Ep. 337: Hacking Remote Work

Remote work is a hot discussion topic right now as president Trump moves to eliminate it from government work. For those who are still allowed to work from home this new focus provides a good chance to rethink how to get the most out of these arrangements. In today’s episode, Cal presents three foundational ideas from his reporting about what makes remote work actually work, and for each provides concrete advice individuals can apply to make their own virtual setups better. He then answers reader questions and ends with a tech corner focused on what the law says about whether social media should be banned for kids. 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: Hacking Remote Work [4:58] - How does Cal explain time management vs. focus and attention management? [40:53] - How can I self study hard, technical concepts? [50:12] - Should I quit my PhD program after 3.5 years? [54:13] - Does Slow Productivity work for college students? [1:08:35] - CALL: Organizing a writing sabbatical [1:16:55] CASE STUDY: A software engineer removes distractions [1:25:41] TECH CORNER: Is Social Media More Like Cigarettes or Junk Food? [1:33:11] 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? newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/is-social-media-more-like-cigarettes-or-junk-food youtu.be/-U7D4Fw67Zs?si=srHaYr3inZ9uAd0p Thanks to our Sponsors: zocdoc.com/deep oracle.com/deepquestions notion.com/cal indeed.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:11Cal Newport?

  I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.

• 0:24Cal Newport?

  I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I've got a request I'm going to make of the audience. I'm volunteering you here, so hopefully you're ready for that.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  What do we got?

• 0:35Cal Newport?

  I need a story, a very specific story for a writing project. So what I'm looking for is a story of someone who had like a big idea for a bold career move, or like maybe like an ill-defined, "I'm just going to go adventure and do like a Tim Ferriss, make money off my websites and live a life of adventure." Someone who had like a very bold but ill-conceived idea that they went after young in life and it didn't go well. Preferably someone who maybe even dropped out of schooling to do this. I'm basically looking to, I had a story that I need to replace with another story. So if anything in your

• 1:17Cal Newport?

  past matches this, you're willing to share it for a writing project, so some notion of like you dropped out of school or quit like a really good early job to go after some ill-conceived but inspirational sounding thing, didn't go well, send the note to [email protected] and I'll follow up and tell you more if I think it's a fit. So that would be useful. By the way, those of you who sent in last fall, stories about their interest in reorganizing their life with my help, there's another round of that coming, so you may still hear from me. So you know, if you did send in that last fall and they hear from me, you may still hear from me soon. I'm still sort of working on that project. So anyways, thank you for that. Hopefully there's some of you out there who have a story like that that they can share.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  So then if it didn't go well, then they're doing something else now?

• 2:00Cal Newport?

  Yeah, so this might be, hey, when I was young, you know, I dropped out of school or I had a good job and I dropped out of it to like kind of pursue this ill-conceived dream and didn't go well. And then now, it could be years later and like you have things figured out, but just, I'm looking for the, the principle I'm trying to demonstrate here is one of Going for a job or a career pursuit that would give you like cool autonomy in your life would be awesome, but not really having the career capital to back that move up yet. Like it would be great if I could just like live a life of adventure, making money off my blog, but you didn't really have the career capital to make a lot of money off of a blog and support that life adventure. You wanted it to work because it'd be cool if it did,

• 2:43Cal Newport?

  but you didn't think through what would be required for it to actually work. Like what, what, what skill or preparation would I need for this plan to actually succeed? So it's looking for an example like that. Alright, so [email protected]. Alright, it says here, Jesse, that people are, in addition to mocking my mispronunciation of insidious, are mocking my use of tractable? Is that right?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:07Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I think it's a perfectly reasonable word. Maybe this is an, see, here's the problem, Jesse. Some of this stuff is engineering speak and I don't know.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Can you define them both?

• 3:17Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Well, to be like insidious means it is like negative in a sort of creepy, growing, systemic way that is like hard to get away from. To be tractable means it's practically accomplishable. Right? So like in, in algorithms, and see, some of this comes from engineering speak. If you're writing an algorithm, you're like, oh, we want to solve this problem. That problem is tractable. What that means is like, we can come up with an algorithmic solution that's going to have like an efficient time complexity. So it's like solvable in a way that is reasonable. The other one, I try not to use on the show, but this is real like theoretical computer science speak, is we constantly use the term non-trivial. And I don't know if I, I've done a pretty good job of keeping that off the show, but that's

• 4:02Cal Newport?

  definitely a mathematician, computer science thing. Non-trivial means actually requiring some difficulty or effort. So like, if you're trying to solve something, you'd be like, well, that could be non-trivial, that part over there. That means like, eh, this is going to take some actual effort.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  I love it. That's great.

• 4:19Cal Newport?

  Engineering speak. Yeah. Look, you're only getting 10% of that audience. When I'm with my computer science people, it gets out of control. My wife makes fun of me for it. All right. Well, we got a good show today. We got a deep dive on work that is inspired by events in the headlines. We got some good questions and case studies and a call in there. And then we will end the show today with a tech corner based yet again off of a New Yorker piece that I've written since the last episode. And it's going to be about some of the legal standards when it comes to banning things for kids in a particular social media. So we've got a good show. Let's get started with the deep dive. So where I live in Washington DC,

• 5:00Cal Newport?

  remote work is a hot topic at the moment because one of President Trump's new executive orders is demanding that federal workers return to the office. So this is causing a lot of chaos here for federal workers for any number of specific logistical and practical reasons. But I thought this timing might be good to talk to those of you who still have some sort of remote work set up in your job about the very general topic of how do you make the most of that? You see the trouble your government worker brethren are having with their remote work jobs. If you still have one now, this is a great time to say, hey, let me make sure

• 5:42Cal Newport?

  that I am making the most of what I actually have. So here's my plan. I've written a lot about remote work. What makes it function well? What makes it function poorly? I've covered this extensively for The New Yorker. I've written about this in other publications like The Atlantic. I've written about this in my book, Slow Productivity. And what I want to do today is bridge the gap between big ideas and practical advice for remote workers. So I have three foundational ideas I'm going to review about remote work to come from my reporting from the last five years or so. For each of those foundational ideas, after I explain it, I have concrete things to suggest for how you can leverage that idea to make your own life as someone who does some virtual work better. And my goal here

• 6:25Cal Newport?

  really is not just how do I make you as a remote worker more productive in some sort of vague sense. I really care about not only that, but how do you make your job awesome? How do you take full advantage of the possibilities that at first got everyone excited about this prospect? How to make remote work not just a grind, but something that could be even cooler, or more interesting, or more sustainable, or more varied than the old fashioned way of working? All right. So three foundational ideas, and I'm going to draw spin off some concrete advice for each.

• 6:56Cal Newport?

  All right, foundational idea number one. Successful remote work requires two things. Clear workload systems and structured communication. Let me unpack both of those things. Clear workload system means there is some clarity about what you're working on and what it means for something that you're working on to be done. And the load of what you're actively working on now that you're tracking it is kept manageable. That is what's meant by clear workload systems. And by structured communication, this involves how information flows, questions are asked, and status is checked on the work that is happening.

• 7:38Cal Newport?

  If communication is structured, these type of interactions are consolidated into a smaller number of predictable periods or moved asynchronous. But unscheduled communication is minimized. That means something that comes in you weren't expecting that you need to reply to, like an email or a chat. Calendar clutter is also minimized in a structured communication regime. So you don't have a calendar that fills ever fuller with meetings to talk about work. So if your work is structured around clear workloads and structured communication, remote work can work really well. If it's not, remote work can be frustrating for all involved. I'll give you two examples, one broad, one specific, about workplaces that have these

• 8:23Cal Newport?

  properties and therefore have found successful transitions to remote work. The first is in software dev, right? Software developers had many examples of large teams or organizations that were fully remote, even pre-pandemic. It was one of the only sectors of knowledge work that sort of consistently had success with remote work. Why is it? It's because these firms were using agile methodologies to organize their developers' efforts. So some of the core features of agile methodologies is clear workload management. You have a shared board. Everything that needs to be added, the features that need to be added, the bugs that need to be checked for the particular software product in question.

• 9:07Cal Newport?

  Those are all specified on a shared board. They don't exist on individuals' plates. And then what happens is individuals are assigned specific things to work on. So it's very clear who is working on what, and you have very clear workload limits, right? It might be you should be working on one thing at a time, and when you're done, we'll give you the new thing. Or you could be working on two things at a time, and when you're done with one of those, we'll bring you on a new thing. But it's very clear who's working on what.

• 9:31Cal Newport?

  Workloads are managed. You don't work on too many things at the same time, and it is very clear when you're done. You say, "Okay, I have finished this feature. It's committed into the repository. We can move this card on the virtual board from me working on it to the done column." So it's very structured workload management. Agile methodologies also have very structured communication. They have a daily stand-up meeting. It's very quick. They call them stand-ups because when these would be done in person, you would do them standing up, the discourage, loviation. And in these stand-up meetings, you go person, person, person. Here's the board. Here's the things you're working on. There's two. What's your progress? What have you done since yesterday? Why is this not done yet? What do you need from other people to get this done? Or, okay, you finished this yesterday.

• 10:13Cal Newport?

  Let's decide as a group what you should work on next. Let us know right away what you need for it. So you're consolidating communication about how things are going and what you need to a 20-minute block in the same time every day, as opposed to allowing this to just unfold through unstructured emails and text messages throughout the day. So software dev already had workload management and structured communication. It was easy to move remote. That works well remote. The board can be virtual. The status means can be virtual. Most of what you're doing then is just working solo anyway, so the fact that you are not in an office around other people or not didn't matter. It was easier to move that remote. Here's another example, more specific, of a workplace in which they had these properties and have done well remote.

• 10:55Cal Newport?

  I was talking to someone recently who had a position in the Veterans Affairs office, and he was saying his, the big team that he was working with, they actually measured Productivity, they did a study and it was clear that on all the metrics you might care about for their particular type of work, they all went up with remote work. They said, "Well, what type of work is this team doing?" And he told me, "Oh, it's claims processing, processing claims from veterans for largely for benefits or healthcare." I was like, "That is an example of work in which you can have a very clearly defined workload. Here is our queues of claims to be processed. Here are the ones that have currently been

• 11:39Cal Newport?

  assigned to you. We can check in a system without even really having to have unscheduled communication at all. What have you processed today? What have you processed this week?" Right? We can have a system to flag issues where you need help or to move it up to someone else. It's a very structured workload without the need. It doesn't really rely on ad hoc communication or meetings that clutter your calendar. So yeah, that can move remote very well. I don't, I want to be where I want to be. I'm working on my claims. It doesn't really matter if I'm in the office. Where remote work struggles is where you're missing one or both of those. It's like an average, modern, generic Scott Adams Dilbert-style

• 12:19Cal Newport?

  office doesn't have either of these things. Work is assigned haphazardly, usually through emails and requests at meetings, like, "Hey, can you work on this? What about this? Can you look into this?" So everyone has this sort of haphazard workload. It's not clearly defined. I don't know who's working on what. There's no clear way for me to see what's done, when something is finished, or what the status of things are. The only way to check in is through more communication. So we have a ton of unstructured communication that just try to keep various plates moving. I'm constantly emailing people. People are emailing me. We're jumping in and off in Slack. We begin using meetings as a proxy for productivity, standing meetings to try to make progress on things. Calendars are cluttered. The overhead of workloads collapses in on its own weight. That type of workplace doesn't move remote as well.

