Afford Anything - The Incredible Value of Deep Work, Instead of Distraction – with Cal Newport

Episode Date: September 12, 2016

#42: Your most valuable asset isn’t your house, car or retirement portfolio. It’s your attention. Most knowledge workers spend their day frantically hopping between meetings, emails, phone calls and social media. But that’s not the best way to stand out in the modern economy. Emails are necessary, says author and professor Cal Newport. They’ll keep you from getting fired. But they won’t get you promoted. In fact, his Deep Work Hypothesis states that the ability to do deep work is becoming more rare, yet at the same time, more valuable. That means if you can train your mind to resist the common distractions we all face, you’ll become more valuable in the workplace, whether you’re self-employed or traditionally employed. The problem, however, is that most of us are intimidated by deep work. We welcome distractions from difficult tasks that take a toll on our brain power. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/cal-newport/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've heard me say that you can afford anything but not everything. And that's true not just of your money, but also your time, energy, focus, attention, any scarce resource within your life. My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. And today I am thrilled to introduce you to one of my favorite authors, Cal Newport. Cal is a computer science professor at Georgetown University who also writes books on the side. and his books are some of the most profound works I have ever come across on performance psychology. Cal, in this upcoming interview, talks about how to allocate the most valuable resource of them all, your attention. As you are about to hear, Cal describes the problem that the modern knowledge worker faces.

We don't have a lot of structure or overhead to our workflow. It's not here's the process you do or here's your expertise or here's how you create value. Instead, we all have an email inbox. It's hooked up to our names. And we just sort of figure things out by sending me messages back and forth and just sort of an ad hoc on-demand fashion. This is unprecedented in the history of knowledge work. Never before has there been a time when the modern skilled worker has been expected to monitor their inbox rather than push themselves to their abilities as a craftsman who can produce great work. And as Cal outlines in this upcoming interview, our ability to become that craftsman who does excellent work, rare, valuable work in your given field of choice, that is the differentiating factor that leads to a more satisfying career, better financial gain, an overall happier, more meaningful life.

Everything worthwhile is really hard. What seems to differentiate these people is they just embrace that concept. Okay, what's hard? I want to do the hard. What would really be the most valuable thing I could do here? And probably the reason it's not being done is just because it's really hard and I'm comfortable with that. You know, if you're not doing things really hard, if it's not really hard what you're trying to do, then it's probably not worth it. You can't hack your way into influence impact and meaning. As you're about to learn, putting in the deep work that allows you to move to the edge of your field, that allows you to develop those skills that make you stand out, is the key differentiating factor between being mediocre and being outstanding. Deep work is not a habit. Actually, it's a skill like playing the guitar. It's something that if you have not practiced, you're going to be terrible at. Without any further delay, here's Cal Newport, author of the book Deep Work. Hi, Cal. Hi, Paula. I am so happy to talk to you today. I want to talk about not just your most recent book Deep Work,

but also the prior one, so good they can't ignore you because you have some incredible ideas in both. But let's start discussing deep work. Can you share for the listeners the deep work hypothesis? Right. So deep work is a very particular professional activity, which is when you are focusing for a long period of time without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. And the hypothesis that's at the core of my book is that this skill is actually becoming increasingly valuable. in the knowledge economy at exactly the same time that it's becoming increasingly rare, people are getting worse at it, which I think is a great opportunity. Because if you're one of the few people to actually cultivate this, it's a huge competitive advantage.

So what would be an example of deep work? Deep work is whenever you're giving something an intense attention and pushing your cognitive capacity to the limit. So for example, if you're trying to craft a piece of writing, or if you're a musician trying to master a new difficult lick or measure from the writing. Or if you're a computer programmer, trying to figure out how to make the code do what you want to do. Or if you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to bring in all the variables and figure out, what is my strategy?

You know, what's the actual, what's really happening here? Anytime that you really are pushing your mind to its limit and concentrating intensely on something, that's deep work. And how is that distinguished from shallow work? Would that be email and social media are the obvious culprits? Are there any other examples of shallow work that people often are guilty of? Yeah, I define shallow work. This is the antonym of deep work.

So if it's not deep work, we can default it to shallow. The attributes of shallow work that I think are most relevant is that they're not cognitively demanding. So you're not applying a hard one skill at your fullest extent. And they tend to be pretty easily replicatable. So if you're tweaking your WordPress configuration or tweeting links or answering emails or, you know, in most meetings or putting together PowerPoint slides, most of those tends to be shallow work. It doesn't require you to focus as hard as you can. And you're not really applying a hard one skill at a high level. Probably you could get a savvy 22-year-old right out of college could probably do that for you if they had the right background.

And I think that distinction is important because, you know, the marketplace, if it's anything, it's brutal. and essentially the marketplace is going to value things that are rare and valuable. And it's deep work that produces things that are rare and valuable. Shallow work by definition doesn't. So there's a good tension here. You know, shallow work is necessary. I mean, it's what keeps the lights on and what keeps, you know, accounting happy. But it's deep work that makes a difference.

And so I think having that tension, you know, shallow work will prevent you from getting fired, but deep work will get you promoted, is a good way to sort of keep these two things in your mind, these two sort of conflicting and both useful types of obligation sort of balanced in your head. In your book, you kind of, you break up your book into two parts. The first section really focuses on why deep work matters and the second dives into how to execute deep work. So let's, following that lead, I'd like to talk a little bit longer about why this matter so much before we dive into strategies on how a person can, execute deep work. So as you mentioned, deep work is rare and valuable. You also talk about how it is meaningful. Can you elaborate a bit more on that, the satisfaction that comes from deep work? This was a surprise, actually. It wasn't in the original book outline. That first part was really

supposed to focus just on the professional benefit to deep work, which you can make a very clear case that deep work helps you, A, learn complicated things quickly, and B, produce at an elite level, both of which you can draw from economic trends and the commentary of the economists to show that this is going to be increasingly important if you want to stand out or survive the knowledge economy. So that was what part one was just going to be about. But as I dive into that research, I kept finding these different strands and from a variety of different areas from neuroscience, from psychology, from philosophy even, that all seem to tangle up and around the same message, which was deep work is also really meaningful.

That for whatever reason, doing deep work, where you're spending a lot of time just completely focused on one thing that's really at the limits of your ability, feels deeply satisfying for human beings. It's like we're wired for craftsmanship. And the flip side of this is we're really not wired for continual partial attention, jumping from this to that to this to that. That type of fragmented state of attention, I think, makes us feel so anxious because it's so different from what we're really wired to do. So, you know, you really feel it.

