Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 1: My New Task System, Deep Work with Kids, and Finding Purpose in Distracted Times | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader queries on how I manage my tasks, the conflict between deep work and kids, moving beyond fairy tale messages when seeking purpose in difficult times, and so much more.For more about me about my writing: www.calnewport.comThis episode features the Swoosh 1 sound effect, used under a Sampling Plus 1.0 license (see here for details: http://soundbible.com/682-Swoosh-1.html). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, where I answer queries about work, technology, and the deep life. Now, these questions come from my mailing list. If you want to submit one of your own, you can subscribe to this list at calnewport.com. Okay, let's get started. Time for work questions. Justin asks, how do you manage being involved in multiple projects successfully while avoiding burnout? Well, Justin, here is what I have observed. Burnout is caused by too many days in a row of high stress. In the work context, stress is almost always created by not having enough time to get things done. It's deadline driven.

So you have a report that you promised by tomorrow and you don't have what you need to get it done. or you have a book manuscript due on Monday and you still have 30,000 words to go. That's what gets that stress reaction going. You get that stress reaction going enough, your body's going to burn out. So how do you do lots of things without burning out? You do them in a way that avoids the stress reaction. So that means you spread it out. You give yourself more than enough time.

You don't do too many things in parallel. Maybe you finish one project before doing the next. but you make steady progress. Every day, work, work, work, work, work. I always used to tell the students I gave advice to, writing a paper is not stressful, writing a paper when it's due in 12 hours is. So if you are working a lot,

but very rarely under time pressure or very rarely putting too much on your plate to actually get done when it needs to get done, you're not going to be stressed out. So you just repeat that formula day after day, week after week, and a lot gets done. right so I'm 37 I've published a lot of books I've published six books I have a seventh coming

out all right that seems like a lot book writing seems stressful but I've been doing it since I'm 20 years old it's 17 years where I have very rarely gone for a stretch where I'm not writing at least a little bit almost every day so that's 17 years of work with very little actual stress and yet it still adds up to a lot of results abby asks with constant destruction a physician has to face during a hectic day in the hospital, how would you suggest pursuing deep work? Now, Abby, I assume what you mean here is producing peer-reviewed academic papers outside of your clinical shifts. That seems to be the most common deep work scenario I hear from doctors. The most basic answer is pretty straightforward. You do it outside of your shifts,

and you do it on a regular schedule. You have your research hours. It's in the morning. It's in the afternoons, if you are on three on, three off, whatever your shifts are, you take the off days, you make sure that you always have time. It's just the consistent application of effort in a time period that you expect. It adds up to something deeper. I will say, however, when I hear people talking about doctors and deep work, I like it because it's an opportunity to do one of my favorite activities, which is going back and marveling at a young Michael Crichton. So my goal here, to make anyone out there who is a doctor somehow feel much worse about themselves because I went deep diving into the press archives of articles that were published in the Boston area about Michael

Crichton around the time he was emerging as a force in fiction literature. All right, here is one such article. I'm quoting now. Michael Crichton spent four years at Harvard Medical School and what does he have to show for it? Seven novels, a movie, several more manuscripts and screenplays and a fast-paced provocative book of nonfiction on the state of American hospitals, which was published last week. When that article came out,

Michael Crichton was 27 years old. Ooh. All right, let's see what else we could find out about Michael Crichton. He sold the movie rights. He sold the movie rights for the adronoma strain during February of his senior year at Harvard Medical School. I looked it up. Those rights sold, I believe this was 1969 or 1970, for $500,000. That's about $3.3 million if we adjust for inflation. So that's a pretty successful side hustle for a medical student. What a lot of people don't realize about Crichton is that the Adronomus strain was not his first book. He had actually written five books before that under a pseudonym all throughout medical school to help.

pay his bills at Harvard Medical School. He was writing pot boiler style techno thrillers. I own three of them. They republished them a few years ago. They're okay. I mean, they're not great, but you can see Crichton polishing his craft using a pseudonym, which he says he did because he did not want his professors at the medical school to get upset with him. I have a sort of similar tale when I was a graduate student at MIT.

I didn't tell anybody that I was writing books. my doctoral advisor found out that I was writing books because she saw one of them on the table in the MIT bookstore. She did not get as mad as I feared. Maybe Crichton's professors would not have gotten mad as he feared, though with a $3.3 million movie write advance, I guess who cares. So he wrote five books with a pseudonym while in medical school. They got better. How do we know they got better? The fifth book he wrote, the final book under a pseudonym before he wrote the adronom.

