Ep. 344: You Are Not a Cog

Modern knowledge work jobs should be cushy gigs. Fixed hours, air conditioning, no hard manual labor, flexibility. So why are we so often burnt out and what can we do about this reality? In this episode, Cal draws a lesson from an unexpected corner of computer science, computer security research, about how we can fix some of the big problems of work in a digital age. He then answers listener questions and returns once again to the topic of AI in a final tech corner segment. Find out more about Done Daily at DoneDaily.com! Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: You Are Not a Cog [11:00] - Should I break my large tasks into many small ones? [38:18] - How will AI affect living the deep life? [42:47] - How can I say “no” to more incoming requests? [48:14] - Should an architect take on broader roles that don’t necessarily add to career capital? [52:03] - Can a nurse implement time blocking? [54:33] - Can a Kansan system work across all departments without being overly complex? [58:11] - CALL: Organizing the details of a Trello board [1:03:19] CASE STUDY: Lifestyle centric value based planning for a young family [1:07:58] TECH CORNER: AGI is not Super-intelligence [1:15:35] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? medium.com/@tony.infisical/password-requirements-are-still-confusing-in-2023-also-heres-our-flavor-44ce03a3255c youtube.com/watch?v=ZzJMxh68RGI Thanks to our Sponsors: This episode is sponsored by to you BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/deepquestions mybodytutor.com upliftdesk.com/deep shopify.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:11Cal Newport?

  I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, a show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I'm going to give an update on the book I'm writing.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:33Cal Newport?

  So here's the timeline of where I've been and where I'm going, where I am right now. I cracked the outline for this book a year ago. So I remember it was during like a spring break trip. I started writing it over the summer. I wrote a draft of most of the first half over the summer and into the fall. Took a break when I was having my surgery and also when I took over Cal Shaka's column for a month for The New Yorker. So I was like, okay, I'm working on that. Came back to the book and decided that none of what I wrote worked.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Get out.

• 1:08Cal Newport?

  Yeah, the voice wasn't there.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  The whole thing?

• 1:10Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Has that happened before?

• 1:12Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it wasn't that much. It was half a book. Yeah. Let me think how many words. Well, I didn't finish the last. I had one, two, three, three full chapters and then the fourth chapter, so the first four chapters make up the first half of the book. The fourth chapter I had written, actually I had written quite a bit on, I hadn't finished that one. The voice wasn't right though, and I knew it wasn't right, right? Which is how writing often works is you have a gut about something, whether it's working or not. Doesn't mean you can get something that your gut feels good about easily, but you know when something's not right. So I did not like it, went back to the drawing board. I've now rewritten the first two chapters and am in the process of rewriting the third.

• 1:57Cal Newport?

  But now I found the voice that's working. That's just what it took, I think.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  So you wrote two chapters in basically a month?

• 2:05Cal Newport?

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. Then it took, but so you must've used some of the

• 2:09Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  The thoughts from like last summer when you were doing all that other stuff?

• 2:12Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I was using a lot of the material.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  So it wasn't totally a waste?

• 2:15Cal Newport?

  Wasn't totally, the first chapter I did rewrite from scratch, but that was a shorter chapter. It was the introduction to part one, which kind of lays out the big idea for part one. So that was only You know, it's like 2,500 words. It's short. And that I rewrote from scratch. The second chapter is like a beastie 9,000 word chapter. That one, actually, it was mainly the, the opening, the first couple thousand words. The way I was getting into the topic, it was a chapter on discipline. And the way I was getting into it wasn't working. And so I, I cut that all off and came at it from a different way and shortened it. And, and then cleaned up everything and added a new section. So yeah, that wasn't, but the third chapter, I'm rewriting from scratch. So the third chapter is on time management.

• 2:55Cal Newport?

  Because the first half of this book is you have to become like a more eminently qualified human. To borrow a sort of Jaco phrase, before you start the process of trying to significantly change your life. Like you have to get your act together first, like we talked about on the show. You get your act together first, then you make the major changes. You can't just jump right into the major changes. Like one of the things you need to do, I'm arguing in chapter three of the book, is you have to have some control of your time. Because making big changes in your life requires time. Like you need time to reflect and figure out what's going on. You need time to like learn the new skills and make plans and to put things into action. If you don't have time, you can't affect change. And I sort of tell some classic tales of like classic change.

• 3:39Cal Newport?

  And what do you see in those tales? They've got a lot of time. It's like time management, I'm arguing, take it out of the business productivity context. It's valuable for lifestyle change. So I'm like, that's the chapter I'm working on now. The first way I wrote this chapter was no good. It was no good. And so just to give you a sense, like what's going on with the voice. The first time I was writing this stuff, it was much more like me, me kind of thinking about things as a cultural commentator and someone who's, who's like, involved in lots of conversations on these issues. So there's a lot more grappling with like the tension about time management and productivity. And sort of Oliver Berkman and Jenny Odell. And whether this is good or whether this is bad. And like, why actually we, we need to think about it and sort of countering criticisms

• 4:22Cal Newport?

  of thinking too much about structuring your life versus sort of the, being more free form and flowing. And it was boring. And then I was just like, let me just go through like my multi-scale planning system. And that was just sort of like walking through that in like great detail. I wrote a whole 11,000 word chapter, just like, let's go through, what happens at the quarterly scale and like a lot of details. Kind of boring. Let's go through what's happening at like the weekly scale or whatever. None of that was working. Like this is not interesting. And like I've been, I've been using, my wife has been my main sounding board in this book. She's helped me find the voice and she was like, no one cares. No one in the real world knows who Ginny Odell is, cares about like whether time management or productivity is like

• 5:05Cal Newport?

  good or bad. No one is talking about like, well, I think like hustle culture and this is like capitalist constructions of whatever. She's like, people like generally like, I like to be more organized. Sure. Like, what do you have to offer me? Like, I don't, she's like, that discussion's interesting to like you and your friends. Most people don't care. And so I was like, oh, you're right. Like, none of that matters. What matters is why do you need time to live the deep life? That's what matters. And why, and now I'm rewriting it more around like, why do we struggle so much though? If we know it's important, why do people struggle so much to have time management systems that stick? And I have a new theory because I like theories about, I won't give away too much, but like helping people understand in like an original way, here's why people struggle with time management systems, even though they really actually want

• 5:50Cal Newport?

  a system that works. They love the idea. They want that bullet journal to like structure their life or some complicated digital system to like automate all their, and they want it to work and it doesn't, so why not? And what should you do instead? And I'm pulling from like the minimally viable system idea we talked about a couple of weeks ago on the podcast. And the whole thing is like, it's moving more, but the voice I found is much more of a voice of like actually talking to the reader who's like vaguely on board with like, yeah, I would like to improve my life. I kind of buy the skill is useful. Like, let's get into it, you know? So it's a little hard to explain the details of the voice, but I think it's, it's moving a lot quicker. It's less dense. It's less heavy. The other thing I am doing though, with the book, and so the final update I'll get,

• 6:32Cal Newport?

  the thing I am doing with it that I really am enjoying is I'm trying to reverse 180 degrees, the most common criticism of advice books. So the most common criticism of advice books is this is like a chapter or a long article that has been inflated into a book. Right? So that's often like the critique people have with these books is like, yeah, I like this idea, but like, You know, give me a long essay on this. I got it. Why do I have to do 250 pages? I'm doing the opposite. I'm actually making every chapter of the book could itself probably be expanded into a full-size book. So it really is, that's why I'm taking my time. I extended the deadline on this.

• 7:15Cal Newport?

  This chapter on time management is actually going to contain more ideas, more theories, more practicality than like sort of most time management books. You could actually probably expand that out into a whole book. Like my chapter on reclaiming your mind, teaching yourself how to think again in a way that's sort of like clear and undistracted. The ideas I'm shoving into that, the examples, the ideas, the frameworks, the science, like that could probably be blown out to a whole book. So I want like every chapter of this book to be something that could be on its own an entire book. So it's the opposite of the effect of this book could have been a chapter. This is a, to use applied mathematics terms, it's an uncompressible information store.

• 7:57Cal Newport?

  Like I'm actually sort of trying to be at maximum compression. Like I'm, every, every few pages, it's new. Every, like this is new. This is adding something new. This is practical. There's no extra information. I keep ripcording out of sections as soon as you get what you need and then we move on to another chapter. So that's, that's the other thing. I want this book to be very information dense. Like wow, every chapter of this book is like itself has a bunch of stuff in it. Original stuff, a lot of details. I'm gonna have to go back and read it again. And then I'm moving on to something that's very much different in the next chapter. So none of this like stretching things out over.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  The one thing I would say with the bonus stuff or the multi-scale planning that you've cut out, you could probably include that as like a bonus for people who preorder the book.

• 8:40Cal Newport?

  And, and you'll, you'll get, the ideas will be there, but the, the way, I have this new way of thinking about it with time management, where it's much more about building up an idiosyncratic system from the ground up.

• 8:54Cal Newport?

