tower downtown.

• 11:24Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  And they could function. But like, if you want to get, break into that next tier, it's about performance. You know, and like what performs as a workplace? You know, what gets us in the right state of mind? What puts us in the right kind of relationship? And that is, it's a tricky thing. Like a great experience is a tricky thing to build. It's like a spell. Like, yeah, like you, you kind of conjure it. It's like a bubble or something and it's easy to break it. It's like concentration. Like as soon as your phone buzzes or somebody taps you on the shoulder.

• 11:55Cal Newport?

  Here's a, okay, so here's a follow up. Going on a rabbit hole here, but it's a fascinating one to me.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Does this make sense to you, by the way?

• 12:01Cal Newport?

  Absolutely does. Yeah. So my follow up is I had this idea I wrote about in the early days of virtual reality. Where I had done the first demos, one of my students had brought an early vibe to Georgetown. And I wrote this article on what I called immersive single tasking. And my idea was because of exactly this theory you're talking about. I said, space matters. I was thinking about Cambridge, thinking about Oxford. I mean, space matters, the, the symmetry of those greens, the, the fireplace and the wood panel offices. You know, C S Lewis is in there. It matters for certain creative production.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Well, it's like the Seinfeld thing about space. You know, it's cataclysmically relevant.

• 12:33Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  You remember that?

• 12:35Cal Newport?

  So I was saying, okay, so at home, I was like, maybe something virtual reality is going to bring to us is workspaces that are inspiring in that way. That you're single, I call it immersive single tasking because you'd be working on a single thing. And I think my example was, you know, you're in. Like the Hogwarts Dining Hall, which is based off King's College or whatever, with a whiteboard you can draw on with like the virtual reality and you're working on a proof there. It's gonna be a completely different mindset than at your kitchen table. And people built these things, right? I mean, I said, okay, here's the limitations. It was resolution. I like, you need a good enough resolution that you can actually read and see text and be able to write. And people have built these things. It really has not caught on. So is this just we're not there yet? Or is there something about the physicality?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  So I think we're not there yet.

• 13:21Cal Newport?

  Okay.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  I, I was totally blown away when I did my first demo of the Vision Pro, the Apple Vision Pro.

• 13:28Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  I'm like, oh, my God. You know, there's a, have you done it?

• 13:34Cal Newport?

  I haven't done the Vision Pro, though I've done other AR.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:37Cal Newport?

  I mean, you know, I'm on the record.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  It makes it, it makes old ARs, to me, in my view, look like toys.

• 13:45Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  You know?

• 13:46Cal Newport?

  But what'd you do in it?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's a couple simulations that you walk through, which are kind of like, okay. And then there's this whole deep experience they do at the end where they're like, basically play like a reel of like, it starts like it fades out of black and like Alicia Keys is standing from media away, like singing to you, you know? And it was so shocking to me that I made the guy play like three times.

• 14:12Cal Newport?

  But this is just like a virtual reality demo at this point. This is with the pass through completely turned off and now it's in virtual reality.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Well, what's weird about the Vision Pro too is that your peripheral vision is intact.

• 14:21Cal Newport?

  Oh.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  So you can kind of look to the side and see real world stuff. But then there's like, it takes you to like a, you know, Greek ruins in Turkey. And then it takes you to like little kids playing soccer in Nairobi or something. And I've been to Greek ruins in Turkey and I've seen little kids play soccer in Africa. And that's exactly what it feels like. You don't have the dusty bus ride to get you there, but it's like 80, 90% of the way. So like, immediately after I had that demo, I emailed a guy I know who runs like a software company for architects. And I'm like, you gotta do captures of like all the great buildings in the world and sell them to architecture schools.

• 14:57Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  You know, because like now you don't have to go to, you know? The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, like you could get most of it, you know, just like sitting in your couch in your living room or something. Now, why hasn't it caught on yet? And like the sports stuff is actually awesome, too. Like you'd really appreciate the baseball one where you're sitting on like the first baseline.

• 15:18Cal Newport?

  I did.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Watching it at bat.

• 15:20Cal Newport?

  I did one recently of the SNL 50th anniversary show. They put a 3D, 360 degree camera.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:27Cal Newport?

  And you could sit next to the cameraman while they were doing one of the skits. And like they were here and you could look over and the cameraman was right there and you could look behind you.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:34Cal Newport?

  And the audience, yeah. But do you buy this? My, my argument has been the way into this world is what I've observed and reported on it is going to be screens. So the number one productivity app in the Oculus store during the pandemic was this company called Immersed. And what they found was everyone else was trying to jump straight into a full virtual experience, typically with like group meetings. We'll all meet at the ruins of whatever. And it was friction was the problem. People like, I don't want to go through the, I don't want to put on my thing and log into a room. And like, I could just do zoom on the computer I'm already at. So what Immersed did is they said, you know, you're in a virtual world, but here's what you care about. We give you monitors. And at, at home, you only own one extra monitor, but in the virtual world, we give you four. And so it's like a more useful workspace, right?

• 16:19Cal Newport?

  You have more monitors. So I'm working from home and I can have three big monitors. And I don't own three big monitors, but they're virtual. But you're surrounded by on top of a mountain or this or that. And they found this got people into the virtual world because it was convenient. It's a better screen than they physically have at home.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:36Cal Newport?

  But then they were in a virtual world and then other things could, could happen.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  My personal test for these kinds of things is when you forget and you're, there's like a slip in your mind.

• 16:44Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  And you forget that you're in a Apple store or whatever. And you think you're in Turkey, you know? And

• 16:55Speaker 01

  I guess it'll be exciting when that's readily available to everybody. But man, the bar is so high for making all that content and stuff. And it's, it's, it's, the adoption has got to really be agonizing for Apple and the companies that are invested in this because, you know, you haven't even tried it.

• 17:15Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  The, when I think about these things instead, when I think about great experiences, you know, I am like maybe oddly satisfied with the real world, you know? And like my favorite digital experience is the Apple Pay. I didn't ask for it. It's invisible. It was free. It just showed up one day and it makes my life easier, you know? So I don't have to think about extra stuff. I can focus more on, you know, what I care about that day, like what I set out to do that day. Did you read Rick Rubin's creativity book?

• 17:54Cal Newport?

  Some of it. It's not a book you really read through.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, he modeled on the Dante Chin kind of, so you can kind of pick it up and put it down whenever you want. But there's one part in there that I thought you'd like a lot where he, he encourages you to plan your day with a concentration that you're like landing an airplane. And so like, yeah, the first 15 minutes of my day, when I'm like time blocking and stuff and going through like my kind of core daily metrics, it like, I have it written right next to it in my planner, like take the same seriousness to those 15 minutes as though you're landing an airplane.

• 18:26Cal Newport?

  What does that mean? What does it mean to be serious about planning?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Be really focused on like the two or three really important, like for me in the, my rhythm and my daily life right now, I can probably achieve two or three really important things in a day, you know? And so I just need to, and I, I like carefully segment creative time out from normal time, a shallow work time. And so I really carefully budget because if you don't do it, the world just... Sweeps in and steals your time.

• 19:01Cal Newport?

  I'll tell you something interesting about it, because I was just writing about exactly this idea this morning. So I'm working on a chapter of my new book, and it's about organizing your time as a prerequisite for changing your life.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:14Cal Newport?

  And I was writing about exactly this idea, and I was looking back historically, where did this idea of MIT's most important tasks, like make sure that you've figured out the most important thing and get that done first, right? It seems like a timeless idea. It arose early 2000s, right?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Okay, like just that phrase?

• 19:32Cal Newport?

  That phrase, but not just that phrase. That phrase came a little bit later. I think that was Gina Tappone at Lifehacker.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:38Cal Newport?

  Invented MITs. But it was, you had Brian Tracy eat that frog, was sort of getting around that idea. If you eat the frog, eat a frog first thing in the day, everything else won't seem so bad. And his idea was do your most important thing first. Then Julie Morgenstern, in the early 2000s, wrote, never check your email in the morning. And her idea was, before you do anything else, spend one hour on the most important thing, because you're not going to get to it. And then the bloggers took over. Leo Babuda, that's where I first came across it, is in Habits. And then I wrote about it. This, by the way, is like one of the issues I'm having now when I'm using AI, asking about the origins of different productivity ideas, my articles keep coming back. So it's become

• 20:19Cal Newport?

  oddly circular. I wrote about this back then. But this idea emerged sort of concurrently with email culture. And I wonder if it wasn't as relevant in 1992. It was, I have time. I have two meetings today. And my problem is like filling my day. But you get to the early 2000s, we introduced this idea of make sure that you do the thing that matters first, because that might be your only chance to get to it.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I could see that. I like Ferris' kind of idea of make before you manage. I just think that, yeah.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  The sort of situation I've carved out for myself is that I have decent amount of control over my time, especially like I know the hours of the day where I'm pretty productive and I try to really focus on taking things off my master task list. Like I don't have to go looking for stuff to do. It's all there. Like I've captured it or configured it or whatever. And like I kind of tee it up and I go for it. But man, I look at like, because people share their calendars and stuff, you know, and

• 21:29Cal Newport?

  Well, you're talking now, you get a lot of communicate, like you're in it, right? Like there's emails, there's meetings all the time or whatever.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I have to, I look at other people's calendars and they're just jammed all the way. And I'm like, man, how do you get anything done? You know?