Strain, a case of need, won an Edgar Award for Best Mystery in 1969. So by the time that Adronomistramus Drain book came out during his senior year at Harvard Medical School, he'd been honing that craft for a while. All right. So how did he, how did he do it? Right. I mean, this is, let's get back to Abby's question. We'll talk about deep work while a doctor.

I mean, that's a lot to do while in med school and in that first year internship. Here's another quote I found from a contemporaneous article. as a student, Crichton took his typewriter during summers and Christmas vacations and into medical courses in which he had no interest. Anyone who wanted to look at my transcript, Mr. Crichton said with a boyish grin, could see when I was working on a book. All right. So I guess he was in what I would call in the book Deep Work, the journalistic mode of deep work. Wherever you can get time to do it, right. Get that work done.

Be obsessive about it. Be relentless about it. I've heard apocryphal, perhaps, tales of him writing on. the shuttle bus in Cambridge that went between the various med school campuses there in the Boston area. I've also heard stories perhaps apocryphal during his internship year, fourth year of medical school of writing in the room where you would go to sleep, you know, at the night shift when you're waiting to be called in. So this was a guy who worked a lot. Another quote I found from the time he said that he writes when the fit hits me.

then the article goes on to say, this is a New York Times article from June of 1970. It goes on to say, Michael, Mr. Crichton can write 16 hours a day for a week or two, often turning out 10,000 words a day. 1970, so this article would correspond with the year after Crichton left Harvard Medical School. He did one year as a post-stock and left that fellowship because he was just having way too much success as a writer. All right, Abby, so you have the boy. boring answer and the exciting answer. The boring answer is find regular time outside of your clinical shifts and allow the deep work to accrete, build up day by day, week by week, so those

papers come out. The exciting answer is be like Michael Crichton and write 16 hours a day somehow, bring a typewriter into your classes, I'm not quite sure how that worked, and make $3 million by the time you graduate, right? So there we go. Two different ways of thinking about that challenge. Kylie asked about adjusting to life with kids. So a little bit of background on this question. Kylie had a baby about a year ago. She says that she is struggling with the adjustment and wondering, quote, how I will ever get anything done ever again.

I think this is an important question because it has layers. Gets at some pretty deep issues as we go deeper into these layers. Let's start at the surface here. Productivity when you have kids, this is something I have some experience with. I have a whole messload of kids and none of them are particularly old. How does productivity work? How does professional productivity work when you have kids? Well, something that I've seen true, proven true again and again is that there has to be this strict separation.

Psychologically speaking, there are work hours, which are hours in which you were not providing child care. And then there are non-work hours, which are hours when you are providing child care. You basically have to write off those child care hours. Caring for kids is a full-time job. If you go into it thinking, hey, it's a baby. Can't I still get some stuff done while I have this baby here? It doesn't work. You have to think about there is the hours in which I am not responsible for the kids and hours when I am.

you have to be as a parent really on your game in those hours in which you actually have time to work. You just basically have to be a lot more organized and a lot more productive than, let's say, your colleagues who don't have any kids at all, or colleagues who have essentially a spouse that handles everything so that you still have all your waking hours essentially free, that sort of older misogynistic model from generations past. you don't have that benefit anymore. You have to find a way to fit what needs to get done into the time that you're not doing child care.

It's very binary. To make it work, you really have to start caring about your productivity habits. There is, however, a deeper layer here, which I think is really interesting and worth discussing. I used to be confused why so many people would ask me, Cal, how can I do deep work?

I have kids. Right. And this would be confusing. I think, well, you know, deep work is about what you do during your work hours, that during your work hours, you should spend a probably higher ratio of those hours doing deep versus shallow. I don't know what having your kids outside of the work hours has to do with this, right? Deep work, that book was about what you do during your work hours. But what I've come to realize is that the reason that question has become more relevant is because of the shifts in how we work. right we have entered in this age of frictionless digital communication like email and slack we have we have we have entered this world in which we are so disrupted and our time is so fragmented that very little can actually get done during work hours i mean basically we're human network routers we sit there answering messages in between meetings and often during those meetings just passing information back and forth talking about work moving little tasks around where does the actual work have to get done, well, increasingly the only way to actually get anything deep done is outside of work hours, where there is no child care. So if we actually had a sensical knowledge work system where we were organized about work, we were structured about work, we actually thought critically about how do I get what's the best way to get things done, what's the best way to assign

task, to review tasks, how do we get away from this rolling constant emailing, this issue of kids in deep work would be less pronounced because it would be there's times when I'm working and then there's times when I'm not and when I'm not I'm caring for kids while as when my younger colleague is not working then maybe they're playing video games it wouldn't be as big of a deal but we've we've squeezed work outside of work hours and this is not a good situation I just get so surprised that we don't take more seriously these drastic changes we made to the very definition of work they have all these second order effects when you when you transform your nine to five hours into this email slack, persistent, constant communication,

