Ep. 342: The Good Life Algorithm

How do escape a life of shallowness and distraction to cultivate something deeper and more meaningful? In this episode, Cal draws from both algorithm theory and the habits of a reclusive author to highlight an effective strategy for achieving this goal – one that underscores the advantages of the small targeted changes versus major grand leaps. He then answers listener questions and reviews the five books he read in February. Find out more about Done Daily at DoneDaily.com! Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: The Good Life Algorithm [1:42] - How should a federal worker navigate all the negative news? [23:56] - How do I get my non-geeky partner on board with the deep life! [26:40] - How can I develop a schedule with flexibility following a health setback? [29:08] - How should I reshape a once successful aerospace company? [35:06] - Are there perceived benefits to pseudo productivity? [43:32] - CALL: What does it mean to work enough each week? [50:19] CASE STUDY: Can knowledge workers be happy doing less? [58:55] FEBRUARY BOOKS: The 5 Books Cal Read in February, 2025 [1:07:50] - Moral Ambition (Rutger Bregman) - Brotherhood of the Rose (David Morell) - How Dante Can Save Your Life (Rod Dreher) - Buzz Saw (Jesse Dougherty) - The Siren’s Call (Chris Hayes) 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/office-space/the-hollow-core-of-elon-musks-productivity-dogma tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/ Thanks to our Sponsors: landroverusa.com shopify.com/deep thrivemarket.com/deep vanta.com/deepquestions 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. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse. Jesse, here's what we need to do. Help me justify this. I think we need in the month of March to be moving the HQ to Florida near baseball spring training. There's got to be some way that we could figure that out because it's kind of cold here. Wouldn't it be great to be down, I think they're near Palm Beach, the Nationals? We could have like the Deep Work HQ South. There's got to be a way we can justify this.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Although this week has been pretty warm in DC. Yeah, you're right. We should move it down there.

• 0:56Cal Newport?

  I've been listening to the games and it's always 75 degrees sunny. We'll do that. That's the dream. That's the dream. That'll be my deep life. We're talking about the deep life in the show today. We haven't talked about it a little while. Have a new algorithm for us to discuss. So just keep in mind, as I discussed then, a new strategy for achieving a deep life in today's episode that in my mind in the background, I'm just thinking about how do I apply this to get our podcast down, down to spring training. We got a good show though. We got a lot to cover. As I mentioned, a deep dive about the deep life. We got a good array of questions and because this is our first podcast in March, in the final segment, I will talk about the books I read in February. We've got a lot to do, Jesse. I'm excited about it. Let's get rolling with our

• 1:40Cal Newport?

  deep dive. So I want to talk today about the desire to build a good life, one that's focused on what you care about, one that feels meaningful, one where the appeal of zoning out on your phone or losing hours to mindless video game playing. Is diminished. Now, I have a specific strategy for achieving this goal that I want to talk about in today's episode. It's one that's going to pull from both my background as a computer scientist, as well as from the habits of a reclusive writer. So this should be fun. I call it the good life algorithm. Let's get into it. All right, I'm going to start and my apologies for people who are watching instead of just listening. I'm going

• 2:24Cal Newport?

  to draw something. So this is always a risk. I haven't done this in a little while, Jesse. New viewers of the podcast are not used to my artistic skills, but here we go. I want to draw a picture that's going to help coordinate us here. I have a big box on the screen. Okay, so I want to think about this box as capturing possible lives. Let's say it that way. Now, within this space of possible lives that you could live, only some of them are actually achievable. So we'll draw like a region within this, this bigger space here. So if you're just listening, I'm drawing this region is green. So within this space of possible lives,

• 3:06Cal Newport?

  we kind of have a region of things that are actually reasonably achievable. So for example, here's a life outside of that region that might be becoming a Cy Young award-winning pitcher. If this was my diagram of achievable lives, I, I mean, I'm not quite there, Jesse. I still have some hope, but I'm rapidly getting to the point where like I'm probably not going to be able to make it to that. I'll probably not be a Cy Young award-winning pitcher. So there's lives in here that are achievable. All right. And what we want to do is get to the achievable lives that are deep or good. Like, I don't know, I'm, I'm drawing a couple possible lives in here. I'm going to highlight one of them, like maybe this life right here.

• 3:52Cal Newport?

  I have drawn up here this achievable life that I've circled. Maybe that is like a really good one. That's one that would satisfy our definition of deep, meaning that if you could live that life, it would feel meaningful, it would feel interesting, the appeal of being just distracted on your phone would be reduced like that. That's a goal. And then maybe like right now, you're, you're down, we're like down here. So circle of life, you know, down here on the side. The whole challenge, we want to think about this visually. The whole challenge of trying to cultivate a deep life is to try to get from wherever you are to one of these possible deep lives that's going to be much better. That is the challenge of trying to do some sort of lifestyle design. So the question is, how do we actually achieve that?

• 4:35Cal Newport?

  Well, what most people do is what I often call on this show, the grand goal strategy. This is where you pick an appealing sounding grand goal and just go for it and hope that it will, if achieved, to make your life better all at once. Well, when we have this diagram, this landscape of possible lives, it allows us to visualize the problem with this strategy because here's what actually happens if you apply the grand goal strategy. You can think about each of these possible lives that I've drawn here as a two dimensional picture. So they exist on, they're going to exist on two axes, right? So we can think about each of these points as being described by two values in this particular simple example. So like how far it is on this vertical line and how far it is on this horizontal line.

• 5:19Cal Newport?

  So I don't know, we can just make up properties, but maybe like this horizontal line describes like number of hours per day spent reading Brandon Sanderson books. So higher is more, lower is less. And maybe this one over here, the horizontal line represents like hours spent working per day. And so like as we move over here, you're working more hours and as your points over here are working less hours, like every point in the simplified example of some combination. In reality, of course, your lives will be defined by hundreds of couple, hundreds of relevant points. I can't draw on a hundred dimensional space. So let's just use two for this example. What happens when you apply the grand goal strategy is to simplify it a little bit. You're basically choosing one of these axes.

• 6:02Cal Newport?

  So like one of these points you care about and then just leaping. In that direction, hey, this is something I care about. My grand goal is going to take one of these properties and just take that singular property and try to greatly amplify that in my life. So for example, maybe you say, I really like, you know, I know I like reading Brandon Sanderson books, I'm going to find an opportunity, a big grand goal that's going to increase that. And maybe you decide I am going to start a, you know, a full-time business making novelty T-shirts with esoteric quotes from Brandon Sanderson books. You're going to read them all day, like looking for quotes. And so you make a big leap up that axis, but that's the only thing, whoops, that's the only thing you care about. So where might you end up?

• 6:47Cal Newport?

  Well, all you do know is that you're going to be increasing that one thing and maybe you end up like up here. So for those who are just listening, I've drawn something that is higher on the reading Brandon Sanderson scale, but it's also way far over on the hours of work scale because you weren't thinking about that. You were just trying to leap up. So maybe for example, you start that novelty shirt company and you're working 15-hour a days trying to pay your bills because you got to sell a lot of shirts and there's not a big market and you're really having to hustle. And so yes, you did improve, you did move, improve on this one factor, but you disregarded this other factor. So yeah, you're reading a lot of Brandon Sanderson in this example, but you're also exhausted from how much you're working. That's what happens with the grand goal strategy is it is a, think of it as a blunt way of

• 7:32Cal Newport?

  moving through the landscape of possible lives. You're just picking one of many dimensions that matters and just making a leap that increases that one dimension. But where it puts you on the other dimensions might be a problem is disregarding these other areas. So what should you do instead? Well, this is where I want to turn and take some advice I mentioned from a reclusive author. I'm going to bring up here an article on the screen and those who are listening, I mean watching instead of just listening can see this. See here. Okay. So this article, it's a podcast interview. This is from Tim Ferriss's podcast. Episode 361 of his podcast. This is from six years ago, February of 2019. I actually

• 8:15Cal Newport?

  remember listening to this interview. I was shoveling snow. I don't know I remember that, Jesse, but I was snubbling, shoveling snow. There was a big snowstorm in February of 2019 here in DC. The interview was with Jim Collins. So Jim Collins is a former Stanford Business School professor, who is a very well-known business book writer. Good to Great and Built to Last are probably his two most famous books. He sold something like 10 million total copies of his books, which puts him in like the elite of elite when it comes to nonfiction advice writing. He left Stanford right around the time he was 38 years old, so kind of similar to my age, just to write full-time. And he doesn't do a lot of public

• 8:58Cal Newport?

  interviews. So this, this was a big get for Tim, and we got some interesting insights into how Jim approached his life. And so there's a part in here that I want to capture, because we're going to bring back this idea that Jim Collins talks about in his, in his interview. We're going to bring it back to that landscape of possible lives, and it's going to help us solve this problem of how do we more systematically make our way to better lives. All right. So I'm going to quote, I'm going to quote here from the interview. Let me just set this up. Tim has, has mentioned to Jim, like, hey, I've heard you mention that you use like a stopwatch to track things, and that you track in particular, each day, how many hours you spend doing deep work. You put it in a spreadsheet, and you have

• 9:43Cal Newport?

  this goal of like 1,000 hours a year of doing deep work. Like, what's going on with this, Jim? Explain what's going on here. And so he said, okay, here's what he explained.

