BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 449: How Emails Are Constantly Destroying Your Productivity with Cal Newport

Episode Date: March 7, 2021

We’ve known for a long time that humans aren’t great at multitasking. Once distracted, our brains find it hard to let go of the new information we’ve just learnt or seen. This is why the constant onslaught of emails, messages, texts, and phone calls could be killing our productivity and creativity. Cal Newport, author of A World Without Email, has seen this first hand. Cal discusses something he likes to call “Hyperactive Hivemind Workflow”, which is essentially what happens to our brains when we’re constantly being nudged by electronic messages. When you’ve got your head down and are working hard on an important project, just a simple glance at an email can spin everything out of whack. Here’s the thing, this is happening to all of us, all the time. We are constantly monitoring our emails and messages, and by the mid afternoon, we’re out of energy. We’ve exhausted all of our cognitive resources. But isn’t it productive to check emails and respond to them quickly throughout the day? This is what Cal refers to as the “fool’s gold of busyness”. Luckily, there are some ways to get us into a more productive state, without having a barrage of emails in our inbox. Cal talks about efficient meetings, Kanban boards, restricting ad hoc communication, having office hours, and being intentional with your time and attention. While these small email responses may seem like just a minute here or a minute there, they actually eat up a huge part of our work life. In This Episode We Cover: Why we need to limit our intake of email, messages, and other communication throughout the day Getting your team to be less ad hoc about communication and more intentional Having a “process and procedure first” mindset when starting a business Understanding what the “vital tasks” are in your business Knowing your cognizant footprint and having intentional attention And So Much More! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Podcast BiggerPockets book store Brandon's Instagram David's Instagram BiggerPockets Podcast 330: How to Ditch Distractions and Get WAY More Done With Cal Newport Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/show449 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 449. To maintain all these ongoing asynchronous back-and-forth conversations that are digital, you have to constantly monitor these inboxes. You have to constantly monitor these chat channels, and this constant monitoring is killing us. Our brain cannot network switch that much. Every time we glance at that inbox is full of all these messages from people we care about, most of which we cannot resolve right there in the moment.

It's a cognitive catastrophe. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio. Simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on to vote?

It's Brandon Turner, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, David, so good you can't ignore him green. What's up, man? How you doing? Nice and nice segue there. That's one of my favorite books and probably one of the best things someone could say about you. That is one of my favorite books as well. So Good They Can I Know You by a guy named Cal Newport, who we have on the show today. And so that actually leads us to today's quick tip.

Our guest today is named Cal Newport. He is one of my favorite authors of all time. He's written several books, including Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and a book called So Good They Can't Ignore You, which was, I mean, all three of those books are some of my favorite books of all time. But the quick tip is simple. Read those books, especially start with so good they can't ignore you. It's so good. You can't ignore it. So check it out.

And I know David made a big impact on you as well. We interviewed Cal back on episode 330 of the Bigger Pockets podcast and where we talked more about that book. Today we're talking about a little bit different topic. So we're going to talk about just some of the overwhelm in the world with technology that we have today, specifically about email and communication and how that's causing us to slow down and be less successful. he goes through a lot of what it actually takes to be focused and successful today.

It's almost like a deeper dive into deep work. And so I think, again, I love Cal. I love everything he has to say. I think you're going to love this interview. So hang tight for all of that. Do you ever notice how every passive investment somehow turns into a very active lifestyle, active spreadsheets, active phone calls, active stress? Here's a better question.

What if you could buy brand new construction homes, 10% below market value in the best markets across the country without making real estate your second job. That's exactly what rent to retirement does. They're a full service, turnkey investment company handling everything for you. In some cases, investors get 50 to 75% of our down payment back at closing, plus interest rates as low as 3.75%. They've partnered with BiggerPockets for over a decade, helping thousands invest smarter. If you want to do the same, visit BiggerPockets.com slash retirement to learn more. Here's why savvy real estate investors are obsessed with bonus depreciation. It lets you take that rental property or commercial building you own and depreciate most of the cost against your income. Legally, 100% IRS compliant. That's instant

cash flow improvement. Cost segregation guys is the number one firm nationwide, specializing and identifying these faster depreciating assets in your property. They've completed tens of thousands of studies across all 50 states from remote cabins to apartment complexes. So if you own investment property, this is a no-brainer. So visit costsegregationguise.com for your free proposal and find out how much you could save this tax season. There are two kinds of real estate investors, those who have reviewed their insurance, and those who think that they have. Most don't realize their coverage wasn't built for how they actually invest. Vacancy periods, rehabs, short-term rentals, or LLC held properties.

These gaps surface only when filing claims. That's why investors work with NREG. They specialize exclusively in real estate investors, understanding portfolios, risk at scale, and cash flow protection. One claim can erase years of returns. If you own a rental property, don't assume you're covered. Have NREG review your insurance with someone who gets investing at NREG.com slash BP pod. That's N-R-E-I-G.com slash B-P pod. Is that anything you want to say, David, before we get into the interview with Cal? I think Cal is probably one of my favorite guests that we've ever had. He's brilliant. And you got to listen closely to what he's saying, because he's sort of just.

says it so matter of factly, it's very easy to just be like, oh, that's the case. But it's incredibly smart. It's very well researched. Cal is the person who's sort of, in my mind, one of the front runners of being successful and productive, just not wasting your time. So one of my favorite points that he makes is he's basically saying what you and I say, like what you did with the lapse funnel, leads, analyze, pursue success. You isolated the things that matter most in becoming successful. It's getting leads. It's analyzing them and then pursuing them. It's really just three things you're doing to become a real estate investor. And all the other questions people have of what should I do, they center around one of those three things.

Cow really hits that point for us. He highlights how there's certain actions in a pursuit of a goal that really, really matter. And then there's a lot of fluff that you fill in. And training your brain to recognize what really matters is what successful people kind of do. So I just hope that all the listeners as they're listening to this, don't just apply it to real estate investing. I hope they apply it to all the other goals that they have in their life and sort of get that clarity that Cal always sense to bring for me. There we go. I love it. All right, with that said, let's get to our interview with the Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, Cal Newport. All right, Cal, welcome back to the Bigger Pockets podcast, man. It is awesome to have you here. Well, thanks for having me back. And by the way, thanks for locations shaming me. You know, I'm in a windowless little studio in raining Washington, D.C. having to look at Maui and Cabo. So thanks for making me feel terrible. Yeah, anytime we really, our goal in life is make people feel as bad as possible before they come on the show. So it's good.

All right, let's dive in, dive and do. The last time you were on the show, we talked a lot about digital minimalism. We talked about deep work. Two of my, if I had to say, I'd say two of my top 10 favorite books of all time. And I'm not just saying that to butter you up. I really love both of them in immense amount

because like my life, I just deal with constant digital overwhelm. And so we talked a lot about kind of how to get through that stuff. But today, I know you wrote another book. And this one's more targeted towards another huge pain point in my life, and that is email. So I'd love to dive into that a little bit today. Can you tell us real quick, what's the book called? And then even though it might sound obvious, what's it about? Well, the book is titled A World Without Email, Reimagining work in an Age of Communication Overload.

And essentially what I do is two things. one, I look at the question of how did we get to this place that we are today where knowledge work is so often just constant, constant back and forth on email or Slack or Messenger, but just constant back and forth messaging. I really get into why this is terrible for both our happiness and our ability to produce work. And then the second thing I do, the second part of the book, is I make the argument that we're going to move away from that. It's inevitable we're going to move away from that. There's massive productivity and economic growth on the line here. And the only question is whether you're going to be out of front of that trend or not.

And I get into some of the principles about what this world without email is going to look like. So maybe we can start there. Why don't we start with why? Like email and like Slack messages, text messages, all that is designed to make our life better. It's designed to make like communication easier. We are able to, you know, and all this can, we can all point to examples where it does just that, right? Like I'm stuck somewhere and I need something done. I can text somebody or I can shoot an email to my assistant and she can take care of something.

But why does that make us, why do you say that makes us unhappy and unproductive? So the real villain in this story is actually a workflow that I call the hyperactive hive mind. So what happened is once email spread and it spread very rapidly in the early 1990s, it brought with it sort of as an accidental side effect, this new way of working where the primary way we collaborate or work together on things is just back and forth messaging. Let's just rock and roll online, just send messages ad hoc, unstructured, in tools like email, and tools like Slack. Now, as just a protocol, like email is great.