• 13:05Cal Newport?

  Because it's just dependent on all this like ad hoc back and forth interaction. And when you move remote, that all that just gets harder. It's all just higher friction. I can't grab you in the hallway. I have to schedule zoom meetings for everything. Calendars get even more cluttered. I have to send many more emails because I'm missing all the in-person quick grabs and quick conversations in the hallways. When you don't have workload structure or structured communication, remote work can actually just increase the frustration and friction work. A lot of people saw this in the pandemic where they got no benefit out of remote work from a subjective well-being perspective, because their work became even more interruptive. They've more zoom, more like talking about work or feeling interrupted from talking about work, and it made things worse. All right, so once we have that idea,

• 13:47Cal Newport?

  what's some like concrete advice we can give to make your own situation better? Well, if you work in a team and you have some control over how your team operates, take a page out of Agile. Track those tasks centrally. It should be clear, what does our team need to accomplish? New tasks should show up on the team's list, not on an individual's plate. And then you should have a clear way of saying who's working on what. And it's fine for most stuff. The answer is no one is working on this yet. We don't want anyone working on more than two things at a time. So the 20 things we've identified that our team needs to do, maybe most of them are just in this waiting to do column that no one owns. It's not generating any overhead tax, no emails or no meetings for anyone, because no one's working on it yet. Over here, we see, okay, Cal's working on these two things.

• 14:32Cal Newport?

  And now I actually have to do those things. Hey, you've had these on your thing for two days. What else are you doing? You should be making progress, right? But we are saving ourselves from being completely overloaded with work. Daily synchronization meetings of the same style they use in Agile can work really well for teams. 20 minutes, we all look at the things that need to be done and the things you're working on. Batch all of your email conversations into real-time conversation right here. Okay, everyone, here's what I'm working on today. See, let's look at the board. These are two things that have been assigned to me. I'm really working on this first thing today. Let me save you all the emails that would otherwise trickle out as this day unfolded, and I'll just tell you all now. I need this from you and this from you. Okay, when can you get that to me? By, by noon? Let me write this down.

• 15:17Cal Newport?

  Okay, so you're getting that to me by noon. Let's type this up and you're getting, and you will talk to those clients. And when, actually, don't even email me those responses when you're done. You'll just put them in this shared folder. Great, we're typing up a summary of what everyone committed to in this meeting. And boom, it'll be right there under the board and a saved document. We can all see our commitments. Great, everyone, we all agree. We have just saved ourselves ad hoc emails that might get ignored for days. We're all on the same page. Let's go do our work. If you have some control over how your team functions, do that. If you're an individual, build a task board for your own task and make it transparent for the people you work with. I talk about this a lot in my book, Slow Productivity. Make a clear distinction between I'm working on this right now and I'm waiting to work on these things. And make sure that all the people who want you to do things can see this list.

• 16:02Cal Newport?

  They see where their thing falls. And they're like, hey, let's have a meeting. Let's check in. You can say, here's the link to my list. You're in position three. You're marching steadily towards my actively working it on status, but you're not there yet. Once it's there, I'll let you know and then we can get into it. So even if you do not have control over the activities or organization of your team, you can organize yourself in a similar way.

• 16:23Cal Newport?

  Use office hours to deal with impromptu back and forth conversations. You email me something that I can't respond to with a single message? Grab me at my daily office hours. Call me, jump by my office, jump on an open Zoom thing I have. We'll figure it out in real time. Teams can have docket clearing meetings twice a week. If there's things the team needs to address, put it on a shared document called the docket twice a week. Everyone gets together. You go through that docket one by one, either dismiss the task, assign it to one individual, make a plan for it, do all, again, this batch in your communication in advance. This is another place to do that. Hey, what will I need from who by when to actually do this thing? While you're all here, let's all commit to that and write that down. So we save ourselves emails.

• 17:05Cal Newport?

  So there's a lot you can do to make your workload management clear and your communication structured. If you do, the fact that you're not in the same office doesn't matter nearly as much anymore. All right. Foundational idea number two.

• 17:19Cal Newport?

  Small scale seasonality is the ingredient that makes remote work awesome. Kind of mixy metaphors there. Should I say delicious? It's the ingredient that makes remote work delicious. What do I mean by small scale seasonality? That's an idea from my book, Slow Productivity, where seasonality writ large is this idea of variations in your work intensity at different time scales. So at the big time scale, you know, it might be this season is slower than these other two seasons. At the smallest time scale, it might be I'm starting slow this. I'm going to have a slow morning to kind of recharge and then I have a busier afternoon.

• 18:01Cal Newport?

  Right. So it can go from the scale of the year down to the scale of the hours of a given day. Small scale seasonality is looking at this sort of variation in intensity at these smaller scales, like of the day, hours within your day or days of your week.

• 18:16Cal Newport?

  And something that really makes remote work much more sustainable and cool is if you're able to embrace more of this variation in the intensity of your work.

• 18:27Cal Newport?

  Why do you need remote work to more easily get this type of small scale seasonality? It's because of what you face when you're in the office. Now, again, this is sort of canon from my Slow Productivity book. But in the first part of that book, I talk about how in the second half of the 20th century, office work became gripped by this idea of pseudo productivity. The notion that visible effort is a useful proxy for valuable effort. The more stuff you're doing, the better. It became this rough heuristic we used to try to just manage knowledge workers because we didn't actually know what you were working on. And there was no pile of widgets or parking lot full of newly built Model Ts we could point to to say how productive you were.

• 19:09Cal Newport?

  So we fell back as managers on this heuristic of you're doing stuff is good. If you want to prove to me that you're even more productive, do more stuff like be here earlier, go home later, always seem to be frantic moving papers around when I walk by your office. Right?

• 19:26Cal Newport?

  The side effect of pseudo productivity is it meant that you had to sort of constantly always be on. Now, in a pre-digital age, that was okay. We could sort of fake this, right? Like, it really was a game of you're all talking football at the water cooler, and the boss walks in, and you immediately change. Like, you're in the middle of saying quarterback, and you're like, "Yeah, the quarterly results are going to be good this year because of our new reporting system," right? I know, stuff like that. Or like, you're kind of reading a magazine at your desk, but when the boss walked by, you'd, you know, I'm typing. You do like typing motions. That's how they know you're being busy. You do vampire typing motions. Digital screwed that all up, because now you can

• 20:11Cal Newport?

  demonstrate activity at a very small granularity. Like, each email, or even more finer, each response to an instant message is a demonstration of your productivity in a pseudo-productivity regime. And you can do this at all times. Any, in a meeting, in your office, at lunch, but also at home, while commuting, while at the dinner, while at a sporting event with your kid on the weekend. Like, you can at any time be doing this really fine-grained demonstration of productivity. And what we got then was like, "Oh, I actually have to be doing stuff all the time now. It's not just I need to physically be moving when my boss walks by. I have to be responding to these emails, staying up on these, these instant messages, hopping in and off of calls, or what have you." And you get no variation in your work. It is just like expected. You're on all day, because if there's any

• 20:56Cal Newport?

  time of the day where you're not responding to emails, then I'm going to worry that you're slacking off, and this is going to be a problem. So pseudo-productivity made seasonality impossible. Remote work makes it possible again. No one is there directly observing you, and in particular, if you have followed the ideas from Foundational idea number one, and it's more structured communication, not ad hoc communication, and it's more clearly managed workloads. I'm working on like one thing right now. You gain back a lot more capability of, I'm going hard today, but I'm going to take tomorrow slow. Friday's going to be an easier day because you're not being monitored so

• 21:36Cal Newport?

  fine grained. More structured work maybe holds you more accountable, but it's not so fine grained how it unfolds. There's not with structured communication, there's not emails all day for people to answer. There's not meetings people are trying to schedule that they're judging you by how many you accept and how many you say no to. So, remote work, if done right, allows for more small scale seasonality. Alright, so here's some advice built on this idea. One, to help try to inject more of the small scale seasonality into your remote work setup, consider trading accountability for accessibility. It's a big move. You've got to have your act together, but in a lot of positions, especially when you're remote, there's an option that can become available where you're saying, "Look, hold me accountable

• 22:21Cal Newport?

  for what I'm doing. Like, I will show you my proverbial widgets at the end of the week or the end of the month or the end of the quarter. Like, this is what I did. And if it doesn't hold up, you know, fire me." But, the flip side is, I'm going to do this my own way. I'm not going to be in all your meetings. I'm not involved in these ad hoc projects that require like lots of back and forth ad hoc communication. I'm going to go, you know, do my work and produce these, finish these projects, whatever they are, the things you can count, and you're just going to have to let me do it my own way. It's dangerous. You actually have to deliver, but if you gain that type of freedom, you can now inject

• 23:04Cal Newport?

  small scale seasonality into your job, and that's a lot of what makes remote work jobs potentially really cool. Time block your days. If you time block how you work, you get more enjoyment out of how you relax. Time blocking is needed to free yourself from the pseudo productivity mindset, because now you can actually look at your day and say, here's when I'm working and here's what I'm working on, and here's when I'm not working. And I can see the plan, and it's not just me deciding on a whim, I'm going to go relax now, and you're going to be nervous the entire time. Like, oh, my God, what am I missing? Should I be, is there something I'm supposed to be doing? Am I falling behind? When you time blocking gives you control over your time. It's control, not just over your work, but over your non-work. It allows you, I can fit this all in here, so I can take this 90 minutes here and go for a long

• 23:48Cal Newport?

  walk. Time blockers get better relaxation into their workday. So, great, great tool if you want more small scale seasonality inserted. Consider doing things where particular days are lighter than others. No meeting Mondays or no meeting Fridays are great. You know, you don't announce it, you just do it. Hey, when can you meet? What about blah, blah, blah, and blah? You say yes to the options not on Monday, no to the options on Monday. Now, like, your Mondays are free of meetings, and it allows you to come out of the weekend in a way that's maybe less stressful. I kind of roll in, like, what's going on? I get started back up on projects. I clear the plates. I just have time to get back up to speed again. People worry, oh, my God, people will be upset if I don't take meeting on Mondays. But no one's tracking you that way. Again, there's not a control

• 24:33Cal Newport?

  center where people have bar charts of your average email response time, and they're plotting like your yes and no's to meeting requests and seeing if there's any patterns in there. There's not like a supercomputer somewhere crunching, looking for patterns of like, I think he has a rule about not taking meetings on Monday. We got them. We got them, guys. So, just keep some days different than others. I like the idea of balancing hard days with light days. You produce better work in a way that's more interesting and sustainable. If you get after it one day, and then like you recover the next day, as opposed to taking the same number of hours and splitting them between the two days, and kind of move, putting the work in between meetings and other types of things going

• 25:14Cal Newport?

  on. It's much more sustainable, and you can produce cooler stuff if you just focus on something and produce it. And then the next day, you're just... Answering emails, doing some meetings, like going for a long walk. That's more sustainable and the work you do is going to be better. Also, consider, again, if you have some control over how an organization runs, an idea I pitched in The Atlantic last spring, which was the hybrid attention model for hybrid work. And here the idea is, I think many more offices should have a setup in which, if you have some days that are remote and some days in office, so a hybrid schedule, synchronize the days where people are remote and make the rule, no meetings on those days,

• 25:57Cal Newport?

  and probably no email response expectations either. So the days you're at home, they like just work on the stuff that's most valuable and just do that work. And when you're in the office, you can have like meetings and communicate as well. And that's actually like a better place to do that because one meeting in person can maybe knock off, you know, 50 emails that might be generated if you had that same meeting on Zoom while you're at home, because when you're in person, now you're all in the place and the meeting's kind of over. You're like, hold on a second. What about this? What about that? Like we, I've noticed this at Georgetown, like where I'm a professor. Our faculty meetings got moved virtual during COVID and now they're back entirely in person, which I like.