• 9:55Cal Newport?

  Let me find the right quote. Okay, so he explained why he was doing that. "I was worried what would happen if I went from being invisible to visible, and that if I was fortunate enough to have a success, that I might wake up in five or six or seven years and have not gone back to the wellspring of the deep, quiet solitude of work. And then your second book is half as good, right? So I started, as I was heading out on the Thelma and Louise leap," he's referring here to leaving being a professor, "counting my hours every day." All right. So that's how he got started. He was counting his, how many hours did I spend doing creative work every day? Because he, he thought if that went down, like you had a successful book, and that went down. Then he was never going to produce anything good again. So he was going to track it to make sure. So Tim starts pushing him because Tim likes details.

• 10:40Cal Newport?

  Okay, but Jim, like, what is in the spreadsheet? Is this all you're tracking? Like, every day, how many hours of deep work? And Jim revealed, I think, for the first time, well, actually, every line in my spreadsheet is one day, I have three cells on each line. So the first cell is actually a quick summary of what I did that day. The second cell, as I talked about, was the number of hours I spent doing deep work. What was interesting is the third cell, this is what's going to start getting us closer. All right, I'm going to read this. There's kind of an exchange here that's worth hearing in full. So here's what Jim says. Now, there's a third cell that I put in there that most people don't know as much about, because people know about the hours thing somewhat. But what I started to do is I started creating a code,

• 11:24Cal Newport?

  which is plus two, plus one, zero, minus one, minus two. And the other thing I put in, and the key on all of this, by the way, is you have to do it every day in real time. You can't, five days later, look back and say, how did I feel that day? And what this is, is a totally subjective, how quality was the day? Or like, a plus two is a super positive day. So Ferris interrupts and says, you're talking about emotionally speaking? And Jim Collins says, exactly, just like, was it a great day? A plus two is just a great day. Doesn't mean it wasn't. There might not have been a really difficult day. It might have been a day of total really hard rock climb. It might have been one of really hard riding, but if it felt really good, right? I'd put that down. Plus one is another positive day. Zero is meh.

• 12:06Cal Newport?

  Minus one is kind of a net tone negative, and minus two is bad days. And so you can say, over the last five years, what's going on in all of the plus two days? So Tim comes in and says, oh, so this is why you're writing the description of those days as well? And here we get to the punchline. Jim says, yeah, exactly. And over the last five years, what's going on in the minus two days? And now, as I navigate, it's kind of like the simplex method in operations research, where you find optimal by never knowing what optimal is ahead of time. You do it by a series of iterative steps of the next best step. This is where we get to the magic of Jim's advice. I'm going to load back up my diagram here.

• 12:48Cal Newport?

  All right, this is where we get to the magic of his life. He is saying, "If I track every day, here's what I did, just a sentence or two, and here's if it was a plus two day, a plus one day, a zero day, a minus one day, or a minus two day." He can start to gather data, right? He can start to gather data about, "What am I doing on the plus two days? Also, what am I doing on the minus two days? Like, what are the days I come away from saying that was really good? And what are the days that I come away from and saying that was really bad? And I can learn over time the type of stuff that makes me happy, and over time, the type of stuff that doesn't make me happy." And he says, "I can use that to make iterative changes in my life." Now, this is where my computer science hat comes on. He references the simplex algorithm. The simplex algorithm, if you do any sort of like mathematical theory,

• 13:33Cal Newport?

  is like an algorithm you use for finding feasible solutions for linear programs. So linear programs is just basically where you say, "Maximize this value or this vector of values, given a bunch of constraints on them." You're trying to figure out like a really good answer to a question. Think about it that way. There's a lot of possible values you can assign. So how do you find like a set of values to assign that's really good? The simplex algorithm is a solution to that. The details don't matter. I mean, as you probably all know, and Jesse's shaking his head like a corpse, you're moving through a multi-dimensional polytope, which we understand through the vertexes of the multi-dimensional polytope. We all know about this, that's fine. But the key is, if you actually look at the simplex algorithm operating, it's iterative.

• 14:17Cal Newport?

  So you're sort of moving ever closer towards an optimal solution. So you don't know in advance where you're going, you're moving there. So if we come back to our diagram here, looking at the landscape of possible lives, and we have the circle down here where we started. The Jim Collins simplex algorithmic approach is as you learn about, "Well, what days am I happy, what days am I not?" You make a little change. "Well, I'm gonna do a little bit more of this, because I associate this with plus two days. And I'm gonna do a little bit less of that, because I associate that with minus two days. Let me look at what's possible, and let me make this change here." All these changes are small,

• 15:01Cal Newport?

  and they're within the realm of what's possible. Given just your current obstacles and opportunities, right? So there's no big grand scheme here. You're not going off to start your brand, the center's insured business. Small changes to get more plus twos and less minus minus twos. And maybe some of these, eh, that didn't work out, but that's okay if it didn't work out because it's not a big change in your life. Maybe we go over here and you work your way iteratively towards that optimal solution. You make your way towards a much better life. This, I think, is a, it's not the only way to get to a deep life, but I think when we look at this diagram of the landscape of possible lives and we imagine it is existing

• 15:42Cal Newport?

  on these multiple dimensions, we really begin to see the difference between evidence-based iterative changes versus gut-based grand leaps. It's just really hard to make a grand leap because you, you make one thing much better, you might make another thing much worse. Also, you don't have a great understanding of the full landscape between here and there, what's actually around here. Maybe there's a lot of challenges around here or this thing here is in some sort of fitness lull. It's not as good as you think there's traps around it. The iterative approach is not exciting this week, but over five years, it leads you somewhere really cool. And Collins has built this like really cool life. I mean, he, he, he left academia and formed this like really cool life that's built on doing this deep work and these other activities.

• 16:25Cal Newport?

  And he's built these books that matter, but it's not fallen into the typical traps, the time traps that authors fall into. So I think it's really interesting. The iterative approach. So anyways, I have a friend who has been doing this for the last, it might've been five or six years. He has the spreadsheet. He has the plus and minuses. He has the short description and he has been changing his life bit by bit based on this data. I've talked to him all the time. I've heard him do this and right now he has a very, he's ended up in a really interesting, I would, I'm going to say idiosyncratic because it is never something that he or anyone else would have come up with from scratch if he was just thinking 10 years ago, what do I want to do with my life? But he has a fantastically deep and interesting admirable life.

• 17:08Cal Newport?

  I'm actually going to go interview him for my deep life book. I'm going to have him come on the podcast soon. We'll do like an in-depth episode to really get into it. But he was the one who really helped me come back to this concept of actually the data-based, evidence-based iterative improvement of your life is much more likely to move you towards the good life than taking these big gut-driven swings. Those could work, but often they don't. They make one thing better while making other things worse, and then it can be just sort of a wash in the end. For now, let's just sit with this idea, the path to depth is sometimes iterative and not the result of major leaps. I call that the good life algorithm.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  I like it.

• 17:49Cal Newport?

  I actually, I met Jim. I probably, I don't remember how I got in touch with him, but it was probably after listening to that interview. But we had a good talk. Good advice. When I talked to him, I was like the exact age he was when he left Stanford. He was like, you know, it works out pretty well if you go and just become a full-time writer. I didn't, but he did make an interesting pitch.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Well, you like teaching, right?

• 18:10Cal Newport?

  I do like teaching, yeah. He was in the business school is kind of different, I think, too.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:14Cal Newport?

  It's its own, it's its own sort of business.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Being around some pretty smart kids, it keeps you pretty young.

• 18:18Cal Newport?