  Is actually much more likely to avoid the traps that lead people to abandon systems as opposed to having a complex system that you take in top down. And so when I and I have the key ideas you need for a system. Here's the questions any system or practice has to answer and it'll. As I give a lot of ideas for how to answer these questions, the ideas of multi-scale planning will be in there. So it'll be in there, but not in the gory detail that the original draft was.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure the big fans of the show though would like to read both, you know, so you could I got that as a bonus.

• 9:24Cal Newport?

  Yeah, get you want the 9,000 words on weekly plans.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, preorder a copy. Give you all you ever wanted to hear about Trello boards. And then one last thing I noticed you have the shirt back.

• 9:36Cal Newport?

  I brought the shirt back. I brought the shirt back. There's a couple of reasons. Well, A, I was not happy with the T-shirts. I still want a better shirt, but I think it should be. I don't like my other options. So I brought the shirt back for now. Also, I want some consistency. I'm going back to wanting some consistency for evergreen purposes. So we clip things out or this or that. So the shirt is temporarily back. I still have a dream of like, I'm going to upgrade the outfit, but I don't know how to do that.

• 10:05Cal Newport?

  If I try to upgrade the outfit, I don't know what I'm going to end up with.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Well, a couple of years ago, you talked about how you had a person who helped buy stuff for you, right?

• 10:11Cal Newport?

  I did, yeah, I should get him back involved. Yeah. The stylist guy.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:15Cal Newport?

  For my book tour. Yeah, yeah. He was great. I actually should just call him and be like, hey, figure out something that works for the show. Yeah, he was awesome. Yeah, you put you put me involved. I'm like, I don't know. Think we need like a fruit of the loom, white T-shirt and soccer shorts and Umbros. I don't know, like, I don't, I don't have it there.

• 10:40Cal Newport?

  Remember Umbros?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:42Cal Newport?

  And some Samba sneakers.

• 10:45Cal Newport?

  I want some Sambas and some Umbros and a fish T-shirt. It's just, I just don't have enough brain room for that. It's a bunch of 90s references. All right, well, this is enough nonsense. We should probably get started with our show and start as always their deep dive. So one of the things I love to do is a computer science professor who also thinks more broadly about how we live and work in the modern digital environment is to draw connections between these two worlds of mine, the computer science and the advice world. So I went to a talk the other day, it was given by a computer security researcher from around this area, and it sparked in my mind that interesting thought about one of the reasons why we often feel so exhausted and unhappy with contemporary knowledge work.

• 11:29Cal Newport?

  So what I want to do here is try this out for size. I am going to connect a very narrow computer security issue with the very broad question of how do we make our work less exhausting? Alright, so let's get into it. I've pulled up on the screen here for people who are watching, instead of just listening, a meme that gets at a clear computer security issue. So here's what this meme is. There's someone at a computer, and here's the text. "Sorry, but your password must contain an uppercase letter, a number, a haiku, a gang sign, a hieroglyph, and the blood of a virgin." Alright, so does this sound familiar? Starting in the early 2000s, and picking up with increasingly urgency, has been these

• 12:13Cal Newport?

  ever escalating requests from software and security ops to make your password increasingly better from a hard to crack or security perspective. And the way this sort of process unfolded was like, at first, there were sort of suggestions, like, "Hey, a good password, you know, should have this." People ignored that, and so then they started educating, like, "Well, we're going to give you some, like, information about, like, why you want a better password, or what makes a better password." That was largely ignored, and then the software and security operators finally just began forcing people, like, "Your password has to obey all these rules, or we're not going to accept it. So you have to figure this out when you set up your password."

• 12:57Cal Newport?

  There's other rules as well. It's not just what a new password has to do. They begin adding rules about, like, "We looked at your last passwords as well, and it can't be too similar to your most recent password." Also rules about, like, "You have to change this password roughly, like, once every 18 minutes." I see, seems roughly what they seem to request. So from a security operation perspective...

• 13:18Cal Newport?

  It's as if their mindset is, why are users resisting these rules? Having more complicated passwords objectively makes these systems safer and harder to crack. And it's bad if these systems get hacked into and cracked. And from the security people's perspective, it's not like these rules are somehow super onerous. Like people don't know how to do them, or it requires some sort of complex skill that people don't have. It's just coming up with a password that matches these various rules. Like, we're not making that big of an ask, and it's like important for passwords not to be cracked. All right, so this is like a mindset in the security world. I'm going to give it a name.

• 14:02Cal Newport?

  The mindset behind this approach to computer passwords, I'm going to call the isolated optimal mindset. So I'm going to try to generalize this mindset, and then we're going to bring it out of computer security here in a second. But the isolated optimal mindset looks at specific behaviors in isolation and asks, what's the optimal thing for a person to do in this situation? So let's just look in isolation, setting up a password for this IT system at our company. What is the optimal thing for users to do here? Oh, to give a password that we know will be largely resistant to brute force cracking attempts. And the way that this isolated optimal mindset unfolds is like, look, if the optimal thing to do here is not crazy,

• 14:48Cal Newport?

  like, okay, you need to go on a quest of ever increasing, you know, difficult obstacles. And when you make it back on the other end of the quest, you'll have your password. As long as it's not crazy like that, or something that people just won't know how to do, right? So you're not saying, yeah, we just need you to write like a quick C sharp script, and let's just have it do auto generation of your password and make sure that it has like proper polymorphism on its objects. Actually, I don't know if C sharp is object oriented, so that reference might have just upset. Jesse got really upset when I made a, I referenced a property of object oriented programming when referencing C sharp, or famously you would use C++ more often than C sharp for object oriented programming. And Jesse, he just like rolled his eyes and shook his head. He gets really mad.

• 15:33Cal Newport?

  Would you say that's true when I mess up computer programming references?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  All I can think of is like Neil Stephenson's cryptography books when you're talking about all this. And I'm like, I don't understand any of this.

• 15:41Cal Newport?

  If there's one thing that upsets Jesse is when we're talking about polymorphism and objects and object oriented programming, not correctly referencing the ingrained polymorphism support in various language classes. We fight about this all the time. But anyways, all right. So, trust me, we're leaving the nerd world in a second, but we're starting in computer science and we're going to move to the world that 99% of you care about. So this is the mindset that drives all that annoying password stuff, the isolated optimal mindset, which again is just, hey, what would be the optimal thing for someone to do here? And if that answer isn't crazily complicated or onerous, then like, why won't they just do this?

• 16:19Cal Newport?

  I think this mindset explains a lot of the expectations in the broader world of work

• 16:27Cal Newport?

  that tend to exhaust us as well. So this mindset insecurity, which I heard and talked about in a talk the other day, got me thinking about, you know what? This is the mindset in the world of work more generally that is causing some problems. I want to give you two concrete examples to try to make this more clear what I mean. Consider all the issues surrounding email. And let's apply the isolated optimal mindset to help explain these issues. Isolated in the moment, if I send you an email with like a question, the optimal behavior is for you to just to respond right away. Right? Because think about it, if, if you

• 17:04Cal Newport?

  would just respond to my message right away, it gives me a lot more flexibility and ease in how I do my work. Like when I need information, I can get it much in the same way that when, you know, I need information from the internet, Google will just give me that answer. And if I look at this behavior in isolation, you answering my email, it passes the test of this is not super onerous. I'm not asking you to go do something really hard or beyond your ability. In fact, it will probably just take you three minutes, right? You just have to look this thing up and get me back an answer. So the isolated optimal mindset says, yeah, just respond to my email right away when I send it.

• 17:46Cal Newport?

  But out of this comes that culture of responsiveness that we know creates a lot of problems. Let me give you another example of this at Play in the World of Work. Think about meetings. Isolated in the moment, if you could just agree to a meeting, when I need to get a group of people together to make a decision or to gather information, or better yet, as is they're trying to make the norm in certain parts of my university right now, better yet, just have your calendar made public so that other people can just see all your free time and just choose a time that works on everyone's schedule and just have a meeting invite show up. So I don't even have to interact with you to pull you into a meeting. We don't even have to talk about when you're available.

• 18:30Cal Newport?

  If you would just do this, it would make my life easier. It would be optimal in isolation because I have this thing and I need feedback from these three people on it. That would be a good way to make progress on it. And if I could just, without having to do much else, just have a meeting, go on the books and we'll all get together at the next available time, we can all get together and talk about it. That makes life easier. It seems optimal in isolation and it's not super onerous. Like, what do you care if like some meetings show up on your calendar? It's work. Work has meetings and your time was free and like, what's the problem? Not asking you to do something onerous. So the optimal isolated mindset says, yeah, we should just be able to auto-schedule people in the meetings when we need them. This, of course, creates that culture of meeting availability, which itself leads

• 19:14Cal Newport?

  to all sorts of problems in practice. So what is the alternative? Well, this is where I want to go back to the world of computer security because that approach, the passwords, is now something that's getting a lot of pushback. And if we look at how the computer security world is beginning to push back on the, give me the super complicated password because it's going to make our system more secure. If we look at how the computer security world's starting to push back on that narrow issue, we can see that that solution's going to generalize to our broad work issues as well. So we're going to get some insight about how to fix the world of work more broadly. So this was the talk I was hearing about computer security. There is a new subfield within this broader topic that's known as human-centric security.