• 26:43Cal Newport?

  I can notice a like a major improvement in like emails and Zoom because we're all just in this room and the meeting ends and everyone is like, I can take care of seven or eight hanging issues by just talking to people right here. Where before, if we're all on Zoom and just all logging out, that's seven or eight email threads I would have to initiate, each of which would now have any number of unscheduled messages that I have to see and reply to and all the clutter that comes with that. So I'd like the hybrid attention model. All right. Third and last foundational idea, when working, spaces impact your mind. Spaces matter.

• 27:27Cal Newport?

  This is something I think we underestimated when we were initially extolling the potential virtuals of remote work in the sort of pre-pandemic or early pandemic period. We underestimated the effect to which being at an office in an office building had a psychological benefit of our mind saying, this is a place to work. I understand when I am at my building at the office, like I'm not thinking about signing up for day camps in the summer for my kids. I'm not thinking about, we need to repaint the house or there might be a roof issue. I'm not thinking about, you know, my fitness routine because my weights are over there. Like, oh, I'm at the office, so I'm just thinking about office stuff.

• 28:11Cal Newport?

  That reduces cognitive drag. It takes these sort of metaphorical cognitive barnacles off of the boat hole here that are all adding up drag that slows down your progress through the waters. We underestimated that effect. When we're working at home with the laundry basket right there and the home gym right there and the forms on the table that we need to fill out for the kids and all of those reminders of all this stuff that's unrelated to work, our mind has a little bit of attention moving between those and that's taken away from our work and we feel more distracted and unease and uncomfortable and we run out of energy quicker. So spaces matter. We underestimated the value of commutes. We complained about them because it's a pain, especially if you live somewhere like in DC and there's a lot of traffic.

• 28:54Cal Newport?

  But commutes had a psychological benefit in terms of moving through space transformed our mind from one mindset to the other. I need to leave this cognitive context of work and I need to shift to a cognitive context of my kids and home and my friends and life outside of work. A 20-minute drive is not a bad way to do that. You're moving through space, literally from one space where the first context is housed to another space where the next context is housed. And in that movement, you're able to start clearing out what's in your mind from work, loading up what's relevant to home, taking a breather in between to make that transition. We lost that when it was just, I'm at my kitchen table working and next thing you know, I'm also like making dinner at the same kitchen table. We underestimated the value of the commute.

• 29:38Cal Newport?

  Okay, so if you're working from home, you can recognize that idea and make some changes that is going to build on it and make your work from home experience much better. One, I am a big believer in the phrase I coined in a New Yorker piece back in 2021, or maybe it was 2020, work from near home.

• 29:56Cal Newport?

  Should be much more prevalent than it is right now. Work from near home means you have a remote work setup, but instead of doing your remote work in your home, you're doing it in a space near your home. You're not commuting to your office, but you're not working at your kitchen table either. The Deep Work HQ where I am right now, this is work from near home. I can almost see my house from here. It's a few blocks. It's like a four or five minute walk, but it's not my house. So I can come here even when I'm working from home to work, to work on, you know, writing a problem set for my discrete mathematics course or to work on an essay I'm writing for The New Yorker. I could do that at home if it's a day I happen to be at home.

• 30:35Cal Newport?

  But coming here gives me a dedicated cognitive context that's different than the context that is my house. So working from near home matters. It is something you should consider investing in. Renting cheap office space, like the HQ is inexpensive office space. It's the office space that's above commercial buildings on our small town Main Street. Like that, a lot of, a lot of small town Main Streets have like a lot of the sort of Class B commercial space on top of like the shops and the stores. We're on top of a restaurant. You know, I don't work here as much at the evening because I can, it's rock and rolling downstairs, but it's like fine in the morning. So, you know, it's not a fancy office building. There are shared workspaces that could work as well.

• 31:17Cal Newport?

  My, my point is if you can work from near home, it's a completely different experience than actually working from home. And I've converted some people, Jesse. I've gotten at least a couple neighbors in the general area to have offices in the various office spaces. Actually, that, you know, the, I don't know if they're doing this anymore, but during the pandemic, and I know some people who did this. Yeah, there's a church down the street from where I live. An old church building. They had just like some extra office, offices, you know, like church offices or whatever. And they were like leasing those out cheap, just like, yeah, you can have like a, go to the church and there's like some offices in the back and people were doing their, their remote jobs from there. There's a lot of options like that. So anyways, I think that type of, that matters. You know, I think at first we're like, hey, this is cool. I'm at my house, but your

• 32:01Cal Newport?

  house isn't great necessarily when it comes to actually getting things done. If you are working at your house, spend money on spaces to the extent possible. Prioritize investing in your spaces to make them better for work. That is not a triviality. It shouldn't be an afterthought. It should be as important as making sure that like you have the right laptop to work at home or the right lighting camera to do the zoom you have to do all day. We should spend more money to the extent possible on making our workspaces better for working. Like if you have a shed, consider transforming that into a workspace in your backyard. Will transform your experience of work. If you have a home office, consider transforming it to be a space you really like to be in. Like these type of things matter.

• 32:44Cal Newport?

  Inside, if you're working at home, separate deep workspace from logistical space. Have a cool space you use just for depth. You don't do email there. You don't have a printer there. You don't fill out forms there. You go there to think, to do the hard stuff, the code, to write that memo, to figure out the strategy. And then you have a separate space where you do the logistical stuff. So maybe like wherever like the home offices in your house where you pay your taxes and bills and you have your printer in your filing cabinet, use that for your logistical space, but build a deep workspace somewhere else. It could be, you know, a nice chair by your bookshelf somewhere. At my house, I have a library where I write and I read. And then upstairs in an alcove, we have the sort of home office where the filing cabinets and the printers and the scanners and I do my taxes.

• 33:27Cal Newport?

  And if I'm doing email or something, I'll do it up there. And if I'm writing at home, I'll do it in the other space. That can make a difference. Consider adventure work. It's an idea I first introduced when I was giving advice for students. We called it adventure studying. It is going to cool places to do work. You're working from home, you might say, okay, I have to read this like complicated report, summarize it or figure out our recommendations. I'm going to go somewhere interesting to do that. Like, why don't I go to downtown DC? I used to do this. Go to like a museum. And I'm gonna like read it in like an interesting part in one of the museums. I'm gonna go like downstairs at the National Gallery near the waterfall where there's no cellphone reception at the cafeteria.

• 34:11Cal Newport?

  I'm gonna get a cup of coffee and read it there. And then I'm gonna walk through this gallery to see whatever it is. I want to look at Renaissance art to sort of get inspired and take a break. And then I'm gonna move over to the cafe in the other wing. And there I'm gonna sit down, make my recommendations. Like, go to a cool place to do this type of work. It's more fun, it's less drag, and you get more creativity. A big fan of adventure working. And finally, simulate your simulate a commute even if you're at home. And typically, this will be a long walk. I am gonna do a 20-minute walk to shut down my workday. So I'll do my shutdown routine and have a 20-minute walk to sort of get my headspace out of work, to start reflecting on other things, to clear my head, get some blood flowing. And then when I get back from that walk, it's like my commute is over and now I'm ready for home life.

• 34:54Cal Newport?

  I'm a big believer in doing a workout as your simulated commute. Maybe go around the block and do like a workout then. And it's a hard physical effort that can just reset your body and your mind. And then when you're done with that, like, oh, now I'm done with work. Don't just be like type, type, type, type, type, type, type, type, turn, I'm now at home. Simulate the commute, it makes a big difference. Alright, so those are my three ideas. One, workload management and structured communication. You need that for remote work to be successful. Two was about seasonality. Variations in intensity is what could makes remote work's full potential unfold. So really fight to get that into your remote work setup. And three spaces matter, where you work, your commute.

• 35:37Cal Newport?

  You need to care about that if you want remote work to be like a something you really like about your job and not something that you're like indifferent towards, or maybe even makes it worse.

• 35:47Cal Newport?

  So there you go.

• 35:49Cal Newport?

  Remote work. The hardest thing writing about remote work, Jesse, is actually the different terminology. Cause you can't just keep saying the word remote work. And also you use work as a verb often and you get redundant works. So you have like virtual work and telework and remote work, but then you have to throw in telecommuting, even though that's an old term, because it allows you to reference the concept without repeating the word work. It's actually like a surprisingly tricky thing. It's hard to have the right references to write about this.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've noticed that. You also use the word, did you use bloviation?

• 36:19Cal Newport?

  Yes.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  What does that mean?

• 36:20Cal Newport?

  Bloviation, that's the, the, the talk in a sort of like loud mouth or brash manner.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:26Cal Newport?

  As made famous by Bill O'Reilly. Remember his show on Fox News?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:32Cal Newport?

  He would always say something, I forgot the exact context, this like nineties? I don't know, it's a childhood. But he always would say, I don't know if he was doing like Reader, I don't, I don't know the show well. Maybe it was like Reader Mail or something, but he'd always say no, uh, something, no bloviation or don't bloviate. I don't know, he, he liked to use that word. And it was like funny and ironic because he's, was a bloviator. Brash and loud mouth. It was like this ironic thing. It's a good term, bloviate. All right, well, we got some good questions coming up, but first let's hear briefly from a sponsor.

• 37:06Speaker 02

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• 37:35Cal Newport?

  I want to talk about our friends at Notion. You heard me talk about Notion. It's a tool that helps you combine your notes, docs and projects into one space. That's simple and beautifully designed. What's cool is you can now leverage the power of AI right inside Notion across all of your notes and docs, without having to jump between your work and some sort of separate AI power tool you have in a browser and app somewhere else. It's integrated right into Notion.