• 21:48Cal Newport?

  But How do you resist that?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  I try to not, I personally try to just focus on doing fewer things but doing them well. And I try not to, I try not to show up or like volunteer to show up to meetings where I'm not contributing.

• 22:10Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Unless there's something like there's, there's a series of meetings that are within my company that I'm not participating, other people are like presenting forecasts and stuff like that, that I love because I can feel like the pulse of the company and stuff. But I just, I don't have a lot of meetings that aren't mission critical. And most of my meetings are external to like with, you know, people that control workplaces for other companies that I'm trying to sell my services to. So you don't, like, I think the biggest thing that helped me have a under-scheduled calendar is

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Just like just killing the pseudo productivity dragon and be like, don't like, don't assume that you're more valuable to the company because your calendar is full.

• 23:01Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I just met last weekend, he just retired, but he was a president of a relatively large company and had been for most of his professional career. And the story he told me is he said, look, my calendar was filled because of exactly what you're saying. This is what makes me useful is people want to talk to me and I can talk to them and give them guidance or help them make decisions. This is why I'm useful. Then he hired a new CFO and a really high level executive assistant and they they kind of put their heads together and came back and said, you have too many meetings and here's what we're going to do. We're going to block off a non trivial amount of time every day. And the executive assistant is like, I'm going to protect that. Like you're at your daughter's wedding. So this is time that I'm not gonna, we're not gonna let meetings go into it. He's really worried

• 23:43Cal Newport?

  like, but that's like three or four meetings and I mean, and he said after that change, it was, you know, night and day. He felt like he was 5X more useful, not productive, but useful. He had time to sit and think and strategize. And it turned out that there is this back pressure and meetings that would fill every minute. Anyway, there's no into it, right? So it's not like those three extra meetings was the difference between success or not. And then the story I told back, I tell this in a world without email, is that General Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army during World War II, that the, the person in charge of the entire war effort, essentially, right back here in DC, didn't work past five during World War II. Cause he had a heart condition and like back then, the doctor's

• 24:27Cal Newport?

  advice was don't work past five. So you don't have a heart attack. So he ran World War II.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Fixed schedule.

• 24:33Cal Newport?

  Not work, it was fixed schedule. He had to get congressional approval to completely change the lines of communication within the War Department. So there's too many people reporting to me. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to talk to these five people and then these people will handle these people. And if you're going to have a meeting with me, you're going to bring all of this stuff in advance and that meeting's going to be 10 minutes and most of this stuff I'm not going to do anymore. And it turned out it was all a knob you could turn and you could turn that knob to fill every minute of your day. You could turn the knob to work till five and he was just as effective. There was just a element of intentionality. I mean, you sort of just have me now on a workflow tangent. I still want to get to the main thing I want to talk to you about, but all right. So the main thing I want to talk to you about is I do think about you as someone who's very intentional about your life.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 25:12Cal Newport?

  And I, I want to break down some of the things you've done to get there because I think it's useful for my listeners who care about the deep life. But I want to paint the picture a little bit more. We've talked about your job. We know you're an architect. Now you have this job where you're helping to design sort of the workspace of the future. That's like a Disney Epcot term, but you know.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:30Cal Newport?

  But you also have, tell us about the farm.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Epcot was pretty radical, by the way. Okay, so, yeah. One of the things that I feel happy about in this conversation is that I do kind of feel like a representative of the audience. Like, I'm not a famous person, nobody, like, I don't have a, I'm not an author of some other book that's coming here to kind of do that. But like, I, and I'll give you your flowers just once really quickly, that I attribute a lot of the things that make me a kind of an intentional person to the fact that I've like, I've taken a lot of your lessons really seriously and applied them over a long period of time. Like, a decade.

• 26:13Cal Newport?

  This is why I'm having you on. We want to hear the story.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. So, um, so where do you want to start? The farm, right now?

• 26:21Cal Newport?

  Tell me, yeah, tell us about the farm.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:23Cal Newport?

  Like, where you, you live normally in the farm, and then I, and then I'm going to wind you back to like how we ended up there.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  So I'm from a small town in Wisconsin, and, but I live in Chicago, and my wife and I are from the same small town. And we decided during COVID that, you know, and we'd been thinking about it for like a while, but we wanted a country spot that is a kind of a complement to our city spot because our jobs depend on being in the city. And so.

• 26:50Cal Newport?

  And your city spot's really a city spot. Row House, like, you know all the people, you have a shared courtyard.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I live in a great neighborhood, right close to university, Hyde Park, south side of Chicago. It's kind of like Tacoma Park or Georgetown. But, yeah, it's great. And it's like a working class neighborhood. And, um, but we found a

• 27:11Speaker 01

  We were looking and looking for like a country spot and we finally found a really interesting one that is like five acres right in Lake Michigan, you know, like 10 minutes outside my hometown. And so An orchard nonetheless? No, it didn't have an orchard. Oh, you planted that? Yeah. All right. We planted the orchard. So it was just five acres when you got it? So we, yeah, we bought it and it wasn't expensive. It was, I think we paid 170 grand. Yeah, because the house was It was an old barn. Yeah, an old barn. From the 1870s and then it had a two-car garage attached to it. And so we converted the garage into a thing, but we had to put in a well, we had to put in gas, we had to put electric. And those weren't bugs. For me, those were features. Yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Because I got, like, we got to design everything. I like building stuff. And so it was cheaper. Like, I could never have afforded to hire, contract, do all that stuff. And so And how far is it from your house in Chicago? Two and a half hours. So we can migrate there on the weekends and stuff. And the, pragmatically, the way that we did it is that we will like, well, Airbnb it when we're not there. And that worked out perfectly. You know, we kind of have a push-down pop-up system where if there's a big event in Chicago, we can Airbnb our place in Chicago and go to the farm. And it works out. So like, we're not rich people, you know, very middle, middle income folks. And like, but we really wanted this to work. And we came up with like an

• 28:38Speaker 01

  imminently practical solution. But now it's like, like, I joke around, like, with you probably, but like, every day I'm there is a plus two. Yeah. You know, every day I'm working there for sure is a plus two. Well, you have, you have the writing. Construction stuff. What do you call it now? The writing? My writing cottage? Cottage, yeah. Or dark star? I love this part of it. Yeah, so I, we have three little kids and

• 29:09Speaker 01

  It's a lot of noise and when I'm there, you know, sometimes you want to get away from that. So I copied Mark Twain's writer's cottage and like other people have had these, you know, like we've probably jumped around about, uh, Frederick Douglass had one, you know, these other writers have them. And so, and I, I do like writing. I'm working on a book project that I will get to, uh, at some point here. Yeah. I think the writer's cottage, like building a writer's cottage was the ultimate act of procrastination on this book project. Uh, but-

• 29:35Cal Newport?

  Well, the, the ultimate move is what Michael Pollan did, where he wrote a book about writing, building his writer's cottage. That's the meta move right there.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Touche. Um, so anyway, no, it's a, it's like a octagon building about the size of this room and it sits in the field, like beyond the orchard, looks right like Michigan. And it is like my favorite place in the world, you know, and I, it cost $2,000 in materials from Lowe's and-

• 30:06Cal Newport?

  You built it, yes.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's not like, these things are not, but it took a lot of time. It took a lot of hours, but again, that's a feature, you know, it was fun to build.

• 30:15Cal Newport?

  Your schedule is like most weekends?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Most weekends.

• 30:18Cal Newport?

  You would head out there?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:19Cal Newport?

  And then sometimes if there was something going on in Chicago, you would-

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Fail.

• 30:23Cal Newport?

  Airbnb and go out there longer.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we just got comfortable Airbnb in our house too.

• 30:26Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  You know, so it's like, a lot of people kind of raise their eyebrows at that, but hey, man, whatever like makes it that possible, you know, and it's really great for the kids. It's, it's like my life is this really beautiful kind of two alternating currents where on Friday I can get out of the city. I have a couple afternoon calls that I can take on the road.

• 30:48Cal Newport?

  Yep.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  And then I pull up to the farm. It's like I get out and it's just quiet. And, uh, you know, I can notice little changes in the landscape. Like I'm so attuned to that landscape now, the day to day, especially in spring. It's like I can see things changing and that's really exciting to me. And then like Sunday evening-

• 31:13Speaker 01

  I pack up, go back to Chicago and I turn I-94 or whatever and I see the skyline and I feel like seven feet tall.

• 31:21Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  And I'm like, all right, let's get back into this.

• 31:23Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  And it's so, it's such a great way to live, at least at this stage in my life.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  But there's one other thing in the, in my drawer at the writer's cottage, I don't know if I told you about this, but I hacked your time block planner.

• 31:41Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  And I have my own like version of it, but I built a lifetime block planner.

• 31:47Cal Newport?

  So. You mean like on a year scale?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:49Cal Newport?

  Ooh, interesting.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  So it goes 100, it goes from now till I'm 100 years old.

• 31:53Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  And each spreads like a year.

• 31:55Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  And so there are projects that I have that I know I don't have the bandwidth to work on them now, but I don't want them rattling around in my head. So I put them in my life block planner years out, you know?

• 32:07Cal Newport?

  And you look at it.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  And I look at it all the time.

• 32:09Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:10Cal Newport?