• 19:58Cal Newport?

  And this subfield does something interesting. They work with, talk to, and observe at their actual jobs, real people. So they're not just sitting back and saying, for example, what level of complexity of a password means that like these cracking software we have is, is gonna struggle? Like what's the technically, what's gonna be the thresholds we need in our standards? That's gonna make it hard for a hash attack to, you know, crack it? They're actually watching real people. Hey, what's going on in the day? When you get a request to set up a password? What else are you doing? What do you do with this password? Why aren't you setting up this password?

• 20:43Cal Newport?

  Like what else is happening? What's your concerns here? So they actually talk to real people and they figure out the context in which these individual decisions are being made. So instead of using the isolated mindset of just in isolation, this would be the optimal way to set up a password. They say, no, what's the whole context of this person's like life and day and IT situation? When they're asked to do that? And what they realized when they did this type of human centric research was like, well, wait a second. Users are dealing with all sorts of different IT systems, both in their professional life and their personal life. And all the time they have to set up accounts and all these accounts are making these demands. And the problem is, the number one problem users have is not that they couldn't come up with a password that meets those demands. They worry about forgetting them.

• 21:27Cal Newport?

  They're not memorable. And if you forget it, it's a problem. Now you've added a big time overhead of having to get your password recovered. And that can, that can be stressful that like, what if this system doesn't even let me do that? But the IT professional might say like, well, there's these like password managers you can use. But that's not obvious. And people have different systems they're using. Like, well, I use this computer at work and this phone is not for work, but also I use it sometimes for work and my computer at home is both. And this system though, I might want to access it on both systems. It's not obvious if you're not much more in the weeds on these type of computer security systems. And I hate to say this, computer researchers, but these password managers you talk about.

• 22:11Cal Newport?

  Are not so obvious, especially when you have many devices of different operating systems used and owned for many different types of purposes. People aren't that confident about how do I set up these passwords? They don't necessarily trust those things. They say, well, why is this any more secure? Like, what if that gets hacked? All my passwords are there. You might say, instead, well, write it down somewhere. But that's really fraud as well. Where am I writing this down? What if someone gets access to that? Where am I storing it? Well, when I'm at a hotel, I don't have access to that. That might be at home in a filing cabinet. And how am I going to remember this? And so they're like, if there's any way we can resist the rules to try to just get something in here that I'm going to remember, maybe like a single password that's easy to remember that passes these rules I can use for all my systems.

• 22:53Cal Newport?

  People are calling back to that, not because they don't understand the rules, not because they don't understand that, yes, this makes a password more hackable, but they're doing a calculus and saying, this is not worth it for me. The overhead of trying to obey these rules in the right way is worse to me than the fear of like, your system might be compromised. So a human-centric security researcher says, great, that's what we have to work with, the reality of the psychology and the life and the context in which these decisions are being made. Like, maybe we need to set up systems that don't require passwords for the security. Or maybe we, because there's alternatives you can do here. Or maybe we, as a company, have to make standard the password manager. And we have pre-installed it.

• 23:36Cal Newport?

  And as part of your training when you work here, and you learn about it, and it's not so scary, and it kind of makes sense how it works, and it's been explained to you, and that's worth doing upfront, or whatever it is. But you're meeting people where they actually are. You're not tackling problems in the abstract. All right. So let's bring this mindset back to our work problems we had from before. So if we return to email, for example, we said, the problem with the isolated optimal mindset is that, yeah, it's optimal for you to answer my email fast. But if we all are making that same decision, I get 300 emails a day, and all I'm doing is trying to answer the emails, and I get exhausted. You would bring a human-centric mindset to the email picture, and you immediately see...

• 24:17Cal Newport?

  Wait a second. This is exhausting. The actual behavior I'm watching this user doing at their real desk in a real job, they are exhausted because they have 200 emails they have to answer. And they're all different contexts. They have to keep shifting their brain from one context to another. And when they're away from the email, they know more are piling up. And that has its own sort of social psychological cost as well, which is also stressful. Wait a second. This is not good. This approach to communication makes people miserable and cognitively fractured and not very effective. Oh, great. We need to think up other ways to deal with communication that doesn't cause this problem. I don't care what's optimal for you in this moment for this one question. I'm like, what's the best

• 24:59Cal Newport?

  way to run this office? So, understanding the context tells you like, okay, we need to get away from ad hoc unscheduled messaging is our primary vector for like information flows. Same thing when we apply the human centric approach to meetings, right? As talked about in the isolated optimal approach, if it's, look, it'd just be optimal if you make it easy for me to grab you to a meeting, we get over scheduled. And that becomes, we get a situation here where your schedule becomes so full of meetings with these little gaps of time in between, but all you're doing is going from meetings to meetings with no real time to recover, do anything else, that it can become deranging. You have no breathing

• 25:38Cal Newport?

  room, you're exhausted, you're falling deeper in the task hole instead of trying to get out of it because every meeting generates more things. But before you can even process those things and make sense of them and write them down, you're in the next meeting and more things are piling up. So it could be uniquely deranging. You can't actually get work done. It's exhausting. It also becomes super inequitable because the only way to succeed in these setups is to actually do your work outside of the work hours. And guess what? Not everyone is set up to be able to do that. Not everyone is like a 24 year old, living with roommates and bored, who's like, yeah, let me just like crush it from eight to 12 at night. Like other people have things going on in their lives. The human-centric mindset would say, okay, let's look at the context of auto-scheduling

• 26:23Cal Newport?

  meetings. We look at the context of a real person and their real day. They have a ton of meetings on their schedule. This looks really stressful. So I don't care that it's optimal for the person in the moment setting up this meeting. The whole context shows that this is a very stressful way to do it. So we need another way of having group interaction or collaboration that doesn't fracture the schedule so much. And then at least the other types of solutions we talk about, like office hours and docket-clearing meetings and pre-scheduled standing meetings, and things where you have regular opportunities to have real-time interaction with people, but the footprint is constrained, right? These are not, you know, the alternatives to ad hoc communication, the alternatives to ad hoc

• 27:05Cal Newport?

  meetings. They don't pass the test of, is this the optimal thing in the moment for this, what I need right now? They don't pass that test. They're more inconvenient, they're less flexible, some bad things will happen. But when you look at them from the human-centric approach, they make the actual day-to-day experience of the human users involved significantly better. So this is basically what I'm calling for. This is the idea that I'm pulling from the security world and trying to bring to the world of work more generally. I think in a lot of different ways we think about productivity in digital era knowledge work, a lot of these ways we are acting like the computer security engineers from the early 2000s. We're just thinking in isolation, what's the most efficient way to do this thing I need to get done right now? Ooh, technology can make that really fast, let's

• 27:48Cal Newport?

  do that. We need to be thinking more like the human-centric security researchers of the 2020s, who are saying what matters is the actual experience of the humans, what they're thinking, how they're feeling, what's easy, what's hard for them. And we want work to be effective and sustainable for the humans, not for the task. We want the humans to feel energized and successful and do good work, not individual tasks in isolation feeling like they got executed in the most efficient number of cycles. This human centric approach, I have found this to be a useful analogy for thinking about

• 28:31Cal Newport?

  how to think about work. There's a page we can take from the world of computer security, and we can bring that over here. Let me tell you, Justin, it was funny, awkward about that talk. Great talk, but the professor had done this really cool research, but it was awkward for me because it was talking about, they were looking at the way that people online doing VPN ad reads were misinforming the public. I'm like, oh, we do VPN ad reads. And I eventually raised my hand. I was like, look, let me give you like the insider view. Because it was interesting. I think her view was that it's like these YouTube personalities

• 29:16Cal Newport?

  are just like riffing on VPNs. I was like, oh, let me tell you about scripts. Let me tell you about like how this happens. So it's interesting. I was like, I'm in a very unusual situation where I'm a computer scientist who also does ad reads on technical stuff. What'd she say? I don't know. I think she was like, am I in trouble? Like, is he mad at me? She thought it was interesting. I was just talking about like, it was an interesting discussion. Like, let me tell you what that world looks like on the other side. It was really cool research, actually. They randomly sampled YouTube and were able to calculate like how many people are actually seeing some of these ads by like figuring out like how many people are doing these ad reads and their view. And the idea was actually

• 30:01Cal Newport?

  basically for anything, not just for VPNs. If there's a brand that is spending a lot on advertising on like YouTube or something, you could be hitting a huge amount of people because actually the cost per person is pretty low on YouTube. So you could be reaching like a huge amount of people. So you have to care about the information that that you're reaching. The other thing I thought about that was awkward when I was thinking, writing this deep dive, is I thought about our password security here at the HQ, which I don't think, I don't think passwords muster. They give people, without giving away our passwords, I would say the password I use on our machines here is like the second easiest possible password.

• 30:46Cal Newport?

  Would you say if the first easiest possible password would be password? Would you say, without saying what ours is, that is probably the second most guessable, easiest possible password that you would use?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  It reminds me of Spaceballs when he's like, "Your luggage combination is 1234."