• 38:01Cal Newport?

  The fully integrated Notion AI helps you work faster, write better and think bigger, doing tasks that normally take you hours. Now you can do them in just seconds. So we had a bunch of people write in about Notion. What episode was this, Jesse? 335. So that's not long ago. Yeah. I was talking about an issue I was having with calendars and trying to sync my calendar with like my wife's calendar and then another calendar. It was like kind of a complicated setup I had about how I wanted to track various commitments. Multiple people unsolicited wrote in and said, oh, you could build a system to do that easy in Notion. Like that would be your tool. So it's an example of the type of places people use Notion. I'm going to build a little custom information system here to keep track of like different events between various people with like the relevant information. I mentioned our ad

• 38:45Cal Newport?

  agency had this cool system they had built before with Notion to keep track of our ads. Show me what ads we need to read this week. All right. Well, let me click on this ad. Now show me all of the reads we've done for this ad and how many reads are coming up. Show me like the script for this ad. Now show me a calendar where I can see all the places where this shows up. Like these sort of complicated information systems, you can make them easy in Notion. But now that they have the AI support, all of this just becomes even better. The Notion AI will help you write, could jumpstart a brainstorm and turn your messy notes into something polished. It can even automate tedious tasks like summarizing meeting notes or finding next steps, help you find information. It's no surprise that Notion is used by over half of Fortune 500 companies and teams that use Notion send less email, cancel more meetings,

• 39:30Cal Newport?

  save time searching for their work and reduce spending on tools, which helps keep everyone on the same page. I'm all about structured work. We just talked on the deep dive. Notion is a great tool for achieving that goal. So try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/cal.

• 39:47Cal Newport?

  And you need to type that in all lowercase letters for this to work, but go to notion.com/cal to try the powerful, easy to use Notion AI today. And when you use our link, you will be supporting our show. That is notion.com/cal.

• 40:02Cal Newport?

  As long as we're on a technology theme, I also want to talk about our friends at Oracle. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere, from self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it is coming, and it's coming fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. OCI is a blazing fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all your AI and machine learning workloads.

• 40:42Cal Newport?

  OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking, so you're saving a pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters, and Suno AI. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current bill in half if you move to OCI. This is for new US customers with minimum financial commitment. Offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com/deepquestions. That's oracle.com/deepquestions. All right, Jesse, let's move on to the questions.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  All right, first question is from Alex, and we have a video. Alex says, "What are your views on focus and attention management compared to time management?"

• 41:29Cal Newport?

  All right, so I'm glad we have a video for this one because I'm not exactly sure what, how he's using these terms. So for those who are watching, instead of just listening, we're going to bring this video up here on the screen now, but everyone will be able to hear it.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  Is that of focus and attention management instead of time management? Now, a lot of people are drawn to time management because they recognize a problem, that they find it difficult to get stuff done throughout the day. They feel a lack of time to do things. But it's important to realize that that's not actually what it is. You see, we as humans don't have a great sense of time to begin with. So how is... Is it that we can notice a lack of time? The thing is that what we're noticing isn't a lack of time. What we're noticing is a lack of result or a lack of the ability to do certain activities or get certain tasks done.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  So the question is, if I could extend out time infinitely, would that solve the problem? Naturally, the answer seems to be yes. But actually, no. Because during that time, we would end up just scheduling and wanting to do more things. So take this, for example. Let's say that a day was only one hour long. Would we even try to do as much as we want to do in a normal day or a normal week? The answer is naturally no. So what we're noticing actually is a failure of our own behavior or action at fulfilling a certain set of tasks or activities that we wanted to.

• 43:06Cal Newport?

  All right, I think I get what he's saying. I was a little distracted. I don't know if you noticed this, Jesse. This is a new YouTube format I haven't seen before. Did you notice while he's talking, he's sort of drawing pictures?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Actually, the video is four years old, so I noticed it too. He must be doing it, yeah.

• 43:25Cal Newport?

  But he's not doing it live, so he must be going back afterwards. And he's just as bad of an artist as I am, so that's interesting.

• 43:33Cal Newport?

  But man, that's an interesting format. So imagine if you've had my bad drawings next to me this whole time. I think I get what he's saying. All right, tell me if this seems like a fair summary, Jesse, because you listen to it as well. The point I'm trying to pull out of this from him is that he's saying

• 43:48Cal Newport?

  it's not just about how much time you have to do things, which is what time management cares about.

• 43:55Cal Newport?

  Your ability to focus or pay attention matters as well. Because like if that runs out, who cares if you have 10 more hours free?

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:04Cal Newport?

  You're not gonna do anything. It's like what you really, you need to care about your focus and attention management as much or maybe even more than time management. Does that seem fair?

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:12Cal Newport?

  There was a book back, this is, God, back in the early days of my writing. Tony Schwartz wrote a book called The Power of Full Engagement. And it was about energy management and this was a big deal in the business space. This probably would have been an early 2000s era style book. I actually met him once. We spoke, we spoke at the same conference. I'm trying to remember anyways, back in the day when I did more of this stuff. So this would have been like the 2000s and he, his argument, I'll add it to the list was like, your energy is what matters. If your energy runs out, you can't do any work. So if you're a business person, his argument was you should care a lot about how much energy can I maintain throughout the day? And that has to do with diet and sleep and variability,

• 44:53Cal Newport?

  et cetera. So I'll throw that into the same sort of focus and attention management category. Here's how I think about these things. Time management is about making a reasonable plan for the time you have available, typically like on the scale of a day. I want to make a good plan for the time I have available today. I'm managing my time as opposed to just sort of reactively trying to execute tasks as I feel like I have time to do it. So like time block planning is a classic time management move. You're saying, I want to manage the time I have available today to accomplish, like I want a reasonable plan, whatever that is, like to get a lot done or to like to get certain key things done or to relax. But like you're, you're managing your time towards

• 45:32Cal Newport?

  a goal to accomplish a reasonable plan. I think of energy management, focus management, attention management, all of these sort of things. They all control what reasonable means. Like what are you capable of accomplishing with your time managed plan? So let me make this a little bit more concrete. Let's say you have bad energy management, right? You're, you're sleeping poorly, you're out of shape, you're eating poorly, your morning is like donuts and energy drinks and you just crash, right? Like you really crash by mid

• 46:14Cal Newport?

  morning and then you have like a terrible lunch and you have like an hour long carb high and then you crash again. It's hard for you to focus. What is reasonably possible for you to do when you're making your plan for the day? Is really limited by that because you only have like a certain number of windows where you can really be doing good work. So the number of your space of reasonable plans when you're doing your time management is somewhat constrained here. You don't have a version, you don't have a reasonable plan available, for example, where you get after something hard all afternoon because your energy is not there. Here's another concrete example. Let's say your attention management is very poor. You're like a typical young person. You are on your phone a lot. Even when you're working, you're constantly context shifting and quick checking your phone and seeing what's going on on TikTok

• 46:58Cal Newport?

  or seeing what's going on with like text messages with your friends or et cetera. This also reduces the possibility of reasonable plans you can succeed with when you're managing your time for the day because your attention is so divided that it's very high friction to focus on anything. You're probably better suited, the plans that are reasonable are going to be those that are built around like lots of small tasks that already have you dividing your attention or assume a division of your attention. You can't really have like long, deep sessions. So, energy management, focus management, tension management, that type of stuff gives you your set of options for like what is possible for a given day. And then time management is how you shoot, once you've chosen one of those options, how you actually like plan your time to execute it.

• 47:42Cal Newport?

  The time management part of your brain is like, hey, let me know what's on the plate. You give me something we can actually do and I'll arrange the time to make sure it happens. But if you're really distracted or your energy is really low or what have you, like all I do is move the time around. I can't control what you're actually able to do with it. So you can tell me to schedule a day where we're going to like focus deeply on a book chapter for six hours, but that's not going to happen because of these other things. So you need both of these. Time management, you need some notion of how you control your time in the day so that you're in control and your time doesn't control you. Otherwise, you're just going to get pushed around by the incoming and reactive. Managing your time critically does not mean optimizing your time. Managing your time critically does not mean trying to maximize the number of things you do. We talked about this in the deep dive.

• 48:27Cal Newport?

  Time blocking is a fantastic tool for people who want to work less because you're going to have super clarity about this time I'm not working and I feel good about it because I know what I'm doing before and the key things are getting done. You also need to be working on long-term, things like your energy, your focus and your attention, because that gives you more options when you manage your time. And so you have to work on reclaiming your brain and getting away from distractions. You gotta get comfort with focusing on hard things. That's a skill you have to, you have to train with, just like you might train to play the guitar. You be careful about energy and how you eat and how you sleep and how you exercise. All of this gives you more options.

• 49:02Cal Newport?

  And then time management is just how you play with whatever of these options you choose. All right, so that's my distinction. You need both. I think it's a good question, because sometimes people have one but not the other. I know people who are really focused on, I don't want to be distracted. I read hard books, I don't use my phone as a default source of distraction, I have hobbies that force me to focus. My mind is like a tool. I know like some academics like this, but they have bad time management. So they don't, they don't actually apply that tool in a way that would really help them achieve their goals. And I have another people who are just so locked in on time management and I'm all time blocked and multi, it's all multi-scaled and I really control my time, but their attention is just shot and like nothing gets done. So like you really do have to have both. I think about that a lot.

• 49:48Cal Newport?

  You know, this is the big issue I have with the anti-productivity crowd. It's like they think if you just don't do time management, somehow the work that you're expected to do goes away. It doesn't go away. You can be disorganized. The work you have to do is not generated as a side effect of managing your time. It just exists. Like this is the expectations for your job. You can be, manage your time or not, that, that's not what makes this happen. Tasks do not, like we used to think about eels, just sort of materialize out of the ether. Just they show up in the mud one at some point. Like the tasks are here because your boss like wants you to do these things.

• 50:31Cal Newport?

  You can manage your time or not, but the management is not making those tasks less. The management of your time is not making the tasks appear. So anyways, what do we got next?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Next question is from Max. I work as a technical journalist for F1 website. How can I self-study technical concepts to improve my articles so that they can be so good they can't be ignored?

• 50:52Cal Newport?

  I think when it comes to technical knowledge, you basically have to take yourself back to school, which means you need to be in some way simulated or otherwise tested on the new things you're trying to learn. All right, I'm trying to understand like this complicated topic. I need some way of being tested on my understanding of that that I'm studying for. And in studying for that test, I learn it. What you can't do is just read a bunch of stuff and hope it sticks. Like some stuff will stick, but this is a very inefficient way of doing it. So you need to test. Now, there might not be an actual test. You have to sort of find some way of simulating that. Like I am going to write a full explanatory summary of this particular game theory topic that the F1 teams are now using.

• 51:35Cal Newport?