If you need to send information or a file, it's better than a fax machine. It's better than, you know, a voicemail. There's nothing wrong with the tool in isolation, but this hyperactive hive mind workflow, where we said now because we can, we will do most of our coordination with just these back and forth ad hoc messages.

That's what's causing the problem. And the two big culprits here is, number one, to maintain all these ongoing asynchronous back and forth conversations that are digital, you have to constantly monitor these inboxes. You have to constantly monitor these chat channels. And this constant monitoring is killing us. Our brain cannot network switch that much.

Every time we glance at that inbox is full of all these messages from people we care about, most of which we cannot resolve right there in the moment. It's a cognitive catastrophe. We begin to fire up all these networks and inhibit all these other networks. Then we try to bring our attention back to the main thing we're doing. And we're at a fraction of our capability, which is why by like noon or 1 o'clock, We're just exhausted and just give up and just start scrolling through our inbox to try to find the messages that are easy to answer.

It's not because we lack will. It's because we literally exhausted our cognitive resources with all this context switching. And then also, psychologically, this notion that there's this ever-filling inbox full of communication from people we know and need things from us. We can't keep up with it. And it's always there that presses all of our psychological buttons, especially in our social instincts. And it makes us miserable. So it makes us less productive and it makes us miserable overall. And so we have a problem on our hands here.

That makes sense. When you say that it reminds me, what's that, I'm going to butcher the name. It's like the Zerminsky effect or something like that. It was based on that like, that, I don't know, psychologists who saw the waiter would remember everything, right? When they're at like this, there's like back 100 years ago, whatever. They would remember all the customer's meals. But the second that customer left paid their own left, they would forget everything, right?

because our minds like keep stuff until we're finished with it, right? That's kind of the idea here is like because there's so much that's unfinished, whether it's in our inbox or these all these text messages, every one of those is just staying in our head and just wearing us down. The computer is losing our RAM. Is that kind of the idea there? Well, that definitely happens. We have a couple different effects here.

So that's definitely an effect, right? So when you see this inbox, you're basically opening up many unresolved tasks and your mind sticks with them. And we all have this sensation that's really weird if you, think about it in the abstract. But we're all used to writing and responding to emails in our head, you know, when we're like bored or in the shower or something like this, because our mind is held on to, look, people need us. We have to answer them. It has a hard time releasing it. And then there's just a context switch cost. Like you see an email from your producer about an issue with

whatever, the recording software. You see it there. You're like, I can't answer that right now. I need to get back to like an interview I'm doing. There's a part of your mind that started switching over to all of the semantic networks that are related to your production software and your producer and what's going on. And halfway through that, you rinse your attention back to the main thing you're doing. And now you have this jumbled mismatch of networks that are fired up and inhibited. You're trying to switch. And we can look at this in the neuroscience literature. They can actually show you exactly what's happening. But the point is, is we can't do that well. And so we're in this constant brain fog because of all this constant checking. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.

So what's this? I mean, the solution can't just be like no email, can it? I mean, like, your book's a world without emails. Is that literally what you mean is we can get by without email at all? Or is this like tips and tricks and hacks and here's how to get less email. Like, where do we go from there? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's neither of those things actually. So the real title of the book should be, you know, a world without the hyperactive hive mind workflow. It's a little bit a little bit less sexy, I guess. But what I'm arguing for is this workflow where we just figure things out on the fly. with digital messaging. It makes complete sense if there's two of you, right? Because this is the way that we naturally coordinate. It just doesn't scale.

It doesn't scale when you have 16 members and seven clients and nine vendors. And, you know, it doesn't scale, right? And so what we need to do is when we realize this is the problem. The problem is the hyperactive hive mind. The problem is that unscheduled messaging is the main way we handle things. The solution is not going to be in your inbox itself. It's not going to be tips about batching. It's not going to be turning off notifications.

It's not going to be auto responders or better norms about response times or anything like this. You actually have to go and look at here are the underlying processes that make up all the things I do in my work. You might not have ever named them before, right, but we should name them. There's the deal with client issue process. There's the produce, get an episode ready for production process. There's the whatever, come up with new ad copy ideas process. You can look at each of these things. Right now, for most of these, the way that we typically quote,

and execute these processes, it's just hive mind. Let's just rock and roll, go back and forth. But what could we do instead? And you go process by process and say, is there a system we can put in place here that is going to reduce the amount of unscheduled back and forth messaging required to actually get this thing done? And so you fix the underlying processes so that you're not talking over email.

That emails, you know, it's for sending information. It's for broadcasting stuff. It's for sending files. But interaction is not happening with just these asynchronous messaging. And you just start doing this process. process by process, it takes the pressure out of your inbox. You don't need better tips for dealing with your inbox if you don't have the motivation to need to be there in the first place. And so I like to go, we got to go under the inbox itself and radically rethink how we actually structure all

of this different collaboration in our organizations. So how do we do that? Like, what are some of the things that you've found work in your life or with people that you've worked with? Well, there's a couple different, you call them templates maybe for solutions that you see come up time and again. And all right, so one thing that was common when I was studying teams that that have gone through this is gaining some sort of transparency about who's working on what. So when you're just doing the hive mind, okay, it's just all spread over our inboxes, right? Like, yeah, I emailed you about this. You emailed me about this. I'll just, I'll check with you with a Slack message.

But a common solution for people getting away from that is we have a Trello board or a flow board or using a sauna or something like this, but a task board where we can see all the things the team is working on. We can all see it. We can see the status of all the things we're working on. All the information related to the things we're working on is right there, like maybe attached to these virtual cards. And we can see it all right here and in one place. It's not spread over inboxes. It's not informal.

We're all on the same page. And these are often, these tools are often coupled with some notion of like a regular, short, highly structured status meeting. All right. Let's look at the board. What did you do yesterday?

What are you working on today? What do you need from everyone else in order to get that done? Great. Do it. everything you need is on this board, update the board when you're done. Right. So that's common. Another thing that's common, I call them communication protocols,

where people begin thinking through, all right, here's regularly occurring things that requires us to do some back and forth. What are some protocols for doing this that doesn't just involve, I'll shoot you a message and you get back? And so that's where you see things like office hours emerge. Twice a week during this time, always available. My door is open. Zoom is on.

my phone, you know, my ringer's on, grab me if you need me. And all throughout the week, anytime something pops up or someone kind of needs you where it could generate and spawn a back and forth email exchange, like, yeah, just grab me. My office hours, I'll be there, right? So these type of protocols are also common. So there's a bunch of different templates we see, and the right answer depends on the type of business you're in. But this is the kind of the flavor of things you see that all, they might be a little bit more

work, a little bit less flexible, but really reduce the interaction that happens in email, reduce the interaction that happens on Slack. And that's where all the wins are found. That's, I love the way you phrase that. I love that you brought up Asana, because this is what my company, my real estate company, we're called Open Door Capital.

And we originally were all based on email. Like, everything was sending an email to this person, send an email to that person, everything was back and forth. And it's so easy for things to get lost and jumbled, which is where we moved over to Asana. And now, like, I don't do anything in my inbox. I don't even realize this,

other than the Asana messages that come in my inbox, which I honestly just delete everyone. I don't even open them. Like everything we have is run through Asana, which is our project management. We just manage our workflow. All the leads that come in on our properties,

they go in Asana. Everything gets filtered through that way. And so it's much, it's much different than just relying on somebody waiting for an email to come through. Now, we still do the occasional email. Well, you know, usually it's like,

hey, if somebody sent me an email, I forward it to my team. And then they, first thing I usually do is they throw it in Asana just to get it out of email because email is where things tend to, die in my business. I'm curious, David, in your life, have you found the same thing? I know, as a real estate agent, email, like, you have CRMs, you have tools for that, right, to manage

your business? Like, how does that work for you guys? I have so much flying through my head listening to Cal talk right now that I'm trying to make sense of as we're going through this. I know the one thing I'm thinking about is that we typically say I don't have time, I don't have time. And I've realized I almost always have time. I can figure out a way to make it more efficient. but what I don't have is energy. I do 100% run out of like the mental stamina of wanting to do this thing. And for me, it's when my phone feels like it weighs 500 pounds. Just one more freaking phone call or email and I'm like, I'm going to scream.

It's what Cal's talking about. I'm trying to figure out how this works. What I do to in our world is exactly what Cal is saying is I don't look at like what what's in front of me. I say, what do I have to do to accomplish the task? So like to put a person in contract, we have to get a client to feel comfortable writing an offer that's going to win. Now, there's a bunch of things that have to happen. And if you focus on those things, you find that you become much more efficient.