  People leave business schools, I think, more than other type of academic schools, because there's a lot of like going out to start businesses or coming back to business schools after you've done something in business. I think there's more of a revolving door than, though I would say at MIT, in the theory group in the computer science lab where I worked, people came and went. They would go, and then they would come back like $250 million richer. There is a lot of that. There is a lot of like, Robert Morris would go, invent the first shopping cart for the web, and then come back with a lot of money. Ron Rovest would go, sell RSA for $1.7 billion and come back and start teaching. There's more of a, there was more of a revolving door, just because.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And then he'd buy you coffee in the break room?

• 19:03Cal Newport?

  They did. Ron Rovest, his personal secretary B was in charge of the coffee. We had a lot of coffee on that floor. It was none of this like little pot nonsense. We had the... Professional brewers in the big giant caravans and we just had thing after thing of Pete's coffee and like the big where you could brew like 20 or 30 cups at a time and fill up one of those things you know like you would have at like a conference.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:29Cal Newport?

  Yeah, we had a lot of coffee. The good coffee machine was actually the the floor below where the the WC three consortium is so Tim Berners Lee's web consortium. So the Tim Berners Lee's the guys invented the HTML and HTTP and the world wide web. So he worked on the fifth floor and he's I guess he's English. He's a sir, Sir Tim Berners Lee, and they had a fancy espresso machine, like a really nice one.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Were you able to get any of that?

• 19:55Cal Newport?

  We would go down there sometimes. He'd go down there sometimes. Anyway, so there we go. We'll call that the good life algorithm. All right, we got a bunch of questions. We're going to cover a lot of topics, but first here for one of our sponsors.

• 20:09Speaker 02

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• 20:38Cal Newport?

  Want to talk about our friends at Thrive Market? Here's the thing, my wife and I, we do a lot of online grocery shopping. Like we learned this during the pandemic, like, oh, you can do this. And now it's become a bit of a habit because of the convenience of it. The problem is you don't always know what you're going to get, or the stuff you really want is not always available with the sort of standard online shopping stores. You'll often have this experience where you'll say like, I don't know, can we get some bananas? And they bring you a can of pineapples and like, well, it's also yellow. So isn't that like a reasonable substitution? So yeah, we kind of have trouble with them sometimes, but we're used to the idea of shopping, doing grocery shopping online. This is why I love

• 21:19Cal Newport?

  Thrive Market, because what they offer is a really good online shopping experience that is focused on, in particular, Getting you healthy stuff, right? So you can go online and buy stuff and you know that you're going to get healthy essentials delivered. One of the things in particular where this is really useful for us is that, you know, I have three boys and they eat a lot of snacks. We have a snack box. They grab their snacks in the morning, the pack for school or when they get home. The snack box plays a, it's a high throughput food distribution service in our house. And we don't want them necessarily just eating a bunch of processed stuff. This is like a perfect use of Thrive Market. Like, oh, I'm going to go find snacks on Thrive Market. I know they're going to be healthy.

• 22:03Cal Newport?

  It's a no junk online grocery store and they'll just get sent straight to our house. And then we can keep filling up the snack box for it. So that's like one of the ways I have been using Thrive Market. They have a cool feature on there right now called Healthy Swap Scanner. You can scan a product and it will recommend a healthier alternative to it, which I think is a great idea. What they, the main way you can navigate is they have these onsite filters. So if you have particular things you care about, I want high protein, right? I want none of this app. What it is you're searching for, you can filter real quickly to find those as well. So if you want the convenience of online grocery and you also want healthy stuff, you gotta check out Thrive Market. So if you're ready to make the switch, go to thrivemarket.com/deep

• 22:48Cal Newport?

  to get 30% off your first order plus a free $60 gift. All right, that's T H R I V E market.com/deep. Thrive market.com/deep.

• 23:03Cal Newport?

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• 23:44Cal Newport?

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• 24:26Speaker 01

  All right, first question is from Chris. How should I navigate the barrage of negative news as a federal worker? I feel like I should stay informed to understand how my livelihood might be impacted, but it's very stressful.

• 24:37Cal Newport?

  Well, here's what's going on here. If you're a federal worker, and half the people I know are, I live in Washington DC. At the moment when we're recording this, Elon Musk's Doge is trying to do, among other things, psychological warfare. Right? He wants to terrorize the federal workforce because he is essentially, A, kind of a broken person inside, but B, he's mad about having to deal with federal regulators with some of his companies, right? So he wants to, beyond just finding inefficiencies or trying to save money, he wants to add a note of terror about it. If you want to hear more about this, by the way, I wrote an article for The New Yorker last week. Last week,

• 25:20Cal Newport?

  it came out, I think on Tuesday or Wednesday, that looked at Elon Musk's two weeks ago email that said, "Send me five things you did yesterday," which any manager will tell you is like what insecure managers do who are just trying to be, you know, a-holes. I went through the whole history of not just Musk, but productivity in Silicon Valley and saying like, they don't exactly have this figured out yet, but that's an aside. He's trying to terrorize you. So I'm saying, don't give him the pleasure. If you're not a congressional appointee or a probationary worker, you're most likely not in an imminent threat of your computer's going to be shut off at any moment. So what I would suggest is you have a couple set check in times. What do I need to know about what has happened? It could be every day for 10 minutes.

• 26:04Cal Newport?

  What's happening on the times? Or maybe even like every other day, you just check in to see what's going on. But anything that like directly you need to do something also, you're going to hear from your supervisor. You're going to hear from your agency heads. Right? So extremely limit the time you check in when you check. And do not give it other time. Do not be online following it. Do not be on social media. Don't be like sort of obsessively talking about it. Why? Because that is allowing must deliver rent free in your head. Right? So if you actually want to do something here that is going to frustrate the person terrorizing you as hard as it might be,

• 26:47Cal Newport?

  it's just don't look. I'll check in briefly to see if what's going on, if I need to know something. And otherwise I'm going to do, I'm going to do my job. I'm going to live my life. You don't get a liver and free in my head. So that's what I would suggest. It's, uh, it's chaos and it's, it's a bit of psychological warfare going on. Let's, let's not give him too much of the pleasure. All right, what do we got next?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Next is from Anthony. Can you give a preview of your thoughts on relationships for your upcoming deep life book? What about if your partner does not like to geek out on systems, values and stacks?

• 27:20Cal Newport?

  What you're talking about, your partner might not enjoy references to the simplex algorithm as a way of trying to navigate iterative improvement of your lifestyle configuration parameters? I don't believe it. I will give you some reassuring words. I do like to geek out. The Deep Life book, which I'm working on now, and just for a timeline purpose, I'll probably finish the first draft at some point by the end of the summer. So it's kind of a slow process. I am not writing it in a super geeky tone. So I am trying to write this book to be accessible even to people who aren't hopeless nerds like myself. So I'm hoping that's not going to be a problem. There's no stack in it. I'm not using stack terminology. I'm not going to

• 28:03Cal Newport?

  talk about the simplex algorithm. I might talk about the landscape of possible lives, but I'll do so in a, I might use more of like an actual navigation metaphor. Like I'm, you're trying to find, get to a destination on an actual physical map, not in terms of like a multi-dimensional vector or a linear program. So I'm trying to be good, Anthony, about toning down the geekiness for the book, which I'm usually pretty good at, I think. Like if you, if you read, like Slow Productivity, my most recent book, it's not super geeky. I'm trying to be more accessible. So like the larger audiences. So, so, you know, audiences who do not obsessively quote random scenes from season five of The Simpsons as if that's a reasonable conversational gambit.

• 28:47Cal Newport?

  People who think that's weird, I want to also be able to enjoy my book. So I'm trying to de-geekify myself somewhat. I've been pretty good about it, I think, Jesse. I geek out a little bit more in here. Sometimes I can't help myself, but my editors would not let me get away with it.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:01Cal Newport?

  Oh my, because I go publishing, it's all English majors.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:04Cal Newport?

  Yeah, like, come on. Stop talking about simplex algorithms. I, by the way, held myself back. I've done some research. I won an award a few years ago, Best Paper Award for a paper I did on a new application of an algorithmic analysis technique called smooth analysis, which was Spielman and Tang originally created this method for understanding why in practice the simplex algorithm converges faster than you might expect in the worst case. And I took that same technique and applied it to some distributed system analysis. So I could have gone a level deeper in my nerding, but I did not. So you're all welcome. All right. Who do we got next?

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Next question is from Rebecca. I'm recovering from a health setback and struggle with creating a schedule for my projects. Since I may need to adjust for rest in recovery, what approaches do you recommend for developing a schedule that balances productivity with flexibility?

• 29:53Cal Newport?