  And I'm going to give it to one of our like game theoreticians who works on the team. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll take a look at it, mate. And you're like, okay, they're going to look at this and see if I really understand this or not. So now I have a test that I'm working towards that's forcing me to actually integrate the information and study it like I would study material if I was still a student. So when it comes to that type of technical stuff, it's just like I say for college, college kids, active recall, producing information from scratch, being tested on your knowledge. That's how you learn it. And it's quick. It's actually very, if you have a test coming up and you're doing active recall for that test, you'll learn the material quick. It's very hard, but you'll learn the material quick as compared to this, reading it again and again, and hoping that, hoping that you understand it.

• 52:19Cal Newport?

  So test yourself, even if that's just creating the tester, you know, on your own. I'm assuming he means racing, right?

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:26Cal Newport?

  F1?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:28Cal Newport?

  I didn't know if this was like some sort of designation for, you know.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  He's recently out of school too, so it's like his first job.

• 52:34Cal Newport?

  I met some F1 people years back when I went to more computer science conferences. I went to a conference in Brazil and at the computer science conference, they had someone from an F1 team. And he was telling me all about the, he was a, I used this example in the question, he was a game theory expert. So like his whole thing with the mathematics of trying to figure out optimal pitting. And with game theory, you, you, you figure out like the equilibrium. So the, the mixed strategy for all the racers to do in terms of how often they're going to do pit stops. That gets you to a place where no one person can now improve their position anymore. And because they're so hyper rational in these teams, that pit stop strategies would evolve towards these like Nash equilibriums.

• 53:19Cal Newport?

  Because they would figure out like, what is the absolute optimal? Like if we do this, but they, if we do, if you're pitting this way and we pit this way, it'll be an advantage. But if you know, we're going to pit that way, you're going to pit a different way. And that's going to make this a disadvantage. And you eventually find this sort of true style. They call them a Nash equilibrium, but it's a, it's like a, a, a point in the fitness landscape where that you can't unilaterally improve your position. So you, you figure out these strategies eventually where, okay, this is kind of the best we can do. And, and that's what they would do. Just like straight up math guy, hanging out with all these cool like F1 people. They spend so much money on those teams. It's crazy.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  How much do I spend?

• 53:56Cal Newport?

  Have you seen the show on Netflix?

• 53:58Speaker 01

  I saw some of it.

• 53:59Cal Newport?

  You see those centers? It'll be like one race car will have like what looks to be essentially like the headquarters for Stark Industries. Like one race car and like whole team. I do not understand how that sponsor, there must be so much money in that. Because they spend so much money, just billion, I don't know if it's billions, but like hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:20Cal Newport?

  It must be worth it because it's such an international sport.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they can, it's marketing?

• 54:24Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I guess, right? I mean, marketing and brand recognition, but man, they spend and like, I'm not afraid to say it. They spend more than we spend on our show here at Team Questions.

• 54:38Cal Newport?

  I don't want to shock people. They spend more. All right. What do we got next?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Next question is from Jacob. I'm a PhD student in aerospace engineering at UCLA and am considering dropping out after three and a half years. My goal was to be an astronaut. My PhD topic is okay. I'm overwhelmed and I have financial troubles. It'll probably take me another three years to finish it if I stick with the program. Should I enter the space industry now, which is a masters?

• 55:05Cal Newport?

  Look, Jacob, I, I think this is a situation where evidence-based career planning is probably lacking and is now needed to be pretty aggressively inserted. So evidence-based career planning is, think of it as the complement to my concept of lifestyle-centric planning, which also I don't know that you're doing. I think, yeah, I want to be an astronaut is often the epitome of grand goal planning, right? I just, this one goal is going to make my life better as opposed to lifestyle-centric planning. But I'll put my lifestyle-centric planning tirade to the side here and focus on, again, as complement is evidence-based career planning. Because once you're actually going towards a plan, be it a lifestyle-centric plan or a grand goal plan,

• 55:49Cal Newport?

  you need to figure out the right way to make progress. And here, you have to ground your decisions in evidence from real people who understand how that part of the world works, who are telling you clearly what you're doing makes sense and it's the right way to get there. People skip this. It sounds obvious. Like, of course, you would do that, but people don't. They write themselves stories where the moral of the story is whatever move that is sort of available or feels emotionally interesting is like the right thing to do. You go off to get your doctorate, not because you sat down and were like talking to people from the NASA program and like, this is how this works. And if you go here and get this degree plus this type of

• 56:32Cal Newport?

  training, you've got this pretty good chance of actually making to the program. And here's how you can, part of evidence career planning, by the way, is learning what the milestones are along the way you can use to assess that you're making progress. Like, look, if you're here by your third year, then you, you are still on track. But if you're not, then this product could be for you. That's evidence-based career planning. But what people do instead is like, I don't know, I want to be an astronaut. I also kind of grad school, this seems, I can apply to this now. There's something kind of romantic about being at UCLA. Let's just do that. Like I know astronauts have these degrees often and you kind of go off and after a while you're like, I don't know, I don't have any money and I don't know if this really matters and maybe I should stop it. Those answers, if you did evidence-based career planning, should be crystal clear. So what you need to do now is, once you identify what you're

• 57:15Cal Newport?

  looking for, and I do think you need the lifestyle plan here, right? You gotta talk to people who are gonna sanity check your plan and you gotta hear things you don't wanna hear necessarily. They might say, "This doesn't matter. I don't care about that degree." Or, "This degree does matter. This other thing doesn't," right? But you want, especially if you're making a move, like getting various types of graduate degrees, you need crystal clear evidence from people who know, "This degree will get you this opportunity. Without this degree, you can't." It has to be crystal clear. This is exactly why I'm doing this. You cannot get job X at space industry company Y without master's degree Z. So go get that degree from this place. This is a sufficiently good place that if you get the degree here,

• 57:59Cal Newport?

  it'll open up this pool of jobs, you'll probably get one of those jobs, and here's what this job is really like. You need that type of information. Otherwise, you're sort of just wandering through the landscape of possibilities, accruing credentials you think are interesting and hoping it leads to interesting things. So this is a time to do serious evidence-based planning. Now, you could stick with your grand goal of being an astronaut, sure. Get a sanity check. Is this possible for me? If so, exactly what would I need to do from here and what would be my milestones along the way I would have to hit on this path? So I know if I'm failing on one of these milestones, I can eject off that path before I go too much farther. Or you could do lifestyle-centric planning. I'm probably not gonna be an astronaut, but what do I wanna do? Like, what do I want

• 58:41Cal Newport?

  my life to be like? Where do I wanna live in the country? What do I want my daily work to be like? Do I wanna, I mean, do I, what's resonating is seen? Early videos of Mark Rober when he still worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Mars rover, like is that like, hey, this lifestyle looks cool. Like he's working with cool people in a clean suit and you're building things and it's complicated engineering and you get to see your work actually up there and it's challenging, but the hours are usually reasonable and you can live in this cool place and mountain bike all the time. And actually, if I work at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I can live in Alameda and you start like doing, and you build this whole picture out of like, this would be a great lifestyle. That's the other way to do this here. You build out this like vision of a lifestyle that takes advantage of capital you have and say, okay, how do I get there as closely as possible? And then

• 59:25Cal Newport?

  you're getting your evidence from if I want this job at this place, what degree do I need? What milestones can I look at to see if my degree or grades or program is sufficient to get it? Like what else are they looking for? So you got to choose what you're looking for and then you got to get the evidence. Pretend like you're writing a book about whatever you decide you're trying to do. Like you're writing a short book called how to do X. Like, I'm doing research to write a how to book about how to succeed in this thing. Gather that evidence. Gird your loins because you might not like what you hear. And in fact, you might hear for your plan, no, you're, you're off the path. Yes, it's not possible. You got to change. Like, okay, great. Let me change now before it's too late. So clarity about what you're looking for, whether that's grand goal or lifestyle centric, and then

• 1:00:08Cal Newport?

  you got to do evidence based planning. You got to talk to real people and get real evidence about these specific steps I'm doing specifically will help me and get those milestones figured out. Here is how I will know before I get to the very end of this plan, if things are not going well. So those will be the things I would, I would put in there. People leave out the, the milestones are good. I think it's important.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Cal Newport?

  Doctoral programs in particular, you can milestone this very clearly. If you want to be a professor, for example, which honestly is outside of some exceptions, some fields, that is the, the primary reason to begin to PhD is to be in academia. There are really clear milestones you can get. Am I really going to like, so let's say you have a dream of you want a job like mine. Like, I want to be a tenured professor at a top 20 university with, you know, grad students and working on like have a relatively limited teaching load and great kids that I'm teaching and like work on cool research and travel like you, I want to be like a what we think about when we think about professors.

• 1:01:12Cal Newport?

  There are crystal clear milestones you can have in your graduate program. Or if I have not hit this milestone at this point, maybe I want to ripcord. Right? Like, because you need like milestone number one for a job like that. Are you at an absolute top program?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  For undergrad, right?

• 1:01:32Cal Newport?

  Well, yeah, but yes, undergrad. And then for grad schools, like if we're going to look at the grad school milestones, it's like, okay, are you at a top five program? If not, like, ooh, already you want to start questioning this. Right? Two, you figure out along the way, are these courses pretty easy for me? Right? You know, I aced all my courses at MIT. If you're not acing them, they're not, they're not trying to make them super hard. I mean, they're hard because it's at MIT, but they're not trying to trip you up. It's like you should be able to, these should not be hard for you. If they are, you'll figure this out in your first two years. You're like, okay, maybe this is not for me because you have to just own this stuff. Right? Next, research, like, once you're like three years in, am I publishing good stuff?

• 1:02:16Cal Newport?

  And if you're not, right? You're being helped along by your advisor, they're putting you on things. You know, you're going to ripcord it because you have to be a standout researcher in your graduate program.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28Cal Newport?

  To have a shot of getting, yeah, and publishing papers in hard places unambiguously. This paper was published here, it's hard to publish a paper here, it's getting cited. You're not doing that by three years in. Again, you should ripcord. Now, some places kind of do this for you. It's like MIT has a, at least they did, I don't know now. They had a very ambiguously defined qualification as part of your doctoral qualifications that was called the research qualifier. And it was basically ambiguous on purpose. It was a way for them to basically move you out if you couldn't deliver research. And you, you have to have done it at some point by the end of your third year, I think.

• 1:03:08Cal Newport?

  And what it was, was like on paper, it was, you have a panel of professors and you present some of your research. So what happened is if you're not really doing good research, this is what you would have nothing to present, right? And then they would say you failed your research qualifier. Cornell, or maybe this is Carnegie Mellon. I think Carnegie Mellon, they had a day called Black Friday, where they would call out of a second or third year grad students, or it's just like, we're just gonna make this easier for you. You're not gonna be a very successful graduate out of here. So leave the program now. And it's the, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Like at MIT, you can't apply to get a master's in computer science. You can

• 1:03:50Cal Newport?

  only get one along the way, on the way to a PhD. So like, I have a master's in computer science from MIT as well. You just get it along the way to your PhD. So they're, they're nice about it, right? If it's, if it's not coming together, they're gonna let you get that master's, so you'll leave with the master's degree. And you didn't pay for it, because you were in a doctoral program where you took these classes. So you're getting paid, you're not paying for it. So it's like you got a free master's, only took you a couple of years. Several of the people I know who, who left at that stage, have just made bank, because they're like, I've got my master's from MIT, Google, here I come. And you know, 10 years later, you're at your whiteboard and the professor and their, their yacht, right? But anyways.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  But those people weren't that top of students? They can still make all that money in the private sector?