  Well, from a lifestyle centric planning perspective, what was, so the farm is a solution to a vision that, because we talk about this a lot on the show, that in lifestyle planning, you're, you don't work towards a particular, you don't start with the goal. Like I want to buy something here. You start with the vision of the lifestyle. Like here's what I want in my life that we don't have. And then you look for creative solutions that gets that there. So what was, what was the goal that eventually the farm became the solution to?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  I just.

• 32:41Cal Newport?

  Like what were you, what were you thinking when envisioning your lifestyle? This is what's missing.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  I think it's just pace. You know, like years go by like that, you know, and I think that there was something else about

• 32:59Speaker 01

  like returning to our, like our roots, you know?

• 33:03Cal Newport?

  Because your hometown was nearby.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Well, not just that. Yeah. Like my hometown was nearby. My parents are kind of aging and they're there. I want my kids to have a relationship with them. But I was, you know, tucking my middle kid in. When we were at the farm one day, and I was telling her, I'm like, you know, when our people immigrated here, they came right to this county.

• 33:22Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  And she's like, what? Really? Do we have a photograph? And it's like right after the Civil War, potato famine, Irish people. And I'm like, yeah, we got a picture. And she's like, I want to go put a picture on the guy's grave tomorrow. And so we found the picture, made a copy of it, put it in a little frame, and took it out to the cemetery and found the guy's grave. And

• 33:41Cal Newport?

  So your relatives, there's a cemetery nearby.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:43Cal Newport?

  That has like, your relatives are there.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  The first guy from Ireland. He was born in Tipperary. Now there he is. You know, and so every successive generation has kind of come up there. And so, I mean, that's different than when you're in Chicago and it's kind of like anonymous in a way. You're absorbed into this larger thing.

• 34:00Cal Newport?

  What? Like, when you first were thinking about those general goals? I want to slow things down, I want some connection. You were probably thinking generally like the country. You have some part of our life that's slower, back to our roots. Was there, I'm imagining there, I was like, okay, let's look at the obvious options. Like, what would someone?

• 34:14Speaker 01

  The orchard was also a really big deal.

• 34:16Cal Newport?

  That, you planted the orchard?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they're cider apples. They're hard cider apples.

• 34:20Cal Newport?

  Was that part of the original plan?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Well, so my wife and I, she did, we lived in Paris briefly when she was doing a study abroad. And we discovered like in the French countryside, you know, like they have this like, a Normandy has this champagne like apple cider. And we're like, oh my God, we should make this.

• 34:43Cal Newport?

  How long ago was this?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Uh, 2010.

• 34:47Cal Newport?

  So it had been lurking.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:49Cal Newport?

  It had been like a detail that became a part of your lifestyle vision.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like romantic, you and your wife are bumming around rural France and you're like, we should get a country spot and plant an apple orchard.

• 34:58Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  You know?

• 34:59Cal Newport?

  Meanwhile, you're in DC, then you're in Chicago and you're

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, buzzing around. And you're getting jobs and getting promoted and all that stuff. But then eventually it's like, we got to get serious. And so we, as a kind of forcing mechanism, we used our 20th anniversary as like, that's, we're going to have a reunion. Or like a kind of a reunion of the people that came to our wedding, you know? And we're going to do it at this farm. And we did. We did it.

• 35:22Cal Newport?

  I heard that was awesome. Yeah. Well, but when you first, so practically speaking, I'm assuming When you first like, okay, we have this deadline. We know we want country, connection to roots, orchard. Probably the first thing you did was, well, we'll fire up Zillow and you're looking at vacation homes for sale and it's like super expensive and that might be a place where.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  We were even looking when we were here, you know, we looked at an orchard actually in like a by Roanoke or something. But like, yeah, like you, you look in a non-serious way for a while and then you kind of get more serious about it and COVID was sort of like, okay. And then also it's like, you know, we're running out of time. Yeah. What are we going to do? And so.

• 36:02Cal Newport?

  But you got, you got creative, right? Because a lot of people might've got stuck with like, okay, I'm looking up like nice houses on the lake and they're all $800,000 and I don't have $800,000. So I guess that plan's not going to work. But you kept working.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  We found it the day it came on. Yeah. And we put an offer in like a week later. Yeah. And also, I mean, like from the financial standpoint, I just traded my 401k for that, basically. I cashed my 401k early. Yeah. Absorbed all the penalties and stuff and it didn't really hurt my feelings too much because I want to work. I love working. Yeah. So I want to work till I die anyway. Yeah. But it like, and plus like, it's a good investment too, even though I don't even want to sell it or anything. But.

• 36:42Cal Newport?

  You're thinking about the next 20 years.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  I had, I had to make a non-trivial choice about like, should I, should I risk this thing on that? And it was the best decision I ever made in my life. Yeah. I mean, one of them, you know, I don't want anybody.

• 36:59Cal Newport?

  You're prioritizing the next 20 years, like making those, making those as good as possible as opposed to just maximizing 30 years or whatever, that period of life. Yeah. Tell me about the Collins score.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Collins score. Yeah. I threw out this thing that like every day at my farm's a plus two, you know, that was a subtle note.

• 37:19Cal Newport?

  Yeah, we got to, we got to explore. I talked about it briefly on the show about a month ago. But it's, but it's worth bring, bring the listener up to speed again.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  Yep. So about six years ago, Ferris interviewed, Tim Ferris interviewed Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great and a handful of other like landmark books. I consider him like the Peter Drucker of the 21st century.

• 37:40Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I told you, I got, I met him at some point after that. He gave me some advice. Nice guy.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  He's a super, like, I just have to imagine.

• 37:47Cal Newport?

  I don't know how I got in touch with him. He's hard to get in touch with.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I am, I'm not really a star chaser like that, you know, but I, if.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  I look forward someday to hopefully meeting him. We have a lot of things in common. If you go to his website and you go to his further reading, he's like the only person I've ever met who's listened to more Great Courses series than I have. You know, so we can have a fun laugh about that. But he said something on, you know, Ferris's show that really stuck with me or caught my attention, and then I implemented it right away, which is he he tracks every day three things. He brings up a spreadsheet and he does a little bullet points of like the things that happened that day. And then the second column, he records the amount of creative time, what he calls creative time. You'd probably call it deep work. Send me how I would call flow, whatever. Like heads down focused work.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  And then the third column is a rating, like a daily rating, like a grade. And it's highly subjective. It's just a body feeling. How did my day go? And it's on this very specific scale, which I think is the probably the most genius part of it, which is negative two, negative one, zero, plus one, plus two.

• 38:58Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  So you have like

• 38:59Cal Newport?

  Zero is languishing, like it's

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, zero is literally languishing. And I think like, well, I'll ask you, what do you think that score is actually measuring?

• 39:07Cal Newport?

  Subjective assessment of your subjective feel of the day. Like, did you, like a zero to me

• 39:14Speaker 01

  I think it's measuring Jim Collins' individual flourishing.

• 39:17Cal Newport?

  Yeah, but like zero would be pretty consistent for people. I would imagine zero is, I don't even really know what happened today. It wasn't bad, like I wasn't sad. I wasn't like stressed out, but like nothing also got me all that fired up. I, you know, I had some emails, I had some meetings.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  I think people's, if you're not paying attention, if you're not measuring this, I think that the default that hovers around zero.

• 39:38Cal Newport?

  Yeah, because if you're in the negative territory too long, you're probably going to want to make some changes.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:43Cal Newport?

  But what you, people don't do is push themselves to the positive territory.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  That's flourishing. Yeah. And so I started tracking

• 39:51Cal Newport?

  How long, how long, set this up, how long? This is a while for you.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Right after I heard about it, so six years ago.

• 39:55Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  And I started doing it with my mentor. And like, so we would start out our days time blocking. And then we would like text each other our, our schedule for the day. And then, uh, at the end of the day, we'd text each other our rating. And you used the column scale? And we use the column score. Yeah, like that exact rating. And so a couple of things occurred to me like immediately. Like one, uh, or the first thing is that I knew what got me into negative territory. And I deleted that. What was it?

• 40:29Speaker 01

  It's gonna sound strange, but fighting with people, uh, you know, like- Just beating people up on the street? It's stressful. I grew up in a family of Jesuit lawyers and we would just fight for fun. They can argue. Yeah. Jesuits can argue. Everybody fights for fun, uh, you know, and, but, uh, and I think I used to be more aggressive like that. And then I just realized it was actually emotionally draining, you know? Like family members or people you worked with? Worked with, yeah, like being more confrontational about things like pushing on people and stuff, you know? And I just realized like, man, that's not helping. And, uh, the other thing was, um, certain people will kind of trigger, you know, if I was in like meetings too long or if I expected a certain kind of feedback from somebody and I wasn't getting it,

• 41:13Speaker 01

  like it would bring me down. And so I just kind of avoid that. There's like negative score people in your life? Kind of, yeah. Yeah. And so, or like people that can kind of trigger negative score stuff if I ask them for the wrong thing. Anyway, uh, so probably two or three other negatives. Uh, actually, uh, like I'll tell you right now what triggers negative, which is, I have very specific goals that I'm responsible for. And if I look at where I spent my time that day, you know, look at my goals and they don't match, that's a problem. Professionally? Yeah, unless I had like a really good excuse, you know, like some, somebody came to me with a problem- Yeah. That was urgent and they turned to me and I addressed it in a fine way.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  So like, uh, maybe that was like apart from my responsibilities, but I handled it and good. You know, so I'll give myself like a plus for that. But the other thing that was actually probably more positive than eliminating the negatives was- You know, taking the things like setting daily realistic goals. What could I do today to get to a plus one? What might I stretch to to get to a plus two?