• 31:02Cal Newport?

  It basically is like that. But my thought, and this is why I'm not a computer security researcher, is my password protection on these computers is to door lock. Like, we've already lost, if someone is in here trying to log on to our computer, they're just gonna grab all of our stuff and go, right? Like, that's to... Also, it's like, congratulations, you have just gained access to four years of local archive copies of the Deep Questions podcast. There you go. I mean, it's not exactly missile codes on these machines.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  The one other thing that I think about is, for YouTube, is I can't believe more people don't pay the $12 a month for ad-free YouTube.

• 31:39Cal Newport?

  You're talking about me, basically.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  That blows my mind.

• 31:42Cal Newport?

  I just haven't got around to it. I was telling someone about this the other day.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Because we were like, "Oh, see, yeah," like, "I never see ads on YouTube."

• 31:49Cal Newport?

  Let me give the context. Jesse is on my back because...

• 31:53Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't necessarily you. I forgot you did.

• 31:54Cal Newport?

  I know, but he is rightly, rightfully on my back. Whenever I load up a YouTube thing on my computer, I get the ads. And we make, I don't know, we generate just on YouTube ads alone, probably like, tens of thousands of dollars a year. And I don't pay the whatever, $12, what is it, $12?

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, less than $20 a month.

• 32:12Cal Newport?

  Yeah. It's, I just don't know how to do it. That's, this goes back to this question of like, human-centered computing. So you can be like YouTube Pro or something? Like, I know it's something you sign up for.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:24Cal Newport?

  But I don't know what it is. So I just am constantly skipping ads, and like, watching ads. And I'm really plugged into the world of advertising on YouTube. I definitely, I'll tell you what we need, is like, Liberty Mutual Insurance. I've seen a lot of Liberty Mutual ads, and then also ads for like, whatever I just was talking or thinking about. Somehow those always, those always show up. So what is it, though? Pro?

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, premium.

• 32:52Cal Newport?

  Premium?

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:53Cal Newport?

  Okay. I guess it, I mean, we do...

• 32:55Speaker 01

  YouTube Premium.

• 32:56Cal Newport?

  We have like, a 275,000 subscriber channel, and I don't pay the $12. I should. I should. All right, well, there we go. So we nerded out about as much as I think our audience can take. So we've got some good questions coming up, but first, let's hear from some sponsors. So I want to talk in particular about our friends at Uplift. Look, muscles are vital for movement and they play a key role in supporting the vascular system. The calves, if you know this, Jesse, are often called the second heart. They help pump blood against gravity, aid in circulation throughout the body. By using a standing desk and incorporating movement accessories, you are more likely to engage these muscles, promoting improved blood flow and overall health.

• 33:40Cal Newport?

  This is where Uplift comes in. They have the Uplift Desk, which I think is at the forefront of ergonomic solutions. These things are, they're really good technology. Now, we know what a standing desk is. They go, if you haven't seen them in a while, they go up and down now, so you can adjust them. And they are much more compact than they used to be. Somehow the lifting mechanisms are built into the legs themselves. They also hold a lot of weight. That's another ad I see a lot. Uplift Desk ads on YouTube and they're compelling. Like the one that I keep seeing is they have all this crap on the desk and the desk can still raise up and down. See, I remembered that. YouTube ads are effective. But Uplift also has these other accessories that are also meant to promote sort of healthy

• 34:25Cal Newport?

  movement ergonomics during your day. The one I have and I've been messing around with is the wobble stool. I'm going to bring it here, Jesse, so you can see it. It's like a stool that wobbles. It won't fall over, but it wobbles so like you can do some like, you have to do some core, not just like hold up your core, but allows you to get movement. So you're not just stuck in one position. I learned recovering from my, my, my back stuff, that being stuck in a position can also be a problem. So I like these type of movement, movement accessories. So Uplift is really a smart new way to think about the furniture you use in your office to promote healthy posture, ergonomics and movement.

• 35:10Cal Newport?

  The Uplift Desk itself has over 200,000 configurations, which allows you to tailor your workspace to perfectly suit your needs. They even have a desk configurator that helps you build out a complete workstation with storage seating, wire management. You can build out like just the space you need. And again, the other movement accessories are excellent as well.

• 35:29Cal Newport?

  So make this year yours by going to upliftdesk.com/deep and use our code DEEP to get four free accessories, free same-day shipping, free returns, and an industry-leading 15-year warranty that covers your entire desk, and they will give you an extra discount off your entire order. That's U.P.L.I.F.T.D.E.S.K. dot com slash DEEP for a special offer, and it's only available at that link. So start 2025 right. Stand, move, thrive with Uplift Desk. This show is also sponsored by BetterHelp. All right, let's talk numbers here. Traditional

• 36:12Cal Newport?

  in-person therapy can cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per session, which adds up fast. But with BetterHelp online therapy, you can save on average up to 50% per session. You pay a flat fee for weekly sessions, which saves you big on cost and on time. The thing is, therapy should be accessible. It should not be a luxury. Online therapy helps with that because you can get quality care at a price that makes sense, and it can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. Your mental health is worth it, and now it is within reach. I really feel like I've been talking to people about this a lot more recently. Maybe it's because I'm, the next chapter I'm writing in my book after

• 36:56Cal Newport?

  the current one, but I've started outlining the next one, is on reclaiming your brain. And I've been thinking a lot about the role of your brain and your relationship with your brain, and the role it plays in cultivating a deep life. So this is really on my mind, this idea that your relationship with your brain is so vital. We think about all the external stuff that might be relevant for making your life better, more meaningful, how you manage your time, your goals, your plans. But if you have a bad relationship with your brain... All this is going to be difficult to put in place or implement. Therapy is one of the best ways to improve that relationship with your brain. And why I'm proud to be sponsored by BetterHelp is that I really think they make this accessible to more people. It's online. It's easy. You're not stuck having to be in a specific

• 37:40Cal Newport?

  location or stuck with a particular therapist. And as mentioned, the price, I think, is right. There's over 30,000 therapists in the BetterHelp network, making it the world's largest online therapy platform. They serve over 5 million people globally. Again, it's convenient. You join a session with a click of a button. So it's easier to fit this into your busy life. Your wellbeing is worth it. Visit betterhelp.com/deepquestions to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H E L P, dot com slash deep questions. Speaking about questions, Jesse, let's get on with our listener questions for the show.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  First question's from Raphael. I struggle with context switching, especially with complex problems that take days to solve. How can I effectively switch to smaller tasks? Should I treat the larger tasks like the smaller ones, externalizing things into Trello until I get back to them next?

• 38:34Cal Newport?

  Well, it's a complicated question. There's two different possible things going on here. So one is approaching bigger projects using the David Allen approach. And this might be what you're suggesting. So let's deal with that first. The David Allen approach to big projects is there are no big projects. I mean, there are, but you don't work on big projects, is the way David Allen would say it. He would say, all you can do is next actions. Actions that are in the, take a few minutes to do that are clearly defined and you know exactly how to execute them. So like in his approach, projects just get turned into next actions that go on list with any other sorts of next actions, whether they're associated with projects or not, and work remains churning through next action list.

• 39:18Cal Newport?

  And the fact that some of these next actions are supporting a bigger project is great, but you don't actually treat it different in the moment. It's a computer processor paradigm, right? Like a computer processor just executes instructions from a limited instruction set. It doesn't care or know. That this particular instruction is part of this big program that does this particular function and this instructions from another program doing this type of function, it doesn't care, it just says, give me the next thing to do, increment register, done, retrieve this value from memory, done, right? So that's kind of the David Allen approach. If you can just be executing instructions that are very clear, you save yourself from having to constantly be trying to think about what you need to do and why and what that means. When you're

• 40:01Cal Newport?

  not negotiating with this with yourself all the time, work becomes less stressful. I believe the David Allen approach, you have, he calls them stakes in the ground. You have a list of projects, but you just sort of review that semi regularly to say like, do I need to generate some more next actions from some of these projects to put over my next action list? And then otherwise, you're just executing those lists. I tend to think this approach doesn't work particularly well for most projects because a lot of big projects can't actually be decomposed into a sort of a sequence of isolated next actions that you can just interleave with other types of next actions. Most of these type of projects, especially in sort of non entry level knowledge or positions, require non trivial sustained engagement,

• 40:45Cal Newport?

  right? You have to go through the time required to build up the cognitive context relevant to the project you're working on, swap in the right things, inhibit the things that are unrelated to it. And then once that cognitive context is loaded, really give some time to try to grapple with the project, make progress on it, learn from that progress, adjust how you understand it. And when you're all done, sort of like update your notes and your understanding of what's going on, it requires sustained attention. You can't just break down that project into two minute steps. You can interleave with changing the cat litter and calling the credit card company to renew your card. So I don't tend to be a big believer in breaking down big projects into just small, isolated things that you treat like anything else. I think projects have to be scheduled on multiple scales.

• 41:27Cal Newport?