  Rebecca, I was just there and I'm like just coming out of a relatively like still happening, but better rehab about a bunch of stuff that got messed up after I went through this sort of injury and surgery recovery. And here's what I basically learned was start with like, okay, here's the schedule, I think that like gives me some more rest. You know, so it's a little bit like I'm taking my foot off the gas a little bit, right? So here's what I'm thinking. I'm going to, you know, tell my boss or my supervisor, like, here's how I want to do it to try to prioritize rest a little bit more. Then take the amount of rest in that schedule and then multiply that by two. Like your initial reaction about what to do here is not going to be enough rest. It's going to be the sort of minimum possible change because you're very worried.

• 30:34Cal Newport?

  It seems like in the moment, your brain interprets these changes that you're making to accommodate rest or rehab. It interprets these as a permanent change and it begins to predict the future and say, my God, if I only work this much, you know, for the next 20 years, I'm going to really fall behind. I'm going to get fired. I can't, I'm not going to be able to keep up with my job. But the reality is you're probably talking three months or six months or one month or whatever it is. It's not actually that much time. And all the time, people have to take their foot off the gas for three months or four months and then come back to it again. So if you're going to take your foot off the gas, take your foot off the gas enough to really rehab and recover. So that's my main advice is you probably need to rest more than your brain thinks is reasonable.

• 31:17Cal Newport?

  One of the things I actually like to do is collect just internally, I like to collect stories that I encounter of real historical figures who are super accomplished. And they all have these like long periods where they were barely working. You know, they were sick. They were dealing with this. If you go back far enough, like in American history, I'm sort of a fan of colonial history and early post-colonial history. You read these biographies of like founding fathers. It would be, oh, for that month. They were just traveling from here to there. Like just to get from here to there, that that was like a month of time that was just like they they weren't doing anything. Like you read about, you know, Ben Franklin.

• 32:01Cal Newport?

  There would just be these like six to two month, six weeks to two month gaps where it's like, well, he was traveling to London and he just can't do anything. You're just like on a ship and you're sick or you read about Darwin and for like a year, he was basically just throwing up on the Beagle, just like really seasick, right? And so I find this and I talk about this in slow productivity. So if you, if you want to get into these examples, get my book, Slow Productivity. Principle two is work at a natural pace. And I really go through a lot of case studies here of people that we look back at the end of their lives, we look back at these historical figures and say, wow, they produced all this stuff and it was awesome. And I was like, yeah. And they had all sorts of ups and downs and big, long extended periods where they're doing nothing and then periods where they're really productive.

• 32:43Cal Newport?

  That is just the natural pace with which people produce things. Like, here's another story. I have so many of these. Galileo, I believe this was Galileo. He went at some point to stay with friends who had basically like a vacation home and it was up in the the Italian mountains and they had had this clever system, if I understand this correctly, that in their villa, they built a series of chutes that take air from deep in a cave in the mountainside and bring it up into the villa because that air was cool. It was like air conditioner, right? So it's pretty cool. Like they built an air conditioning system.

• 33:23Cal Newport?

  It was pretty cool, literally cool and also cool, you know, pragmatically, except for there was some sort of poisonous gas that was being vented into this cave. And so Galileo is sleeping in this room with his villa with his friends on like vacation and it poisons everybody and it kills like two of the people in the room and he barely survives and is basically like debilitated for a really long time and never fully recovers from it. We don't know any of that. Like, yeah, Galileo, we, he, we know the work he did. It was fantastic. So like people have this. John F. Kennedy.

• 33:58Cal Newport?

  You know, battling Addison's disease, huge issues. Like, he'd be like, "Look, I gotta just go down to the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach and just be there for like, three weeks." Like, they called that place the Southern White House, or the White House South, or whatever, because he'd be like, "I just can't, I'm in pain, I can't move." Like, just weeks would be lost. And then, you know, he'd do his best to work and come back. Anyways, this is all to say, we are used to the modern pace of knowledge work that is set by the concept of pseudo-productivity, which is this heuristic I talk about in my most recent book, where we use visible activity as our proxy for useful effort. In that type of mindset, anytime you're not doing something is like a disaster. And that's what leads to these thoughts of like, "I can maybe like, rest a little bit, like, take a little bit

• 34:42Cal Newport?

  off my plate, but like, anything more than that for more than a couple of days is a disaster." But when you do not have pseudo-productivity, when you're instead focused on like, "I want to produce good stuff this year, in this decade, or the next three years, I have some big initiatives, I want it to go well," the fact that these three months, you're not doing a lot of email or Zoom meetings because you're recovering from a surgery or something is not that big of a deal. So if you need to get bucked up about resting more than you think you should, read, while you're resting, read slow productivity, because that's sort of at the core, especially that second principle of working at a natural pace. It really is, Jesse, like, people don't know how artificial it is, this idea of, even if I'm just finishing work at four, for a few days, for a lot of people, they're, in their mind, they're like, "This is a disaster," which is crazy. There's nothing they're

• 35:26Cal Newport?

  doing where like, not being there is like, working to four instead of five is going to make some sort of major difference. That's just straight up pseudo-productivity. All right, who we got next?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Next question's from Sharkloffen. "I have the opportunity to lead the reboot of a once-successful aerospace company of about 100 people. I've got full autonomy to set everything from building to culture. I'm going to attempt to use many of the ideas in deep work, including office layout and workflow management. The site is performing poorly and is best described as the most shallow workplace ever. So much busy, so little production. Any suggestions on how I can implement this transformation?"

• 36:04Cal Newport?

  Well, don't take a book out of Elon Musk's strategy. I actually went through, this is a bit of a side, but for that New Yorker piece I was talking about, I went through and cataloged what happened in the first few months after he took over Twitter in 2022. It just reminded me of this question. And it was, I would call it haphazard, random chaos that led nowhere good. So don't do that. That was just like, I'm going to start sporadically making declarations, losing interest in that declaration, then make another declaration, and then kind of lose interest in that, and then do this, and lose interest in that, and then just fire half the people for no reason. So don't do that. What should you do? I took a couple of notes, but here's the big picture organizational principle for these notes I'm about to give you.

• 36:49Cal Newport?

  You need a small number of clearly identified, we'll call them north stars, for the journey you're about to take with this company that you've taken over, that you want to be really clear and transparent about, right? Everything we're going to do is what you should be telling your company. Everything we're going to do is aiming us at these north stars. So you know why we're doing it and what our goals are.

• 37:09Cal Newport?

  And I'll give you a few sample north stars, but I think this general approach is really important because otherwise you could end up in that sort of must taking over Twitter in 2022 territory, which was more like, I am going to haphazardly do things and you don't know why. Haphazardness can really be a problem, right? That really can be a problem where it's like, I don't know why you're doing this or what's going on. Okay. What then, what might these north stars be? Well, based on my books, I would mention three ideas you could start with. One, north star number one, context switching is productivity poison. This is the thing we're really worried about.

• 37:48Cal Newport?

  We are willing to go to a pretty extreme extent to try to minimize the times during a typical day where you have to switch your cognitive context from one target to another because we know every time we do that, there's this huge cognitive cost. We're basically siphoning cognitive fuel out of your brain. And there's only so many times we can siphon it before you're just burnt down and can't do anything else for the day. That's what we want to try to minimize is cognitive context switches. I would emphasize here, this is very different than what other people implicitly try to optimize or minimize, which tends to be things like friction, or response time, or they try to maximize the velocity of information. You say, no, this is a business run on brains. We want our brains to run well. We're spending a lot of money on these

• 38:33Cal Newport?

  brains. Context shifts is putting sand in the gears. Priority one, how do we rethink about how we do work and communicate, etc. to minimize context shifts. North Star number two, I would suggest, make it very clear. Deep work on things that move the needle, that is bring in new revenue. That's the priority. We are going to make changes, bend, transform how we do things, whatever is needed to protect that priority. This is what we're going to measure. This is what we are going to reward. This is what we are going to defer to, even if deferring to this makes other parts of our lives less convenient. Even if

• 39:17Cal Newport?

  deferring to this means the HR department has a much harder time getting the information they need for payroll, because they can't just blast email everyone and say, answer in six hours with this information. So we can fill out these charts and it's going to make our job and the HR department much easier. Our goal is not to make the lives of the HR department as easy as possible. It's to produce aerospace products that make money. So if someone is doing that, we're going to let them cook, right? To reference our episode from a couple weeks back about let Brandon cook, that are reference to Brandon Sanderson. This is what matters. We protect this. So if you're able to prove to me, I am producing something with my brain that is directly valuable. But in order to do this, you have to stop, I can't go to these meetings people keep sending me, or I need

• 39:59Cal Newport?

  to take these things off my plate. If you can make a case, this is going to produce more cognitive output that is directly valuable, I will listen to that case. I will always listen to that case. You got to come back to what ultimately actually makes the difference. As soon as we lose sight of that, we are going to end up in a productivity thunderdome where everyone is just trying to optimize their own lives, make their own lives easier. And that's not our business. We're in the business of making aerospace. And the stuff that matters, matters, right? Meritocracy in that way. North Star number three, no more pseudo productivity.