• 42:25Cal Newport?

  Did you know what? You didn't know what those were, I'm assuming, until you've been measuring. Like, in other words, did you have to discover what works pretty consistently for a plus two?

• 42:35Speaker 01

  You know how you feel at the end of that? You know? And?

• 42:38Cal Newport?

  But like, did you discover something you wanted to prioritize before?

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Totally, yes.

• 42:42Cal Newport?

  It's like, what's something you discovered that would reliably deliver like a plus one or plus two day?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Manage your, just manage your expectations and then don't waste time. Don't just like, don't allow time to just bleed away. You know, like, I think it's like, you've, you've, you, you contain the leaks and, and like, you, you do get a sense of, um, it's just a sense of accomplishment from like knocking that one thing. Like, I've become very, I try to be very particular about the things that make it onto my master task list, master task list.

• 43:19Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  But then aggressive about getting them off. You know, things that linger on that list, you know?

• 43:26Cal Newport?

  These are like at the project scale?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the project scale, exactly. And so?

• 43:31Cal Newport?

  So not wasting time for you means you made non-trivial progress?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, yeah, and I will, um, so my quarterly, or my planner, my time block planner, I do it quarterly. And so I set quarterly goals that I review basically every day.

• 43:49Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  You know, because they don't take long to review. And then I just make sure that, the, the part that I'm actually struggling the most with is taking the time on Monday to really lay out the week.

• 44:03Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  I look, if I like review my old ones, those, those week spreads are, um, Undercooked.

• 44:12Cal Newport?

  I keep trying to convince myself to do this end of day Friday, which makes sense on paper. Right. Because that's actually

• 44:21Speaker 01

  It's probably smarter.

• 44:22Cal Newport?

  The slowest part of the week and you have and you get the benefit of the weekend of being like, I know what's going. But it's really hard. It's like you're done by Friday afternoon like that. And but the problem is Monday morning is everyone's rock and rolling. And it's it's difficult to take the 90 minutes. It could take a while.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:39Cal Newport?

  To really get your arms around things. So I've been struggling with that, too. I think on paper, Friday end of day makes all the sense in the world. But psychologically.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:47Cal Newport?

  It's difficult. Monday makes more sense, but it's hard to give it the time Monday morning.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  It's an important link in the multi scale chain, though.

• 44:54Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  You got to get that week in there because you can't just go from quarter to day. Like, I think that you you.

• 44:59Cal Newport?

  Yeah, the week, the week really unlocks.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  You can build a lot more momentum. I want to finish the conscore thing really quick.

• 45:04Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Is that I think actually like what I'm experimenting with at work right now is trying to promote this as a broader metric. Not just within my company and my work, but like within the field of architecture, you know, and.

• 45:19Cal Newport?

  Well, I've told you, if people had to do this every day in a normal office job.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:23Cal Newport?

  You couldn't hide from the fact like we'd have to burn down the building where they make Microsoft Outlook.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:28Cal Newport?

  Like people are like, well, this is just, wait a second.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 45:31Cal Newport?

  What I'm doing in this job is making me miserable. There's no metrics in knowledge work. I call it the metric black hole, you know, in deep work. It's like if people were actually measuring that, they'd be like, I am upset. I did email and meetings all day. That's not a plus one day.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  So now I have access to within my company, I have access to real researchers, anthropologists and ethnographers and people with like masters in this stuff and PhDs in social sciences. And like my, my personal background is in like high performance buildings from an energy and resource standpoint, like zero energy buildings. Buildings that use very little water or have a little carbon footprint. That was really easy and objective because those metrics are.

• 46:10Cal Newport?

  Can count it. Here's how many volts.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  You can build a model.

• 46:13Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  You know, but if you ask somebody. Build me a high-performance workplace that makes my people happier, more productive. You can't look at a mechanical engineer and they're gonna be totally worthless, you know? But you can ask a social scientist, you know, and they can give you some metrics. But like, I think that this Collins score thing, like, if you had, so this is what I'm, uh, I want to experiment with, within my own office, is get a series of my colleagues tracking, okay?

• 46:39Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  And we have some underutilized parts of our office, like a couple, like conference rooms and old offices that aren't really used for anything. And, um, so I want to get a group of people tracking and then anonymize and pool the Collins score.

• 46:54Cal Newport?

  And to be clear about it, practically speaking, you're putting down the score number and then a sentence or two, without overthinking it, just in the moment, why did you put down that score? And that, he leaves vague.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:08Cal Newport?

  Right? And it's one sentence, two sentences?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  So my tracker that I'm designing is a slight modification on Collins, based on my own sort of-

• 47:15Cal Newport?

  How dare you.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Oh, it's funny, usually I try to default towards Collins, but, um, and he actually, I think, folds his personal life and his work life together. That's a tough decision for me, I'm trying to just separate it and just focus on work stuff.

• 47:27Cal Newport?

  Well, yeah, but he, to him, it's all the same thing.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:29Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  But, uh, in the morning, uh, the tracker would ask you two questions. One, what time are you gonna shut down? Two, which is helpful, because then it reminds you to shut down.

• 47:39Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  And then two, it, uh, what would you have to achieve today to get a plus one? And then at that time you set, it comes back to you and says, how'd you rate your day?

• 47:48Cal Newport?

  In your vision, this is an app?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, on your phone.

• 47:50Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  And then, how would you rate your day? Why would you rate it that way? And then, how many hours of creative time, or of heads-down focused time, did you have? And so what, from the research standpoint, what you would get every day is-

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Two quantitative metrics and one qualitative metrics. And that's really the magic because the qual and the quant together create the full picture. A lot of times, people just track quantitative stuff.

• 48:20Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  And you can tell like what's going on, but you have no idea why. The qualitative stuff tells you why.

• 48:25Cal Newport?

  What are you going to tell a manager though? Let's say you do the research, you're doing it in someone's office and you find like, look, when, when people look at the qualitative and quantitative.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:32Cal Newport?

  When they're able to spend three hours heads down on something they think is important, they're plus one days and when they can't, they're negative days.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  You're jumping ahead.

• 48:40Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  What's next?

• 48:41Cal Newport?

  Okay.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  So like, um, what I want to do with my team is get everybody tracking or get like, this is opt in. I'm not going to force anybody to track stuff, you know? And I think everybody just keeps their own data, but like pulls the number anonymously.

• 48:56Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  But so it's accurate. That's important. And so, uh, but then what I want to do is I want to take some of these underutilized spaces and get everybody together and say, okay, hey, guys, and this is an architecture group. So we, we know about designing space, but I want to be really intentional and say, what, how could we reallocate these spaces that give us the best chance of upping our collective con score? What would we turn these into that would make us even happier or more productive and more effective architects?

• 49:26Cal Newport?

  Would you then measure it? That's your idea?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then we just keep tracking and you can, through the qualitative data, you should be able to point to these things. And, you know, the, the, the subjectivity piece, some people view it, uh, I think fairly as a, as a vulnerability because you're like, well, what if you get a nasty text from somebody, you know, from your spouse? Is that going to affect your con score that day? But like the, the, the constant day after day after day after day, like you build trends really fast.

• 49:56Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  You know, and, and so I, I'll tell you, I've become so effective at this that I changed my own personal scale from negative one, zero, one, 1.5 and two. Because I'm so, I, I reserve twos for really exquisite days.

• 50:14Cal Newport?

  I see.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  But I'm so regular at one that I'm trying to push it a little further, you know? And I've never had a negative two.

• 50:23Cal Newport?

  Well, so, so what, what have you changed in your life?

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Because of this?

• 50:27Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  I think I'd take on less, for sure.

• 50:33Cal Newport?

  So when you're busy or you had a harder time getting good scores?

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you always feel inadequate. You're always feeling like you're chasing, or you're on the hamster wheel, or whatever. I mean, or you're too ambitious about the amount of things you take responsibility for. Whereas if, like, I would rather get half the number of things done, but do them as, like, at a really high level.

• 50:57Cal Newport?

  It's just an example of, like, my theory of administrative overhead aggregates. So the more things you're doing, the more, the bigger fraction of your day has to be spent not doing things. That's sort of ironic cycle.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's true. And like, there's a, I think you would probably understand this and be able to articulate this better than me, but there's an inherent risk there that if I'm doing less, I'm going to be perceived as not as interesting, or not as well-rounded, or not as comprehensive, or whatever, you know? Whereas if you focus on the things that you're really interested in and curious about, and you maintain like a long commitment to those, they blossom into something that's authentically interesting and exciting, and people like are attracted to that.

• 51:47Cal Newport?

  A satisfaction engine.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:49Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  You know?

• 51:50Cal Newport?

  Like, for what?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Like, they take you seriously.

• 51:51Cal Newport?

  Like, what's an example in your life?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  So for me, I mean, it is, well, even this con score thing. You know, like, I didn't come upon that by accident. I came upon that because I'm obsessed with the concept of flourishing and how to help other people flourish.

• 52:07Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  You know, and so I'm trying, and like, I had developed rare and valuable skills in the high-performance buildings from like an energy resources stuff standpoint. And now I'm trying to like, take what, apply what works over here, or to this other place.