  This is why I recommend with multi-scale planning that you kind of have the, the open loops are there in your quarterly plan, which you review every week. And you can look at your week and say, when am I going to make progress on these big projects this week? And you're moving things around and actually making time for them to make sure that time happens. And then on the daily schedule, you're making a time block plan for your day that's based first and foremost on what's on your calendar. So the time gets preserved. And that's the way I like to think about big projects, right? It's like to be more concrete. Here's a big project I'm working on, writing a chapter for my new book. That doesn't break down into small next actions I put on a Trello board. It's instead each week, I, one of the big things I keep in mind is I'm working on my book. This is one of my big things this quarter. And in fact, what am I trying to get

• 42:12Cal Newport?

  done this quarter? I'm trying to get done these two chapters. So how can I make sufficient progress on this this week? And I'm looking at like, well, most of these mornings I can start each day with writing, let me like protect them. This day I can't, I have a faculty meeting. So maybe I'm going to put together like an evening block. And then these are big blocks to make sustained effort on a hard project. So in general, I'm not a big fan or a big believer in treating all work the same. It all gets knocked down to little projects. I think big projects sometimes need big blocks of time, and those have to be treated differently than small tasks.

• 42:46Cal Newport?

  All right, who we got next?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Natalie's next. How do you think AI will affect living the deep life? Do we need to pivot to new skills because AI will be able to automate so much and deliver things like hard tasks and deep research better than humans? Are you making any adjustments yourself and your approach?

• 43:02Cal Newport?

  Well, I mean, more generally, lifestyle centric planning says you should always be keeping up with what is my career capital? That is the rare and valuable skills I offer to the market, because that is your, your main source of leverage for continuing to shape your life in ways that resonate and to take it away from things that don't. So like in a broad sense, well, sure, you want to be aware of anything that might be reducing the value of your current career capital and/or give you an opportunity to build up new career capital. If we get more specifically, I would say for most people, like 99% of people in the knowledge economy, AI is not that relevant in its current form. It's not that relevant

• 43:45Cal Newport?

  yet to these questions. I mean, if you're a freelance photographer, sure. But if you're an executive, it's not there yet. Right? So what I keep arguing about AI is you don't have to be a technology prognosticator. I don't think you need to be trying to guess, okay, where is this going to evolve towards? And let me try to preemptively start building up skills that will meet AI when it gets there. So I can take advantage of that skill. I think right now, these efforts to try to learn new skills to be AI ready are largely wasted effort because you're learning skills relevant to AI in its current form. And its current form is clearly not the forming, which is going to have the biggest economic

• 44:29Cal Newport?

  impact. So AI, we argue this all the time on the show. So I won't, I won't belabor it. But AI right now is like a generative AI based on language models will be more specific, is largely right now, interacting within a chatbot paradigm of I type text into a box, and then an entity that sort of acts like an oracle, answers back, that kind of answers my request. There was this hope, OpenAI in particular, had this hope that if the, the AI oracle on the other side is sufficiently advanced and powerful, that just having this text box interface with an all knowing oracle would just, people would find ways to make it useful for their work. And this by itself would be a killer app, or lend itself to killer applications in many different fields. That didn't happen.

• 45:14Cal Newport?

  I mean, this was the, in 2022, this was the thought. Yeah, we're like six months away from massive disruption. That's just going to start pouring like waves over niche after niche in the knowledge economy. But year after year passed, and that didn't happen, even as the technology got better. So it's pretty clear now, like, oh, there's another evolution of sort of classic product market fit that's going to have to happen before we get the biggest professional disruptions from AI. Most people interacting with a chatbot is not actually, they're not building killer applications for their work. It's going to be some new integration into existing software, some sort of new way. This hasn't been invented yet. But clearly, this current chatbot form is not causing the disruption that was seen. But a lot of people were still saying, well, I need to learn to be really good at using the chatbots.

• 45:59Cal Newport?

  And so like a lot of people invested a lot of time into, for example, prompt engineering for the current generation of chatbots. That's going to be a worthless skill. Two years from now, if we're looking at industries being highly disrupted by AI, it's not going to be people typing these like carefully constructed prop sequences into a chatbot. It's going to be something that's going to be way more intuitive and easier to use. So what I'm arguing is you have to wait until the disruption vector is visible before you can adapt to it. And we just don't know what that's going to be for most jobs. So if you can't point towards, in my job, AI is starting to disrupt it in this way. There's more and more people doing X. This company is doing it.

• 46:40Cal Newport?

  This is going to make a lot of the things I do now less valuable. If you don't see that happening now or similar things happening in related industries, you don't really know what skill to build up. So I always say, let's have cautious, cautious watch and wait right now with AI for most jobs. We don't know how it's going to evolve into the vectors that are going to have disruption. But right now, if we think about the disruption like a viral infection through the job market, the current form of this virus is not highly infectious. Like a lot of people, maybe a lot of people have been exposed to it. There's a lot of people who mess around with these chatbots. But really, it's still the enthusiasts who are using them most right now. So let's keep an eye for it to evolve, but I don't know yet

• 47:22Cal Newport?

  what skill to tell you to pick up or what skill of yours might become less relevant. This might be slower and messier and more bespoke than you'll realize. I mean, my big argument I've been making on the show is probably my best guess is the first wave of actual disruption will be unlocking advanced features that already exist in existing software.

• 47:44Cal Newport?

  Like, you could always do this advanced stuff in Excel. I just don't know how to do it. But with an AI natural language interface, now I can. So it's going to be unlocking productivity in terms of latent ability in existing skills. It's like a very different vision to what people fear, which is going to be somehow ChatGPT is going to just like start on its own, doing parts of your job or something like that. So keep an eye on it, cautious wait. But it's unclear now where the disruption is going to happen or what skills it is you should be learning.

• 48:12Cal Newport?

  All right, who's next?

• 48:14Speaker 01

  How to say no is next. I work on a multi-year transformation project, but I'm also seen as one of the faces of the department. I use time blocking and Kanban, but the work still never stops. My waiting for others is overwhelming. Is there a way to say no to certain requests that don't derail our long-term goals?

• 48:31Cal Newport?

  Well, you need the first face to productivity dragon here and actually like write down in one place, all the different types of thing that you find yourself responsible for right now. And I think you're going to find that you have yesed your way into an overwhelming number of information flows or systems where you have to be involved. Like to be the face of a department means like you're, you're reasonable, you're reliable, people like you, you're personable. So of course, people are going to come to you and say, can you do this? Can you do that? And there's like a little thrill you get when you say yes. But if you face a productivity dragon, you might just like, oh, this is too many things. Like this fractures my time too much. It's more than I can service well. And then you need to

• 49:10Cal Newport?

  simplify down from that overwhelming amount to an amount that is more reasonable. The key thing I can tell you is based on how you describe yourself, you're a face of your department, you're sophisticated in your use of things like time blocking and Kanban. People really like working with you. They don't want you to go. Their fear is not, ooh, are you going to say something unreasonable or make an unreasonable request? We're just waiting to drop the ax on you. As soon as like you say something or show any sort of like lack of gratitude. No, no, their fear is what if this person goes? This is a really good person. So for you to come in and say, look, I'm documenting all the different things

• 49:52Cal Newport?

  I'm working on. This is too many. This is the amount that I think actually allows me to be effective on them. So I am going to reduce down to this. If you have clarity, you have numbers, it's clear you know what you're doing, you're responsible, you're responsive, you're personal, people like you, you have a lot more latitude than you think. Cause your leverage here is you going. People don't want good people to go. It's very hard to hire good people. So my instinct here is yeah, you have to reduce. So starting with facing that productivity dragon is the right way to do it. So it's not just an ad hoc decision that you personalize and be like, wow, I'm being mean to this person. And instead, you have a realistic assessment of your workload, a realistic assessment of what is a reasonable load for you, and then saying, hey, trust this assessment. I have to find one way or another to get there. I mean, it is hard. I've been so, I say no to so many things, Jesse.

• 50:37Cal Newport?

  So many things. I always think like my, my publicist and my speaking agent think I'm either crazy or like, don't want to be successful, but I have to say no to so many things.

• 50:49Cal Newport?

  I'm still doing too much.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Every week you say no to things?

• 50:52Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Cool stuff too. I don't know, it's just hard today. Too many jobs.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  You gotta write chapter three.

• 51:00Cal Newport?

  I, I'm good at time management. That's why it's easy. That's why I know like, this seems like you, it would be nice to say yes in the moment, but I know too much about my productivity dragon to be like, no, no, I know the impact of doing that and where I am and how much of this stuff I can do. And I just can't be doing that right now. I've found that people are actually pretty reasonable about it. If I'm like, look, here's the thing, and I'll, I'll do things like this. Like I had a conversation with someone recently where there was like a, without giving like away details, a thing that was coming on, we need people to sign up to like do X, Y, and Z. And I just had to be like, look, I can't,

• 51:33Cal Newport?

  I can't participate in any of this. This month, just, I'm, I'm sort of scheduled about two months out now and I just don't have give for this. And I know it'd be good if I'd be there. I normally would. I've done this past years. I just can't do any of it this year. You know? If you're clear, if people get it, like, okay, yeah, must be busy. You know, so I, I get a lot of it. Saying no is hard. I'm excited. That's why I'm excited for Tim Ferriss's new book, which is just about saying no. That one's gonna be good. All right. Who we got next?