you have to force people to work outside of the work offices. You get all of these unexpected inequities. You get suddenly that people that have to do child care are now at a disadvantage to people that don't. To what end? Right? Now you're just holding back potential talent for no real reason. It's an unexpected or secondary side effect. So I think we have to take so much more seriously how we actually work in a knowledge work age. Because what we're doing today is causing a lot of these unexpected issues. Okay, so there's the shallow answer to your question, which is when you work,

you're probably going to have to be twice as organized as productive as someone without kids. That's the only way to make it work because you can't get anything done when you're caring for kids. The deeper answer here is the very fact that this is an issue tells us that we have bigger problems to solve. Kixie asks, what's your chosen task management system? I had to change it this year. So within my department at Georgetown this year, I was the, or I am still, the director of graduate studies. This is a sort of administrative job. You help run the graduate program. It gets passed around the

various professors. We all take our turn helping to run the graduate program. Now, this position has with it, there's a full-time non-academic staff member called the graduate program manager that deals with a lot of the administrative details of running the department forms and budgets, etc. Well, he quit. So at some point this spring, actually right around the time that we shut down in-person learning due to the coronavirus at Georgetown, I also had to learn and handle all of the administrative aspects of running our entire graduate program. So what I actually did is my inbox was going to kill me. You cannot, cannot run such a complex system with so many different types of demands, ongoing conversations, ambiguous request, information to be learned.

This cannot execute as just messages in a single, overfilled, non-differentiated general purpose inbox. That was never going to work. So I ended up switching over to Trello. Trello allows you to create, they're basically virtual. task boards. You can have columns and then you can stack cards under the columns and the cards can have tasks on them, information on them. You can attach files to them. I created a Trello board for each of my roles at Georgetown. So I had one for the graduate director work. I had one for course and class related work. I had one for research related work. So work related to my research, the students and postdocs I supervise and so on. Everything it came into my inbox that had to do

something about, I got out of my inbox, onto a card, onto the appropriate Trello board. So these columns on each of these boards allowed me to actually structure this information. So for example, I could have a column for waiting to hear back from. Everyone that I had sent something to or I'm waiting to learn something from, I can have a card in a column under the appropriate role so that I won't forget that. Oh, I'm waiting to hear back from this dean about this process. It's not in my brain. It's not a David Allen style, open loop, eating away, mental energy.

It's captured. I have a column for, okay, here's things this week I have to act on. I have a column for Backburner. I'm not quite ready to work on these things, but let's put them here. And we'll review them every week when I do my weekly review and so on. So all of this work got out of my inbox, got assigned to a particular role, got assigned to a particular column in that role. all of the information related to that builds up on the digital card so there's no searching around to get the various pieces.

This structuring makes a big difference. It cannot emphasize enough how hard it is to do almost any non-trivial role when all of the information about that role exists in some combination of your head in one inbox. It's incredibly stressful. These boards gave me some structure to that informational landscape. It's still a hard job. I'm still not very good at it, but at least it is not eating me alive in the way that I'm sure it would be. So I like that solution. I like using task boards.

I like putting tasks and information on cards under columns on boards assigned to roles. Chris asks, how can I make my workflow less reactive? Chris, you have to time block, right? You have two choices for how you run your day. You can run it off a list and an inbox. or you can make a plan for your time and give every minute of your day a job and do everything you can to actually try to stick to that plan.

The latter thing is called time boxing. It'll give you about 2x more productivity. It's very hard. You have to work very intense to hit your time blocks. You'll probably mess up your schedule three or four times during the day and therefore have to build a new schedule for the time that remains. But it puts you in control. You see all of your hours, you see all of your obligations,

and you come up with a plan that's going to get the most reasonable work done for what you actually have available. It is just a better way of doing things than instead just reactively saying what just came in, what is on my list that I might want to do next. You are going to get a lot more done if you time block. I talk about this in deep work, talk about this on my blog. I actually have coming out this fall a planner, Cal Newport time block planner. that makes it easy to actually implement these time block schedules. I'm a huge believer of them. If you're not time blocking,

you're not really working near your full potential. All right, Caroline asks, I'm a tenure track professor. How can I say no to colleagues, students, etc., and set boundaries so I can focus on my research, which is critical to achieving tenure. What do I say no to and how do I do it while navigating team player BS expectations?