The more you embrace and prioritize deep work, there's this meaningfulness to sense of satisfaction that starts to set in, which is really kind of addictive. And it's a good thing because deep work is hard. So you need something like that that kind of spur you forward. If people aren't wired for that frenetic task switching, why do we do it so much? Well, there's a couple different reasons. One, it's convenient. So I think this is what's happening in the business world when you have large organizations that seem to prioritize constant communication, be it you got to answer emails quickly or, you know, today it's more increasingly you got to answer your Slack chat window quickly. The reason I think that that has arisen is because it makes everyone's life easier in the moment. It means you don't have to put a lot of thinking into, okay, okay, what are my roles? How am I going to run my day? How I'm going to run my week?

What's on my plate? What do I need from people? When do I need it? Let me have my whole system mapped out. Instead, you can just open up an inbox and rock and roll. And if you need something, I'll just ask you. I'll get it right away. And if you just aren't really in mood of the work,

well, you can just churn through messages and feel productive. So I think it's incredibly convenient and satisfying in the moment just to have a lot of little frenetic things to do. But as we all know, it's also very frazzling and sort of sold deadening in the long term. The more you spin just answer this and this and the piling up of the messages faster than you can reply to them in the long term, it just frazzles us. Given that reality, how can we learn to work deeply? How can a person embrace a habit of deep work within their lives? Yeah, we really have three levels on which we can answer that question, which is what can

organizations do? It's a high level. Then we go down to what can an individual do to actually actually actively stretch their ability to do deep work. And then the other level is what can an individual do to their lifestyle? To help sort of set the stage to be able to sort of do feats of sort of cognitive daring. So we sort of have three different areas. And I'm not quite sure which of those you'd like me to dive into. Let's go into all of those. Let's start with the organizational level.

What can an organization do in order to encourage its employees other than turning off the Slack channel and getting rid of open office spaces, which I've heard you're also not a fan of. Open office spaces are nonsensical, but that's a different topic, just like my plea that you should all quit Facebook. That's another topic to be its own podcast. What's important at the organizational level, and I think this is true whether it's a one-person entrepreneurship venture or you're part of a team of a large organization,

same principles apply. We know from research and experience that it does not work to just try to target sources of distraction and complain about them or just try to minimize them in isolation. So if you go to your boss and say, I hate doing all these meetings, they seem worthless to me,

or stop bothering me on email. I don't want to answer your emails. It doesn't work. It doesn't approve anything. And it's because these things aren't, you know, it's not purely bad. There's a reason why you're having the meeting and there's some value in the emails you're sending.

So what does seem to be effective at the organizational level is the first of all define, we have these two categories. There's deep work and then there's shallow work. And shallow work keeps the lights on, right? We don't want to denigrate it. But deep work is what actually produces things that are valuable to the marketplace. So it's rare and valuable because you're pushing your skills to its limit and getting better.

It's what produces value for your organization or for your own company. So the question in my mind that everyone should be asking is, what is my ideal deep to shallow work ratio? And what I mean by that is in a given week, I think it's a good unit of time for this. If you take every hour in that week and say, did I spend that hour focused intensely on one demanding thing or not? If I did, then I'll count it as a deep work hour.

If I didn't, I'll count it as a shallow work hour. Look at the ratio of that deep, the shallow work hours. Where do you want to be and where are you? And if you work for yourself, I mean, you can just have this conversation with yourself. Where should I be and measure it? If you work for someone else, have this conversation with them. Say, hey, where should I be? What should my deep to shallow ratio be?

And having these concrete numbers and having a sort of positive plan, like, hey, we think positively speaking this ratio of deep to shallow would be best for your position or for our company has an ability to really lead to a lot of changes in workplace culture and in your own habits in a way that doesn't work if you're instead just negative and just pointing out things that in isolation you don't like. In terms of determining that ratio, what factors go into? to helping you decide the ideal ratio for your particular position. Would it be like your entry level versus advanced?

Would it be the particular industry that you're in? Yeah. Well, entry level versus advance matters. Because deep work, again, is where it's not easily replicatable by definition. So it's the only type of effort that really directly produces things that's going to be valued by the marketplace. So if your job is primarily to support someone or some team that can produce value, you can do highly skilled labor, then your deep to shallow work ratio is probably going to be pretty small. And that makes sense.

On the other hand, if your primary value that you offer to the company is the production of things that's valuable to the marketplace, you're going to want that deep to shallow work ratio to be relatively large. You probably want it to be 50% or higher. And putting a number to this really helps. because otherwise, you know, everything just seems useful. Well, all these things are kind of useful. And you have a mindset of like, why not? Like, well, why don't I just use this tool? This could help.

And maybe I should contact this person because you never know that could help. And let me spend some more time on this social media platform because you never know. Like maybe some opportunity will come out. But when you think about it in this ratio terms, you're recognizing every hour you spend on shallow work doing things that are easily replicatable, hoping that maybe serendipitously you uncover some contact. Is time not spent actually hoping? owning your skills and applying your skills to produce things that are rare and valuable. So that's an activity with a real cost.

And that actually reminds me of the any benefit kind of model of decision making that you take umbrage with. Yeah. So the any benefit mindset is what most people in the knowledge economy apply when trying to decide whether or not to use, in particular, new digital or communication tools. And this mindset says, hey, if this tool could plausibly offer me a benefit or plausibly prevent me from missing out on something interesting or useful, that's justification for me to use it. And I think that mindset is a huge outlier in the history of skilled labor.

An example of that would be if there's a benefit to being on Twitter, you cite an example in your book about authors being on Twitter. There's a bit of a marketing benefit so people use it, despite the fact that their time could be better spent writing. Yeah, there's a lot of this, well, you never know. If you're active on. on Twitter as an author, then you never know. You might come across an interesting opportunity or a lead you didn't know about. Or, you know, maybe that audience engagement will lead to some more sales. That's the any benefit mindset.

And we're that, like what I just said there probably sounds completely cynical to, you know, most people listening. But to any other branch of skilled labor, this idea that you would invest time and energy into a tool without a clear and demonstrative advantage, without the tool having to have convinced you, okay, you finally warned me down. This is definitely going to make a big advantage. Just when it makes sense. And so I even went out in the book and interviewed a farmer and asked them, okay, how do you select your tools? Because all of the tools that are available to you in the farm supply store, they all have value. Every tool in the farm supply store is there because

it makes something easier or could make something, you know, higher yield. And yet you don't buy most of them. And he walked me through this really sort of intricate decision-making process he uses to decide where to invest his time and attention when it comes to farm tools. That's going to be the same in almost any skilled craft. The exception right now is in the world of sort of digital knowledge work, where if a company in California puts out some new social media service, the default belief is, well, it's up to me as a user to figure out whether or not this is useful. It's up to me to try it, to see if I like it, to kind of come up with uses, and that that company can just kind of sit back and, you know, cash in on my eyeballs during that time. There's

almost nowhere else in the economy where you see that type of mindset. So I really push people to adopt that more farmer-style mindset. Something has to really convince you that it's going to bring demonstrable value before you sliver up any of your time and attention to invest in it. Why has this formed? I mean, you mentioned that this is an outlier in the history of knowledge work, which is not a very long history, but why is this happening? Why now and why us? Well, a big part of it, especially in the world of social media, is that it was discovered that attention is an incredibly valuable resource that can be mined and make a lot of money for a small number of people. So when you get a multi-billion dollar potential industry, you're going to get a ton of really savvy marketing. You're going to get a ton of really savvy application of website design that is all built around convincing you to use this.