So we've used systems like email and CRMs as sort of like a choke point where you have all this stuff flying around in the world that wants to get done and you want to get in one centralized location. But I've put a person in charge of monitoring that choke point who actually has to make judgment calls on what should be done, who should do it. And then we focus on being effective. That's the only way I've been able to manage the mortgage company, the real estate company, the books were writing, the podcast, like, you know, pretty much everything that goes on. I'm curious what Cal's advice would be for, like, how we're doing this and if we're on the right path. Yeah. Well, first of all, what both of you are doing is fantastic.

Like, what you are working on is basically the vision of a world without email that I'm trying to actually solidify with underlying principles and science in this book is, you know, you're thinking about the actual collaboration has to happen, the actual interactions that have to happen, the actual executions and asking what's the best. way to do this, given the reality of the human brain. Like, just because you could, everything you guys have just mentioned, you could just do, as you said, just rock and rolling. Like, let's just go for it. It could happen in email, but you just don't have the cognitive capacity. So, like, what David was talking about, that's the third template that's common when you look at people getting away from the hive mind, which is this automatic process template.

Whereas, okay, here's something that's repeatable. It's this step, followed by this step, followed by this step. So if we have to get a competitive offer together, there's like, whatever, I don't know how it works. There's three things that happens. we have to get the right comps. There's a conversation we have to have with the client. Then there's like a lot of logistical steps. We have to gather this information to put into the contract.

If you know there's something that happens again and again, this comes up a lot too of like, okay, we're going to figure out how to get from one to two to three to four to five in a way that minimizes as much unscheduled messaging as possible. And so there you go. There's like the assistant posts this information and schedules the comp meeting. There's a template for the meeting that prepares the client. That information goes into the system that then gets

filled into this and then your Adobe whatever with the e-signature thing gets put together. You know, I don't know the details, but you can imagine there's this process. This follows, this follows this. The thing that unifies everything you both are doing, and I think is the key idea for someone else who wants to just get started with this, is that the poison here is this unscheduled back and forth messaging. The degree to which you have to, you're going to send something, then someone will send something back, and then you'll send it back to them, they'll send it back.

Again, you can do about two or three of those conversations in an inbox. fine. You get the 30 and you're hosed. And I think that's a really key point because often people are thinking like, well, wait, I want to like minimize friction in the moment or I want to, I want to minimize complexity or I want to minimize the time I have to spend. So if something takes more time up front, I don't want to do it. None of those are the right metrics. It's the back and forth. How much back and forth do I have to do? Each additional unscheduled message I'm going to have to wait for and respond to, you want to think about it like they're turning up the current on the electrode that is, in an inopportune part on your body.

Like each extra message is making things all the more like, oh my God, this is worse. Like you should have that same fear of that. That is the thing we're minimizing. And like I have hundreds of pages of science that says, this stuff is terrible. It's the back and forth.

Let me just wait until they email me. I'll email them back. That is what is killing us more than anything else. So I'm very impressed. Both of you are great case studies, essentially. Well, thank you.

That's a goal in life. Be a good case study for one of your books. Seriously. You know where I see this, Cal? I'll have agents on my team that are responding to emails from the other agent on a deal we're never going to get. And they're going back and forth and they're like working till 1030. And then I'm like, well, what were you doing? I was talking to this agent. You mean that house that's getting 20 offers and we're not even close and we've already told our client we're not going to get it. You're still answering. There's this belief that like you have to engage in it, that you're wrong if you don't or that the if the other person's feelings get hurt that you're at fault. And I think. that's what leads to that. And you see, I see people spun out, burned out. They constantly say, I'm so busy. I'm overwhelmed. And I'm like, you sold four houses last year. How on earth did that happen? And I think what you're talking about is exactly what leads to that. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think there's this, this equivalency of busyness to productivity. That's this killer.

I think one of the reasons why you see, you often see these innovations in small businesses where there's a clear entrepreneurial leader is because if you're a clear entrepreneur, leader of like a real estate company or something like this, you're really focused probably on results. Like what works, what doesn't? This isn't working. Let's move. It's why most of my case studies in this book are relatively small companies with entrepreneurial

leaders who are willing to move with it. It's very common, especially when you move to big organizations, A, that type of think is harder. And B, there's a certain fool's gold comfort if you're an employee in embracing the sort of faux busyness because it's very predictable. It's very, you know, I get it. If I'm just doing a lot of email, I feel like I'm busy, I'm demonstrating that I'm busy. I understand it. I know it's very easy to do too. I mean, I'm just on here doing stuff. I never really have to think that hard. And there's some comfort in that. Like, I know what it means to do well. But if you run a company, like, I don't care how I feel. I don't, busyness means nothing.

No one pays me to be busy. House sales matter. Like, it's all that matters. So if this is not moving houses, I'm not going to be able to make payroll or something like this. And I say it's a fool's goal because what happens is when you fall into this trap of like, I'm busy and at least I know what's going on, you're not producing. And you don't produce long enough, you know, no matter how quickly you're responding to emails, like eventually that trap door is going to open because where's the actual numbers? Where are you actually producing? That's a really good point. I think in real estate investing as well, there's all these things like people, when they're trying to buy rental properties, trying to buy their first duplex, trying to. I know, whatever that thing is.

There's so many ways to be, I don't know what the word is, yeah, busy. There's so many ways to be busy with things you're trying to do stuff, but none of it actually matters. Have you found any, I guess, in your research or your study? Like, how does somebody really hone in on that? Like, to know, like, what are the vital tasks that actually have to get done that I'm not just busy, but I'm doing the most important things? Do you have any suggestions for people trying to figure that out? Well, like a hack that works pretty well here is actually use your email inbox.

to help you figure out what are my processes. And then we can do this trio. So what you do is you're like, I'm going to, for one day, every email I answer, I'm going to ask, okay, actually, what underlying process is this email pushing forward, you know, and name it, write it down, right? Every email that you answer.

And those are going to list out, like, okay, these are all of the processes that I'm actually involved with. This has to do with bidding. This has to do with whatever, right? And that's a good way to actually see. Here's the things from actually doing lots of interaction on. then triage, right? So before you jump to the step of like, now let me try to optimize all these processes,

to the degree that you're able, and if you're like an entrepreneur or something like this, a solopreneur, especially if you work by yourself and you have a lot of autonomy, be radical. Like, what are the things here, preto principle wise that are really moving the needle, right? Great. Everything else let's get rid of or drastically minimize it. Even if there's little bits of value here and there, there's a little bit of opportunity you'll move. Like, I don't care about little bits of opportunities. If this is going to double my house sales, let's do that, right? So you triage. And then once you triage, like, you just have to have

this conversation. Work it out. Like, how do I execute this process? How do I get into information, coordinate with the people I need to coordinate with and produce the desired outcome for this process? If you haven't named it or thought about it before, the answer is almost certainly the hyperactive hive mind. So that's going to be the answer. See it and know it and own it. And then go through each of these and you can do one at a time, but say, What can I do now to get rid of the hive mine? And again, be willing to be radical. Be willing to spend money, right?

I mean, be willing to say, I'm hiring someone. I can consolidate these three things with one full-time person. I'm going to buy this software, whatever, and we're going to put in this workflow process. Be willing to be radical there. And write down definitively, this is how we do this. This is how we do that. All the time trying to minimize how many unscheduled back-and-forth messages have to happen for this process to execute.

You know, Cal, where we saw this was when COVID changed what was considered the norm. The SOPs all changed. So in the real estate world of being an agent, it was always expected. You have to go to a house. You give a presentation. You look at the house. You get the agreement signed. That was just what everybody did.

And then COVID comes and you can't go to the house anymore. And I didn't have a hard time adapting to this at all. It's like, listen, guys, all we need is a piece of paper that says we have the right to sell this house. How we get there is completely up to us. It is, yes, very easy. go to their house and meet them, it builds comfort, it builds rapport. But we can do that on Zoom. We can do that on a phone call. We can do other things to set up that trust that we need to get to

this point. And I feel like the people that did exactly what you're saying, that adapted and adjusted, and they didn't just say, well, status quo is you have to do this, were the ones that came out on top. And that went for the world of real estate investing and everything else. I mean, I don't know if this book could have come out at a better time because we're all now trying to rapidly transition and say, like, what I used to do doesn't work anymore and how how do I get on board with the way that is going to work? We're definitely seeing that because two things happen with the forced remote transition that happened during the pandemic.