• 52:03Speaker 01

  David's next. I'm an architect that left a traditional practice for an in-house design leader for a hospital system. An executive has encouraged me to take on a diverse roles to broaden my skillset. How do I balance openness to opportunity while staying focused on a deliberate career trajectory?

• 52:20Cal Newport?

  Well, just be deliberate about your openness to opportunity. So, okay, what they're really saying is like, don't just do one thing. You might want to pick up other skills. That's fine, but be very deliberate about that.

• 52:34Cal Newport?

  Well, if I'm going to do that, what is my current workload? Let me face productivity dragon. Let me just do one new skill at a time. That's what I'm doing this year is like I'm going to take on this other role and I'm going to simplify this other one until I can master it. Then I'll put that aside and take on another one, like being really clear. Again, your workload is your workload and be very careful about it. The other thing you could do here is just get more clarity on your career trajectory. So yes, this executive has a vision for what they want your trajectory to be. And maybe taking on these diverse roles is like a good path forward towards an executive position like his or hers. But maybe that's not what you want. Maybe that's not what you're looking for. You're like, no, no, I want to just like do this type of project and eventually get like more autonomy.

• 53:15Cal Newport?

  So I can like move over here and you know, build my, my farmhouse in Door County up in, you know, Illinois or something in Wisconsin and, and walk among the trees. And I don't know, you could have just some different vision. Great. Be specific about that. And like, that's what I'm working towards. If you're working towards something specific, it's easier to resist the blandishments of people who are trying to push you over there, which is not where you actually want to go. So get clear about what you want to do. And if having experience in other roles will be key for what you want to do, be very deliberate about that. You can be servicing that general desire without having to, for example, overload yourself. You could be exposed to like other types of obligations in the office without taking on all the other obligations in the office.

• 53:58Cal Newport?

  So you'll be careful of traps where a good intention creates a bad scheduling situation.

• 54:08Cal Newport?

  Oh, I was thinking about Door County. Door County, God, this is coming up from deep work. I think that's the, I think it's deep work where I talk about Rick Fur making the Viking sword. And he works with at a barn with the doors open, like overlooking one of the Great Lakes. And that was in Door County. That's what I was thinking about. It's got, it's cool up there. It's a nice, nice country. All right, who do we got?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Next is Jay. Is it possible for a nurse to implement time blocking in a 12-hour shift?

• 54:39Cal Newport?

  No, it's a different type of job. Time blocking presupposes a job more like a knowledge work position where you have a relatively large amount of autonomy in terms of how you execute your work. So anything that's objective-based, like, yeah, here's the things you've taken on to do. You need to make progress on these things and maybe attend some meetings, but how you fill your time between that meeting is up to you. Time blocking is for a useful set of time is not wasted. A nursing shift typically, no, no, it's way more structured than that. Like, you're, you're seeing patients either as like assigned by the incoming appointment flow, if it's out of private practice, or what's going on on the big board, if you're in a, like, a emergency department type of situation. It's way more structured, what you're doing throughout your shift. So, time, time blocking is not that relevant.

• 55:24Cal Newport?

  There's other things that are relevant in the medical scenario that could make work more sustainable or less exhausting. Like, I'm a big believer in looking at places in the medical context where there's unnecessary friction that adds up over time to a lot of exhausting heat, like, the way that people have to wrangle with electronic medical records, for example, can sometimes be like a big source of friction that really makes things less sustainable. Being explicit about the sort of patient per hour load and seeing what actually is a reasonable number there, as opposed to just like, let's push people as far as they can physically go. So there's a lot of things that could be done in healthcare to make these jobs more sustainable, but they typically aren't the type of things I talk about, which are more cued into a more highly autonomous knowledge work type role.

• 56:10Cal Newport?

  All right, what we got?

• 56:11Speaker 01

  So we have a bonus question from Bill.

• 56:14Cal Newport?

  Bill?

• 56:14Speaker 01

  That we're going to dedicate the theme music to.

• 56:17Cal Newport?

  Is our excuse to still play the slow productivity theme music?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 56:21Cal Newport?

  All right. Let me show you, by the way, Bill sent me, not to encourage this behavior, but I kind of do, he sent me a first edition of The Good Shepherd, a book I praised on this show as what I think like one of the very first techno-thrillers. Takes place on the deck of a destroyer in World War II, and it's written in this sort of tight, I don't know if it's third person or first person, let me see. But it's tight perspective. All right. I think it's done in tight third person. So by tight perspective, I mean, it's third person, but it follows the captain. So the perspective never leaves the where the captain is, what the captain sees. And it just follows them through this like very stressful 24 hour ship on the destroyer. And it's written, and it feels like in like a real time type

• 57:06Cal Newport?

  format, like it just unfolds linearly, like what's happening, tight third person perspective. So you're just from the perspective of a single person. And it's impressionistic, like trying to build up what it's really like, but also tons of technical details of World War II era anti submarine operations on destroyer. So like a lot of technical details, which are presented like in a good techno thriller without much explanation, just like they just talk about the stuff like they would be talking about it, even though you don't understand as the reader, what all this stuff means, like a good techno thriller. I just think it's a really cool, interesting book. It's from, I'm going to guess 1955. Let me see. It's post-war, but not super post-war. Da, da, da, da. Why can't I find it on here?

• 57:49Cal Newport?

  It's not the copyright. What if it was like 2019? Yeah, 1955. You called it. There we go. So thank you, Bill. You've earned yourself, whether you asked for it or not, the slow productivity corner theme music.

• 58:10Cal Newport?

  All right. What's his question?

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Can a Kanban system work across all departments in an organization without being overly complex?

• 58:18Cal Newport?

  So for those who don't know, I mean, we talk about a lot on this show, but the Kanban style system is where you have the, the columns and you have the cards in the column. So like in Kanban, typically you have like a waiting to be done, working on, and completed column. And if you're in a team, you might have a working on column for each team member. So you can clearly see who's working on what and clearly how much they're working on. Kanban has clear limits called WIPs or work in progress limits on how much cards can be in anyone's column. So it's a great workload management. I also like about Kanban systems that

• 58:55Cal Newport?

  Stuff that needs to be done is not all spread out on people's plates, but exists by default in a generic team level waiting to be done. And the only thing you're responsible for are the things that are on your column. This is important because it's the things you're working on that generate administrative overhead. So sometimes people just say, hey, it's just convenient. If stuff comes in, I don't know who, let's just spread it out. You don't have to work on it all at once. But like, you know, hey, can you handle this? You can put it on your list. The problem with that approach is that once something is in your hands, it can generate administrative overhead you have to deal with. Emails, meetings, and cognitive cycles. So by keeping things by default off of any individual's hands, it can't generate administrative overhead. There's no one that you can email about it. It doesn't belong to anyone yet.

• 59:39Cal Newport?

  There's no meetings to have about it because it's not being worked on yet. And so each individual is not only just working on a reasonable number of things at the same time, they're dealing with a reasonable amount of overhead at the same time. So I really like those systems. Agile methodology systems like Scrum use Kanban-style boards. This is why it's a little bit confusing. They also have boards with columns and cards representing things that have to be done. There's more of a variety of what those boards are and different collections of rules and terminology that surrounds them. So agile methodologies and Kanban have similar metaphors for dealing with work, but they differ in the details. Can these apply to a lot of different types of work? Yes.

• 1:00:21Cal Newport?

  Can they apply, like every team in a big organization uses things like this? Yes. Here are the two caveats. A, you want these to exist at the team scale. So six people, sure, this works fine. 60 people, you can't have one big board for that. It's going to be too many things and too many people. You can't easily coordinate with all the people. So usually these systems have a very efficient approach to coordination. Like, let's all just like stand up and talk to each other for 10 minutes. Like, how's your card doing? What else do you need? What should we do next? So they need to exist at the team level, not at larger scales. Each team should have their own board. And the key thing is to resist. I think the thing that bogged down these approaches in software dev, where they really got big.

• 1:01:07Cal Newport?

  Is that we nerded out too much on them. Software types, we just nerded out too much. And we begin to obsess about the rules. And there's all these like rules and sub-rules. And it became about the rules themselves because, you know, I'm a computer scientist, so I can use the second person plural here. We love complicated rules. So we want our dev system not just to be like, hey, here's a place to keep tasks. And see who's working on what. We want to be rolling like 2D10 to see if like I my attack number is above your hit point level. And like the goblin got killed by the wizard. Like, we want to have all these rules and rules and all these complexities. And it can get pretty absurd, like agile in a software development environment. People have scrum masters and secondary scrum masters and dungeon master screens.

• 1:01:52Cal Newport?