So in a words, the creatures of the attention economy have a lot more resources at their disposal that convince you to invest time and attention in their tools than, say, you know, the companies within farm supply world. Those companies don't get the multi-billion dollar valuations with 11 employees like you can get in the attention economy. So it's dollars and cents, you know. It's like 100 years ago, oil was discovered to be valuable. And so we went everywhere we could to try to extract oil from the earth. well, you know, in the 21st century, your eyeballs are valuable. And so, of course, you're going to have a lot of money going around saying, okay, how can we get as much to extract as much of this resource as possible? And what you get is incredibly well-marketed, well-positioned applications and services that are

designed from the ground up to be sort of as sticky and addictive as possible and are positioned not as tools that, you know, are trying to convince you they're valuable, but instead is sort of they're part of the cultural conversation and to not be using them as to somehow to not be engaged in some important part of the culture. So I tip my hat. You know, if you put enough money in an industry, you're going to get some pretty good results from the industry's point of view. Sounds like somebody in the industry had to do the deep work necessary to think of how to make it so sticky and so applicable. Yeah, what's so funny about it. You know, I'm a computer scientist and I work in the algorithms behind distributed systems, which are incredibly complicated.

and really hard. And these are what run services like Facebook or Twitter. And so it's this funny irony that, you know, no one's ever made a fortune being good at using Facebook. But there's certainly a group of people out in Silicon Valley who made a fortune doing the deep work necessary to create the complex systems that run services like Facebook. So it's this irony out there that these services required deep work to exist. And yet they do everything they can to make it hard for anyone else to do it. Right. And you talk about how as we move forward into the remainder of the 21st century, the differentiating factor in whether or not you succeed in the new economy will be your ability to focus on rare and valuable skills or not. Yeah, this seems to be a clear trend because of there's increasing competitiveness, increasing automation, and increasing outsourcing in the knowledge economy. There's this growing consensus among economists. that we're going to end up with the sort of bimodal distribution of outcomes in the workforce.

And there's going to be those who are real stars, those who have mastered complicated things and can apply complicated systems and ideas and produce things at an elite level. They're going to do really, really well. But then we're going to have this huge group of people that are going to be doing way worse. So we're not going to have this nice clean middle class anymore. It's going to be a little bit more bimodal because if what you're doing is at all easily replicatable, then it's going to be automated, it's going to be outsourced, it's going to be replaced, it's going to be eliminated with more advanced systems.

So there's both this issue and opportunity. I mean, it's probably an issue economy-wide that things are going to get more competitive. But it's also an opportunity that if you're one of the few that can be a star in the economy, that you can keep up with complicated systems and ideas and apply them at elite levels, you're going to have more rewards. There's going to be sort of more of the pie going towards you. So what do you need to be on that side of the distribution? you need to be able to learn complex things quickly and to produce high quality work at high quantity.

Both of those are direct effects of deep work. The better you are at deep work, the harder you can concentrate, the more time you spend in intense concentration, the better you are at those two key things. So, you know, when you look at it from an economic lens, deep work, and this is quoting the economist now, begins to look like the killer app of the knowledge economy. It's kind of underneath the covers of everything that looks like it's going to be valuable in the next 10 or 15 years. So that's why I'm sort of shouting it from the rooftops. Guys, it's not about how connected you are. It's not about how comfortable you are with consumer-facing internet tools. It's going to be about how hard can you focus.

That's going to be the differentiating factor. Focus is going to be in the 21st century what IQ was in the second half of the 20th century. So then let's go back to how to work deeply. You've talked about at the organizational level determining the ideal percentage of your time that you would devote to deep work, what about at the individual level? Right. So when it comes down to the individual level, if you want to succeed with deep work, we can really think about in two ways. One is what can you do in your day-to-day life to support it? And then the second category is sort of what can you do to actually get better at it when you actually do it?

And that second category is important because it implies a truth, which is often missed, which is that deep work is a skill, not a habit. So a lot of people think about deep work, likely what a habit, such as flossing their teeth, something they know how to do, and it's really just a matter of like I should make more time and do more of it. But deep work is not a habit.

Actually, it's a skill like playing the guitar. It's something that if you have not practiced, you're going to be terrible at. So, you know, most people, if you haven't actually cultivated your ability to do deep work, even if you are able to protect time and go to a cave and you're cut off from the internet and you sit down to think really deeply,

if you haven't trained this ability, it's going to be uncomfortable and not much is going to get done. So I think that's really important to recognize, because a lot of people will just kind of try deep work and say, I don't know, that was uncomfortable, I didn't get much done. I must not be a deep work person and they give up on it. And that's from that fundamental mischaracterization, thinking about focus as something you either can do or don't,

but actually it's a skill to train. So we have, how do you get better at the skill of deep work, and then sort of related, how do you make sure that deep work is sort of, of protected and has a big place in your schedule. How do you get better at the skill of deep work? I really want to dive into that because that seems to be the million dollar question. I mean, forming a habit, there are many tips out there on how to incorporate new habits into your life, but skill formation is a different level. Yeah, and it's exciting too. I mean, once you realize

that deep work is something that you can get better and better at, it opens up for you this potential, You realize, like, hey, I can get better at this and better at this and better at this. And the limits of what you can produce might be way farther out than you might be imagining. So really deep work is not about, let me be a little bit more productive. It's about what transformations can I make to be massively orders of magnitude more productive. I'm talking people who seem like superstars in their fields. So once you understand that, it gets more exciting. You're like, wow, okay, I'll train this.

So when it comes to training it, there's two parts to it. there's the active things you can do. So you can actually actively stretch your ability to focus, the sort of depth you can achieve. And there's various exercises you can do. And then there's really the passive side, which is, you know, if you want to be good at focusing and increase the intensity of your focusing, you actually have to build a lifestyle that's conducive to that. So just like if you want to be a professional athlete, you have to be careful about what you do outside of your training. You can't eat junk food. You can't smoke.