One, anyone using the hyperactive hive mind found it got more hyperactive, right? When you push everyone remote suddenly, the amount of messaging that goes back and forth, if that's how you normally coordinate things, just exploded. So it made the pain point higher. But two, it exposed people to this idea of, oh, we can radically change things and it's okay. So like you said with the real estate insurance, this is. happening all over the industry. It's like, oh, I guess we don't have to have an in-person meeting for this. I guess we don't have to have an editor do this, right? I guess we can work from all

over the country, and it does actually function. So it puts you in the mindset of we can do different things at the same time that the pain point of what we're doing right now gets larger and larger. So I think it's a huge opportunity right now to make these moves. As long as everything else is being changed before we just go back and reosify into the ways before, while everyone is open to doing things differently. Now is the time to say, forget busyness. That's nothing. Forget the hive mind. I don't care about flexibility. How do we actually, what do we do? What do we do? How do we do? What do we do? How do we do it? Let's optimize, optimize, optimize. And it's a mindset, by the way, that created massive wealth in the industrial sector. The entire essentially wealth on which the

developed world was built was this 50x increase in productivity that happened in the 20th century in industrial manufacturing because they began to obsess about how do we, actually build things. What's the right way to do it? Is there a better way? Let's really think through, what's the best way to build a car? I mean, there's a better way to build a car. Maybe we should have a lot of innovation. We haven't even started that thinking for the most part at a large scale of knowledge work. So the potential here is massive. And I think now is the perfect time to do it. How does this apply to meetings? Like does if you try to get more away from the email and more into these more process driven or however you want to phrase that, does that just mean we have

more and more medians or because that lead to less meetings? How do you view meetings and all this? Yeah, so there's a double ed sword with meetings, right? So the positive edge of that sword is that real-time communication is incredibly more efficient than asynchronous communication. And I go deeply into this in the book, but essentially, especially if there's voice involved because there's a whole other information channel here than if it's just linguistics. stick, just text. So me and you talking with five minutes can do the equivalent of 25 emails. 25 emails that are going to be sent back and forth over a week, each email, which is going to require 10 times we check, waiting for it to come in. That's 250 disruptive email checks avoided,

right? So that's the positive side of the, if we can just talk and work things out, we can do things very quickly. The negative side of meetings is that there's a plague in organizations right now of what I call productivity by proxy. You basically say, I know we got to make, this is important. Like, there's a project or a milestone. I don't really trust myself to, you know, get this on a list to make a plan for it and execute. The thing I do trust myself to do, though, is if there's a meeting on my calendar, I'll go. Yeah. So here's what we'll do. We'll set up a meeting or we'll set up a recurring meeting. Now I don't have to worry about it. It's off my mind because, hey, when I get to that day, I'll see there's a meeting. And I always attend meetings because I look at my calendar as to one

productivity thing I do, and therefore I feel good that progress will be made. And you multiply that by six or seven projects, and now all you're ever doing is being in meetings. Once you take this process-centric approach, however, here's what happens. Once we're thinking in general, like, how do we execute this thing that happens all the time? If you think that through, you're not going to need three hours of meetings a week where, hey, let's just, what's going on with this? How's it going? because once you start having real systems in place, you're not going to use meetings as a proxy for productivity. Now, you are going to have probably real-time interaction,

but it's going to be structured. It's going to be fast. It's going to not have a very big footprint because you're really thinking things through. So we can solve the problems of meetings once we adopt this mindset of just being really explicit about how do we actually want to do this. So we probably will have more real-time conversation with that real-time conversation. And we see this in the case studies in the book. It's usually like two very focused 20 minute meetings a day, on top of which many processes are quickly synchronized. Plus maybe like a couple general office hours that people hold that takes care of everything else that pops up.

So real-time communication, fantastic. But a relatively limited amount of that can do a lot of work if you're very careful about it. That makes a lot of sense. So, Brandon, you've got a family. You're running several different businesses. you're in several different parts, you're writing books, you're doing a lot. And you have a ton of communication that has to happen. But at the same time, you're someone that I really respect because you've committed.

I'm only going to put this much time in a day towards work. You have to be efficient. Do you mind sharing with our listeners some of the ways you're applying what Cal is talking about? And then maybe we can see if Cal will give you some coaching right here on how you can do that better. Sure. Yeah. And I love that the reason I ask about the meeting thing is I feel this dichotomy, this problem of like, like I, a phrase that I say a lot is we will move at the speed at which we meet.

If I meet with my team once a month, we'll move very, very slowly. If I met with them every single day, twice a day to say, what's the next thing that we're going to do? We would move very, very, very quickly. At the same time, so it's exactly what you said, Cal, like there's that meetings do help, but we move very quickly when we identify the problems. Meetings also become very routine and very boring and very much like you just put it on your schedule because people don't want to make a decision.

a lot of meetings are simply because people are afraid to step up and take ownership of a problem and just like to answer something. I found that in my in my life. And so the way that we have solved this is again, it's exactly what you just said. We implemented a system called EOS. I've talked about it a number of times here on the show. It's based on a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. It came out a few years ago. And it's basically an operating system for your entrepreneurial business, right? So the whole idea is like, this is how you do, it's all process, like, this is how you do, you know, the process of hiring. This is how you bring on. This is your core values. This is what when you meet. This is how you meet. This is what your meeting is. This is how it gets done. And so what I found is that by meeting more

intentionally with my team. And literally, it's one time a week. Now, we meet, we, I've got down to meeting one time a week. Now, my team meets on their own several times with different departments, but we have one company meeting once a week. And in that one hour, recall because we are very deliberate on how the meeting is run, it eliminated probably 10 hours of meetings that I was in beside that, right? Because now we have the right kind of meeting, the right kind of structure. And so that's how I've been able to run a lot of my life is off like one meeting a week. Like I probably meet once a week for bigger pocket stuff. I probably meet once a week for open door capital stuff. And because we run them correctly, we're able to get through.

So now as much as like the whole idea of we will move at the speed at which we meet, which is still true to a degree. Today, I like to say there's a lot of freedom in limited structure, meaning like it's structure, but it's limited to like a set amount of time and location in place. And so we made every Thursday, 9 a.m., we knock out our call and we move on. So that's kind of how I've done that. How does that jive with your thoughts, Cal? Well, it's perfect. I mean, I get into that in the book. Like the structured, structured meetings that are part of a structured process is that is the secret sauce, right? And there's various structures that have been successful. Like, for example, these agile methodology inspired processes, they have this whole structure of the standing

status meeting. It's standing is kind of a you're supposed to stand up because they're very quick, but it's incredibly structured. What happened yesterday? What are you working on today? What do you need? Right? That's the structure there. Boom, boom, boom. I cite this interesting paper in the book about a professor, professor at University of Maryland, a computer scientist, who brought this over to his research group. And he gathered a lot of data because he's a nerd like me, right? So he's like, what works? What didn't it work? And tuning that just right made all the difference. If that meeting got 15 minutes more slack, it fell apart. And they really died. It was like getting it just right. It's the right frequency, the right structure. They really take it seriously, just like you're doing.

The other example is like what we see, the sort of background. researched meeting protocols you would see like Jeff Bezos famously did. In the book, I talked about George Marshall, who was in charge of all the U.S. Armed Forces during the World War II, who finished work by five every day, by the way. He did this as well, which is like, okay, if you're going to meet with me, you know, here's how it's going to happen. You're going to have completely thought through what's going on. You're going to have prepared an understanding of, okay, here's the issue and how we're going to solve the issue. You're going to have a very clear like, okay, this is the question I have or where I need your input. And if you weren't

completely prepared, Marshall was going to kick you out of there. Bezos actually made you put this in writing. You had to submit it to him in writing in advance of this meeting. Everything explained, here's the background, here's the point of the meeting, here's the decision point we can't make without input. Here's the thing. Here's the actual input we need to make this decision. If that didn't pass muster, he wasn't walking into the room, right? And so that's another way of structuring meetings. But structure is everything with meetings, and you don't have structure until you're thinking in terms of processes, which is why I love more generally the EOS idea, which, again, I get into. Tractions is a great book. I get in the Sam Carpenter. You know,

Michael Gerber talks about this and the e-myth. All of these, this idea comes up again and again in entrepreneurial circles, and I'm trying to push it in the broader circles, including like your own life, your own life as an employee. It's incredibly systems focused. And I think people get nervous about this sometimes, right? Because they think knowledge work is creative. You know, you got to have autonomy. We can't take. this, you know, writing computer code and make it into an assembly line. And this is really true. And my big point is we have to separate execution from all the workflows that surround the work that's executed. We can give knowledge workers lots of autonomy on how you write to computer code,

how you come up with the whatever ad copy. Great. That's creative work. You're skilled. This is what makes knowledge work satisfying. But everything that surrounds it, like how we figure out what ads we're working on, how we get approval, how we move the assets around. we better believe that we're going to systematize and process, you know, that six ways to Sunday. Because that is where you get the sort of huge returns. That's where you're able to take these human brains and get the most out of them because they're not stuck in this morass of informal ad hoc on the fly type organizing. So this is great.