Look, if you're pre-tenure and tenure, track, the expectation is that you're going to get your research done and get tenure. You probably are blowing up in your head the degree to which other people really are upset if you're not able to do something. Here's a secret about other professors and administrators at colleges. They're just overburdened and just trying to get stuff off their plate. They're not over sweating it if you say no. If you want a strategy to make that easier, use the quota strategy where you say, well, look, I have a quota. for how many committees I can do per semester.

I have a quota for how many peer reviews I can do in a semester. I have these quotas I set up to make sure that I still have enough time left to do the work I need to get tenure. And you know what? I've already hit my quota on that for this semester, so I'm unable to say yes to this particular request. This method works really well because, man, it is hard to push back on that. It is very hard to say, I don't care about your quota. I would rather you do this for me than actually get the work you need to do for tenure. No one is going to say that.

It works like a charm. You lose this ability once you get tenure. I can tell you that from the other side of this equation. But that's a good way to do it. But Caroline really just say no. Say no more often. People are not oversweighing what Caroline did yesterday. They said, okay, she can't do it.

Who else can I ask? They've forgotten about it four minutes later. Protect your time more fiercely than you do the feelings of others. It is the right equation. Trust me, they will get their revenge once you actually do get tenure. All right. Final work question, John, what's your next book? Well, I haven't talked a lot publicly about this,

but I do have a book coming out next spring. We are editing the manuscript and looking at covers right now as we speak. I'll probably make a big announcement once we have all the information sort of uploaded to Amazon a little bit later in June. or July, but we're all friends here, so I'll give you the exclusive. The new book is titled A World Without Email, and it takes a big look at how did we get to the way we got today with work? How do we get to this world in which we're just constantly communicating all the time? I make the argument that it's arbitrary. I pull together all the

research in a way that no one has done. All the psychology, all the organizational psychology, all the neuroscience, even drawing from anthropology, pulled together all the research. to make the the comprehensive case that the way we work today is incredibly unproductive is making people miserable. Part two of the book, I say there's a better way. Take people inside organizations that are working without constant communication. I draw lessons from companies from the past. I say a world without email is not only a possibility.

It is inevitable. The only question is whether or not you are ahead or behind on this coming trend. That's the new book. It's a monster. Really excited about it. hoping to make waves with it, you will hear more about that soon. All right, let's move on to technology questions. Sarah asked, as an author, how do you effectively market your books without using social media?

It's true. It's what I'm known for. I've never had a social media account and have managed to sell a few books. One thing I'll say about this is that where social media really helps author, is that it allows people to talk about your book if you really like it. I find that's actually probably more important for your sales than you yourself talking to your audience about your book. Your audience assumes that you like your book.

It's not nearly as important as other people who like your book spreading the word. So writing a really good book is a really good first step. I have a mailing list that helps, right? I mean, mailing lists are actually significantly more effective than social media. feeds in terms of actually driving sales. Once you get your list to a given size, you can get a pop of sales early on, which can help with bestseller list, but it's really not going to get you much farther than that. I mean, honestly, guys, a really big social media following, a really big mailing list can maybe guarantee you 20,000 sales, but it's not going to get you

200,000 sales. That has to come from the book itself. So I don't overswet that piece of it. I think writing the right book, the right book for the times, that you're the right person to write. It's going to change the way people see the world, that people are going to love, that people are going to pass on. I mean, that's what sells books. There's only so much you can force through your followings. I recommend authors, like, look, if you want to have some social media fine, just make sure that it is not getting into your writing time. By far the most important thing is to write books that people care about. Brad asks, what academic and related psychological effects do you see the average college student going through because of increased social media use? Anxiety is the big one.

This is what the college mental health professionals I've talked to saw change most dramatically once students began arriving on campus with smartphones. It was anxiety. The number of students that were coming into the mental health centers for anxiety or anxiety-related disorder. dramatically and significantly increased. So I think college kids are a lot more anxious. The second issue I think we have from this era of ubiquitous and addictive technology in your hand is concentration diminishment. I think students are just less comfortable sustaining focus on hard things than they used to be.

You're less comfortable sustaining focus on hard things than an act like learning something becomes more challenging. It takes more time. The quality of the work produce goes down. So you might be asking, can we see this in the data? Can we see, let's say, average GPA is dropping? Well, we don't, because I'll tell you why. We're just implicitly inflating our grades by we, I mean, college professors, because you have in mind roughly what these grade distributions should be like, and we just sort of implicitly inflate our grades. Everyone feels fine. But I don't know. My guess is that the average college student in the year 2000, in when I went to college, without a cell phone even, without a laptop, probably was way more comfortable focusing without distraction than the average college student in 2020, and that

is going to have real effects. Connor asks for an evangelist of deep work and for disconnection from social media, how do you justify an email distribution list? Well, this is a common, I think, mistake that people make. which is taking all things internet related and kind of mixing them all together and saying look if you're against this piece of the internet then you're against this piece of the internet as well

if you're against social media then you're against email list and so on but I think we have to be a lot more nuanced people are often surprised to find out that hey I'm an internet geek right I mean I'm one of these guys that was using gopher I'm one of these guys that was telnetting into university computer mainframe systems over the early internet before there was a worldwide web. I had the first mosaic browser that you could download.