You've got to get sleep. The same thing is true if you want to reach more elite levels with the ability to focus. You can't spend most of your hours outside of your focus blocks constantly checking phones and diving between a lot of social media apps and text messages all day and on attention economy websites. That's the same as being a professional athlete who's eating McDonald's, you know, when they're not at the track. So there's actually changes you have to make to how you live your life that sort of get your brain ready for the rigors of real intense level focus. And that is one of the most interesting things that I thought came out of your book when you talked about, you know, when you're in line at the grocery store, don't take out your phone to play candy crush or read an article. Embrace a bit of boredom.

Yeah. Does that truly help a mind develop focus? I mean, what should your mind be doing when you're waiting for the elevator and you're not looking at your phone? Mentally, what should you be doing instead? Well, so the key thing about embracing boredom is that what you're really doing there is trying to break the addiction to novel stimuli. So the way to think about it is you constantly get these cravings for stimuli. I mean, boredom I define sort of technically in this context to be the absence of a lot of novel stimuli. And so you get a craving.

Hey, this is boring. I want some novel stimuli. If every time you have that craving, you give into it. And smartphones allow you to give into that craving at a moment's notice anywhere at any point during the day. I have a thousand novel stimuli in my pocket that I can pull out. That builds up this expectation or addiction that your mind expects, okay, in the lack of novel stimuli and gets them right away. All right, fast forward to the next day, you're sitting down your painstakingly built rider's cabin, you know, overlooking the ocean and you're okay now this is it like i'm going to lock in

well deep work is boring in the sense that there is not a lot of novel stimuli because your attention is on just one thing and if your mind has been taught no no no you get stimuli as soon as you're the slightest bit bored it is not going to accept your request that it just be okay without stimuli and just focus on this this one hard thing for a long period of time so you have to break that addiction you have to teach your mind to be comfortable feeling bored and not really needing other stimuli and the best way to do that is to actually inject a lot of boredom into your life. This time after time, giving yourself experiences with,

I'm sitting at this restaurant waiting for my friend, they're not here yet, I'm just going to look around. I'm waiting in line at the bank. It's taking a long time. I'm just going to think about something. I'm not going to look at my phone. That's actually doing a ton of positive good that's going to help you out the next day

when you sit down and actually try to create something of value. Is it then equally dangerous for your mind to escape into some type of internal novel stimuli, such as daydreaming? It's not nearly as bad. It's not nearly as bad. See, the level of novelty that has exists in your smartphone is at such a high level. I mean, you have to understand that social media apps, for example, they employ attention engineers who borrow techniques from Las Vegas casino gambling to make these things as most sort of stimulus, as much stimulus as possible to make them intermittently reinforcement.

A lot of social media also praised really successfully on your need for sort of recognition because it's, hey, there could be something in here about me, which we're completely wired to be like, I got, there's something about me somewhere. I, you know, I absolutely have to see that. I mean, we're wired. We're social beings. And so that's the flashing bells, you know, Las Vegas slot machine, someone gossiping about you type thing that's incredibly stimulating.

That's so much more extreme than my thoughts are wandering. Your thoughts are wandering an internal dialogue. Now, I do talk about in the book, there are things like productive meditation where you try to take a given thought that's useful, a professional thought, and stick with it and develop it. And so there's things you can do and actually do some active deep work training during those periods. But even in the absence of that active deep work training, there's nothing you can do in your mind that's going to be as addictive forming of what the smartphone can do to your brain. When you are engaged in deep work, how do you differentiate between productive deep work versus overfocusing or over-optimizing, you know, to that kind of obsessive-compulsive quality? Yeah, it's hard. It is hard. Deep work is hard. But it helps to think about it through the lens of craftsmanship. I mean, that you really want to develop a small number of crafts that you're getting really good at and that you apply with deep work focus. Because remember, a key attribute of deep work is that it pushes your cognitive capacity to its limits.

So focusing really hard on clean out your email inbox, for example, might actually help you clean out that inbox faster because you're focused really hard. But it's not deep work because you're not actually pushing a hard one skill to its limit to produce something. That's where your limits are producing it. And the actual art of producing high-value things is craftsmanship and it's complicated. But recognizing that's useful. and so that you should constantly be striving. I want to be better at my craft. And you should be thinking a lot.

What do I do during my deep work sessions? And was that a successful deep work session? And why was that one more successful? That's how you improve your craft. And as you put more and more focus on it, you're able to get more and more out of your deep work sessions. And you learn a lot about the cul-de-sacs to get you stuck. And the type of specificity or lack thereof

that helps you produce more. And when the hardest question for me, when to abort on this, I do a lot of proofs. When to abort? I'm just stuck. I can't white knuckle my way out of it. I need to move on to something else. And when to say, no, no, no, I'm on to something. I need to keep, you know, hammering away at it. Those are all the right questions. And none of them have easy answers. But I'll tell you, I'd much rather be spending a work day dedicated to grappling with those questions than I would with, you know, grappling with an inbox. How much time can a mind reasonably spend on deep work in a state of productive focus? It's a surprisingly tricky question. What we know from the research is that no one can really do more than four, sometimes five hours of actual full-out intense concentration. And the easiest place to measure this is professional musicians, because when professional musicians are practicing, they practice at a state of incredible intense deep work.

Two books ago, so good they can ignore you, I spent some time with a professional guitar player and I wrote about what it looks like to watch him practice. and it's intense. I mean, he's barely breathing in these ragged gas. So if you measure how much time can a professional musician practice in one day,

you get a pretty good proxy for how much intense concentration can a human brain put up with when it's really highly trained. The answer is four to five hours. But the reality is for most people, when you're doing deep work, what's actually happening

is a little bit more cyclical. So, you know, I might spend like an eight-hour day, for example, working on a single proof. And I would say I just spent eight hours of doing deep work. But if you actually looked inside my brain, what you see is 20 minutes of intensely thinking and then I kind of wind it down and let my brain relax a little bit.

And then another 30 minute dash. And then, okay, I'm just going to let it relax a little bit. And then another dash, right? So it seems like a contradiction at first. We have this research that says even the best thinkers can't do more than four hours a day. And then you have a lot of people who are doing eight, ten hour days of deep work. That's how you reconcile those two things. is that the reality of deep work for people who aren't professional musicians is that for the whole period,

your brain is sort of locked into the topic. It's in the context of the problem. You're not checking email. You're not switching and you're not putting on the TV. But your intensity levels have been flow. You give your brain a breather. Then you go back in you give your brain a breather. With that in mind, you can spend a whole day doing deep work.