• 52:23Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  You know, that is, that's right on the very edge. Of what's innovative in my field right now.

• 52:31Cal Newport?

  Right, so you're saying you're playing the long game on the idea you were just explaining to us, for example.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:36Cal Newport?

  But working on that and continuing to work on that might be a big innovation in the field. And that is a choice versus you could be much busier with many more smaller projects, which like in the moment would make it feel like you had your finger in a lot of pies and were getting after it and et cetera, et cetera.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  I can take that concept. I mean, I've got a, there are a series of conferences that are influential in my field. And I want to use, I have the vision for a slide to start the talks that are coming this fall that is like point zero, one, two, and then arrow and like 1.15. And like, that would be like my office's com score moving from like hovering around zero to like plus ones. This is like, that's going from languishing to flourishing objectively, you know?

• 53:25Cal Newport?

  Right, so if you could have that slide and say, here's what we changed. We, like, we tried this in the physical space, then it changed the score. Then we tried this and it made a big difference. And it's whatever it is.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  And it might not work.

• 53:37Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  You know, and I'm like a little bit, probably in a kind of a petty way afraid that I'm going to try this thing and people are going to reject it or whatever. But I don't care that much. Like, my ego has been diminished through.

• 53:53Cal Newport?

  Do you think the score, keeping the score helped motivate the farm? In the sense that now when you're thinking about your life in this way, you're thinking this is going to be a plus two generator?

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Well, I know for a fact that I was, I didn't know that it would be as effective as plus two generator as possible. And like, I literally, I was like, I remember, it's funny that you mentioned this, this memory kind of flashes back, but you know, like chess notation? Like how they give like exclamation points next to good moves and like if it's a really good move, it gets two exclamation points. It's kind of similar to the plus, plus two thing.

• 54:28Cal Newport?

  I know this from you. You explained this to me once, yeah.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and. In all the chess notation I've ever seen, I saw one three exclamation point move, which was Bobby Fischer's game of the century and like Ruben Fein's like commentary on that game. But like, the day we actually got the farm was the only plus three day I've ever had.

• 54:47Cal Newport?

  You mean the, when you're walking through the property?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Like, we signed the contract at the bank and we went over and it's like ours, you know? That was plus three day, you know? And I was just so happy. But what I didn't anticipate was that, and we got it in January in Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan, during this winter that was cold as hell.

• 55:05Cal Newport?

  Right. So it's not like a beautiful, a beautiful spring day, like the birds were chirping?

• 55:09Speaker 01

  No, no, no. And so our initial wave of work to get it kind of going, I was working out there when it was like 10 degrees every day. Every single day in that first month that I was there was a plus two.

• 55:23Cal Newport?

  Did you, you spent like a whole month out there?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Every day, plus two. And then like, I'd never expected or experienced anything like that. It was just, you know, and now they're not all plus two days out there. But like, it was so great, you know? And, um, yeah, wow. But, uh, that's not the, that's not the, I don't think that's the point. The point isn't huge string of plus twos. The, the point is trying to get from, trying to just live a flourishing life, you know? And that's why I think, I think the days that are, you know, for a lot of people, zeros

• 56:07Speaker 01

  are the days where you just feel, what happened? Where did they go? You know? And what happened is that, you know, your device stole your concentration and you spent too much time worrying about things that you can't control and reading about them in the New York Times, you know? And letting people live rent free in your head, instead of just getting control of your, your own situation.

• 56:31Cal Newport?

  I mean, what's interesting to me, to me about it is, like, if we look at your life, for example, it's not built on some radical decision.

• 56:40Cal Newport?

  It's not built on, "I was miserable, this is the cliche, and we moved to a sailboat." And whatever, and it's some very, like, and through the radicalness of it, this is why I like the call and score idea, is I feel like it allowed you to explore the landscape of possibilities in your life more systematically, and build out a flourishing life, which is different necessarily than a life built around some sort of central radical decision.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  So, it's built, my life is built on the ashes of a failed radical decision, you know, and the, uh, but like, it was a youthful, you know, indiscretion, let's say, where like, when I was an undergrad, I tried to do, um, a sort of a heroic, uh, you know, design-build project in Central America, you know, a poor community. And I didn't have a sustainable skillset. So even though it was like, really deeply aligned with my mission and my values, and even like, the skills I was building, I didn't have the ability to execute.

• 57:38Cal Newport?

  But this was a thing back then.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:39Cal Newport?

  But I remember this, there was like, the late 90s, early 2000s.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:43Cal Newport?

  This idea of, it's like Project Water. It was like, this follow your passion, do be useful though, right? And it was like, the idea is you would go somewhere and build a school is a big thing, right?

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Pencils and promise.

• 57:55Cal Newport?

  Pencils and promise, yeah, Project Water, like, this was...

• 57:58Speaker 01

  So I was right in the mix with all those things.

• 58:00Cal Newport?

  Three cups of tea, yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and even design for, or architecture for humanity. Um, so, a lot of, it, this is actually what like, the Dalai Lama calls sloppy sympathy.

• 58:11Cal Newport?

  Interesting.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  You go to a place where you, you see a problem, you want to help, you throw a little energy at it, but if you really want to be helpful, you have to move there.

• 58:21Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  And you have to like, transform your whole life, and, and be extremely humble.

• 58:26Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  You know, and accept a lot of failure before you probably get successful. And I did not take that approach. Some people do take that approach, and they like, they're, they're, they do really impressive work. But like, I felt the sting of taking the leap before I was ready, and what happens is you get...

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Alien, you, the failure alienates you from the thing that you really love. You know, so.

• 58:52Cal Newport?

  The goal got confused with the thing, the goal was, the vision, here's something that's important to me.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:59Cal Newport?

  We often confuse it with the radical goal. Well, if I do this radical goal, which was inspired by this feeling of whatever it is, I want to be helpful or whatever it is, but then the radical goal becomes the thing. And so when that fails, you, you lose the connection. We talk about lifestyles and applying the difference between the.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:15Cal Newport?

  The, the properties you're looking for in your life and the particular things that might generate those things in your life.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, except, I'm with you. I'll, I'll give you another example that's contemporary for me.

• 59:29Cal Newport?

  But what happened, finish the story though, so what happened?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  So what happened is that it was, the project was a failure. I felt humiliated, but I kind of nursed that wound for a long time. But then I, you know, I, that's when I came across, so good, they can't ignore you. And I like, I started like connecting dots. Oh, rare and valuable skills. Okay, so there are rare and valuable skills you would need to be successful in that environment, rather than just an architect working in Tacoma Park. Um, oh, career capital. You know, maybe I shouldn't have like skipped steps here. Maybe I should have become an effective human being first and then gone on to those types of things. So, um, that, that was really, uh, that was really meaningful in terms of,

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  you know, creating a structure where I had like greater patience, a different set of expectations about what was possible. And so like a big project that I'm gearing up to take on right now is writing a book on spaces of hyper creativity.

• 1:00:33Cal Newport?

  Which I think is a good idea.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  The architecture of hyper creativity. But the reason that you think it's a good idea probably is because it checks, I've taken the time to check the other boxes about like. Is writing something I can even do? Or like writing for editing, something I could do. Is this an interesting idea? But I could see a lot of people that are listening to this that might be nursing book projects of their own, being like, okay, I'm gonna throw a ton of energy at this. And then if it fails, they're gonna feel shitty about it. You know, and that's unfortunate. And it doesn't have to kind of be that way. You can take a more measured, methodical approach into like Brad Stalberg's kind of thing. Like the consistency and like owning up to the fact that like the consistency is more important than the intensity.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  And I would say with that early project of mine that was a failure, it was intensity over consistency for sure, you know? And then acknowledging upfront that every single day you sit down to write is gonna probably be painful.

• 1:01:31Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  You know, and just being, or sometimes it's not. And if it's not, enjoy that and ride that wave as long as you can. But if it's not going well, that's okay. Just keep grinding.

• 1:01:42Cal Newport?

  It's like building something. Yeah, some days it's a pain.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:01:45Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And the joints don't fit that day, your cuts aren't great. It's tedious that day.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  And man, it helps if you enjoy building stuff, you know? Like if people look at this farm project and, you know, they're like, was that fun? And I'm like, yeah, for me it was really fun, you know? So if you can figure out a way to like, and my wife's different. She doesn't like to do construction stuff. So it's not plus two days for her if she's swinging a hammer or sawing stuff. But for me, it's great.

• 1:02:14Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:02:14Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:02:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Well.

• 1:02:22Cal Newport?

  So you came out of, I always, when I talk to you, I internalize a lot.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah?

• 1:02:29Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 1:02:29Cal Newport?

  I do. Well, about your approach, I like the intention of it, but I like that you act on it. You know, you make choices, you make changes. It's easy to get stuck in the zeros. Or to get stuck in, this isn't quite working, there's a lot of negative ones happening, but it seems difficult to change. And I think you're better at, you're not scared of change.

• 1:02:56Cal Newport?

  Would you say this is fair? Like, the difference between you back then and now is you're not afraid of change. It's just your change is more evidence-based now than it was before. It's not on a vibe. You have data, personal data, insight data. You're like, okay, this is going to be better, so why wouldn't I do it?