• 40:32Cal Newport?

  Visible activity is meaningless to me. Results matter. What are you working on? Did it go well? Good. What are you going to work on next? To this end, teams should be tracking work in a more transparent fashion so that no one gets overloaded. Teams should have, like I talk about a lot of my books, Slow Productivity. Here's the things we are working on. Here's the things we need to work on. We have a whole list and it doesn't exist distributed haphazardly through different team members' email inboxes. It is on this digital board or this physical bulletin board, a card for everything that we need to do. Over here, we're tracking who's working on what right now. And you can only have so many cards under your name, like one or two, maybe that's it. So we don't take all these things we need to do and just sort of spread them around everyone's plate

• 41:17Cal Newport?

  and just start talking to each other all the time about all of these things. Hey, what about this? What about that? That goes back to our first North Star. That violates minimize context shifting. It also violates our second North Star. Prioritize deep work on the stuff that really matters. So why don't we? We track work carefully so that no one gets overloaded. You're not allowed to work on 10 things. Work on two things. Do those things well. I don't want to overload you. If I give you 10 things, you're going to have to have meetings and emails about all 10 of those things, which means most of your day will be having meetings and emails, which means when are you doing the deep work on the stuff that really moves the needle? That's no good. So let's track at the team scale, workloads in a transparent fashion. So no one has to take on too much. And we can allow people to be more efficient.

• 42:00Cal Newport?

  This in turn will allow you to structure communication because now you can check in on this. You can have daily standups at the team scale. Okay, who's working on what? I know that actually it's on the board. What do you need to get this done? All right, you've been working on this since Monday. What is the, what is the roadblock? Oh, you need these information. You need this information from, you know, Bob. Bob, you're right here in the daily standup. When can you get that information over to Cal? You can get it? Okay, by 11? Get it to him by 11? We're making, we all agree on this? Great. And then you're going to work on this for the four hours after that. You're going to get that done? Great. Now just go work. But look at your inbox. Go work. So those would be my three North Stars if I was taking over a hundred person company. Make it clear that context shifting is productivity poison.

• 42:43Cal Newport?

  Make it clear that the number one thing we care about is cognitive efforts to produce things that directly move the needle. Everything else is going to revolve around making that better and doing more of that. That is our North Stars, what we care about. And three, no more pseudo productivity. We're going to track work carefully so that no one gets overloaded and so that we can make sure people have what they need with a minimum of unnecessary activity. And if you're moving things from your column to the done column, I don't care about anything else. I don't care about how fast you answer emails. I don't care about how many Zoom meetings you're in. Productivity versus pseudo productivity. So that's what I would do.

• 43:15Cal Newport?

  All right, what do we got next?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  We have our corner.

• 43:18Cal Newport?

  Ooh, slow productivity corner. This last one could have been a part of the corner a little bit too. So slow productivity corner, we specifically highlight a question that's related to my, my book, Slow Productivity. We want to highlight at least one question each week that is related to that. Wow, we're running out of time on that though, Jesse. We said one year, right?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:36Cal Newport?

  When did my, my book came out? Pretty early in March last year.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  I think it was like March 5th.

• 43:40Cal Newport?

  Oh.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  It's gonna be the last one.

• 43:43Cal Newport?

  Technically, this would be the last, the last episode with a slow productivity corner. So, so go buy the book, Slow Productivity. We'll find, we'll find a reason to play this theme music. We'll find a reason.

• 43:59Cal Newport?

  All right, what's our slow productivity corner question of the week?

• 44:02Speaker 01

  All right, it's from Daniel. Are there perceived benefits to pseudo productivity in the workplace? And my company being responsive at all times on email and instant messaging leads someone to being seen as dedicated to work and visible to leaders, which leads to advancement. How do I advance if I don't do this?

• 44:17Cal Newport?

  Well, yeah, I mean, this is the, the dangerous nature of pseudo productivity is that as long as this becomes the implicit heuristic by which your company measures value, it's hard to escape. So again, we talked about in the last question, but just to reemphasize, pseudo-productivity is using visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. So the more visibly active you are, the more useful you will be assumed to be. In a digital world, this is a problem because mobile computing means you can be demonstrating effort at any location at any time. And mobile communications like email and Slack means you can be demonstrating effort at this incredibly fine granularity, at the granularity of like answering individual emails, being involved in back and forth conversations.

• 45:00Cal Newport?

  So it leads to a sort of overload of work. You work too many hours and it leads to a style of work that is very draining and doesn't produce much that's actually valuable. I hate pseudo-productivity. I think it is a cancer on employee well-being in the knowledge sector. It's why I wrote the book Slow Productivity to say, do this instead. Right? Part one, here's why this is bad. Part two, do this instead. First of all, just recognize the problem. All right, so what can you do if you're in an organization that still worships at the altar of pseudo-productivity? Well, most of the advice in my book is geared at least in part towards this situation. You're behind enemy lines and you're trying to make your way towards safety. So there are still things you can do.

• 45:46Cal Newport?

  One is trade clarity for responsiveness. Be really clear what you're working on, its status, when it's going to get done and deliver it when you say you're going to deliver it. If you're trusted, if that, if you have this clarity, the need for you to be responsive goes down, right? Because why do people want answers typically right away to like messages? It's because they don't know what's going on. They have an open loop in their head. Oh yeah, this project, I forgot about that. What is Jesse up to with that? And it's just an open loop in their head and until you respond, they have to keep track of it and it's a source of stress. But if you have some other system, they could be like, oh, Jesse's on the ball. You're like, yep, I'm working on it. It's in position five in my queue. Here's what it is.

• 46:29Cal Newport?

  I think I should have it done by Tuesday and I'll tell you if that's going to shift. And they trust if they don't hear from you, it's going to come on Tuesday. They don't have to worry about it. So a lot of responsiveness is driven from uncertainty. So if you're very clear, you can reduce the demands of responsiveness. Two, is a big thing in the book. You have to have some way of limiting concurrent workload.

• 46:50Cal Newport?

  The kiss of death in pseudo productivity is working on too many things at the same time because everything you're working on brings with it its own administrative overhead. So if you're working on too many things, that administrative overhead aggregates until most of your schedule is servicing tasks instead of actually completing them. And that's this terrible state where almost nothing gets done. It's incredibly stressful. So how do you do that? Well, one thing you can do is distinguish between here's what I'm actively working on. Here's what I'm waiting to work on. Of the things I've accepted, active waiting. I do email meetings about the stuff I'm actively worked on, not on the stuff I'm waiting to work on. And I make this transparent and clear. It's in a shared document. I'll send a link right to you. Oh, you want to have a meeting to talk about

• 47:35Cal Newport?

  it? Here's my cue. It's still in the waiting part. It's in position three. You know, I should get there in about a week or so. I'll email it as soon as it gets to active and then we'll talk about it all day if you want. But I can only be actually working on a few number of things at a time. That sort of clarity works. Also, if you have some flexibility on what you can say yes and no to. So the problem is just not yourself wanting to say no to too much. Use quotas. Yeah, I do this type of thing, but only this many per quarter. And when your quota is filled, say, yeah, of course, typically, I would like to have a mentoring lunch or jump on this call or come to this committee meeting. But I've already passed my quota for this quarter or for this month or for this week. So I can't do it this time. It's a very reasonable way to moderate activities that are important. So you're still doing things that are important, but not doing too many.

• 48:20Cal Newport?

  There's a bunch of other ideas like that that are in the book. But those are the two big picture things to think about. Trading clarity for responsiveness and finding ways to manage your concurrent workload. You do those two things will be better. Above all else, just get really good at things that matter. That's principle three of my books, obsess over quality. If you're doing something that's valuable, they do not want to lose you. I'll just make this final point because I think a lot of people have a an overly charactered antagonistic mental image of their employer or boss. And they really do see their employer or boss like a Bond villain.

• 48:58Cal Newport?