But in terms of how long can you sustain the most peak concentration, you know, 20 minutes to an hour, a little bit of a tail off 20 minutes to an hour. I mean, that's pretty common. I'm going to continue this interview with Cal Newport in just a moment. First, I want to take a second to thank our sponsor, Fresh Books. If you are an entrepreneur, if you have a side hustle, if you're a freelancer, you probably spend a bunch of time invoicing. That's part of the shallow work that you do. It's necessary.

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It takes about two minutes to create an invoice in fresh books, and they automate the system from that point forward. They will let you know whether or not a client has even bothered looking at the invoice. They'll send automated follow-up reminders to clients who have paid late. They will take over that process so that you can focus your mind. mind on growth and development. Give them a try. Head to freshbooks.com slash paula.

That's freshbooks.com slash p-a-u-l where you can try them for free for 30 days. Again, that's freshbooks.com slash Paula, P-A-U-L-A. And when they ask how you heard about them, please mention this show. Thanks so much. Back to Cal Newport. In your previous book, In So Good They Can Ignore You, you discuss a related concept, deliberate practice, which you describe as a method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond your limits. Are deep work and deliberate practice synonymous, or is there a

difference? Deep work is a more general concept. So it's a good question. So deliberate practice is, as you explained it, it's the activity that is required to improve on complex skills. And it kind of sounds like common sense, but this was actually a hard one insight in the world of performance psychology that how do people get better at hard things, they have to do activities that are deliberately designed to make him better, which means you're going to stretch yourself. So that's why when I watched a guitar player, it's so good they can't ignore you, I was watching how he got better at a guitar lick. And the way to get better is he would play it just a little bit faster than he could do comfortably.

So he'd make a lot of mistakes that concentrate as hard as he could that try to keep up with it. That was stretching himself. And that's what was going to make him better and better at it. deliberate practice is usually pretty uncomfortable because by definition you're stretching yourself past where you're comfortable and it's definitely under the umbrella of deep work so to be doing deliberate practice you're doing deep work so the better you are at concentrating intensely the more efficiently and effectively you can do deliberate practice there's other types of activities though that aren't deliberate practice that do fall under the umbrella of deep work in particular activities that create flow states which can actually be quite pleasurable. where you're applying your skill at a high level and in an expert way, you can really get lost in the activity, you can lose track of time, and it can feel very pleasurable. That's also an example of deep work. Flow states are very different than deliberate practice states.

So that's the way I think about it. Doing intense focus on things, there's different types of activities that require intense focus, and they have quite different subjective experiences. Though I should say there is debate in the field. I did a Scott Barry Kaufman's podcast not too long ago, and we had this nice long discussion about the debates in the field about deliberate practice versus flow. And it's actually somewhat contentious. So what I just said there was basically Anders Erickson's view on it, the founder of deliberate practice. But there's others who think they're more enmeshed than has been portrayed before. Can you tell me a little bit about that conflict?

What is the premise of that? It's interesting. So the deliberate practice partisan. So like Anders Erickson, who pioneered the concept, draws of clear dividing line. Flow states are different. Flow states feel good. You're not getting better. You're not stretching yourself.

The flow state is you're the musician playing the performance. And you know what you're doing. You're doing something hard, this great musical skill, and you're applying it at a high level, and you get lost in it. And it's a very pleasurable experience. Deliberate practice is trying to learn the song. And it's not at all pleasurable because you can't quite play it. You can't quite get that lick right.

like the guitar player I profiled, trying to push yourself a little bit faster and it's very frustrating and you're breathing and ragged gasp and you're not losing track of time, you're counting every minute and really not liking it. So that's what the deliberate practice partisan say, that's different. The flow partisans say, no, no, no, no, it's all flow. Like, everything, anytime that you're like doing anything intensely with concentration, it all kind of falls under the metric of flow. And I think Scott Kaufman's point is, it's really hard to measure in a useful, consistent way, people's subjective states, how they feel. So, you know, any type of attempt to say this feels better mentally and this feels worse is actually

on somewhat shaky methodological grounds. We just, there's nothing we can measure quantitatively. We're just kind of asking people survey questions. People have different ways of thinking it. And so the flow of partisans would say this is all kind of the same thing. So it is an interesting debate. From the perspective of deep work, it doesn't matter. The point is those things, whether they're the same experience or not, are very valuable, and they all require deep work.

Would deep work be, regardless of whether it comes in the form of deliberate practice or any other type of deep work, could deep work also develop the career capital that you talk about in so good they can't ignore you, the capital that can be cashed in for qualities that correlate with career satisfaction, like autonomy and mastery and a sense of purpose? Yeah, that connection is very important in understanding sort of the genesis of this book. So yeah, in so good they can't ignore you, the book I wrote back in 2012, I laid out this argument that, you know, if you follow people who love what they do, a very common pattern is they got really good at very valuable things. This gave them sort of leverage over their career. I called it career capital. That leverage or career capital then allowed them to obtain traits that made them passionate about their work, made their working like. made their working life really good, like autonomy and a sense of mastery and these type of things. And so the obvious follow-up question was, okay, so how do I master rare and valuable skills?

How do I build career capital? And one way to think about deep work is it's a book that answers that question. So deep work is the activity that matters for mastering things that the market actually values. And therefore, gaining the leverage you need to craft a working life that's really meaningful and satisfying and it generates a true sense of passion. And I think it's just important to capture this economy that the shallow work stuff, though it's not bad and it has value, does not make you better at things. It does not build up rare and valuable skills.

It does not earn you career capital. So it should really be seen properly as like a necessary evil. I want to do just as much of this as I need to to not get fired or to keep my business afloat this week. and I want to do it as ruthlessly, productively, and efficiently as possible because the big show, the thing that matters, the thing that's going to lead me to a working life I love, that's going to lead me to passion, that's going to leave me to meaning, all of that comes out of deep work. Deep work is what counts.

Those are the hours that count towards your goal of a working life you love. There's no amount of email efficiency. There's no amount of Facebook or Twitter expertness that is going to earn you any career capital or give you any real major leverage over your career. It's the intense concentration to improve and apply skills. That's the whole ball game if what you're concerned about is really finding sort of meaning and passion in your working life. So what should you do if you are at work and you have promised yourself that I've put the afternoon aside for deep work? I've no meetings.

My phone is off. You've controlled for all of the external factor so that you have that afternoon free to focus on deep work. And yet you cannot get your mind to behave in the way that you want it to. What should you do in that situation? Well, first of all, you would want to be go easy on yourself and think about it. The analogous situation is that, you know, you've just picked up a guitar and you're trying to play and it sounds terrible. Your initial reaction would not be, I'm not a guitar person. Like this doesn't sound like it does on the radio.