You don't need to read the book. I think both of you guys basically should just be a chapter in the book itself. Well, thank you. I still, I'm probably, I'm showing my highlight. real here. I still spend way too much time on email and on completely shallow work I spend a majority of my time on. But thank you. Very kind of you to say. So let's relate this a little bit to people who maybe aren't in like, I don't say not in knowledge work because I think most people are going to be in some type of knowledge work, especially with real estate investing.

It's largely, I mean, it's almost entirely knowledge work unless you're out there actually fixing toilets and stuff. But how does this apply to the person who's maybe like, well, I don't have a big team of people. I'm just trying to, you know, I'm working with a real estate agent. I got a contractor. We're just trying to like buy houses occasionally and fix them up. Like, does this stuff apply to them as well on a smaller scale? Maybe. Yeah. I think everyone could be doing this and you can be doing this just in your own life. And one of the places this comes up is when you talk about employees at big companies, for example, where their boss is not on board, right? They're, they're not Cal Newport fans.

It's like, no, answer my email, right? But even in those situations, if you identify still, I'm going through my inbox and every email, what process this associated with, write them all down, here's my processes. Okay, let me try to optimize each of these to minimize the back and forth. If you asymmetrically optimize these, just given what I can control, I can't control anyone else, just given what I can control, how can I reduce or minimize the amount of back and forth messaging required for each of these processes? Even in that context, it's a huge win.

So if you're an independent, you're just getting started in real estate investing, maybe you're doing it on the side, do this. from the ground up. Here's my processes, write them down. Here's my EOS, the use the Wickman terminology. And just keep in mind, the metric is I want to minimize back and forth. In fact, this becomes even more important for people who are side hustling this at the moment, because they have to minimize that cognitive footprint to some degree, right? I mean, they're at the insurance agency all day and doing Zoom meetings with the HR department or whatever. They only have so much time available. So if you actually want to let supercharge a side hustle

for something like this, start with that process thinking. I tell the story in the book about I ran a company when I was a teenager in the 1990s. I ran a tech company. And I was in high school. And this was before smartphones and this was before laptops. So like I was literally unreachable. There was no way. I was in school and there was no way you could reach me.

But we're running a company. We had a team in India that was doing the development work. We had clients that were paying like reasonable like five, five figure style contracts, which were big for a high school student at the time. And we had to figure that out. And so we got aggressively priestly. process focus. We have to figure out every process here so that these clients will be completely comfortable, even though they can't reach us. And even though that's what they're used to with

other people, I can just call you up on the phone or I can just shoot you an email. And so we just sort of process the hell out of that, right? It's like, okay, here's our extra net. You're going to log in. There's a work blog. So you can see what the team was working on. So you won't be worried about that. There's clear milestones. Every document is posted in there once you sign it. We have these clear, we had this creative brief process to make sure that everyone was on the same. page of what we're doing, we processed the hell out of it, and we were able to run a business with basically no back and forth communication. I think about that today when I think about side hustles, because it's kind of the same idea. If you're careful about these processes to

minimize the back and forth you need with messaging, you can really keep the footprint very reasonable and not have it be something that is competing with your attention and draining your energy throughout your whole day when you're trying to do everything else. Yeah, that's so good. That's so good. It reminds me even like somebody who's just trying to flip a house or trying to flip their first house or a second house, their house flipper. They've got a big rehab going on. Like a lot of what takes place going back and forth with a contractor, the back and forth with a it's all systematizable, like every single bit of it. I mean, I have friends. I've never done this and I should. But like, who would have a, they have a workbook that has UPCs of like every

single item at Home Depot that they would buy and it alternates if they're out of the first thing. And so it's like, oh yeah, this is the paint we use. This is the brand we use. This is the final look, here's a picture of it. And they do their entire rehab. And so guys like, I mean, Tarle Yarber is a friend of mine. He lives out here in Maui, or at least it's staying in Maui right now. And he flips lots of houses. And yet he, like he told me the other day, he's like, yeah, I never even stepped foot in them anymore. He's in Maui for six months at least now. He doesn't walk through the flips that he's doing. Why? Because it's all systematized and processed. And again, it could be a person on their own, their very first thing. But just thinking

that way, which is why this interview is so important, is once we, our minds are going, way of what are these processes that we can build, everything just becomes easier. Because at the end of the day, I love to say that almost everything that we think we're making like a judgment call on, like in our heads, like, uh, should I, you know, whatever, doesn't matter. Should I date that person? Should I paint that building blue or red? Everything is actually a like a computer program or running in our head. It's an algorithm that we're, we're running. So we can take that out of our head and put it on a piece of paper or into a workflow or into a sauna, now of a sudden, everything is easier. One example would be repairs with rental properties. When you own rental properties, you got

to account for some kind of repairs that happen on a regular basis. So how much do you account for? Is it 5% of the rent? Is it 10% of the rent? Is it 20%? So every investor is like, we're making this up every time on our own when we're analyzing a property. We're just trying to like wing it. But when we really sit down and go, well, what am I actually doing? What is the process I'm doing right now. Like I realized, and I put this actually in a future book that doesn't come out for another six months or so. I'm writing a book on multifamily, but I took that whole thing and I was like, let's just make that an algorithm that we can say, what are all the factors, the age of the property, the condition of the property, this, this, this, this. Now we can put on a piece of paper,

and now I could have a 15-year-old assistant high school kid. They could run my deal analysis because I just took what was in my head and put it on paper. So anyway, that's just a long, drawn out way of explaining, I like what you're doing. That's good stuff. Well, yeah, and so part of what happens here and why people don't do this enough is, well, they think what they're trying to optimize is time, right?

And so it takes time up front to build out and figure out one of these systems, whereas in the moment, it doesn't take much time to send that one email you're sending in the moment as part of a dozen that's going to be sent. Like, it's quick for me to be like, no, I don't like that paint color, make it bluer. Right?

Like, that's just real quick. I sent an email, whereas if I have to sit down and copy all the UPCs, come on, that's going to take time. But that's the wrong metric. You're not trying to minimize. It seems like what people are really trying to minimize is like, okay, take the longest amount of time contiguously I ever spend on this. I want to minimize that. Yeah, that'll lead you to doing emails all the time.

But what you're really trying to minimize is the, what's the cognitive footprint? How much like back and forth? How much am I going to have to monitor and be responsive to this thing that's happening here on my email or on Slack before this gets done? That's the real cost. And I think the real estate analogy here is like some sort of repair-based carrying cost, because we're used to that in real estate, right? Like, okay, yeah, it costs a little bit more money up front what I'm doing.

But if that reduces my monthly outlay, very quickly I'm going to be in the black on this decision. Well, this is just like a cognitive carrying cost, right? You do the work up front to figure out how to make these systems work. Yeah, it's more upfront, but you're reducing this carry every month. And by carry, I just, you know, again, in this context, I mean, how much do I have to be responsive and talk to people and do unscheduled back and forth? and you're going to end up way, way in the black. So don't think about my message to the audience. It's like you're not optimizing time.

Yeah. You're optimizing back and forth interactions. And that, if you can get that low, I mean, I'll put a lot of time in up front. If you can guarantee me that I don't have to answer an email for the next month after that. 100%. People love to call real estate passive income, which is interesting because most of the investors I know are very busy. Busy finding deals, busy managing teams, busy worrying they pick the wrong. market. Rent to retirement flips that model. They help investors buy turnkey new construction homes,

often 10% below market value in top rental markets across the country. Their local teams handle the build, the property management, and the details, so you don't have to. In some cases, investors even receive 50 to 75% of their down payment back at closing, and there are interest rates as low as 3.75%. They've been trusted partners with BiggerPockets for over a decade. And if you want to learn more, visit biggerpockets.com slash retirement. There are two kinds of real estate investors, those who have reviewed their insurance, and those who think that they have.