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  I feel like the core skills are so strong that even if whatever I'm currently focused on was a failure, I can reapply the same skill set to the next challenge. And I'm like, I feel like a very effective person. I think the positive thing about a lot of the systems that you have invented or aggregated or whatever clarified for people is that they get things out of your head so that you're not spending time circular thinking about something. And you're able to then be more present in the moment so that when you're working on

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  something, you're applying your whole consciousness towards it. So that it, like, and then, like, life is just easier, man.

• 1:04:04Cal Newport?

  I mean, how do you? I think what's interesting also about your story is you have a job that, like a traditional knowledge work, like high-skill job, but you still have this life that's very, like, intentional. So how do you bring that thinking to a job where you have an email address, you have a calendar? Because often people think, look, if I really want to change my life in a way that's going to be like plus one, plus twos all the time, I have to be like a novelist. I gotta leave my job. I can't also have a calendar and Zoom and email. Your job could be overwhelming and distracting and languishing.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can just look side to side and see my peers.

• 1:04:43Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So how do you keep it different? What's the key to David Duane's approach to knowledge work?

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  I think it's about managing, becoming really good at managing expectations and becoming really, really good about managing time. I consider, like, when I, when I show somebody, like, my time block planner,

• 1:05:11Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  I describe it as the most essential mental health tool I've ever had.

• 1:05:19Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  You know, and, like, I think that, um, I think, like, I'm an ambitious person. You know, like, I want to achieve something, you know, that's meaningful in my field, but I don't, so I take it seriously, but I, like, at the same time, if, like, I, I view the effort more important than the rewards, you know, and this is, like, just classic philosophy stuff, you know, try to disassociate the fruits of the labor from the labor itself, you know?

• 1:05:51Cal Newport?

  But it doesn't, it lets you slow down, too, right? The slow productivity principle is, you, like, the project you're working on, this vision you have for using these numerical scores to change architecture.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Cal Newport?

  It's not really gonna matter in the long term till we have this right.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  It's like my Apple Pay for architecture, kind of.

• 1:06:06Cal Newport?

  Yeah, and if that happens six months from now, or a year from, it doesn't matter to you, it doesn't have to be done as fast as possible. What matters is you're working on it, it gets done.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  And, like, the hyper creativity book, which would be great, because then it would be, it would put into people's path, uh, principles that are, like, they could apply.

• 1:06:25Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  You know, and I think, I just have this personal kind of feeling that as we go into the AI, uh, kind of era, that creativity is gonna become the coin of the realm.

• 1:06:38Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  You know, human creativity is gonna be really, really important when it, because a lot of the, a lot of the grinding work is going to be relieved, and the...

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  What should we do? Why should we do it? You know, it's gonna be, um, it's gonna surface. So like, when you study the, the environments around creative people, in the, in the process of creativity itself, and get that out there into the public domain, like, man, that's, that's, if I could just do that, I'd be pretty happy.

• 1:07:11Cal Newport?

  But to be more concrete, like, how do you avoid, for example, in your position, you have a team, not, let's say, check an email every five minutes? I'll, I'll, I'll just, like, concrete.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  I check email probably too much.

• 1:07:21Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, it's not something I feel great about, but, uh, you know, the, the tools are powerful. The, the, and the grip that they have on your consciousness is really powerful.

• 1:07:32Cal Newport?

  What about meetings?

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Um, again, I, I've, I think, I think a lot of people, I, I, I think the thing that's kind of freed me up a little bit is not being paranoid that, like, my calendar looks emptied at other people that are sharing my calendar with me.

• 1:07:55Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Partially because I, I have a physical planner, so I, I don't write a lot of this. I don't take the step of putting everything I do into Google Calendar.

• 1:08:05Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  But also, um, like, I don't equate it with value. My value comes from a totally different realm.

• 1:08:14Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  And I am, like, laser focused on trying to create value in the way, and like, my, the people that I report to understand what I'm trying to do, and they've given me the time, and I, to a degree, maybe I've earned the, the, the permission.

• 1:08:28Cal Newport?

  Right.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  To get control of how I do that.

• 1:08:30Cal Newport?

  But that means practically saying no to more meetings.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:34Cal Newport?

  Periods of inaccessibility, uh, shutdowns.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  There's so, there are people that I look at all around me that are probably in too many meetings.

• 1:08:42Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  You know, and if you really just buckle down and say, like, hey, you know, Like I can't, I can't go to everything. Can I skip this one and just go ahead? I don't know. But people trust you have your act together and your time. Yeah. They give you leeway. Just out of curiosity, did you look at the Plains Marathon thing?

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  Which one? The Plains Marathon, the email I sent you the other day about, um, cause I was, I was captivated by your Elon Musk conversation with Brad Stalberg and Clay. What's the guy's name? Yeah, Clay Skiver, yeah. And it was about like, and I think this is another thing where people, I would imagine people in your audience, and even me, like you look at somebody like Elon Musk and you're so enamored, at least pre Twitter, with like the stuff that this person was able to accomplish. And that's like, you kind of hold that up as this is what success looks like, right? Yeah. And Not me though, it's just me out, but yeah. I did this exercise as a kind of like, and again, like this is, I did a, a kind of a private writing project that was a buildup to my real attempt at like, uh, commercial writing.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  And, but just to get in the habit of day after day after day, writing. And so this project was, it was very personal. It was a letter to my daughter. And it was about the like, painting a picture for her about like the really beautiful moments in my life and what it felt like to be me at these different times. Yeah. You know, and I collected a handful of maybe 20 vignettes. And after that conversation where you're talking about Elon and like our, our society or our culture's sense of status and sense of accomplishment and sense of success. I look back at that list and they're very mundane moments. There's nothing in there that's about like a huge professional accomplishment. Yeah.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  There's nothing in there that's about like rushing up against a celebrity, you know? It's all just like, it's like a moment on the farm, like working in the orchard, you know, or like working on a building project. It's about, um, an early morning writing session and my daughter sneaks up on me, you know? And I have this like nice moment with her, you know, when she's little and I'm, you know, um, you know, or like the, like a child's birth or something. Like when you really think about like deep life for me, it's like.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Those moments, like enjoy what you have.

• 1:11:12Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Don't peg so much of your sense of self-worth on like a grandiose accomplishment, like on revolutionizing the electric car industry in America.

• 1:11:27Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  You know, and like, I think if you, if you connect, or if you were able to peer into the lives of people that have done those things, I bet you would find that they made a lot of personal sacrifices that would be pretty grim.

• 1:11:45Cal Newport?

  Yeah, lonely.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:47Cal Newport?

  Alienating. Yeah.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, when I think about deep life, I mean, I think about like, plus one day, you know?

• 1:11:58Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it's engineering your life. That's one way to look at it. Engineering a life so that you have more plus ones. And it's not too hard to avoid the negatives.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the trend.

• 1:12:07Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  It's the big trend, you know?

• 1:12:09Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  And being, um, yeah, like being super intentional about it.

• 1:12:16Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is what, this is what bugs me, or you'll, we can, we can jointly crack on these people, but there are a lot of people that look at scans at self-help, you know, and this whole like advice and like productivity.

• 1:12:30Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  And like that, this whole subculture, you know?

• 1:12:33Cal Newport?

  Yeah. You mean like the reviewers at the New York Times Book Review?

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Perhaps.

• 1:12:38Cal Newport?

  They don't seem to appreciate it, I've learned.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, um,

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  I think if you, like, if you real, I feel like, I've been on both sides of this. I've been on the, I've been on the sort of hapless, Don Quixote-style, passion-driven mindset, all your passions guy. And ridden that wave. But I've also been on the like, very regimented, very disciplined, very patient, very slow, very focused side of this, and it's just better.

• 1:13:17Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:13:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  It's not fancy. It's not, it hasn't made me rich.

• 1:13:22Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  Like, in terms of money, but it's made me extremely rich, just in terms of like, my overall life satisfaction.

• 1:13:27Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:13:28Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I mean, I have this argument often with, with the anti-productivity crowd, many members of whom I really like and respect, because I think they're on to something, and, but they, they often, I think the setup, which I don't buy, is, look, if there's structure in your life, then you're somehow internalizing capitalist narratives, or constant work ethic, or it's some sort of exploitative relationship from a cultural superstructure to your life that's benefiting other people, and that the true-

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  I can see that, but like, it doesn't, it doesn't take a lot of thinking to, to just realize that you don't deep work to do more for the man, deep work to work less-

• 1:14:06Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  And to make your work better. If I could, if I could go back in time, I mean, I went to a punishing graduate program.

• 1:14:15Cal Newport?

  In architecture?

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  It was, it was so, the culture was so intense, that I think there were 24 people in my graduating class, 17 of them were medicated for anxiety and depression.

• 1:14:29Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  Because we were in our, like, studios constantly, you know? And the people that weren't there were sort of like marginalized a little bit socially.

• 1:14:40Cal Newport?

  Not serious.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, why are you, why did you even take up somebody else's, somebody else could have gotten that spot and been here with us, you know? Man, if I could go back in time, and I think I could have done better work-

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Been such a like a much healthier person and worked less time just simply by having like better time management.

• 1:15:09Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Better like ability to concentrate, you know, and also not like and readjusted my expectations and not tried to like do everything.

• 1:15:19Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  You know, so, yeah.

• 1:15:22Cal Newport?