I must not be a guitar person. Your initial reaction would be, all right, I really need to practice the guitar. Obviously, I don't know how to play it very well because I haven't practiced. and just recognizing that this is something that you practice and get better at, that's going to give you at least a little bit of relief. So you say, okay, yeah, I'm having a hard time this afternoon. That's okay. I mean, maybe I'm new to deep work.

And recognize that there's a lot of levels. You know, if you spent your whole life up to this point with your smartphone at all times and on social media and text and checking, you know, clickbait sites just sort of all day, and then you turn around and say my afternoon is clear, let me focus. You're really, really going to struggle. And there's different levels. No, I'm someone who spends a lot of time on deep work, and I'm pretty good at it. But I've been around people who are world-class at deep work, and they make me seem like an amateur.

So there's all of these different levels you can reach. So that's the first thing, is just, okay, go easy on yourself, it's okay, this is something that has to be cultivated. And then from there, I think having an actual plan of action for how you're going to develop your deep work skills is just as important as what you might do during the deep work sessions themselves up front. So having some sort of crash course and I'm happy to share some sort of the first three things to do type ideas. But having some sort of systematic thing, here's what I'm going to start doing now to get better at this thing that I'm not so good at is pretty important. All right. What are those first three things to do ideas? First I would say you want to regularly put aside some time, not too much.

And I suggest at first doing this on your calendar, doing it maybe one or two weeks in advance. And actually blocking out, I think five hours broken up into two blocks is a fine place to start. maybe you have a three-hour chunk one day and a two-hour chunk another day, and that's it. I think it's a fine place to start. Put on your calendar, treat it like a doctor's appointment. So if someone says, you know, hey, Paula, can you jump on a call Thursday at three and you have already put aside, you know, two to five, just like you would say if you had a doctor's appointment, now I got a thing. I'm free again at five, I can do it some other time, and you'd pick another time. People recognize appointments and meetings are things that they have to schedule around.

So that would be the first thing. So you start regularly putting aside a modest amount of time for you. deep work, but consistently, and you treat it like a doctor's appointment. So once it's on there, you have to schedule around it. Two, I would actually, I would start doing some sort of systematic, at least one exercise to systematically stretch your ability to concentrate. So for example, during these sessions you put aside, I would suggest doing dashes. You know, you have a timer, just like kind of the Pomodoro method in some sense. All right, 20 minutes as intense as I can on this very specific demanding goal. Okay, five minute break. No email, no distrave,

just let your mind calm down. All right, another 20 minutes. So you give yourselves these stretches and you can increase that time. So at least one exercise to actively push it. And then the third of three things would be do at least one thing in your life outside of work to signal to yourself that you're serious about your time and attention that you respect it. Just like if you commit to I'm going to run a triathlon, you might then at the same time say, and therefore I'm cutting out junk food or I'm not going to drink beer during the week or something like that. Do something similar in the realm of time and attention. Quit some social media sites.

Don't tell anyone. I'm just going to quit this for 30 days, see if anyone notices. Stop web surfing. One of my favorite passive training techniques I offer to people is during your leisure time, start scheduling when you're going to use the internet for entertainment, and then during that time, go nuts. But all of the other time outside of that window, you just don't. And if you're bored, you're bored.

So you're not cutting yourself off from the world. but if you're not in that window you put aside, then you just have to be bored. So you do one thing in your lifestyle outside of work that says to yourself, I value my time and attention. This is something I want to cultivate. So if you do just those three things, do that for a month, you're already going to see major improvements in your ability to sort of lock in, focus intensely and produce at a high level. What results have you seen over the years that you've spent doing deep work? You know, if 2010 Cal Newport could interview the Cal Newport of today, what would you tell them? Well, I'll give you a personal example. So it took me about a year to write this book. You would imagine during the year in which I was writing the book that my high value output as an academic would go down because, you know, writing a book takes a significant amount of time.

I would definitely imagine that, yes. So it's taking a lot of professional time away from doing the academic. So it should be. It should be. go down. And the right metric for an academic at a research institution is the number of peer-reviewed papers in prestigious venues. That's the right metric that count. So during the year I was writing this book, that should go down. But during the year I was writing this book, because the book was about deep work, it really got me thinking about my deep work habits and really helped me commit to sticking with my routines and rituals and training my deep work and treating my deep work with respect. So I got better at deep work during that year, even as my time drastically reduced. The result was,

I published more papers that year by a factor of two than any other previous years. That's the type of output I'm talking about where training your ability to focus can deliver. It's not about being a little bit more productive. And it's not about, oh, distractions are annoying, you should be less distracted. It's not a moral stance. It's a order of magnitude improvement on output. It's about drastically reducing the number of hours you have available and yet doubling your output of high value production. Another example I gave in the book was a writer who had a tight deadline and he booked a business class ticket to Tokyo from Los Angeles. He flew to Tokyo riding the whole way because there was no distractor. He could really go deep on planes more than anywhere else. Got to Tokyo, had a cappuccino

in the airport, got on the flight, flew back. 30 hours, basically. He was gone, wrote an entire draft of the book, you know, during that time. You know, examples like this, this kind of pile up, but when you really push your focus up to an intense level, it's an experience that a lot of people haven't had before. The amount you produce and the quality that you produce can be like a foreign experience when you're new to it. It's really an exciting thing. And so like I always try to hammer that point home is that it's not about distractions or annoying or you want to be a little bit more productive. It's about, it's like a superpower almost. It's about a substantial substantial improvement in the amount and quality of what you produce.

Do you have any advice for people on the art of learning? I mean, your blog study hacks is very much about your philosophy. I shouldn't say philosophy, but, you know, it provides a lot of advice on focused studying and focused learning. And given that deep work is a skill, you need to learn how to learn. What should a listener do if they are trying to master the skill of mastering skills? You know, one of the things you become comfortable with if you embrace the sort of deep life philosophy is you become comfortable with mental discomfort in much the same way that, you know, professional athletes become very comfortable with the sort of bodily discomfort of training. You know, it actually, you know, it technically feels bad when you're really, you know, you're doing a squat and your legs are tired or you're doing that last 400 and your lungs are shot. it doesn't feel good, but athletes don't fear it because they're like, no, this discomfort is good, right?

This is, I'm pushing myself on developing. People who really embrace a deep life get much more comfortable with mental discomfort. So like learning something complicated, we have to focus intensely, it's supposed to generate mental discomfort. You don't understand it at first. That's the whole point of you needing to learn it. And your mind struggles with it. It can't keep all the variables in place. It can't see how they click together. And the more you practice deep work, you know, the more comfortable you get with, like, that's okay. Okay, this feels. very uncomfortable, but instead of switching to my phone, I'm just going to sit there with that discomfort, and let me keep the variables in my head. Let me move around to this configuration.