Most don't realize their coverage wasn't built for how they actually invest. Vacancy periods, rehabs, short-term rentals, or LLC-held properties. These gaps surface only when filing claims. That's why investors work with NREG. They specialize exclusively in real estate investors, understanding portfolios,

risk at scale, and cash flow protection. One claim can erase years of returns. If you own a rental property, don't assume you're covered. Have NRE review your insurance with someone who gets investing at nreg.com slash BPPod. That's nr eig.com slash BP pod. If you think property management is expensive,

try mismanaging a vacancy or an eviction or a maintenance issue that turns into a five-figure problem because no one caught it early. That's expensive. A good property manager isn't overhead. Their protection against small mistakes turning into big losses, and that matters more than ever in this account. That's why I like Mind. Unlike other property managers, Mind manages your property like an investment.

They obsessively measure the things that matter for your bottom line. Things like occupancy, delinquency, and net promoter score, and they have the results to prove it. Go to mine.co slash show me to see how mine performs and get your first month free, which is much cheaper than learning the hard way. All right, rental property investors, listen up. Our friends at Dominion Financial already have some of the best DSCR rates in the industry. Now, they're the fastest, too. They just launched 10-day DSCR closing. That's right, 10 days. And they're still the only lender with a DSCR price beat guarantee. That means faster closing, the best terms, zero guesswork. That's Dominion Financial. Check them out at biggerpockets.com slash dominion. Again, that's biggerpockets.com slash dominion. You know, another area of my life

that this really applies to is property management, like owning rental properties and having to managed tenants, I would say 99.99% of everything involved with managing tenants is systematizable and can be put into a workbook. I mean, I wrote a book on managing rentals for that very reason. Like, this is like, everything can be written down on how you deal with this stuff. So, like, I don't deal with emails. I don't even do it with calls. I don't deal with any of that stuff with tenants. And most everything now is digital. It's on a website. They handle it. I even just, things that you think would be completely absurd. Like, hey, you know, there was a fire in my unit. Like there's a system.

There's a process that you can handle that stuff. And so it's just amazing how much can actually be systematized and then how easy that thing becomes when the system runs it rather than you running it. David, were you going to say something there? I think I cut you off. Yeah, I wanted to ask Cal about what advice he has for those that are hearing this message. But maybe they're not, how would I describe this? I know I didn't value this until I got super busy and I realized what a drain this was on me. And then my performance was affected because I just had no energy.

When I wasn't doing a lot, I didn't value energy or time. Those emails, they're almost a welcome distraction when you don't have anything going on or you don't want to get on the phone and make phone calls or there's something that you're uncomfortable with. Well, it gets to be like addicting to just say, I'm answering emails and that becomes your escape out. Do you mind sharing some advice of what you found for those that don't yet maybe understand how valuable this is and why they should? Well, it's a good point. And it's something for the last, whatever, 10 months of the pandemic's been going on, for example. I've been talking about this a lot of my podcast. So I have this podcast where people ask questions, and we go back and forth, right?

And so these type of issues come up a lot. We ended up actually coining this term, the deep life, where you have different buckets of your life, and you're really trying to go in and optimize each, focus on what matters and get rid of what doesn't matter. So in some sense, if you have these other areas of your life that is important, like community, contemplation, constitution was my term for like your health or this or that. Other areas that are very important that you're taking very seriously and you're focusing on things that matter and trying to get rid of things that don't matter, it gives you a nice pressure on your work and puts you more into a mindset of I want to get done what matters

and not waste time on what doesn't. And I've been preaching this for the last 10 months because I think it's what a lot of people need right now, is to get more systematic. Outside of the context of work, I have these buckets. I have craft. It's what we call. We're needlessly alliterative. but craft is the work stuff, right?

But then you got community and you have contemplation, which could be like ethics and philosophy and spirituality. You have, we sometimes call it celebration, but like the stuff you enjoy doing and get real pleasure out of and gratitude is the things that, you know, the non-work stuff, you have real expertise in. And you go bucket by bucket and say, I want to go in there in 80-20 this.

What's the stuff that really matters? I want that to be in my life. What's the stuff that gets in the way? I want to reduce it. And when that's your mindset for your whole life, work falls in the place. Now, if you're not doing this on any of these other buckets, then you can end up, you're right, filling your time with email or something like that because busyness. You'll do that and you'll numb yourself on your phone otherwise, right?

YouTube, social media and email. But that is not a sustainable strategy. I think a lot of people burnt out with this over the pandemic. You know, the resilience comes from actually thinking through, here's what matters in my life. I want to do this stuff to matters. I want to make time for it, right? So do that whole, if you do that whole overhaul in your whole life, it puts the right pressure on work. It also, by the way, probably will prevent your work from getting to that point where you're just completely overwhelmed and you're doing this stuff out of a survival instinct.

And even then you don't have time for the other things. And I didn't used to talk about these issues, but there has been a huge interest, I would say, in pressure and trying to figure out these bigger issues of a more resilient, meaningful life. And so, again, on that podcast for the last 10 months, like, we get into that. Like, we really get into it. And there's been a great response because you're absolutely right. the rest of your life really matters how you approach what's happening in work. Yeah, that makes sense. Hey, Cal, I got a couple questions here.

I'm not going to get to all of them today. I got a whole bunch for you. But I'm curious, like in research in this book, like, as you were putting together the research and the book and reading all the articles and all that stuff, anything surprised you? Anything in there just be like, wow, I didn't expect that. Or, you know, that's a super interesting thing. I just think that's an interesting question to ask author. So anything surprised you in there?

Well, one of the things I didn't expect was the accidental nature of this way of working. I sort of assumed this is convenient for bosses or something like this. There's some reason why we switch to let's do lots and lots of communication all the time. Let's just rock and roll on the inboxes. And I went down this whole rabbit hole in the research on a corner of the philosophy of technology known as technological determinism. And technological determinism is this idea of understanding society and technology. that argues that in a lot of cases, the mere presence of a new technology can really impact how people behave in a way that no one planned, like unintentional, right?

It's not serving a particular purpose. It's not part of an agenda. It's not because it gets this group from A to B. Just the mere presence of that technology just changes the way that we behave. And it's pretty arbitrary. And sometimes it could be in our benefit a lot of times. I'm pretty convinced. You know, I'm pretty convinced that email is an act, not email itself, but this way

this hyperactive high mind working way that we did after email got here, this an accident. That the mere presence of this low friction digital communication tool stumbled us into this way of working. And then once we're in there, we're stuck because we have this focus on autonomy and knowledge work. That was the second surprise. I wrote a whole New Yorker article on this recently.

One guy, Peter Drucker, one guy basically coined the term knowledge work in the 1950s and spent the next 50 years convincing everyone, autonomy, autonomy, autonomy. Objectives matter, but don't tell anyone else how to work. And so that was also really interesting. So we accidentally fell into this way of working. And because of one guy's influence, we were convinced it's not my business to tell my employees how they should work.

It's not my business to think about what's the best way to organize. That's up to the individual. They should buy a productivity book if they want to be more organized. And so we got stuck. I had no idea either of those things were true until I got started. No idea that this was an accident. No idea that we're stuck because of one person convinced us. that we shouldn't really monkey around with how work actually happens in organizations.

And so those were two very surprising, very fascinating threads that I ended up pulling pretty hard. That makes sense. A couple more questions. Number one, key challenges. What did you face when writing this? Anything just like either as an author or from the information? Well, it took me a long time to write this book. You know, I started writing this book immediately after deep work came out because I really wanted

to understand why is it so hard to do, why is it so hard to do deep work, right? And, okay, it wasn't nearly as casual as I made out in that book deep work, which is like, whatever, we have too much email, we'll fix it once we realize focus is important. It's like, nope. It is a huge deep problem. It's the way we organize all of our work.

You know, so I've been working. I had to work on the book for a long time. I put it on pause, wrote digital minimalism, came back to keep working on it, right? Because to me, it was such an epic topic. And people were so far from it, right? It wasn't like this was, everyone was about to have this idea that I didn't feel any particular urgency.