• 1:04:35Cal Newport?

  They are top students, because they're, they're at like the MIT doctoral program, which meant that they were like the top student in their undergrad class. It's just the stakes keep getting higher.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:04:47Cal Newport?

  Like, if you're there, if you have a master's in computer science from MIT, meant you were top one or two in your undergrad program, and it was probably a top undergrad program. And then you have professors saying like, this is one of my best students. It's just so, what it means if you leave there in a master's program, really what it means is like, I couldn't, research didn't work for me. And it's not that you're not smart, it's just, there's also like an entrepreneurship to it. And I don't know, just like, you're like, this isn't working for me. I'm not able to sort of write a bunch of papers. This is not coming together. Which I don't, if you're at Google, you might not care.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I mean, I remember being, and I don't mean to go off too much tangent here. I remember someone from our field, early on, going off to Google. They're a grad student. And they're, they're like, I don't think it's gonna come together as a, I'm not killing it enough to be a professor, I'm gonna go to Google. And they came back to one of our conferences to present research data before they went. And I remember how horrified me and my fellow theoreticians were, where they talked about that he had the program now. He had to write computer code. We're like, oh my God. Cause for like a theoretician who's training to be a professor, to have to write computer code is like you're training for the MBA and you're running the locker room. It was just like, I remember that. Oh, you have to code?

• 1:06:01Cal Newport?

  By the way, he's killing it, killed it. He's going to Google in the early 2000s. Like he's killing it. But anyway, it just gets so, so rarefied. And then like out of that class, only like the top X percent go off to the, the tier one, R1 schools for professorships.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  So then in terms of the courses, when you were doing well in the, were a lot of people not doing well?

• 1:06:22Cal Newport?

  I don't know.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Cause it seems to me then everybody would be doing well if they got a masters.

• 1:06:27Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I think they made those courses.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Like did anybody struggle?

• 1:06:31Cal Newport?

  Yeah, they're just very quiet about it. Yeah. Well, you have to, so at MIT, and I'm just using that as an example because I know them well. If you didn't, you had to get really good grades or you're out too.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Cal Newport?

  I think you had to get As or A minuses and everything.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  So everybody's pretty much doing good.

• 1:06:50Cal Newport?

  Everyone's good when they're kicked out of the program. There is no like, oh yeah.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  And they want to get a masters.

• 1:06:54Cal Newport?

  They would have got, yeah, you have to, so right. So you would not, you had to have gotten As or A minuses in, it was called a technical qualifying exam. They split the courses into buckets, theory and systems or whatever. And you had to like pick a course from each of the buckets and do really well in it. So if you didn't do that, you didn't pass your technical qualifier, you couldn't get your masters. So you're right, you're right. But you really didn't hear about those kids because like they're.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  So that particular kid wouldn't be going to Google and crushing it most likely.

• 1:07:24Cal Newport?

  They, well, yeah, but they still got into MIT. So they were still like, it might just be, they just didn't have their act together. I mean, the classes I guess were hard.

• 1:07:35Cal Newport?

  God, I don't remember. I remember, all I remember is taking theory with Mike Sipser.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  Is it similar classes that you teach now for regressions?

• 1:07:42Cal Newport?

  I did. Yeah, it was interesting. I like, I took theory of computation, graduate theory of computation with Michael Sipser, who was the head of the math department at MIT at the time, but he wrote the definitive textbook on it, the Sipser textbook on complexity and computability theory. And then when I got to Georgetown, like, that's what I taught was doctoral student, the doctoral level theory of computation using Mike Sipser's textbook.

• 1:08:04Speaker 01

  You still talk to him?

• 1:08:05Cal Newport?

  I, no, I didn't. It was, these classes are huge. It's like Good Will Hunting over there. You're in these like old auditoriums where you have the, like, the little flip over desk thing that comes next to you. And Sipser taught it exactly out of that scene in Good Will Hunting with the professor and the chalkboard. He has the, the three level chalkboards where you pull them up and down, and he'd move them up and down. He had teaching assistants. I mean, it's exactly out of, out of Good Will Hunting. And then when you would take your exams, it was in the gym, and they would just have like 500 seats because it would be all these classes taking them at the same time. And there'd be flags that would have like the course number. So you'd go sit by your flag for your course number, and there would just be TAs wandering this giant gym full of people like taking their final exams. It was like really old school.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:47Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I mean, it's really like, you just gotta perform, like, do well on this exam, you know? Yeah, interesting times.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  There you go, Jacob. You got a good answer there.

• 1:08:56Cal Newport?

  All right. You're now prepared to get your computer science degree at MIT. All right, we gotta speed this up, Jesse. What do we got next?

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Next question's from Ahmed. I'm a college student in Tunisia. Can I use the principles of slow productivity for my coursework? Sorry, that was slow productivity corner too, so we have to play the music.

• 1:09:13Cal Newport?

  Let's hear some music, yeah.

• 1:09:20Cal Newport?

  That's slow productivity corner, questions related to my book, Slow Productivity, which you should buy. All right, so Ahmed's question. Slow productivity, does it relate to learning things?

• 1:09:33Cal Newport?

  That's a good question.

• 1:09:37Cal Newport?

  Yes, but I wouldn't say it the way you said it, Ahmed. Right? So you're saying, should I apply the principles of slow productivity? I would say this another way. If you treat your studies as a college student like a job, like you, you use best practices, like do it well, it will match the principles of slow productivity. Right? It's not that hard of a job. And if you're doing it right, it should match the principles of slow productivity without you having to start with the principles and figure out how to apply them to your student job. Because I mean, I think there's just some best practices for being a student, which are congruent with the principles of slow productivity. Right? So like, here's the things I always talk about.

• 1:10:20Cal Newport?

  You know, you treat your, your studies like a job, right? Don't just like study in some sort of ambiguous way. Like, how do I actually do this as my job? You should autopilot schedule the stuff that happens regularly. If you know you have a problem set due every week, pick the same time on the same days and the same place to work on that problem set. If you're gonna have a lab report due every other week, have on your calendar exactly when and where you work on that lab report, same place, same time, same days every week. So you automate all the stuff you know you have to do, so you don't have to make those decisions on the fly. You need to use specific study strategies. How are you studying for this exam? How are you working on your problem set? How are you writing a paper? You need specific strategies that you think are going to be very effective.

• 1:11:05Cal Newport?

  And then you need to evaluate those strategies. How did this go? Did I do well on the test? Did I do well, but there was a lot of wasted time? Like, you go back and you evolve your study. What's the better way to study? What's a better way to write papers? You've got to evolve it towards what works best. Because a tested study strategy that you've worked on can be 3X more time efficient than just quote unquote, "studying at the library." It really makes a difference. So you want to be very specific about how you study, and you want to evolve or improve those based on evidence. There's a lot of key principles for, you know, how to build these things. The most relevant book here would really be my book, "How to Become a Straight-Aid Student." Where I talk about how actual straight A college students who are not grinds would study. And you'll see principles in there, like active recall rules.

• 1:11:49Cal Newport?

  Don't just read things quietly, always generate things from scratch without looking at your notes to see if you can do it. That's how you learn things. I talk about math classes is all about sample problems, finding sample problems everywhere. From your book. From the lectures, from the problem sets, like you're just like a sponge for sample problems to see if you can actually solve them. I have methods in there, best practices for writing papers. I have a sort of three-phase method for writing papers. I have a very specific method that's pretty analog for how you manage your research for working on a college paper. You have to have specificity. So use something like my book to jumpstart those strategies, but then evolve them based on your own experience. And then finally, you just want to be careful about your time in general, outside of autopilot scheduling,

• 1:12:32Cal Newport?

  time block to some degree of your days. You don't need a time block every minute of your days as a student, but figure out in advance, hey, what studying do I need to do today? When am I going to do it? So you don't have to time block all eight hours of like a workday, but you do need to time block the stuff you have to do that day or is on your plan. You want to time block when that actually happens, instead of just like waiting till you feel like you have a bunch of time. The only other hack I would throw your way is at the beginning of the semester, take the big things, exams and big papers. Put them on your calendar, and then work backwards, right? Work backwards a certain number of weeks and put on your calendar, make plan for upcoming exam or paper. Typically, like three weeks or four,

• 1:13:16Cal Newport?

  three to four weeks is a good scale here. But you know you have a paper due at the end of December. You should have at the beginning of December, make plan for paper due at the end of December. And then when you get there in your calendar, you say, great, now I'm going to put aside time for the next month for when and how I'm going to work on this paper. And in that way, you never have deadlines creep up. Anyways, do these type of things. Your life as a student should more or less correspond with slow productivity. Let's check it out. Do fewer things. I mean, okay, your workload is your workload in college. You just want to make sure that you're not too overload on any one given day. Work at a natural pace. This really gives you control over your time. So it's not panic before

• 1:13:57Cal Newport?

  deadline and then sloth. It allows you to have sort of a more smoothed out variability. And you can plan, I don't want to work on Friday, but I got started on my paper a month early. So I'm not stuck having to work on this thing all out for three days right before it's due. That will help. And then obsess over quality. Well, that's what you're doing when you care about your study, actual study tactics. I care about doing well in terms of the grade I get. So in some sense, this book I published in 2006, How to Become a Straight A Student, is like a handbook for a slow productive lifestyle as a student. So maybe check that book out to help prime you and you will see the principles of slow productivity will show up in your student life.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  The do fewer things you talk about a lot in that book too, like not doing too many clubs and stuff like that.

• 1:14:44Cal Newport?

  That's true. That's a big deal. Yeah, that's a big deal. I don't know what the culture is like in Tunisia, but there's like an American culture of doing a lot of extracurriculars. I was like, don't do that. There's an American culture of if I have a really hard course load, I'm going to impress people. Don't do that. It's going to impress maybe like your cardiologist because of like the, the heart attack you're going to have, but no one else notices. Employers don't care. They don't have the time to look at your schedule and understand that it was really hard that you were taking three computer science courses in the spring of your junior year. They don't know. Like what'd you major in? Where'd you go? What grades did you get? So make those things easier. Yeah. Don't overload yourself. I was talking to a student the other day. I failed to convince him to change, but he had three different relatively significant extracurriculars going on at the same time.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  Is one of them a sport?

• 1:15:31Cal Newport?

  No, sports are killer, man. Man, that's what I remember from my, my one year experience as an NCAA athlete. It's time consuming.