I'm not going to give up the train of thought yet. Well, what if I try it this way? And you push through it and you push through it and then you get a connection and it makes sense. And then all of these pieces you're holding your head all collapse in the wand and you get this sense of mental relief. And you're like, okay, now I can go to the next level. That type of nuance of what it feels like to be in a state of intense concentration is something that people that have to use their minds for a living at a high level are used to, but we don't really have that vocabulary in the sort of common world of knowledge work. I think that's something we should change because the ability to do this is such an advantage of knowledge work. So that would be, you know, sort of my

advice is start to be much more perceptive and accommodating a mental discomfort and seek it. That's good. You want to feel bored. You want to feel attention. You want to feel a desire to check your phone. That kind of means you're on to something and sort of learn to embrace it. It gets easier. you get better with it. It's a really rich life of the mind that's available once you start cultivating these skills. And I can tell you it's a lot more satisfying than the sort of anxious feeling that comes from the alternative, which is the sort of constantly fragmented attention, which we're really not wired for. So be comfortable with discomfort in your brain, which would be my first piece of advice. If you actually want to do learning at a high level, the type of thing

that can actually move the needle. Do you have a morning routine? I do, yeah. Can you describe it? Well, it might change, actually. We actually just changed something major in our life. But for a long time until very recently, it was built around when my wife would go to work, which was right around 715. So I would normally get up around six, and then right away, I'd go for, it's a run on the very same route that ends at this outdoor playground that has pull-up bars. So I'm a big believer in, you know, the primal notion of you need to lift heavy things every day.

Your body needs to feel its muscles, you know, do something hard every day, so they remember it. So, you know, 25, you do 25 pull-ups just to move everything around and, you know, run home and, you know, have a cup of coffee and see the paper and get ready for work. Then my wife would go off to work. And it would only be like 7.15. Then I'd be sort of ready to, you know, embrace the day. So that's for a long time. It'd been my morning routine. And why might you change it?

My wife doesn't go to work at 715 anymore. That's the main. So I'm actually, this is literally the first week where I have to think what my, if I want to adjust the routine. So I'm in the process of configurational Syracos. Nice, nice. All right, two final questions, and then I will let you go. I don't want to take up too much of your time. Who are your influencers?

You know, who do you draw inspiration from? Who, dead or alive, would be on your personal life board of directors? You know, in terms of how to craft a meaningful life, in terms of like how to craft a life I'm satisfied with or proud of, you know, most of my sort of informal mentors there are often like historical examples or people I don't know, but who are well documented so that they have, you know, good biographies written about and a lot is known about. So you can really dive into what their lives are like that have done things of impact and are real high achievers. So if you read, you know, a great biography. like The Rise of Teddy Roosevelt is fantastic biography or if you read something more contemporary about the jobs biography or Gates biography or Elon Musk biography

or whatever it is but Edison you know I've read a lot about Rockefellers, the Carnegie's, the Vanderbiltz you know whatever I read a lot of these biographies and those have been very inspirational to me in the sense of there's obviously pros and cons these people's lives but the thread that I keep finding through here is that, you know, everything worthwhile is really hard.

What seems to differentiate these people is they just embrace that concept. Okay, what's hard? I want to do the hard. I want to, what's the thing? What would really be the most valuable thing I could do here? And probably the reason it's not being done is just because it's really hard and I'm comfortable with that. And I can't get to that hardness at the level that these figures can, but I find it very inspiring. I find those biographies very inspiring that, you know, if you're not doing things really hard, if it's not really hard what you're trying to do, then it's probably not worth it.

you can't hack your way into influence impact and meaning. What's your next book going to be, Cal? Well, I haven't nailed it down, but I've been intrigued for the past few months about the notion of how knowledge workers work, how they actually structure their workflow. I have this analogy I've been trying to work out that the state of knowledge work right now is like the state of the early industrial revolution. And so in the early industrial revolution, you had these new, technologies come along that opened up brand new marketplaces. And, you know, at first there

was sort of like a gold rush. And it was people were just sort of generating new capital and making money. But if you actually look at how early industrial revolution factories were run, for example, incredibly inefficiently, just, you know, no one knew what they were doing. It was piecework systems and subcontractors. And you'd go to this side of your factory and say, here's all the materials and just, can you deliver me built things? And they're like, yeah, we'll get it to you and they come back at some point. And they're like, okay, here's your widgets. Like, there was no actual management or control. And then at some point, there was a revolution. And people said, actually, we actually have to start thinking about what's the right way to work and the wrong way

to work. And we got the assembly line that things got way more efficient. I think knowledge work is like in that early industrial revolution days. And in particular, this current, really common approach to work that has become pervasive, which is just, I call it a hyperactive hive mind. But the idea is we don't have a lot of structure or overhead to our workflow. It's not, here's the process you do, or here's your expertise, or here's where you create. value. Instead, we all have an email inbox. It's hooked up to our names, and we just sort of figure things out by sending messages back and forth, and just sort of an ad hoc on demand fashion. It's just kind of rock and roll and, hey, are you working on that? Did you get that? Do you know

about this? And we'll just have this ongoing conversation throughout the day and just kind of emerge in in an ad hoc fashion figure out who needs to be doing one and hopefully things get done. I think that's an incredibly inefficient way to work. I think it's just like the earlier industrial revolution. I think a revolution is coming in knowledge work in which we're going to say, yeah, convenient, just like it was really convenient back before the assembly line where you could just sort of say, hey, go build this and let me know when you're done. But convenience is the wrong metric. And I think we're going to see a revolution in knowledge work in which we get away from this sort of just ad hoc, hyperactive ongoing conversation and start seeing way more developed

and verify workflows, more specialization, certainly an end to the age where just everyone has an email address. It's their name at company.com that anyone can access and they're expected to respond. All that's going to go away. And we're going to find. whole new levels of value production and productivity and satisfaction to come out on knowledge work. So I'm trying to essentially take that argument and make it convincing. And I'm trying to decide if there's a book there or not. Do you have any ideas on what that revolution would look like? I mean, you cited the example of not having a name at company.com email address. What other characteristics might that revolution hold? Well, my tentative answer is I think that

what I call workflow engineering is going to place a much more prominent role, which is where instead of just saying, hey, you vaguely work on this, but we'll just kind of send emails and figure it out. We say, no, no, we're going to actually design from the bottom up what your workflow looks like. And it's going to be designed from the bottom up to sort of maximize both the amount of value you produce for us, as well as the sort of sustainability of this job for you, right? So you don't burn out that you enjoy it, that you can be here. And so what I, what my workday looks like and how people communicate with me and the flow of my day should look very, very different than someone else. And right now that's not the case.