  And I don't know all the, it just becomes super complicated. And everyone gets obsessed with doing it just right because we're all like slightly antisocial in these circles. If you're adopting these ideas outside of software, don't overburden it with rules. What matters is we have a centralized place to store what needs to be done. So it doesn't by default, these things do not by default exist on individuals' plates. We have clarity about who's working on what. We have constraints about who's working on what. And we have a clear way to check in with everyone about what they're working on, what they need. And when they're done, what they should work on next. You do those things, that is good. You get, you know, I'm going to read some complicated scrum manual and have all the different roles and do all the different, like the story requires this and that. It gets over the top. You don't need that.

• 1:02:36Cal Newport?

  My book, World Without Email and Slow Productivity, both talk about this. World Without Email gives a particular case study of a healthcare group that uses this, that I think is a good example of a combo style system outside of straight up software dev. And I get a lot more details in Slow Productivity as well about like, what are the key ideas of these systems that matter? So yes, I do think these can exist across large organizations if they're integrated properly.

• 1:03:03Cal Newport?

  All right. Do we, do we play it twice if it's a bonus question?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:06Cal Newport?

  All right, let's hear it.

• 1:03:16Cal Newport?

  All right. Do we have a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear it.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  Hey, Cal and Jesse. It's Derek from the case study in episode 340. Thank you very much for the advice. It was really validating hearing your thoughts. As you'll recall, I have two Trello boards right now, one for admin and one for grant application processing. I've been doing a lot of deep diving and slow productivity, a word without email, and the podcast on what else I can do to help keep my work sustainable. And to this end, I figured out how to create a task board within Microsoft Teams that I've shared with my coworkers. My vision is this will serve as one of those two status lists that you've written and spoken about.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  Right now, my columns are queue, active, back burner, and done. My question is what granularity of obligation should live on this board? Do I put grant-related activities in the queue like draft, financial agreement for X? Should administrative tasks go in here too, or just your definition of what a project is from slow productivity, which is any work-related initiative that cannot be completed in a single session? Lastly, how does this board interact with the existing ones that I have for admin and application processing? I'm really excited to take this for a spin and report back. I would just really appreciate clarity about what types of things go in such a task board, especially since this is shared with my team. Thank you very much.

• 1:04:38Cal Newport?

  Usually I don't put projects on task boards. I want the granularity of what's on a task board. It doesn't have to be like a David Allen style next action, but something you could work on in a single session is typically the way I like to think about that. So when there's projects you're working on, they can exist in your larger scale plans, and then you can decide on the smaller scale plans, what progress you want to make on that project that week or not. Whether or not that interacts with your task board, it depends, right? So sometimes if it's a project like I'm writing a grant application, and it's on your quarterly plan, when you make your weekly plan, what that really means

• 1:05:19Cal Newport?

  is I want to like block off 10 hours of writing this week. And it'll be on my calendar, and when I get to those days, I'll work on the writing, then I'll be making progress on it. There's not really a task you need to put on a task list somewhere. I mean, you could put write 10 hours, and at the end of the week, take that off your task board, but that seems like a little bit over the top or superfluous, right? On the other hand, a project might be kind of complicated like that it generates different types of tasks. So maybe it's organizing a conference and you're like, okay, this week I need to work on this. There's really like six or seven different things I need to get done for this project this week that are all sort of tasky. There I would put them on my task list, perhaps. What I might do in that situation is create a temporary

• 1:06:01Cal Newport?

  column for that project and then have those tasks under it. Or if I have like work on this week, I might label certain projects related to this project like with that, just in caps, like the project name and then have the task in it. And there, when I'm working off my task list, I sort of see those there. Oftentimes, though, if it's something that I know I want to make progress on, I might have put aside time for working on that project. And so, you know, I'll know when I get to that time, oh, the details of what I should do right now are on my task list. So I really just think about the interaction between those task boards and projects about whether I need help knowing or remembering what about that project I need to work on this week. And if the answer is yes, you can put them in task on that board. And if the answer is no, like it's just writing, it doesn't

• 1:06:44Cal Newport?

  have to interact with your task board. But I would keep the cards on the task board at the granularity of things you can do in a single session. It's why you need other stuff in your practice, other than just a task board, right? That's why you need your like, this is what I'm working on this quarter and its deadlines and my strategy for getting this done. You need somewhere, the like in March, we really have to get out in front of this grant application, but not until late March should we really start ramping up this work on the website overhaul. But let's wait till then to do it. Like you need that type of thinking and like some sort of quarterly plan or semester plan document. And then how that translates into actual work, again, just depends on, do I need help remembering what it is specifically I need to do to work on this each week? So, you

• 1:07:29Cal Newport?

  know, a lot of my project work just exists as projects. Like my task board is it's more like one-off specific things. I would say if I really looked at it. It's fine. By the way, I like that Derek had specific, he had some specific task boards for recurring obligations in his work to come up all the time. And like the application processing or this or that, like, okay, I get this stuff all the time. And like, here's my dedicated board. I kind of have a system going with that. I think that's good. That's fine.

• 1:07:59Cal Newport?

  We also have a case study here. This is where people write in to talk about ways they've put the advice we talk on the show into action in their own life, so we can see what it looks like out in the wild. Today's case study comes from Jake. Jake says, "The other day, I was beginning to explain to my wife the concepts regarding career capital and traded it in for more control of one's schedule versus traded it in for more responsibility and increased pay. While doing so, I realized that she has done exactly that with her career. She is a pediatric dentist who has worked at an office for about 10 years. While doing so, she has focused on doing great dental work and interacting with the patients in a way that leaves them happy with the visits, making her the company's

• 1:08:41Cal Newport?

  top earner and most senior doctor. We recently had two boys, now two and a half and four years old. One thing that was really important to her was that she was able to pick up our boys after school every day. When her older son started school, she told her work that she was unable to work past 2:00 PM because she needed to pick up our son. Being the top earner, they created a new schedule for her to work 7 to 2, doing op only. She not only gets to pick up our son every single day from school, but because she is op only, she actually makes significantly more money. I have read all of Cal's materials, so it goes without saying, I also have tremendous work flexibility and I'm able to drop him off in the mornings every day. Us being able to drop off and pick up our son every day as working professionals is incredible."

• 1:09:26Cal Newport?

  Did you know what he means by op? I was wondering that when I first read it. She is op only, OP, capital OP. Is that operation? That could make sense. So see, she's a pediatric dentist. Yeah, maybe she's only doing operations? Yeah, that's possible. Well, regardless, I appreciate the case study. What I like about it is that this gives you a... Realistic view of lifestyle centric planning, the deep life. So when we think about living a deeper life, especially in a modern distracted world, again, we like to connect with the, the idea of the grand goal.

• 1:10:06Cal Newport?

  So the traditional grand goal thinking would say, if you're in the situation where you're like, ah, I'm unhappy with my work because I really want to be there to pick my boys up from school and I kind of worked these longer hours. The grand goal thinking would say, you need to make a radical change. You need to like start your own, you know, store, open up a store in town where you can control the hours or become like a full-time novelist or some sort of grand change and we need to make our life completely different. But what did Jake's wife do instead? She said, I have a lot of career capital. I'm very good at what I do. People don't want me to go. And so I'm going to say, I'm going to leverage that capital and say, here's what I need. Here's what I, I want to create a situation in which I am done it too.

• 1:10:52Cal Newport?

  And because she was very good at what she did, they said, okay, we'll make this work. You can start early and you'll just do this and not that type of work. And now she's done it too. And because she was working backwards from not a vague dissatisfaction with being busy, which again would lead to the radical change. But with specificity about what would my ideal lifestyle look like? And a big part of that vision was very concrete. I'm there to pick up my kids from school. She's like, well, how could I get towards that vision? Oh, I see. I don't have to radically change my job. I could change the configuration of my job and I'll probably get away with that because I'm pretty good. So that's like classic applying career capital theory in lifestyle centric planning. These are the type of things that can make like a really intentional life.

• 1:11:33Cal Newport?

  The intentional life doesn't necessarily mean, oh, I guess I need to quit this job and we're going to sail around the world with our kids on a sailing boat. Right. It doesn't have to be that type of dramatic, uh, radical change. It just has to be figuring out what attributes you want in an ideal lifestyle and then working with what you have. What are my opportunities? What are my obstacles? How do I make that? How do I make that actually work? So there's, there's a lot more of that possible than people realize. Once you understand the game, it's not this like vague, uh, radical change. And it's more like I'm trying to reconfigure and change and shift towards the ideal lifestyle and knowing that it's skill and rare and valuable skills is what's going to help you actually get there. I think it's a cool story.

• 1:12:14Cal Newport?

  All right, we got a final segment coming up, another tech corner. It's just one thing you haven't heard from me enough. It's overly technical jargon. But first, I hear from another one of our sponsors. Talk about in particular, our friends at Shopify. If you sell things, you need to use Shopify. I would say most of the people I know who have some sort of business where they sell directly to consumers, maybe like I know writers who do this, like with online stores, with merchandise, et cetera. They use Shopify and for good reason. Like Shopify is the tool if you want to be selling things. No one does selling better than Shopify. It's home of the number one checkout on the planet.

• 1:12:58Cal Newport?