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Cal Newport?

  Because you're traveling, right? Like that's, I mean, it's not just that you're like you're training all the time, but also, you know, because I was going to school in New Hampshire, this meant even when you're training, you have to travel to train because like the river is iced over. So we have to go down to like Georgia. And then when it gets later in the season, let's go to Boston because the Charles has melted before the Connecticut. So you're traveling just to train. And then when you're in season and a lot of sports like rowing has a fall and a spring season, like you're, you're in hotels all the time. So now you're doing like, uh, you have to get used, you're doing homework, you know, like in the hotel lobbies. You got good at that. Like going down to the hotel lobby where they have the coffee and like, that's where you would work on your homework. It's like impossible. I remember that research, by the way, back when I was working on those

• 1:16:23Cal Newport?

  study books 20 years ago. Um, this was clear research. I have no idea where this came from now, but I remember clearly the research was saying some things you can still get good grades with, right? Um, other commitments, not. The commitment that had like the clearest negative correlation with grades was athletics. It's just so time consuming.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:48Cal Newport?

  That's why they invent these fake majors and stuff like this.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:51Cal Newport?

  Problem is when you're majoring in computer science, I needed to be in like the LSU major for their star offensive line, you know?

• 1:17:02Cal Newport?

  We're going to sort blocks by colors, whatever. We just don't want you worried about this. We need you to be focused on the game.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Should we hear the music again?

• 1:17:11Cal Newport?

  Let's hear it one more time.

• 1:17:21Cal Newport?

  All right, that put me back in a good mood. Do we have a call this week, Jesse?

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  We do.

• 1:17:25Cal Newport?

  All right, let's hear it.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Hi, Cal. My name is Meg and I'm an academic librarian currently recovering from my stint as department chair, but blissfully embarking on a 10-month sabbatical. During this time, I am committed to pursuing a creative project that I've long wished to complete, a murder mystery set on a college campus. I've been a longtime fan of your work, especially your insights on deep work and time management that I've tried to use at work. But with 10 months of unstructured time laying ahead of me, I need some new process. I'm curious to know how you use your own time management practices to organize your writing sabbaticals in the past. As I navigate this creative process, I found myself grappling with how to break down such

• 1:18:11Speaker 04

  an expansive project across such an expansive period of time. I'm curious, when you're writing a book, do you rely on specific systems of projects and project lists, subprojects, or some other structured framework to keep your writing momentum up? How do you balance staying flexible with ensuring consistent progress on your writing? And do you find that a weekly review is necessary when you're able to tackle just a single large project at a time? Thanks for your insights, Cal, and I promise to put your advice to good use solving fictional murders.

• 1:18:45Cal Newport?

  All right, so I'm gonna give two answers here. My first answer is gonna be like what I think you should do during your 10-month writing sabbatical. And then I'll answer your second question about how I tackle and structure book projects. These aren't necessarily going to be the same answer. All right, in terms of what you should do, I would suggest in your 10-month sabbatical, having a five-day-a-week writing habit. It should be the first thing you do, probably every day. Then be relatively uncommitted after that. You want to take advantage of the fact it's a sabbatical. You might want to do like I do in the summers is if there's still going to be some like meetings and calls and work stuff in your life, make those Tuesday through Thursday in the afternoon so that Monday and Fridays, like after you're done writing, you're just done.

• 1:19:30Cal Newport?

  So I'd write, quick email. Only middle of the week do I have like things that are scheduled and like really just lean into the rest of the time doing non-work-related stuff. So write five days a week. You need a community for this. You haven't written one of these mysteries before, I'm assuming. So you need to join a writer's group, a mystery writers' group. You can find these online. There's probably a convention you can go to as well. There'll probably be one that is held at some point, hopefully not too late into your sabbatical, but don't wait for that convention to get going. You need to join a writer's group and right away get committed to get feedback on the plot, start writing chapters. We're gonna read chapters. Like you gotta just get going. Is it your first book and it's your first novel potentially? So it might be what you're really gonna end up with at the end of 10 months is a draft

• 1:20:14Cal Newport?

  of a novel that's not there, but now you've broken the seal and you've learned a lot of things, you've picked up a lot of skills by talking to the other writers, and now you're well-suited to sort of more systematically transform this thing even once you're back to work. So join a group, commit to producing things, work every day, two to four hours, and let that just start to add up. That's what I would do. The other thing I would add, find a way to make the writing fun. It doesn't have to be every day, but like go to cool places to write, do adventure writing. Go, don't just, I'm just always going to sit down dreary like, like punish myself in my basement, like next to the dripping pipe and that's just where I'm going to write, like make the writing actually fun.

• 1:20:57Cal Newport?

  If you're trying to crack a plot point, like this is great, I'm going to go like an early morning hike through this trail I like. I'm going to bring a notebook and what am I doing this morning? I'm cracking this, this plot point, right? Or I'm going to go to this museum and I'm going to work there. I'm going to have like a whole morning, a whole half day where I'm going to go and I'm going to have like a breakfast here and lunch here. And I'm going to bring a mystery book to read during lunch and I'm going to work at this live, this public library. And then I'm going to go for this walk and then go to the cafe at this museum. Like make the writing fun, not every day, some days it can be just sitting there, but you, you have a sabbatical. You want to associate with your mind, this is fun. I like working on this, this is better than being department chair, right? I mean, this is different. There is a tendency a lot of people have when they're writing, they feel bad about it, that this doesn't feel bad enough.

• 1:21:40Cal Newport?

  So they try to make their experience be harder, somehow that justifies it to themselves or the rest of the world. You earned a sabbatical. Make the writing fun, make it restorative. Like you earned it. This is not you being lazy. It's six years worth of semesters, I'm sure you had to do to, to earn this 10 months off. In terms of my own writing projects, I tend to, I have a long period of working on the idea and working on the annotated outline for the idea. When I'm leading up to selling it, since I write nonfiction, you sell it first. Once I'm happy with it, I sell it. Then I go through a long period where I sort of change what I want it to be. I often do a lot of this work on foot. I'm working in single purpose notebooks, trying to crack what I think the book should be.

• 1:22:24Cal Newport?

  Then I just start writing chapter by chapter. I typically write books sequentially, starting with the first chapter, the introduction I come back and do at the end. And that's how I start to get a feel for the book. Usually at some point, three or four chapters in, it might lead to some relatively significant changes to the structure. After I really feel like, what do I have access to? How is this unfolding? How are the ideas unfolding? And I'll go back and radically change the structure again. But it really is just like, I'm, once I have thought a long time about what I want to write, I just start writing and just doing the work. I want to write this many days a week. I want to make progress on this chapter. And some days that's a lot of typing. Some days that's just a lot of like tracking down sources. Some days it's completely reworking things, but I want to just keep going.

• 1:23:04Cal Newport?

  And I stop and I rework as needed to integrate the lessons I'm obtaining as I actually try to make progress. And it's just in my life. It's like one of the things I do, but I'm a professor. So it's what I do. If it's not working on a book, it's working on academic articles. It would be working on trade publication articles. Like my job is built around this idea that you are spending regular time writing. So this just sort of fits. This is like what I, what I have done my entire life. I started writing regularly my senior year of college. That's when I was writing how to win a college. And ever since then, I was just, I'm always just writing. As a grad student, it's academic papers and it was books. And as a professor, it's the same idea. So that's how I go about it. I think a lot about the idea and then I

• 1:23:46Cal Newport?

  just get going and I update as I needed. So anyways, I'm jealous about your sabbatical. I think your plan is awesome. Have fun with it. Have fun with it for sure. But you need a community. Don't just do this on your own.

• 1:23:58Speaker 01

  Two quick follow up questions. I thought you started writing like earlier than that, like your sophomore year.

• 1:24:02Cal Newport?

  Yeah, but in terms of like a daily practice.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:24:04Cal Newport?

  Yeah, because I, that was, I remember is like, I woke up every morning and I would write before my first class. So like, that was the first time. I mean, I wrote for the, the Jack-o'-lantern, the humor magazine before that. But it would be like, oh, there's an issue coming out. And then I would write a bunch of pieces, but there might be other times where I wasn't writing. But it's like, it's a regular thing I'm always doing that that really got started my senior year.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  And that's when you started the book or you started the book?

• 1:24:26Cal Newport?

  That's when I started the first book. Yeah.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:24:28Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So I wrote the first book, the fall of my senior year.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  And then one else, so fiction books is different. You write the book first and then you sell it?

• 1:24:37Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So in fiction, yeah, well, it's yes and, right? So your first, in general, in fiction books, like if you're an unknown author, you're giving your, they're buying the manuscript. You write the whole book first. Yeah.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:24:49Cal Newport?

  Nonfiction, you don't do that. And it's a problem if you do that. And everyone always ignores me when I say that because they want to just get right to the writing. They're worried about rejection and they think they can somehow get around rejection by writing the book first, but it's not the way it works.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Why is it different?

• 1:25:04Cal Newport?

  Because they want to be able to, well, partially, they want to be able to help shape the book. But also, just like the idea in nonfiction is your advance is supposed to help pay for you to go do the research to write the book.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  I guess more the other way. Why is it different for fiction?

• 1:25:16Cal Newport?

  Because they have no way of knowing if the book's going to be good. Like, so for nonfiction, it's like, it's not going to be, if you're, if you're a good writer, like, you know how to write, you're an expert on this, you're going to write a book on this, we'll help you shape it, it's going to be fine. But a novel, like, I just come to you like, I've got a great idea for a mystery novel set in academia, like, it could be terrible.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  That's a good point.

• 1:25:35Cal Newport?

  You know what I mean? Like, novel writing's harder, right? So it could just be terrible. The exception is multi-book deals, right? So typically, like, let's say you have a book that's, like, successful, and especially in genre writing, they'll then sign you to be like, okay, give us three more. And, and you haven't written those yet, now you owe them those books. So, so like, in fiction, when you're new, you have to write the book first, and that's what you're selling. But if you're in a genre, they will probably sign you to a multi-book deal, and now they're paying you, but you've proven yourself already. Like, you've given them a book that's, like, done well already. All right, we've got a case study here. This is where people send in their accounts of using the type of advice we talk about on this show. Today's case study comes from Sean.

• 1:26:19Cal Newport?

  "I'm a 33-year-old software engineer. I've worked to remove social platforms for my life. I left all the big social media platforms since 2016. This has helped me reduce digital clutter to the minimum. YouTube was more challenging, but I disabled the history collection setting. The benefit is there are no recommendation algorithms on the landing page. I've reduced my YouTube subscriptions. I also created a new account that only has tech content. For Reddit, an ad block plugin has helped doom scrolling. For LinkedIn, I only follow folks in my field. Since I have made the lucrative platforms boring, I have more time for myself. I have times in the evening which I could invest back into my career and learn new things. I have also found more time to exercise every other day.

• 1:27:01Cal Newport?