  I mean, people don't, what they don't often get, like people who will look at Deep Work, for example, and be like, well, this is all about maximization, right? So I often get the critique of like, man, this is all about just like squeezing everything out of the day and what about people who can't squeeze as much out of the day? And what's often missed is like that book was the follow-up to So Good They Can't Ignore You. It was the answer to the question, So Good They Can't Ignore You said, if you have valuable skills, you can create your own life. And clearly you could see the bias in that book, that the visions I had of life was like yours right now. I was, you know, you have autonomy, you have control over your time. I was very stressed and I remained very stress sensitive. So it was a big motivating factor of that book is why do I want control?

• 1:16:04Cal Newport?

  Cause I don't want a life that looks like Elon Musk, right? I don't want, I'm running three companies and a master of the universe and have meetings all day. I want control and you can get control by being good at things that are rare and valuable. And Deep Work was like, well, how do you do that? And like, well, okay, focus, focusing on stuff, deliberate practice, get better, do the stuff that really matters. You don't have to be busy, right? So it's kind of ironic that for some people, Deep Work is seen as some sort of like hustle culture bro manifesto of like crushing it and getting after it, where to me that was the skeleton key for unlocking being able to go to the farm on the weekend.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  When I think about Deep Work, I just think about eudaimonia. It's another, it's a synonym.

• 1:16:43Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  You know, and, you know, for those of your audience that don't know what eudaimonia is, look up the Wikipedia entry, but it's, it's an old term that the Greeks had, like many Greek terms.

• 1:16:56Cal Newport?

  I'd always say flourishing would be my translation.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Deep human flourishing, but like, what's also cool about eudaimonia is that it like the weak translation is happiness, but like in contemporary culture, happiness comes and goes. Like you could be unhappy in this meeting and happy in the next meeting and then unhappy again. Eudaimonia was not that. Eudaimonia was like.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Like, uh, uh, uh, it was the trend. It, you, are you on the trend?

• 1:17:24Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  The right trend? And so like, uh, yeah, I think about, but it's also like the feeling. It's like the flow feeling or like, be like a highly, you know, concentrated feeling. And like, if you're applying that to, you know, like the, uh, what was cool about eudaimonia in the way that Aristotle describes it in the Ethics is that even an inanimate object could express eudaimonia. So like for a knife, I think is the example he uses. It's to be sharp in cutting something.

• 1:17:54Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it's very teleological.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's like, uh, it like, the easiest way to think about that is like, for you, what is the best version of yourself and how are you engaged? You know, and so I think like, you know, something like deep work, it's, it's not about, yeah, it's not about piling up more capital. It's about being sharp and engaged, you know?

• 1:18:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Well, whatever.

• 1:18:20Cal Newport?

  Yeah, and that was my, my program was different than yours. Like my grad program experience, the theory group over there at MIT, working too much would be bad. Like they had their own pathologies, but if you're working too hard, that might mean you're not smart. And like for them, the ultimate was coming up with a brilliant idea, like a math insight, solving a theorem, being smart, being a monster mind. And so it was not a, it was a high stress place in the sense that huge imposter syndrome. But if you could get over that, it was completely reasonable. You're like, I'm not here. I'm, I, I want to come in and stare at the whiteboard and like solve a proof and then go play bongos or whatever. Like that would be like, that's really impressive. It had its own pathologies, but I think that also laid an interesting idea in my mind. It was like, yeah, focusing could be very valuable. It's very human.

• 1:19:04Cal Newport?

  I mean, Aristotle thought that was ultimately the theology of all people was deep thinking because only humans can do that. That must be human's purpose. But they really didn't value busyness.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:16Cal Newport?

  And that really stuck. And I think that stuck with me as I was writing my books and thinking about things. It's like, I came up in a place where busyness, like what values there in busyness? Like what does that have to do, in their lingo, what does that have to do with solving proofs? Like that could only get in the way. And so there was something nice to see that purity. It's also brutal because you're always being judged if you're smart or not, but it was simple.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think in.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  You know, like, for whatever reason, this is where my mind's going when you're talking about this, is that like, I think a good life is where you're, I mean, I talked earlier about the alternating, like, my, my sort of, my charmed life of being alternating between, like, city life, where I feel really engaged and charged, or charged up, and then country life, where I feel very slow. I think in like, in a more day-to-day zone, it's like, the ability to, and the ability to concentrate on something and go kind of internal and grind, and then come out of that and share it with somebody and get, and feedback, you know, and like, it's the, it's the kind of rhythm between highly social, highly focused.

• 1:20:28Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  You know, and my, my longstanding critique on open office spaces is that, instead of those things being intentional and putting like a logical barrier, like visual, audio, proximity barrier between those things, you're all supposed to, you're supposed to do all that stuff at the cubicle.

• 1:20:46Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  And at any second, somebody could tap you on the shoulder, and any second, somebody could send you an email that you have to respond to instantly, you know, and it is just, it is no way to live, effectively.

• 1:21:00Cal Newport?

  Well, I've always thought open offices is the physical correlate to an email inbox. The email inbox was like, can't we just have everything come through here?

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  It always feels like a blender.

• 1:21:08Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  It takes your brain, puts it in like a Vitamix or whatever, and just like, correct.

• 1:21:13Cal Newport?

  But this is the cybernetic vision of like, the Silicon Valley-inspired office, right? It's like, this is what email and later Slack is. Like, can't we just be in this hive mind? And we're just all talking to each other all the time, things are moving back and forth, I'm answering your question, you're answering me this, you're sending me this file, what about this? And our minds will be melded together, and out of that will come sort of distributed intelligence, which of course, misses the way this wetware actually works in our head, because we can't actually, we're not bees. We can't be plugged into constant, unrelated conversations at all time, and also flourish, or produce good thoughts, or not be completely stressed out.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  I pay a social cost at work for resisting Slack.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  And I do, like, I, I tell people, like, I only check Slack every once a day or something, you know? And it annoys people.

• 1:21:58Cal Newport?

  Well, it's convenient if everyone's on it.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, I, I would have to take a different approach if I was, like, more in the trenches on, like, a project day to day, and that's, like, how the team was communicating, and then I would change my behavior. But for me, right now, it's like, how many more tools do I need to do the exact same thing?

• 1:22:15Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  You know? Like, uh, let's say it's-

• 1:22:18Cal Newport?

  Email versus no email solves some problems. Fax machines were slow, couriers were even slower, voicemail was annoying. It's like, email, kind of solved those problems.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:28Cal Newport?

  Like, okay, we're good. Yeah. Um, and we don't need to use it as constant conversation, and we don't need, I mean, I've always argued Slack is just the, they built the right tool for the wrong way to work. Like, if this is what you're going to do, is use email, which was supposed to be a voicemail fax machine replacement, as like an ongoing back and forth conversation machine, well, that's not a great tool for doing that. Slack does that better. If what you want to do is, let's just have everyone be in touch at all times so that there's no friction and we can keep things moving, email has some shortcomings, so Slack will solve those shortcomings. So, a great tool for implementing that way of collaboration, terrible way of collaborating outside of, like, a small team working together on something. So, it was, it's like, that's, it's a love-hate relationship, I've always said, because if

• 1:23:10Cal Newport?

  that's the way you're collaborating, like, I love this, it's better than email, but also you hate that way of collaborating. So, it's like, I don't know what to do.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, just pick one.

• 1:23:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:23:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, uh, yeah, if we're gonna do Slack, then let's just get rid of our emails.

• 1:23:25Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  You know, there's, I've heard of the Architecture Office, one of my colleagues works in, where they don't have individual email accounts, they just have project email accounts.

• 1:23:32Cal Newport?

  I've been advocating for this.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:34Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  It's a cool idea.

• 1:23:35Cal Newport?

  It's arbitrary. The fact that it's a name at domain.com or whatever, I mean, that's just, just a happenstance that the original email programs, the MailDemon on Unix, was from timeshare computers. So, in timeshare computers, you had to have a login so they could bill you for the time you were using, and the original email, what it would really do is just leave text in a text file on someone else's account, and then you could read it when it came into your account. And so, that's where, it was your username for timeshare computers became your de facto email addresses. But there's a counterfactual I've talked about, where, yeah, you have emails for projects. And that like completely changes, by the way, how the tool is used. Because as soon as I think about an email being your name,

• 1:24:17Cal Newport?

  I imagine interpersonal interaction, that you're someone, there's someone on the other end of this, and I want something from that person. And if you're not answering me, there's a person who is sliding me. And I imagine you're there and you saw it and you're ignoring me. You get all the interpersonal dynamics. If it's a project, all that goes away. Like, yeah, I'm sending a request over to this project and, you know, they'll get back to me.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Sure, multiple people are looking at this, yeah.

• 1:24:39Cal Newport?

  Yeah, and they have a standard. They'll get back to you by the end of the day if it comes before whatever. And you don't think twice about it. Like, all the interpersonal dynamics are gone.

• 1:24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I'm excited, man. I'm excited about Deep Life. I'm curious, how has actually working on that project changed your outlook? Or changed your habits, anyway?

• 1:25:03Cal Newport?

  We'll see. Yeah, we'll see. I'm in the first part still, which is like how to become, how to get your act together before you try to change your life.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  I sense you being more like discerning about bigger things in your life, you know?

• 1:25:16Cal Newport?