  Who is somehow converting like rapid email responses into fuel for a laser that they're going to use to destroy the world. And like, that's what they care about. This thing that you really makes you miserable. They're like twisting their mustache and they have a cat that they're petting. And it's like, we need you to be answering emails is what's important because we, we use those quick responses in my volcano layer. The fuel, my, the fuel, my laser. The reality is it's really hard to hire good people. They worry about people leaving. They don't have enough people. If you're doing something valuable, you're really good at something that the company needs. You know what they're staying up late at night thinking about? Not, hey, how quickly is he responding to my emails? They're thinking, oh my God, what if he leaves?

• 49:39Cal Newport?

  You gotta recognize, make yourself valuable. Don't be a jerk about it, but recognize you have value. You don't have to make a big manifesto or a big autoresponder, but just like I, I work differently. And you know why? Cause I deliver. I produce this code that's awesome. I organize these events that kill. I put together these, these marketing campaigns that have the highest ROI of my entire team. And yeah, I'm kind of do this Cal Newport stuff. That's a little bit weird and I'm my, my project queue and I'm not super, you know, I, you get here for me within 24 hours, but not within 24 minutes when you email me and I'm responsible, but I'm a little bit off kilter and I say no to a lot more things. But if I go, you're going to lose that ROI. And there I, you do not want that person to go. So you kind of put up with it.

• 50:24Cal Newport?

  So remember that if you're doing something valuable, you are really needed. You were really wanted. Right? I mean, unless again, you're under the supervision of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. Uh, if you're at an actual company with an actual boss. Who doesn't walk around holding chainsaws, they are desperately afraid of losing good people. So be good and you get a lot more flexibility as well. All right. Do we have a call this week? We do. All right. Let's hear it.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  Hi Cal. My name is Joe and the majority of my work centers around optimizing websites for clients. My job is remote, flexible, and I have a lot of autonomy. However, my responsibilities aren't clearly defined since I'm on a very small team. This has sort of led me to a cycle of reacting to urgent tasks, putting in a lot of work, and then taking work easier for a while until something urgent comes up again. This has left me either overwhelmed and tired some days or feeling bad that I haven't done enough most others. I'd love to strike a balance between client work and working on company goals while also leveraging the sort of flexibility and autonomy at work

• 51:36Speaker 03

  so I can work on my personal projects like content creation while not quite going full quiet quit mode. While struggling with motivation is definitely one of my problems here, one of the other thorns in my side has been struggling to define what enough means for a work day or a work week. For people with more autonomous or flexible roles or even just business owners in general, how do you recommend going about defining what it means to have worked enough? Thanks.

• 52:07Cal Newport?

  All right, we've got a couple of things going on here. Let's get to your job situation in particular. I think you need to think about your job as really being two different jobs. The first job is client responsiveness, right? Your first job is working with clients with their issues or requests and satisfying them. Then you have the second part of your job, which is self-initiated, less monitored and less deadline. Let's just call that part B because what that is could depend. But you sort of have to think of it as like the self-initiated part of your job and you have the client responsive as part of your job. Let's look at both of these. Let's do some work on both of these. And then I want to talk about overall this question of how much work is enough? How do I know if I'm working enough?

• 52:52Cal Newport?

  I would look at the client piece first. And even though it's reasonable, right? You're saying it's only sometimes there's issues that I have to deal with. I would say, how do I make this piece as sustainable as possible? Right? Like, let's do some optimization over there. And maybe this is about, how do I stop crises from occurring as much as they do? Or how do I have, more importantly, maybe a way of dealing with crises that is reassuring to the client and moves us away from just constant, immediate responsive communication? Right? So in the lack of structure, if you run like a website dev company and there's a problem that a client has had with a lack of structure for like, here's how we stay in touch and here's how we deal with crises. What it's going to be is like, answer my call, answer my call, answer my call.

• 53:37Cal Newport?

  Like, this is now a big source of stress for me. And I don't know what's happening until you finally like, tell me what's going on. So you might want to work on that a little bit. Like, here's our crisis response. You know, we have [email protected]. You send in that email, like, we will, we will be on it within two hours. We have a daily setup call. I don't know. I don't want to give you the details, but find a way to make sure that's not too stressful or draining. All right. All the other days, you're working on part B of your job. And here you have a choice. You can either do a phantom part-time job. This is our word for I have like a consistent amount of sort of unstructured time that I'm going to structure for another goal, something that's really important to me that I'm working on. And it could be building up a technical skill

• 54:21Cal Newport?

  or something that might eventually become a side business or it could be a self-education project or something completely unrelated, community-related, unrelated to your professional job. You could do that. Or as you suggest, build in a more sort of self-initiated sort of value-growing project within your company. Like, I also do this, which is going to have value within the company. So you have to make that decision. There's something to be said for, if you like the general company and the client stuff's a little bit stressful. You have this flexibility where you could start building a secondary pursuit within your company that you're initiating, that you want to become so good you can't be ignored

• 55:03Cal Newport?

  on eventually, but there's no actual pressure or deadlines or close monitoring in the short term with the idea of if I keep getting better at this, I can spend less time doing the client stuff and more time doing what I want to do. So you can have a vision of like, what do I want my job at this company in an ideal world to be like, and start working your way towards there with this extra time. That might not be a bad way of thinking about it. Oh, I have a vision for what I could be doing here. You know, I don't know, maybe it's building back in tools that not only helps the company, but then like the, the company can license and sell to other people and you're just on your own soft, you know, doing dev and no one really knows what you're doing in a particular day, but like you're kind of pulling out cool tools or something like that, right? That's an example of something you could do within your company that makes you really valuable. You could point to the

• 55:47Cal Newport?

  money you're bringing in the door. Like we're much better because of this and you made 500K selling licenses for this last year. So like, obviously my salary is justified, but it's entirely autonomous and there are no crisis days, right? So something like that might not be a bad idea. I don't want to discourage you from spending this time on a content creation related phantom part-time job, but I will say the content creation world is really hard. I think you'd say that's probably true, right, Jesse? Like we work pretty hard at this and I have 20 years of writing books. It helps. I mean, it's a tough, that's a tough world. And there are traps there. There's a lot of, a lot of this world right now is this thin stream of people making a good living. And then a lot of people that they're, they're

• 56:31Cal Newport?

  saying they can use similar tools and kind of feel like you're in this world. You have like a sub stack or you're used to be like you're posting your medium post or you're doing your threads on X that are in the exact same format. And at the end of this last one, you say, if you want to find out more, sign up here. But a lot of that's just like getting people to churn and be online and be monetized. Like you're not making money, you're being monetized. So I, you know, be careful about it. Content creation is a rough world, but you know, whatever you do, you with that. The final question then, regardless of how you choose to do through A and B is how should you feel about, you know, guilt or non-guilt? Look, here's the thing. If you're not defrauding your company, if you are doing what they're asking you to do and you're doing a good job at it and they're happy with you and they're actually giving you a check that has money in it and that money is enough.

• 57:16Cal Newport?

  The market is saying you are working enough as far as that employer is concerned. Right? Again, this, this, the pseudo productive culture, pseudo productivity culture. The thing I inveigh against in my book, Slow Productivity. Pseudo productivity culture says activity is what is valuable. And this arbitrary amount of activity, what should be like 40 hours, but really like 40 plus, like you should have a couple of late days. Somehow that amount of activity means you, you're worthwhile. And anything less than that means you're not, which is crazy because if you look at any sort of kind of classical value creation figure from history, there's all sorts of different amounts of times they're working and it's not 40 hours. That's not, 40 hours a week is just what the labor unions compromised with, with the

• 57:58Cal Newport?

  factory owners for like, how long can we get someone to stay on an assembly line and put steering wheels on Model Ts before they begin to bleed out of the eyes, right? And they're like, well, the factory owners are like, can't you just do this for 80 hours? And the unions were like, I think people will die on their feet and like, all right, I guess 40, right? It has nothing to do with like web development. There's no magic when it comes to what's the right amount of time to be a writer, to be doing marketing campaigns, or to be working on software dev. What matters is, is your employer happy? Are you making money? Are people paying you? I mean, money is a neutral indicator of value. Are they paying you?

• 58:31Cal Newport?

  A good living for what you're doing? And there's no deceit, right? You're not tricking them. You're not tricking them like I, making them think you did something you didn't. They know what you're doing. Yeah, we have these clients, these clients should be handled, the clients are happy, here's your paycheck. That is a free exchange in a capitalist market. Your, your labor is being valued there. And it's, you know, one of the cool things about these sort of more entrepreneurial knowledge, sort of remote work, knowledge work markets is that like the markets, it will try to value you properly. And it's possible that like, yeah, this job is taking 15 hours a week, not making a good living off it. That's not a problem. That just means you're doing something high value for this particular company. You're bringing skills to the table and it's worth that much money to them. So I wouldn't worry about that. If they're unhappy with you, you're not working enough. Right?