  They have their shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts go abandoned and you get more sales going. Shopify works as your commerce platform, whether your customers are strolling or scrolling on the web, in your store, in their feed and everywhere in between. That's just the way I talk now, Jesse, I rhyme because that's just, that's just smooth. It just works. You have a point of service kiosk like thing in your store, point of sale, whatever it's called. You have an e-commerce shop, you have whatever you're doing in between. Just don't think farther than Shopify. It really does get it done. You can upgrade your business and get the same checkout that basically everyone I know who sells things online uses.

• 1:13:42Cal Newport?

  Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/deep. All lowercase, you gotta type that in all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com/deep. I also want to talk about our friends at MyBodyTutor. I've known Adam Gilbert, MyBodyTutor's founder, for many years. He used to be the fitness advice columnist in the very early configuration of my blog. More recently, he's been working on MyBodyTutor. I say more recently, but he's been doing this forever. This company, I was talking to him recently. This company has been thriving for a long time. It's a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is lack of consistency. It's not hard to figure out. What you should eat and what type of exercise you should do.

• 1:14:27Cal Newport?

  What's hard is actually doing that. My Body Tutor hooks you up with an online coach who helps you figure out for you, like what you should be doing with your eating and your exercise. And then you check in with this coach every day. That accountability leads to consistency. It also leads to flexibility because you have something coming up like a trip or the holidays and your coach who knows you can say, here is how we're modifying what you're doing for the days ahead. So it is a, it solves the problem. But because it's a hundred percent online, it's not the same expense as having like a personal trainer, meeting you at the gym or a nutritionist who's coming to your house and helping you do your food. So it's way more affordable than what it used to require to have that type of one-on-one accountability and consistency.

• 1:15:12Cal Newport?

  So if you want to get healthier, don't look farther than My Body Tutor. Here's the good news. Adam will give Deep Questions listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention this podcast when you join. Go to mybodytutor.com. That's T U T O R, mybodytutor.com and mention Deep Questions when you join. All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment. So I want to do a quick tech corner. I want to follow up on our recent tech corner. So I had talked, I believe it was on the last episode, about the Ezra Klein podcast episode that was generating a lot of attention. It was an episode on how AGI, artificial general intelligence, was closer than people think.

• 1:15:56Cal Newport?

  He had on a, someone who knew a lot about it, who was saying, yeah, we will probably quote unquote, reach AGI at some point during the current presidential administration. And this generated a lot of energy and attention. And I came on the show and said, we have to be very careful about what AGI actually means. I think it gets misinterpreted and it get, it's not unimportant, but it's not as scary as you think, but it gets misinterpreted with other types of things that people fear with AI. So this happened and I wanted to bring up a particular example of this so that we could maybe be a little bit more reassuring when we're thinking about AI in our current moment. So up on the screen here for people who are watching,

• 1:16:40Cal Newport?

  instead of just listening, is a clip from the Breaking Points TV show. So with Sager and Crystal, they did a segment on

• 1:16:50Cal Newport?

  This article, and it was a very good segment. This is Saagar and Crystal who's up here. But what caught my attention is how their YouTube guy labeled this video. So it's not them, but it's how their YouTube guy labeled the video. I actually met them. Yeah. When I wrote that New Yorker piece a few years ago, I went and hung out at their studio. And I remember Saagar telling me about their YouTube titles and they have a person who does it and they have caps. And blah, blah, blah. They use caps lock or this or that. They sort of had like someone who does this. Anyways, let me read you the title of the YouTube clip from this episode. That was about that Ezra Klein interview. The title was

• 1:17:27Cal Newport?

  "Former AI Insider: AI Superintelligence Coming Under Trump." Alright, so here's what I want to emphasize. This is the type of conflating of issues that we need in our current moment to be very careful about. Superintelligence is a very different thing than AGI. Alright, that Ezra Klein discussion had nothing to do with superintelligence. And certainly, the, the person he was talking about was not claiming that superintelligence was coming under Trump. He was talking about AGI. So I want to just again, briefly emphasize the differences and why the differences matter. Right? So AGI, as we discussed last week, artificial general intelligence is a subjective threshold.

• 1:18:13Cal Newport?

  At which point, we just kind of agree more or less that the, the types of things that these AI systems do right now, that we know that we're doing and we're seeing them doing. The generating text and conversations and data searching and photo generation, whatever. When they can start doing the types of things they do really well, when the ability at which they do them are, are doing them gets at what we roughly agree is like comparable or better than like the average human who does them. That is not a, it's not a, a binary threshold that like you cross that threshold and then everything is different. Because these systems are already doing things very well. If you look at the text they generate or the photos they generate, you're like, wow, that's as good as a person or close to it.

• 1:18:55Cal Newport?

  AGI is just where we agree like, yeah, this is all as good as a person. It's like, we're not that far from that right now. And that's what that official was saying. But that is what AGI is. In general, it's an arbitrary threshold. Why it's important is just from like a general like economic and security disruption standpoint, the better these models get at the things they're already doing now, like the more we have to worry about various economic and security disruptions. And so certainly as they get better, we're going to have to care about that more. But there's not like something that happens post AGI that like, oh, we've crossed some Rubicon and now our relationship to technology is different because these systems already do things close to human

• 1:19:37Cal Newport?

  level. Right? So I mean, we're not going to notice something different immediately when the systems that can do pretty well, like a certain type of math exam can now like do as well as like a good, you know, human test taker. Like, these are not necessarily major epsilon. So they matter, but they're not scary. Superintelligence is talking about something very different. So it's over in this different sort of tree here. If we're looking at the physiology of AI, it's on this different tree where you get first some notion of artificial consciousness, where you have a system that has, it's alive, it has like autonomy and a sense of itself and can take autonomous actions. We talked about that in the last episode. And superintelligence is a step beyond that. It's where a system that is autonomous with some notion of self and

• 1:20:22Cal Newport?

  consciousness begins creating ever better versions of itself. And the idea there is like that can somehow recursively speed up so that like it creates a better version of itself, which is now really smart. So it can create a better version of itself even faster. And you get some sort of exponential speed up until you have something that's not only like conscious and self-aware and autonomous, but is like exponentially smarter than humans. And then game's over because like it can outsmart us in all ways because it's just much more smarter than us. That's superintelligence. That's sci-fi stuff. That's really different than like the moment when the research reports generated by AI, which right now are pretty good, but kind of are sloppy in some areas or like less sloppy in those areas. That's what AGI is. Hey, you know what?

• 1:21:07Cal Newport?

  This like memo is now good enough. Produced by Tati, like right now, it's like, okay. But there's like a few things in here I'd be embarrassed about. But now it's good enough. I could use it without editing it. That's important. That's very different than superintelligence. And so I, what I'm, I guess I'm trying to emphasize is we have to draw a clear line between this tree of discussion around like artificial intelligence coming alive and the existential implications. That is very different than these discussions that are happening like on Ezra's show about what happens when capabilities in certain things get comparable to people and its economic impacts and security impacts. A very different thing.

• 1:21:50Cal Newport?

  Crossing AGI, we're still talking about using chat GPT, doing the types of things we're doing now. It's just doing it X percent better. Those are, those are two completely different things. I made that point last time. I'm trying to clarify it this time, but this is the type of the thing I don't want people thinking because I, you know, when I talk to people about that article, there since was like a Rubicon was being crossed. If we get to AGI, now systems will be able to do X. And now we have a new thing in our world. That's not the case at all. They don't do anything new. They can't do now. They'll just be doing it X percent better. So superintelligence. I'm still of the school of thought, by the way, that we have no reason to believe that's even computationally possible.

• 1:22:31Cal Newport?

  Like we're just making huge assumptions that A, our level of intelligence can create a more intelligent version. B, that that is recursively true, that there's always these new levels of intelligence that are possible and computable. And that the, the speed at which these intelligences can be created somehow also speeds up. So like going from intelligence level 10 to 11 is somehow going to be faster than going from intelligence level one to two, even though like, these are all just like massive assumptions that like Nick Bostrom made in a, a philosophy seminar at Oxford, right? It's not anything we actually have any reason to believe is true. It's also just as plausible that like, when it comes to like general self-aware intelligence,

• 1:23:13Cal Newport?

  like evolution got us about as good as it can get. This is it. Like, there's not like some higher plane of really complicated, you know, understanding that just that's out there that we, computers can achieve, but humans aren't there. We just don't know. A lot of assumptions there. All right. So there we go. That's my PSA this week, Jesse, a continuation of last week. Superintelligence and artificial consciousness are different concepts than AGI. I don't know if that makes people feel better or worse. I think it should make you feel better, though. AGI is an economic, it's an issue of economic and security disruptions, and the threshold itself is arbitrary. It is not like the thing is aware now, and it wasn't yesterday, and now we've crossed the line. It is not that. It is like an arbitrary subjective threshold in

• 1:23:58Cal Newport?

  how we evaluate the things that these systems are doing, the type of things we're already doing when they get sufficiently better, we sort of say that we've passed that threshold. It's a big deal, but it's not a big deal from like a sci-fi movie way. It's a big deal from a like, the powered loom was bad for textile workers type of way. So hopefully that makes sense. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:24:29Cal 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.