So to pull together all these threads, there was a real challenge, right? I mean, I get into the whole history of how email spreads. I'm deep into New York Times archives, trying to trace every use of the word email through the year the 1980s to try to figure out how it spread. I had to figure out all about the philosophy of technology and technological determinism. I had to talk to all these researchers about what happens in our brain when you're constantly context shifting and why that happens. I got really deep into the psychology of why we get really anxious about email.

And that led me to studying hunter-gatherer groups in Africa that they put sensors on to try to understand the role of interaction, one-on-one interaction and its evolutionary fitness and why therefore an overflowing inbox, why that stresses us out. I had to go deep on understanding the industrial revolution and how that happened and then pulling all these kids. I mean, it was a challenge I haven't had before in a book, the amount of completely diverse fields that had to come together to really understand this is how we got here. This is why it's bad. This is what we need to do. What I should have done, of course, is just say, ask Brandon and David because just ask them how they do it, right?

We just get Brandon's EOS. We're rock and roll. I was going to say, this is why I love authors who, like, dive into topics like this and why I love all your books because, like, you did hundreds of. hours of research that I don't have to do now. I just read Cal and I got everything I needed. So much easier, much, much easier. I tell people all the time that Cal is like my spirit animal. When I read so good, they can't ignore you. I just wanted to like, I was on an airplane. I want to get up and scream like, yes, this is what the world needs. Like there's this, this pain that

so many people are in that they can't get what they want and they believe it's hopeless and they believe everything is set against them. And they come up with all these elaborate explanations for why. they're not happy and it's so simple like you're just not that good and that good news is you haven't even tried yet to be good okay like if you just gave the smallest effort at being better at what you did you would find out it's really not that far away from where you're trying to go and um just to highlight like what cal is talking about how this applies to us as real estate investors when i wrote long distance real estate investing many people said this is crazy you can't buy a house without seeing it i heard this constantly is the number one objection is this is reckless david is telling us

to buy people to buy a house they've never seen. And I would have to come back and say, what do you know about what you're looking at? Okay. Like when I pop open the hood of my car, when it breaks down and you know, like you get outside and you open it up, none of us know what we're actually trying to see there. Nobody does, right? We're not mechanics. Unless something's like visibly smoking. And I probably don't even know what that thing is. A mechanic is the one that has to look at it. When you're buying a house, the home inspector needs to review it and tell you and you need to let them interpret what they're doing. You don't have to be there. burr this whole idea that you got to pay your down payment when you buy the house that you can't buy it

fix it up and then finance it was like revolutionary thinking to so many people that it said this is the way we do it but to those of us that were in it it was sort of common sense we looked at it like well why are we doing that that's dumb you're going to put all the money down then you're going to fix it up and then you're going to rent it out and you're going to leave 80,000 bucks in this house but Cal is like the frontrunner of challenging this ineffective way of thinking that just follow the leader just get in front of the lemming in front of me and just go where they're going. Email comes in. I have to answer it. A person has to question, I have to reply. You know, meetings there, I have to show up. On our team, we make sure before you come to a meeting, I know what the thing is that you have to get answers for

that only I can answer. You cannot come and ask a question that you could have asked somebody else before you even came to the meeting. And to me, that was kind of common sense. Let's make this as efficient as we can. But everyone else just shows up and they wait for someone to tell them what to do. So for those it will embrace this, even if you think this doesn't apply to where you're at right now. Just like start conditioning your mind to look at everything. Like, why do I have to do it that way? It will open up doors that can literally change your life in such amazing ways. It's why Brandon's in Hawaii and it's why I'm in Cabo and, well, Cal, you have like a white

background behind you. You can't really see where you are. But I'm sure you get to go cool places when you want to go there. I used to be able to. But you're absolutely right, though. But David, you're absolutely right. Right, right? I mean, go back to first principles. Like, that's my whole thing, is I go back to first principles. If there's a pain point, I go back to first principles. Why couldn't we do deep work? Everyone had an answer, but everyone's answer is just, I don't know, here's a thing that's annoying me, or it fits some agenda I have, or it's just internally consistent. It was all so superficial and it's all such a posturing at a high level. And I said, okay, maybe let's go back to first principles. When did email first get invented? What were the first companies to use it? What did it look like at 19? 90 versus today. Why did it change? And doing that in almost every aspect of your life, I think

is a good way of summarizing my work. I think it's really important. Here's like a twist on that. This is a very Cal Newporting twist. If you want to do more of this type of original thinking to figure out from first principles, like how do I do this better or that better, I honestly think excessive social media use. And of course, I was going to bring it back here, has some sort of negative influence there. Because when you check in on like social media interaction, it's a whole different ballgame that's more about like what team am I on and what's going to get approved of by what I say. And it's just a completely different way of thinking that I think is counter the first principle thinking, which in business, for example, is going to be very important.

So I think the fact that I don't use social media helps me think about things as diverse as you know, career trajectory or email or how to run a company because it gets you out of this mindset of what important, what's important is like demonstrating the right allegiance or getting the right applause for what you pointed out. And I don't care about any of that. I'm not on any of those things. I just sit silently for five years with stacks of books and annoy researchers, you know, so, you know, of course I'm going to bring it back to like, maybe use less social media and your business somehow will be more successful. I don't know how that quite works, but I always bring it back there somehow. Especially clubhouse. Yeah,

yeah, everyone's on that. Clubhouse is the perfect example of a waste of time because why am I doing it? Because everyone's doing it. Well, how does that help me? And then you just hear crickets. Yeah. All right. So I was actually. actually going to ask you, Cal, about if your lack of social media has changed. I remember that surprised me and a lot of people last time you were on the show is you didn't have social media and you're not a, you know, not a social media addict like the rest of us. And now you have a podcast though. And so I feel like part of me says, well, now he's got a podcast. He obviously needs social media to promote a podcast, right? Like, part of your life, I feel like would dictate

you have social media, but you still, you still don't. And so has that changed? Have you been tempted to do that because that might help your podcast or is that just a limiting belief that you need to have a big social media to try to grow a podcast. Look, if I use social media, probably in the short term, I could get more podcast listeners. I mean, I don't quite know how that works. I actually don't either. I don't know if that actually helps. Yeah.

I don't know how it works. I mean, I don't know what a clubhouse is. I don't know what a TikTok is. I'm sure if I guess if I was if I was club housing a TikTok, I mean, maybe it would get me more podcast listeners. But in the long run, I would stop doing the types of things would make people want to listen in my podcast in the first place. So I don't know. I'm sure I'm leaving book sales on the table. I'm sure I'm leaving podcast subscribers because I'm not, you know, doing those things. But I don't know. I don't know. I want to do interesting things. I want to have big ideas, write interesting

ideas. I started the podcast during the pandemic because I wasn't doing speaking and I sort of missed interacting with people about my my work. And so the podcast was a way it's all interactive. It's like Dave Ramsey. So there's like callers that call in. right and like here's my here's my problem and I'm overwhelmed by email or my life is you know I feel like I have no meaning and and I I you know do my Dave Ramsey impression and give advice I just wanted to talk to people and it's I don't it's better than I deserve better than I deserve right better than I deserve yeah doing fine better than I deserve um yell at people about credit cards and uh but anyways I don't know right I I prefer I call it the deep life like what are the big things that matter

let me double down on those try to get rid of the distractions. Have you seen anyone during this pandemic, by the way, who has said, you know, come out of however many months and be like, I'll tell you the one thing I did love during this pandemic was my social, being on social media, definitely being on Twitter and finding out the ways in which, you know, like the virus was sneaking in on my food and, and is going to infect me all bad news. All bad news. Right. No one's happy about being on Twitter. No one's happy about spending a lot of time on YouTube during the pandemic. So like, I don't know.

It's probably helped me in that way. I can, I can draw a complete correlation to my happiness level in a given week and the number of hours I spend on my phone or social media. I mean, it is a direct correlation. And I know that and I still struggle with it. And there's always new social media apps being brought all the time. The big one like you mentioned with Clubhouse. Clubhouse is basically a, you just get on there and you talk with people like you're on

a stage. Think about a panel at a conference. If you're at a conference, there's a panelist, there's five panelists on stage. and there's 100 people listening. That's Clubhouse is also digital, right? Just talk. And everyone, that's like the big thing right now is Clubhouse. And like, yeah, David and I both have talked about like,

where they, like I have a profile there. I don't think David does. I'm not sure it benefits me, which goes back to like deep work and digital minimalism is this idea of like, instead of just saying, hey, that's a new technology, let's adopt it. It's asking the question, does this actually get me closer to the things that I want? Like you said, you want to think these big thoughts, you want to write books, do you influence people. Does Clubhouse get you there? Probably not.