• 59:16Cal Newport?

  That's what you should, but they're happy with you. You're working enough. Now you're saying, how do I, now what do I want to do with my job? What do I want to do with my surplus time? So that's the way I would think about that.

• 59:25Cal Newport?

  All right. We have a case study here. This is where people send in their accounts of applying the type of advice we talked about on the show to their own lives. We can see what it looks like in practice. Today's case study comes from Ariel, who says, "I worked my butt off in grad school and landed what I thought was a dream job in biotech. As these things go, the dream job," I'm putting this in scare quotes, "is turning into a career with many flaws and limited growth potential, but I've really been able to improve my productivity per unit time. To achieve what I used to accomplish in about 60 hours of, again, scarecrow's work, showing up at an office for six days a week, has turned into about 10 hours of focused work that is very flexible, plus 12 hours of meetings. I use many of the tools

• 1:00:09Cal Newport?

  you talk about as a means to be very productive, but work far less than I used to. But the workaholic thoughts are a daily struggle. Anytime I have some free time, I think things like, hey, maybe I should start a science sub stack in my specialty. Maybe I should write some fiction. Shouldn't I be busier? I would love to be at peace with consuming great books and movies, but the drive to create is pretty relentless. I am torn between creating things in my free time that may benefit my career, or turn into a new one, or maintaining this fairly stress-free lifestyle while it lasts. My question is simply, why can't knowledge workers be happy just doing less? If we have the means and the drive, should we all just start creating content in hopes that people will consume it?"

• 1:00:49Cal Newport?

  All right. Well, interesting case study. I want to really, before we get to the meat of Ariel's embedded question, let's get to the meat of what happened here that I think is really telling. He was working 60 hours a week. And when he stepped back and said, "What actually creates value?" And let me focus on that and be careful about my time. He reduced that to 10 hours of deep work, and then 12 hours of performative meetings. This is true of a lot of jobs. Pseudo-productivity is different than actual productivity. Visible activity is a low-risk, highly replicatable way of trying to trick people into thinking

• 1:01:30Cal Newport?

  that you're valuable. But again, it is just rarely the case that actual value production requires roughly 40 to 60 hours a week. That's like an arbitrary number. So I think this is really telling that in 10 hours of actual work, he did all the stuff he used to do in 60.

• 1:01:46Cal Newport?

  That's what happens when you move from pseudo productivity to actual value production. The workaholic question is an interesting one. I'm actually going to point towards the future. If all things go well, I believe I have an in-depth episode coming out on Thursday of this week, which is a conversation on exactly this question, this question of the pursuit of greatness and is this a problem? Why is it make us uncomfortable? Why does it also motivate us? How do we navigate the conflicting constraints and the conflicting demands of like trying to be really good? We get into that in the upcoming in-depth episode. So listen to that. My short take on this, though, is it usually helps, right?

• 1:02:29Cal Newport?

  So in like this situation, if you're, if you're doing something good, you like your work, you think it's important what you're doing, it usually helps if you are doing some lifestyle centric planning. So what you're working towards with your time in your life is making your lifestyle closer to things to resonate and ways away from things that don't. That might be professional. It might be like, okay, once I've done lifestyle centric planning, I really need to get to this point in my job. So I'm building up a new skill specifically because that'll allow me to move from the headquarters and work remotely out of Maine because I want to live by blah, blah, blah. Right? Or it could be completely unrelated to your job. It gives you like a real effort for a real purpose for energy that you're investing outside of your job, whatever it is, like

• 1:03:13Cal Newport?

  with you, with your, your kids or your health or something else that's going on. Lifestyle centric planning is going to give you a direction for these efforts. So it's not just, maybe I'm just reading a lot of big books, or maybe I'm just trying to like do more work at my job. It gives you a reason for why you're doing that. You have a particular target you're trying to go to. So I think that might be helpful, but also is okay to just have some seasonality. And like, my job's not that hard right now. Kind of nice. I don't know. I'm exercising a lot, spending a lot more time with my kids. I'm like involved with a, yeah, I'm writing a fiction writing group just for fun, no stakes, something to do. That's not the worst thing either. I really think slow productivity, the book Slow Productivity

• 1:03:55Cal Newport?

  is perfectly timed for what you're going through now because it'll continue to have strategies to help you tighten the strategies you're already doing to keep this job load small. But the seasonality, you could really take advantage of the ideas of seasonality, the work at a natural pace principle, and the obsess over quality, like do something really well for more leverage, like that also is right where you are right now. So I think that book is really going to resonate. But I appreciate the case study. 60 hours down to 10 hours of focus work and 12 hours of meetings. And I bet in those 12 hours of meetings, 25 minutes of actual useful information, if I had to guess. All right. Well, we got our final segment coming up where we'll talk about the books I read. But first, briefly here from some more sponsors.

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

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• 1:05:06Cal Newport?

  I want to talk about our friends at the Defender line of vehicles, the Defender 90, the Defender 110, and the Defender 130. This is a classic, iconic line of cars that have been reimagined to not only look fantastic, but to maintain the same sort of durability they've had before, that sort of go anywhere durability they had before with the comfort of a modern vehicle. I actually, this is true, Jesse, yesterday, I'm going to load this on my phone because he's not going to believe me. I'm pulling out my phone here. Our friend Brad Stolberg, who's like my partner in crime when it comes to Defender, sent me a picture of his, from his neighbor. Look at that.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:05:54Cal Newport?

  So it's a Defender logo illuminated on the sidewalk next to Brad's house. His neighbors just bought a Defender and you can set the car that when it is parked to actually shine down the sort of Defender logo, just sort of discreetly on the ground next to it.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:06:11Cal Newport?

  I thought it was really cool. I am assuming they bought that Defender because they heard me say they should, but it's a really cool, these cars are everywhere. Last time we did a read for the Defender, we saw one right outside the HQ. We're doing a read for Defender today and Brad sends me a photo of his neighbors just got one. I don't know. It's a really cool car, but you check it out. If you, if you haven't seen one, go to Land Rover USA.com and you can see what these cars look like. It's an iconic car that's been updated with all of the modern conveniences, drives great on road and off. It's, it's kind of like the official car of the Deep Questions podcast right now. Check that out. Land Rover USA.com. You can explore the full Defender lineup when you go to

• 1:06:52Cal Newport?

  Land Rover USA.com. I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify.

• 1:06:59Cal Newport?

  Look, if you are going to be selling things online or in a store, you have goods you're going to exchange for money, you gotta be thinking about Shopify. The, the thing that anyone who is in like the online space like we are knows is like, this is what people use when they want to start selling something. They go to Shopify. It makes it very easy to set up. You get this sort of best in class tech. The conversion rate on sales is high. The experience is fantastic. It makes everything simple. People who set up physical stores, they use Shopify point of service systems. It all just works really well. It's basically what people, it's almost like a shorthand, like in our world, our online world of like, yeah, I'm gonna start selling like these whatever shirts

• 1:07:43Cal Newport?

  or coins or whatever, like I'm gonna Shopify it, right? It is just a, it is the technology that people that we know who sell things. It is the technology that they use. Statistically, they're the number one checkout on the planet. Their shop pay feature, so this is what happens when you're checking out, boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning that way less sharp carts go abandoned and way more sales get going. If you're growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web in your store and their feed and everywhere in between, you need Shopify. Businesses that sell more, sell on Shopify.

• 1:08:25Cal Newport?

  So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that basically everyone I know who sells things uses. You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/deep, but you have to type that in all lowercase, but a Shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today at Shopify.com/deep. All right, let's get on Jesse to our final segment.

• 1:08:50Cal Newport?