  Yeah, and I think working on the second part, which is much more about like what we're talking about today. Yeah, there's changes coming, probably. I'm thinking about changes. I think it'll probably lead to some changes. I mean, it's just a stage of life from going through, you know, how your 40s are.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it's a different stage of life.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  And it like, but it like, it feels like on the vector, like a logical conclusion to the vector you've been on for several books now.

• 1:25:47Cal Newport?

  I think so. I think so, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you can imagine, yeah, slow productivity is getting at, well, what does it really mean to be productive at work? And let me articulate my approach, which is it's slower. It's like you talked about. I want results over time, but my busyness in the moment's not that important. And if anything, that's going to be counterproductive. It's going to make me feel worse. And so that book is trying to articulate that. A world without email is my attempt to be like, for God's sakes. We have to be communicating all the time, completely failed, by the way. It did not.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  A world without email.

• 1:26:18Cal Newport?

  I mean, it failed to change the world.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  Do you think it was a victim of timing?

• 1:26:20Cal Newport?

  It's a little bit of victim of timing. The pandemic was not when people wanted to think about that. But also, it's just a victim of difficulty. Right? I mean, it's.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  I always thought about world without email is just deep work for companies.

• 1:26:32Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  Deep work for teams.

• 1:26:34Cal Newport?

  And maybe that's just a smaller market. If it's something you can't put into place and. But I've talked to a lot of C's. It's just hard. It's hard to move away. Deep work, yeah, all these books are kind of on these trajectory. I see, I mean, I'm rethinking, you know, I'm in a different phase of life now.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  You've always been good at that, too. You always write about the phase that you're in.

• 1:26:51Cal Newport?

  That's the only way I know how to do it. Because if I don't care, it doesn't come through. But I mean, I'm in a different phase. I've talked about this. It's, you know, after college, what were my two goals? Writing academia. And let me just focus, go deep on those, not be busy, want to do those well. And I've done those well. Right? I'm been in academia. I'm a full professor. There's no more promotions left to give. Published papers, won the awards. You know, I did well there, writing. I've done well there. I think my, you know, I've sold a lot of books. It's, it's that that number is large.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  You've been in this one genre.

• 1:27:21Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  There are other genres.

• 1:27:23Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you think about.

• 1:27:27Cal Newport?

  You're talking about my romance novel, I assume. That's what, that's what people are waiting for.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  Fifty Shades of Cal.

• 1:27:33Cal Newport?

  Fifty Shades of Cal.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Um, no, like, do you ever think about what Michael Crichton would be writing about right now?

• 1:27:40Cal Newport?

  I wrote a piece.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Like a, oh, did you?

• 1:27:42Cal Newport?

  I wrote a piece for The New Yorker a couple of months ago.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  About AI or something?

• 1:27:45Cal Newport?

  Yeah, yeah. It was like what?

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  And he would, he would be going crazy.

• 1:27:48Cal Newport?

  Well, he would be going crazy. Yeah. And, and I wrote, it was interesting piece. I was like, okay, what are the real lessons from Crichton? And I'll just, my, my takeaway was actually unexpected. My, but my takeaway was because I know Crichton well. His work well, and I know a lot about him more than I probably should. But it's like, you know, really, my takeaway is what Crichton really understood was. The issue was not so much the people when it came to technology. And I told the story in the front of that article where, you know, when he was trying to write the adronomus strain, it wasn't working. And his editor, Robert Gottlieb, was like, here's the problem. You're trying to write like an actual novel and get into the psychology of the characters and what's going on inside their head or this or that. He said, stop that. Write it like a New Yorker piece. Like what matters, the people aren't that important.

• 1:28:32Cal Newport?

  What matters is the technology and the unexpected outcomes from the technology. Write it like you're like Richard Preston in the hot zone 30 years later. Like you're reporting on something that happened. And then the book took off. And that became his MO is that the really what mattered in these books was the technology and the unexpected ways they unfold, not the characters. Right? And I was saying, this is actually kind of relevant for today because it's right now, we like to snag our technological storylines onto people and actors and villains. And it's this person, this person, this is the villain in the play and this is the hero or whatever.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  And just anxiety generally.

• 1:29:11Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Without getting at the actual issue. Right? So we want to demonize Elon Musk, but we don't get to introducing global conversation platforms might have been a wrong idea.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:22Cal Newport?

  Because like Hammond was like a nice guy in Jurassic Park. He was, he had good intentions and he got his liver eaten out by copies at the end of that book. It wasn't because he was flawed. I talked about Frankenstein and went back to the original Mary Shelley. And I was like, let me, let me read, I replicated the passage in Frankenstein where animated the monster. The technology is completely unspecified. It was the vitality flowed from the machine to the monster and the monster came alive. The whole thing was about the people. It was about the characters and the flaws and Dr. Frankenstein's ambition and how that his fatal flaw broke him. And you go over to Jurassic Park, Richard Hammond's a cardboard cutout. What matters is the specific type of gene sequencer they were using too. So anyways, I thought there was a lesson there about.

• 1:30:09Cal Newport?

  The technologies themselves are often creating the impacts and we want to blame or care about the people, but then that obscures the fact that cloning the dinosaurs is the problem, even if like a better person was running Jurassic Park, it might have still been a problem.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you know where the word sabotage comes from? Do we ever talk about this?

• 1:30:25Cal Newport?

  No.

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:30:27Cal Newport?

  It's French or something?

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  The word for like the French peasant wooden shoe is called a sabat.

• 1:30:32Cal Newport?

  Ah.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  And so when the initial machines during the Industrial Revolution, the agricultural machines showed up.

• 1:30:39Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Uh, like it freaked the peasants out or whatever. And they took their wooden shoes and like jammed it into the gears and it would like break the machine and they could go back to work.

• 1:30:48Cal Newport?

  Like a Ned Lud type of mythology.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And so like, it was literally the act of like destroying the menacing technology, you know, that was coming after your job or whatever.

• 1:30:58Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  So it seems like there's, there's, you know, history rhymes, right?

• 1:31:02Cal Newport?

  Yep. All right. Well, we, we have run over, but I, it's hard not to, because I always like talking with you.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, I really appreciate this conversation.

• 1:31:10Cal Newport?

  Yeah, this is great. So, so, um, I think we covered a lot of interesting ground here. And I would summarize it all as, you know, it's like architecting the deep life. There's a, there's a, there's a lot that goes into it and it's not as simple as the one grand plan, but it's, there's, there's a lot in here that I think is interesting. Also, we got to nerd out about some work issues like we always do.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's a Buckminster Fuller quote that's useful or that I return to sometimes where he talks about, or he just states, we're called to be the architects of the future, not its victims.

• 1:31:38Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:31:39Cal Newport?

  I like it.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  And I kind of think you're called to be the architect of your life.

• 1:31:42Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  Not, not the victim of circumstance.

• 1:31:45Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  You know, and like what you have put out there in a series of tools and books and so forth is like, here are like a suite of tools. Apply them.

• 1:31:56Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  You know, and then life just gets easier.

• 1:31:59Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And they're content agnostic.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:01Cal Newport?

  I'm not going to tell you, and this is how I'm writing my book right now. It's not, here's the five things you need for a deep life. This mix of friendship with this mix of adventure, this or that, like, okay, you can figure that out. But how do you have the tools to act on it once you figure it out? Yeah. So like architects.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  And just don't, don't expect immediate results.

• 1:32:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So architecture, you have to learn.

• 1:32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:21Cal Newport?

  How to design and build a building. And then like the great architects use those tools to build. Falling water, whatever, but you gotta learn the tools first. Yeah, liquid that's going.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, yeah, and for architecture, I mean, last, last word, I guess, is that, you know, it's, it's kind of a cliche in architecture that unlike rock and roll, you don't become successful when you're like 20. You can become successful when you're like 50. And you just, like, it's, again, it's an expectations management game.

• 1:32:52Cal Newport?

  Yeah, takes a long time.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Anyway, all right, man.

• 1:32:55Cal Newport?

  All right. Hey, David, thanks for coming.

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:32:57Cal Newport?

  Good chatting with you. All right, so that was my conversation with David Dwayne, brought to us by DoneDaily.com. I really enjoyed that. Here's the, here's the context. I talked to David a lot, right? We've known each other for a long time. I knew him back before I even wrote Deep Work. He's featured in that book. He lived in DC for a long time, so he used to see each other more often, but he often comes through DC. He used to live in Tacoma Park. And we always have these sort of interesting conversations when he's coming through town and with these wide-ranging conversations. So to be able to capture one of those conversations on air, to record it, to share it with other people, that was kind of fun, because I'm used to all these cool ideas about depth and focus and concentration and the deep life.

• 1:33:40Cal Newport?

  And it's good to be able to share them with other people. I also like, I'm gonna try to do this more when I have these conversations. I think I did this a little bit with Michael Easter as well. I like people who are doing cool things with their life and just to hear more about it, as opposed to just having non-experts to talk about their ideas. Now, David had both of these things. He's an expert on space design for concentration, but he's also an expert on his own life being really cool and having that farm and the orchard with the writing gazebo that he built out there. I think all of that's so cool and romantic. So I like this idea of like, specific people living really specifically deep lives and just hearing how they did it. How better to learn than to talk to real people? Anyways, I'll probably end up putting some of those ideas on my book on the deep life

• 1:34:24Cal Newport?

  because he has too many good ideas about this topic. So this was fun. Thanks for listening. Be back on Monday with a normal episode, and until then, stay deep.

• 1:34:38Cal 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.