Everyone just sort of has an inbox and kind of answers and sends messages out of it as like a primary thing they do during the day. So, for example, if you had this workflow engineering mindset, you might go to a company like Google and say, well, wait a second. We spend a lot of money on these developers. And the quality of their code is everything. You know, like if your code is better, it has massive benefits. That's everything that matters. So let's get rid of their email addresses, first of all. I don't want anyone being able to just fracture their attention and certainly don't have them on.

slack. In fact, let's put them in a part of the company where there's like a gatekeeper that you have to go through if you even want to talk to. And that gatekeeper can do nothing but manage everything for them. And so certainly like HR shouldn't be able to bother them with a memo. And you really shouldn't have, you know, the legal department saying, hey, can you fill out this form? And we need to make sure that they can work without distraction in these deep burst that produce the most value. And sure, maybe it's inconvenient, but who cares? Like, how are we going to get the most value out of them and how are we going to make their job the most sustainable. So you'd start to see things like that, much more specialization, some people that are completely disconnected,

other people that do nothing but connection processes. The assembly line was incredibly inconvenient. Incredibly inconvenient. Suddenly you had all these hard edges and you had to make sure you had the right supplies at the right places and they get the work right was really hard, but it produced cars at a rate of a hundred times more than the make-work system they were using before. So I think we're going to see a lot of this, these highly engineered workflows specific to what you do and how you can produce the most value. And actually, I think it's going to be better for everyone. I think people are going to much rather have a really defined workflow that's built around them being a craftsman and producing a high-level craft than what we have now, which is where

everyone is sort of plugged into this hyperactive hive mind, where if you're not constantly part of these ongoing conversations, everything grinds to a halt. So that's my tentative answer right now. Nice. That sounds like an amazing, not just an amazing book, but an amazing new way to work to be able to unplug from the hyperactive hive mind and the frenetic task switching and be able to become a true craftsman at your art and at your work. Yeah, you have craftsmen, you have professional connectors and just specialization, workflow engineering. It took 250 years to really get the industrial revolution to the place where it is today where, you know, we can actually produce things in an industrial scale at really high levels of quality and productivity. We're only, what, 50 years

into the knowledge work revolution. So if anything, even if I don't, have the right answer, I would like to instill the idea out there in people's minds that what we're doing today, where we send lots of emails and we're very connected, it would be folly to think, I'm sure we have it all figured out, and this is what it means to work, and this is the best way to work. It's way too early for us to be definitive right now. So there should be a lot of conversation about what should we do next? What would be a different way? What are radical new ways to think about knowledge work? Because this is what we've seen happen before. There's a lot of changes that happen as these industries mature.

And I'm pretty sure that's going to happen in knowledge work as well. Well, thank you so much, Cal. I will encourage anybody listening to read all of your books. I mean, deep work and so good they can't ignore you and anything that you produced from have produced or will produce. Your books have a lot of insight and just incredible advice for any knowledge worker, regardless of what field you're in. Well, sure. Well, thank you, Paula. I appreciate the chance to come on and talk with you.

Thank you so much, Cal, for this amazing interview. What are some of the key takeaways that have come out of this past hour? First of all, let's recap. We began this interview with the deep work hypothesis, which states that you need two core abilities in order to thrive in the new economy. Number one, you need the ability to be able to quickly master hard things. And number two, you need the ability to be able to produce work at an elite level in terms of both quality and speed.

So key takeaway number one, deep work is important. And yet, despite its importance, many of us are reluctant to do it. And that's because it's uncomfortable, which leads us to our second key takeaway, embrace the discomfort. Many work cultures try to save people from the short-term discomfort of concentration and planning by organizing their workplace culture in this very ad hoc, frenetic, back and forth, hey, did you get the memo? Yeah, I'm coming to the meeting, kind of work style. But that workflow is not the best way to run a business, nor is it the best way to manage your own time and career. So to the greatest extent possible, recognizing, of course, that there are some natural limits,

you still do have to check email, you still do have to do the things that are necessary to keep the lights on. but to the greatest extent possible, schedule time in your day in which you can embrace that discomfort, in which you can concentrate and plan so that you can push yourself further in the direction that you want to be. Now, depending on your goals, this might mean spending an hour scrutinizing a spreadsheet, trying to really understand the numbers. This might mean working on a mathematical proof. This might mean writing. This might mean reading and studying.

whatever it is you do, the commonality is that it's hard and yet worth it. And that leads us to key takeaway number three. You need to think about how you'll work once you start to work, and you'll also need to think about how you will support your work. So to that first point, how you'll work once you start to work, you might ban the use of internet during the time in which you're engaged in deep work. you might put Do Not Disturb on your phone. You might shut yourself into a library or a quiet room.

Or identify a particular location where you go only when you are performing deep work. Those all relate to how you work once you begin that deep work. But to the second point, you also need to think about how you'll support your work. In the same way that an athlete supports his or her body outside of training, you need to always support your mind to resist the urges of distraction. So that may mean that even when you're at the grocery store or waiting for an elevator, you don't pull out your phone and play a game because you want to constantly be training your mind to resist novel stimuli. Or if the thought of doing that sounds a little scary right now,

then perhaps the first step you can take is making sure you're eating well. and getting enough exercise and getting enough sleep. Because that also plays an important role in giving you the mental energy required to be able to do excellent work, work that a craftsman does. Those are a few of the takeaways that came out of this amazing conversation with Cal Newport. If you'd like a copy of the show notes, please head to podcast.orgadainthing.com where you can read a synopsis of today's conversation. That's podcast.orgate-affordainthing.com.

If you enjoyed this episode, please go to iTunes and leave us a review. My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in. I really appreciate that you spent your valuable time and attention with us today. And I will see you next week. Again, this was an interview with Cal Newport, the author of the book Deep Work. All of the resources that he mentioned are available in the show notes, podcast.offordainthing.com. I'll see you next week. What about you? Would you rather be super fast or invisible?

I'd rather be super fast just so I could get all my work done and not be stressed out about it all the time and then, you know, be able to do more. Every goal or anything you ever have to do would go by so fast. That'd be awesome. Yeah, exactly. Like just speed write a book. Would that make you happy if it just like everything went fast and it wasn't a challenge for you anymore? Would you still be challenged? I think so because knowing myself, I would just add more and more to my plate. My work would expand to meet the size of my ability. Don't be the exact same thing. Yeah, I would still be, I would just like progress faster. You'd iterate faster as an entrepreneur say.

Yeah, exactly.