  All right, this is our first episode of March, so I'm going to talk about the books I read in the short month of February 2025. All right, the first book I read was Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman. A couple of people have been talking to me about Rutger. He's, I believe, Danish, maybe Danish philosopher. He's had a couple of books that have really raised some eyebrows, young guy. I like the idea of this book Moral Ambition. It was basically a call to use your skills to go do things that are useful for the world. I don't know if it's out yet or not. I actually read this in galley form. I was giving a blurb for it, but I enjoyed it. I read it, actually read it very closely. And so I'm including it then

• 1:09:30Cal Newport?

  on this list. And, you know, I admire the ambition of the book Moral Ambition. It's sort of nice to have someone say, hey, hey, smart person, like maybe your whole life shouldn't be centered on like, how do I make the most money in private equity or something? Go do things that are good. I like when people challenge people to stand up, do more. So that was interesting book. I like the sort of the program that Bregman has going on over there. And then I read a thriller. You gotta have some thrillers. The thriller I read was Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morell. David Morell is a big thriller writer from the 70s and 80s in particular, maybe best known for Rambo First Blood. So it was First Blood that became the first Rambo movie, which was actually one of the very first

• 1:10:14Cal Newport?

  sort of modern form action movies. I rewatched it a couple of years ago. It's worth watching. That's actually, that's a very cool movie. It's Sly Stallone, the first one before, you know, the later Rambo movies is where he has like the giant biceps and the headband and is firing exploding arrows. The first movie was not like that. It's at the tail end of the new Hollywood 70s. And it is a smaller movie. And the premise of the first Rambo movie is that he's a Vietnam vet who's suffering like post-traumatic stress and walking through this small town where he's being like hassled by the sheriff, like, hey hippie, get out of here. And he's, he's, he's a really struggling, right?

• 1:10:57Cal Newport?

  So he's unresponsive and he cracks. And all of this training that he had as a special forces guy in Vietnam, kind of like all comes out. He goes back in like autopilot and, uh, you know, breaks someone nose and stabs the other end, like flees into the woods and they're, they're going after there to catch him. It's about, it was a book about like war and its effects and its after effects. And the book has this real tragic ending. The movie is cool though, because of the famous scene where the Colonel who trained Rambo comes, uh, comes to the, where they're trying to find him in the forest. And I think it's Brian Dennehy plays the police chief. Police chief is like, Colonel, we don't need you here. We get it. You're worried about your man. You don't want him to get hurt, uh, but we don't, he killed one of us, like we're gonna

• 1:11:42Cal Newport?

  go get him. And the Colonel says, I don't think you understand. I'm not here to save Rambo from you. I'm here to save you from Rambo. It's like this kind of classic line and he does kill a lot of them. Um, anyways, different book by David Morell. Another classic one, Brotherhood of the Rose is about like these two orphans that have been trained by the CIA to be assassins. And then they're kind of turning on them and trying to like kill them off to make them scapegoats and they're being chased and classic thriller. That was really good. Um, I was hearing about Morell from Jack Carr, the ex Navy SEAL novelist who wrote Terminal List series of books. He always talked about David Morell was like a real inspiration for him. And so I had fun with it. Uh, then I read How Dante Can Save Your Life by Rod Dreher.

• 1:12:26Cal Newport?

  It's an account of Rod Dreher going through like a tough period in his life and Dante's, uh, reading Dante, uh, the Inferno, Paradiso, and I forgot the one in the middle, but the whole canto, bel canto, the comedian, the grand comedian, what do they call it? The commedia, commedia, the, the grand, I don't know what the right name is for the three books of Dante. Look that up. It's the

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Oh, well.

• 1:12:55Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I'm getting that wrong. And I read a whole book about it, but, but basically, he reads Dante and it brings him out of this funk that he's in. And so it's like some cool history of Dante and then like the lessons he drew out of it. There's also like some memoir going on. He moves back to like a small town in Louisiana where he grew up and like things don't go well. And he has like a psychological crisis that leads to like a physical.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Divine comedy?

• 1:13:18Cal Newport?

  The Divine Comedy. Yeah. There's what's the, there's an Italian name for it, right? That's what I was trying to say, the commedia. It's just not like how you say it, right? But I'm clearly a Dante scholar. I've read. I haven't read the full Divine Comedy, but I have a pretty good translation.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  La Divina Commedia.

• 1:13:35Cal Newport?

  Yeah, that's what I was thinking about, La Divina Commedia. So it's pretty good. I don't, I mean, honestly, this is probably not fair. I'm not the right person to read memoirs. I just, you know. The joy came across as somewhat self, is the reader, he feels sort of self-absorbed, which I guess is just what happens in a memoir. But like his whole life was just centered in this period on like, I can't get past that. Like my family is sliding me or disapproving of me or whatever. And at some point you're reading the book and you're like, man, get over it. There's a little bit of that going on, which is not fair. But anyways, he ends up okay. All right. I also read Buzzsaw by Jesse Dougherty. This is the, Jesse Dougherty was the beat reporter for the Nationals in 2019.

• 1:14:20Cal Newport?

  And this was the book he wrote about the Nationals winning the World Series. And I went to see him speak at the, there's a new bookstore in Bethesda. So I went to see him speak and Andrew Golden and Spencer Neusbaum were there. They're the current beat reporters for the Nationals. It was kind of cool to have like a lot of baseball fans get together and just sort of talk about it. And I felt bad for him because his book Buzzsaw came out March 2020.

• 1:14:45Cal Newport?

  This was the only book event he has done for that book is in February 2025. So I was like, this is the only event you got, but he had a full house. So I felt, I felt really good about it. So I read the book. It was great. I was like, oh, man, memory lane, like remembering that season and his style of writing the book is he explained it is like there's a, this is his editor at Simon Schuster told him this, your, your book's on a highway that's getting towards them winning, right? You're going through the season, but you're going to have off ramps along the way where we get backstories of like, oh, like how did this player come into this system or where, what's the backstory on this like head of scouting? So you got all these like side stories about the Nationals as well as you had the through line of the season and it was a lot of fun. It was, it was a better than I thought it would be. Jesse's a really good writer. Finally, I read Chris Hayes's new book,

• 1:15:28Cal Newport?

  The Siren's Call. This is his big news, Chris Hayes from MSNBC, his big news splashy book about attention, the attention economy. This book didn't necessarily have like a big new thesis. It's doing well. It debuted at number one, like Chris is pretty famous and he was on all the shows.

• 1:15:43Cal Newport?

  It doesn't have like a big news splashy thesis, but it's very smartly written. It's just like a smart idea book. There's no advice in it, but it's just, uh, let me try to understand and he's, he, his research assistants are busy. There are a lot of things and examples they're citing. And I thought it was like a, a really well-written book. Chris is a smart writer. We talk about these issues a lot on this show. If you want kind of like a smart cultural critic take on attention, the attention economy. This was a good one. He's a good writer. All right. So that's what I read. What's this picture you've given me here, Jesse? Is it Sega Genesis game?

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't know we were going to talk about that.

• 1:16:19Cal Newport?

  Got to hold it up, hold it up to the camera. It is a Sega, that a listener sent this to us?

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Cal Newport?

  It's a Sega Genesis game that has the title Sigma Insidious.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Cal Newport?

  Did we? Okay. So this is about us talking about both these terms. Oh, I have, I have your text here. All right. Here's what the, the listener said. I was just listening to episode 331 of the Deep Questions Podcast where the two words sigma and ascidius have taken a prominent role, which made me think about how they perfectly align with the two essential philosophies of the deep life. Putting these two words together, sigma and ascidius makes me think of an old RPG game where the hero has to fight the heroes of shallowness and distraction by accumulating career capital in order to live out and maintain his ever-evolving ideal lifestyle. I like that. I love the Sega Genesis reference because that's like our childhood. Yeah, that's like 1994 to 1997. So that's definitely a deep cut. I'm going to be honest, though, I don't remember what sigma means. We talked about it, I guess. I don't

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

  He describes it in the second paragraph, if you want to read it.

• 1:17:17Cal Newport?

  Describes an individual who puts his energy into pursuit of real value rather than relying on empty flashiness. Oh, I like that. All right, man. Sigma.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  It's like the big term with young kids.

• 1:17:28Cal Newport?

  So it's good.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:30Cal Newport?

  Did you know, did you know Ohio is like a negative term?

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:33Cal Newport?

  I learned this from my kids recently. So sigma is not Ohio.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:38Cal Newport?

  I still can't figure out if based is good or bad.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  I ain't heard of that.

• 1:17:42Cal Newport?

  Based? It's a thing. That's based.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  That's the first I heard.

• 1:17:46Cal Newport?

  You're clearly not sigma.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:17:49Cal Newport?

  Guys, Jesse's so Ohio. A sigma's know about based, except for I don't know what it means.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:17:56Cal Newport?

  Every 10 second interval that I'm talking about youth lingo is like a thousand listeners taking their AirPods off and throwing them. So we should probably wrap it up there, but I appreciate that Sega Genesis reference. This was from Alex. Thank you for that. All right, everyone. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:18:21Cal Newport?

  Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions Podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.

• 1:18:42Cal Newport?

  I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.