Is Clubhouse going to get David to get more clients as a real estate agent? Probably not. So we've kind of avoided that. David, anything you want to add on that? Because I know you're the, you're the anti-clubhouse guy lately. Just to think of it that way, that not one person who's told me I should be on Clubhouse could actually give me an objective reason how it helped me with any of my goals. But yet every one of them felt compelled to say, you have to do this. And when I said why, it was, because everybody's doing it. That was the only reason. And that is the exact kind of thing. that leads to you answering every single email in your inbox. Well, why are you answering that?

Well, because it's there. It's just remove yourself a little bit from that perspective, and you'll start to see the things that really matter in accomplishing your goals. Yeah, I always say, like, don't worry so much about missing out on things you don't know about. Worry instead about not spending time on the things that you already know for sure are very valuable. That's where the big win is. There's a small number of things in each area of your life that you know for sure are big wins and important. doubling the time you spend on those is mathematically going to give you a much bigger benefit in your life

than taking that same limited time and spreading it over all of these other little unknown things, each of which generates much less value. That's a really, really good way of looking at that. I really like that a lot, Cal. Well, it's a good way to kind of begin wrapping things up here. Now, we are going to go over the last segment of the show here. It is called our... Famous Four.

All right, the Famous Four. This is the same four questions we ask every guest every week. And I know we threw them at you last time, Cal, but the first question has changed since last time you're on the show. So the question is, what is a habit or trait that you're currently trying to develop or improve in your life? Is there anything you're focused on right now trying to improve? A habit or trait that I mean, yeah, so I metric track all the time. I'm a big metric tracking guy. So I'm always, always, I have a collection of metrics that I'm always evolving.

And every single day, I write down these metrics. So I could probably grab my planner right now. So that's always evolving. So I'm going to think, what have I added? Well, so I added for sure during the pandemic a metric about news consumption that drastically, drastically reduced it. And I was going to check that off yes or no every day. Did I look at news only during the set time in the set way? Or did I do do DumeSroll style checks throughout the day?

Right. And it was either yes or no. And I didn't want to put no. And it saved me. I had such a compulsion, especially when there was, like, kind of bad news going on. But you're like, maybe I'll see something out there that's saying it's not as bad as you think, and that'll make me feel better. And it was a huge way.

So, like, a metric just for that. And it was either yes or no. And not wanting to put down no was, like, actually really, actually really helped me reshaped out during the pandemic. I also decided I need to be outside for close to 10 to 15,000 steps a day outside every single day. and I tracked that down to the step made a huge difference, right? And just being out there, getting the sunlight, moving. That was new. I hadn't prioritized that as much before. So I think that was a big one. But more generally, I track all this stuff. And I'm constantly changing when I track. Yeah, that's really good, man. I love that. I track everything as well.

And very similar way I'm tracking all this stuff. So made a big impact on me. Cool. Side note for you, Cal, do you still write your books in your head while you're outside doing those walks? Yes, I do a lot of work, a lot of article writing, book writing, and math proof solving in my head on foot. I'm still seeing as the crazy professor at Tacoma Park because I just, I'm walking without a dog. And I'm going by, honestly, just a quick aside, by the way, I was a little bit worried. I've been worried recently because my route goes past a well-known congressman's house. And he has police protection right now. So there's always capital policemen parked outside of his house because he was helping to run the impeachment or something like this.

I literally got worried like, I'm always walking by here because it's a nice road. I'm like, they're going to arrest me at some point. This is going to be, this is going to be it. Is they're going to be like, all right, for sure, you're up to something no good. So I've literally been worried about that. Especially if you're muttering to yourself. That's good. Okay.

You mentioned a couple of the EOS books. Do you have a favorite business book you can share? Okay. So it's a good question. I have a hard time. I have a hard time just with favorites are hard for me because there's so many different categories. But when it comes to EOS type stuff, I really liked work the system, the sort of underground self-published book. Sam Carpenter is the writer. And I think it's just right to it. Like, here is how you systematize things and why you need to systematize things.

And so like in that particular space, I liked it. In time management, it's a tie between Covey and Allen, right? I mean, Alan's notion of the psychological impact to tasks, game changer. So getting things done is a crucial book. Covey, however, had this crucial idea of productivity fits within a larger scheme of building a deeper life, and he had his quadrants. And so, like, in the productivity space, those two books, those two books are really close to me.

I don't know. When I was a little kid, I read this old biography of Bill Gates. The author's name was Mainz, M-A-N-E-S. And that completely threw me down a trajectory. I started a business. I went into computer science. And so I can give category favorite. So, so those are a few. That's great. That's very helpful, actually. I like the way you answer that question. Now people have some stuff they can go pursue. What about some hobbies? You know, I have too many kids. So I don't have, I have three kids. I don't have a, I don't have a ton of time that I'm not doing

family stuff. Even though my work, I'm mainly constrained to nine to five. I'm just wrangling kids all the time. And I would say, you know, most of the time I spend when I'm not wrangling kids or working or just trying to keep reasonably in shape as I read all the time. And so reading is probably my main hobby if I had the tag. I look forward to, by the way, having more time for hobbies. And I can just get these kids a little bit older. I think there'll be a new golden age. So I'm looking forward to learning how to, I don't know, build a canoe or something. I know. I'm in the, I'm in the same phase right now. I got like the four-year-old and a one-year-old. And I like look at people like David. I'm like, you have so much time in your life. It's amazing. Like,

I remember what it was like back then. It was glorious. Someday it'll return to us, Cal. One day. All right. Last question for me. What do you think separate successful? If you had to like really boil it down, what separates successful entrepreneurs from those who give up, fail, or never get started? I think first principles matter. Right. So whether you like the answer or not figuring out, this is what moves the needle here, this is what's required here, knowing what moves the needle and being able to then get more of your energy on the things that actually matter, that what seems to distinguish success from not success, right? Also, it helps you move, navigate properly. You're like, okay, this is what would actually be required if I,

you know, I don't know real estate well, but I could imagine, let's see, you're getting down the the first principles, you know, you're reading David and Brandon's books, like you're getting down to you're figuring out how the stuff really works. And you're like, okay, I want to, I want to make money in real estate. Once you're really understanding how it works and what's required, you might be like, oh, I could, I could do multifamily properties and I could manage this meaning I can do it long distance. I didn't realize that. So let me put my energy there, but this idea I had of, you know, I want skyscrapers or something, right? You're like, oh, I see. That's going to require $100 million in capital. And to get there, you have to go this route. And, okay,

that's not, I'm not well suited for that. Or that's not really open to me. So it also helps you navigate away from the shoals you can't pass and towards the things you can. So I think that is key is getting down to not what you want to matter, not the things that feel like it's kind of hard but not too hard, not the glamour stuff. Like, yeah, I want to, I want to, you know, do this because it'll be fun or write my hundred words a day and then I'll be an author type stuff. But get down to like what would really be required, what works, what energy is it take? What's that path look like?

And just get the real story. Yeah. And then once you have the real story, now you can do everything. phenomenal answer. I really, really, really like that. Well, that said, got to get out of here. David Green, you want to close up shop? Oh, yeah, close up shop with the last question. That's exactly what I meant. Yeah, where can people find out more about you? Well, I'll be on Clubhouse for the next six hours. So, you can get the address on my TikTok account. I'll dance. All right. So Calnewport.com. That's where my weekly newsletter is. I've been writing for, I don't know, a long time since two

2007. My podcast is deep questions. And that's about it. All right. It's fantastic, man. Well, thank you so much for joining us. This has been phenomenal. As always, I love learning from you. I love reading your stuff. And I just tell everyone about all your books all the time. So keep it up, keep writing. And everyone go check out Cal's newest book. It's world without email. Am I saying that correct? A world without email. Yep. All right. Well, thank you. David, you want to get us out of here. Thank you, Cal. You're out here doing God's work. We appreciate it. All right. Thank you. Thank you. This is David Green for Brandon, all kids and no time Turner.

Signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate Podcast. Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

On the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer, the show is produced by Ian K, copywriting is by Calico content, and editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing or to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.biggerpockets.com. The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own. In any asset, real estate included involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing.

You should only risk capital you can afford to lose. And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results. BiggerPockets LLC disclaims all liability for direct, indirect, consequential, or other damages arising from a reliance on information presented in this podcast.