  Since saving time, I have retrained my brain to not rely on a lot of platforms, and I'm hitting the gym for a couple hours every alternate day. In a nutshell, win-win in career, win-win in health, and win-win in fulfillment." All right, I like this case study. There is a, a particular thing I want to point out from it. So in my book, Digital Minimalism, I talk about these type of- De-interestifications, you're doing the social media platforms as joining the attention resistance. And it's strategies where you have some valuable thing you need to get out of a social platform, but you don't want the social platform to extract hours of your time in return. So you use tools like block, blocking plugins, or turning off history collection settings, etc., that makes the platform less interesting.

• 1:27:44Cal Newport?

  You can still get the thing out of it, you want to get out of it, but you pay less of that ancillary price. So we call that joining the attention resistance. It's an alternative to just quitting these platforms, and it's what you deploy when there are some legitimate reasons you need to use them. What's useful or enlightening about this case study is, look what happens. He's using a bunch of platforms, but he made them non-interesting. So he's just using them for the actual reasons people give when you say, hey, why are you still on YouTube? Why are you still on LinkedIn? You know those reasons people give? He's only using his platforms for those reasons and turning off the other things, the things we don't really care about, but that captures our attention, and their impact on him is minimal. His hours of time is freed, he's going to the gym, like, they don't really have a big footprint in his life.

• 1:28:28Cal Newport?

  So it just goes to belie this idea that you can leap immediately from, I need to be on Instagram, like, to keep up with these artists who are in my field, that you have to jump from that to, I need to be on Instagram for hours every day. Or, I use YouTube because I like to listen to Deep, watch the Deep Questions podcast, therefore, I need to be spending hours on YouTube every day. This belies that connection. It says, no, no, no, you can, if you actually use these platforms just for the specific reasons you have to use them, they don't play a big role in your life. This idea that you have to be on your phone all the time, like, looking at these things all the time, that is new. That is invented by these platforms. That is a business model that you are just a line item in a big spreadsheet for, and

• 1:29:12Cal Newport?

  that is completely optional. So you can, you can engage with the internet, without the internet, capturing your full mind. So I think that's a great reminder of the power of joining the attention resistance.

• 1:29:25Cal Newport?

  All right. So speaking of which, we've got a good final segment coming up where we'll talk about a tech corner on social media and legal standards for bands. But first, here from a sponsor.

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

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• 1:30:03Cal Newport?

  So I want to talk about our friends at Indeed. Let's say you just realized that your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find an amazing candidate fast, easy, just use Indeed? When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job seen on the other job sites. Indeed sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidate so you can reach the people you want faster. This makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored job posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored request.

• 1:30:52Cal Newport?

  I was just thinking about this the other day, Jesse. Why I wish we would have been useful to have Indeed. Thinking about how did I find you? My memory was I had to charter a blimp and I dropped leaflets. And it said, "You want podcast help? Podcast good time, good." And then it was a picture of me giving a thumbs up. That was a hard way to hire. If I had had Indeed, I could have just had a sponsored job listing and that would have gone much better. Plus, with Indeed sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed? In the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed data. And

• 1:31:35Cal Newport?

  those were all hires by me. I'm building out this team. Let's roll. A hundred people here working at Deep Work HQ. So there's no, no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility if you go to indeed.com/deep. Just go to indeed.com/deep right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/deep. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. I also want to talk about our friends at the sponsor whose name we most like to pronounce and that is Zocdoc. Let's say you wake up and you have some sort of symptom. It's catching your attention.

• 1:32:18Cal Newport?

  You don't know what this is. What can you do? Your instinct might be to jump on TikTok and see, let's see what the influencers there say, but maybe TikTok is banned right now. And you realize what I really need to do is get actual medical help. What stops us is that it is a pain logistically to find a doctor who is in our area and takes the right insurance and is taking new patients and has an appointment available. How would you figure that all out? This is where Zocdoc enters the scene. Zocdoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in-network doctors and click to instantly book an appointment. We're talking about booking in-network appointments with more than 100,000 doctors across every specialty from mental health to dental health, primary

• 1:33:02Cal Newport?

  care to urgent care and more. But we don't recommend that you book the appointment with all 100,000 at once. You should, a little bit of ambiguous wording here. You could do that, but you can instead pull from that vast collection to find the ones you need. Filter for doctors who take your insurance, are located nearby, are a good fit for any medical needs you may have, and are highly rated by verified patients. I like the ratings. You get a sense of like, what's it actually like going to this doctor's office? Once you find the right doctor, you can see their actual appointment openings, choose a time slot that works for you, click and boom, you booked your visit. Appointments made through Zocdoc also happen fast, typically within just 24 to 72 hours of booking. You can even sometimes score same day appointments.

• 1:33:48Cal Newport?

  Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to zocdoc.com/deep to find and instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's z o c d o c dot com slash deep, zocdoc.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, move on to our final segment. So we're going to do another tech corner here because I have been writing a series of columns for the New Yorker this month. We have a lot of my own material to draw from. We have yet again, another New Yorker column of mine that was just published. The title, and I'll have this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of listening, the title is, is social media

• 1:34:28Cal Newport?

  more like cigarettes or junk food? The deck here is lawmakers attempting to regulate children's access to social media must decide whether bans or warning labels are the optimal route for keeping kids safe. And here, there's a picture of a cop. This is so much more friendly than the article, was it last week?

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Cal Newport?

  Man, where it was a picture of a phone melting someone's face. We've gone from that to like a fun cartoon kid. This is better. Makes you less stressed. Here's the premise. Here's the question in this article. All right, we, we worry about social media. It has some harms. How much we're debating, right? We want to take action. We all kind of agree we should do something. There's lots of laws, et cetera. But what, what should they be? The help makes sense of all this. I said, okay, let's look at two past examples historically, where there have been a product that presented harm for kids and we had to react to. The first product was cigarette smoking. We worried about kids smoking and we reacted. How do

• 1:35:30Cal Newport?

  we react? We passed laws that said you can't buy cigarettes if you're a kid. We passed a cigarette ban based on age. The other example was junk food. We worried about kids and junk food as junk food became more prevalent after the mid-century point. We were especially worried about all of the kid targeted advertising, advertising that was happening during kids' programming, which really pushed kids to eat a huge amount of this food and was bad for them. We worried about kids' junk food as well. What do we do in response to that? We didn't ban junk food from kids. We didn't even ban advertising to kids, but we took more of a, let's give parents tools to help them manage this for their kids on their own. So here is nutritional labeling. Here's the food pyramid. We're going to give you

• 1:36:12Cal Newport?

  information, but then you're going to manage this risk on your kids on your own. So the question of the article then is when it comes to social media, if we're thinking about this as a potentially harmful to kids product, is it more like cigarettes or is it more like junk food? And then, once we had that clear question, because the answer will give us some sense of how we should react, I looked at the historical context of both of those past reactions and the legal standards for both of those past reactions. They were historically contingent. Cigarettes were actually banned from kids in the 19th century. It was more moralistic times. The context matters, whereas junk food became a big deal in the 1970s.

• 1:36:55Cal Newport?

  This is Vietnam. This is Watergate. We weren't really looking as Americans for a lot of government intervention in our lives at that point. So the context does matter, but there are also legal standards. So let me quote here what I learned from Meg Jones, a colleague of mine at Georgetown, who specializes in technology and law. She said, "We imposed outright bans for kids when activities involve permanent or hard to reverse consequences, like tattoos or contracts, addiction, like tobacco and gambling, activities with high potential for exploitation, such as hazardous entertainment jobs, and parents unable to assess or manage risks." So by those standards, cigarettes, we had a fear of addiction and

• 1:37:35Cal Newport?

  hard to reverse consequences, whereas for junk food, we don't. We figure like, parents can sort of manage the junk food that's in their house. And with the right information, it's okay to have birthday cake on birthdays. We wouldn't want to ban it, and they should be able to. It's not going to have impossible to reverse or addictive consequences if you're having some junk food. And so we shouldn't ban it. Well, we'll do something like information. How does social media fare by both these standards? Well, by the legal standards, Jones told me it's not doing well. It really is leaning more towards the Marlboros than the Big Macs right now. There is a real fear of addictive use that is addictive once in your life. And there's also a clear signal, an increasingly strong signal from parents saying, we are having a hard time managing this on our own.

• 1:38:18Cal Newport?

  This is as much a social problem as it is a technological problem. It's hard for an individual parent to like, make these choices. The software, we can't control what our kids are doing on here. So increasingly from the legal standard perspective, social media for kids is looking a little bit more like the case that we applied to cigarettes. From a contextual perspective, there is also an argument to be made that the vibes are shifting more pro ban right now than say they were during the junk food era. We're going through actively right now, the Tik Tok fallout. It was, they had to shut down or divest and they didn't and they turned off and they turned back on, but the app is back on, but Google and Apple are still not letting you buy the app in the app store

• 1:38:59Cal Newport?

  because the law says they shouldn't and Trump is saying you can, but they said you can't overwrite the law on the Supreme Court with an executive order. What matters about all of that, because that has nothing to do with kids. That's about national security, is that it expanded our civic imagination potentially. We can imagine now passing laws or banning some of this technology and life still goes on. Right. So that's like, it's, it's an option that we might be more comfortable with. We see more of this going on right now anyways. The FDA just banned red food diet number three, in part thinking about health concerns for kids. So we're kind of in a mood right now. We're like, okay, maybe we're a little bit open. Pass some laws, take some things off the table. It's okay, we can do this type of thing. So you put these two things together and maybe we see a future in which something like Australia's

• 1:39:44Cal Newport?

  response to social media, where they just simply said last fall, under 16, you can't use it. Maybe something like that is going to become more ubiquitous. Maybe that will even make it here to the US. Here's Jones, I'm quoting her in my article. I think age verification is going to pass constitutional scrutiny this year. And we're going to see a wave of state laws restricting social media for kids. And she adds, or maybe that's just my wishful thinking. Well, we'll see, but I think it's more of a possibility than it has been at any point in the past 10 year history of ubiquitous social media use. We care about kids in harm. We have very specific ways we figure out how to react to it. And when we apply those specific ways, we realize.

• 1:40:23Cal Newport?

  The answer we accepted a few years ago of just kids these days use their phones, what you're going to do is actually no longer sufficient. There's a real debate to be had here. And once we start having those debate, a lot of interesting options come on the table. So there we go. I have one column left, Jesse. It's my third of four that I'm writing in a four week period.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  Beast mode.

• 1:40:42Cal Newport?

  All I'm going to say about the last one is that it will involve Michael Crichton.

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:40:47Cal Newport?

  And it is not just a long review of Eruption. Though I might try to find a way to work in a reference to Eruption. It's just 2,000 words in The New Yorker, picking apart how I don't know who the characters are, even after reading 300 pages. I don't know their names. That's a sign of bad writing. That's not Crichton, though. Crichton was, that's James Ferris's fault. All right, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. 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.

• 1:41:32Cal Newport?

  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 challenge 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.