I remember the link style text-based browsers. I'm a huge internet geek guy. I love the internet. I really dislike social media. Not the same thing. So I think the internet's ability to expose yourself to interesting ideas, to express yourself, to connect with people is fantastic that I as a professor and writer can have, 40,000 fans that really like my writing and opt in to have my writing sent to them once or twice a week is a fantastic thing.

50 years ago, any number of thinkers would have really been excited if that had been a possibility. It's much different than what's going on with social media. Social media is about the exploitative extraction of people's attention and information that try to grab that value and ossify it into stock price for a very small number of stockholders. Social media is about how do we get you captured in our ecosystem and spending way more time than you know it's useful or you know as healthy looking at these screens, swiping these things, taking time away from things that are more valuable. Why?

Because we can get a little bit more value out of your time. Yeah, you're spending less time with your kids. You're not getting in shape. You're spending less time pursuing hobbies that are useful to you. You're spending less time in self-reflection, the contemplative arts. They're going to give you a resilient foundation for life. Yeah, you're doing all of that a lot less,

but you know what? We had this Instagram, endless feed calibrated just right, but you can't help scrolling it and looking at a little bit more. It's 50 extra sense of value we got out of you this afternoon. That's what I dislike. I think that is a corruption of the democratic potential of the Internet. And I think it's something that we can be very wary of while still embracing the bulk of what makes the Internet so great.

All right, so that's probably my random. alert of the day. Social media presses my button. So, Connor, you get the award today for getting my rant engine going. All right, so let me power down here. Manual says, how have you changed your digital minimalism attitude during the COVID-19 pandemic? You know, I've been writing about this on my blog. I've done some writing about this for Wired. I have a piece coming out on the New Yorker, which touches on some of this. Essentially, I think the COVID-19 pandemic took the main points of the digital minimalism philosophy

and made them starkly clear. So the core idea of digital minimalism is that technology is best when you deploy it carefully to amplify things you really care about, that if you instead approach technology without this care and just say, hey, that could be interesting, this seems whatever,

I just try this, it has the potential of really having an outsized influence on your time and attention. So if you use technology very intentionally, you can get huge value out of it. If you're casual about it, it can actually make your life much worse. When has this lesson been more clear than during the COVID-19 pandemic? There are certain uses for technology in this pandemic that are very intentional and are incredible value producing, right? The ability to zoom with family members and friends, to know what's going on in your community, to know, hey, on the list, sir, like this happened to be early in the pandemic. There's a neighbor down the street. They're worried. They're sick. They had been traveling. Does someone have one of those

oxygen meters you can put on your finger because their doctor says they need one and they're hard to get right now? And you know what? Yeah, someone had them. They got it over to them, right? This type of intentional use of technology to amplify the things that really matter, like connection to our friends and to our community, shows the power of technology. On the other hand, has there ever been a time where the attention economy has wreaked more psychological damage than during this pandemic?

I mean, if you're one of the people or no one of the people that's just glued to online news and it's just so relentlessly dire that it just fritzes out your brain, makes you despair, you're doing genuflections of despair every morning to your CNN.com feed or social media. And Twitter has really been a problem for a lot of people during this, because what happens is it's just a lot of people spending their time and energy fighting against abstractions. You guys are terrible because you want us to wear masks. You guys are terrible because you're not wearing masks. Look at this picture.

Too many people are in this lake. I mean, this is just a completely counterproductive behavior, this sort of disembodied community activation, where you're at the national level just being exposed to these random things that are good or bad and joining these tribes and fighting. And I think it's making a lot of people very anxious. So here we have digital minimalism writ large. You use technology intentionally during this pandemic makes your life better. You use it casually during this pandemic. You're either in a fetal position or yelling at Twitter phantoms. Probably going to give yourself a heart attack before the virus gets you in the first place anyways.

All right. So I think this pandemic has only amplified what I predicted was true about technology. I wrote a post. You can Google it. It's called On Digital Minimalism and Pandemics. I wrote it early in the pandemic that basically lays out these points. Mike asked, those of us who are consultants and responding to clients in a timely fashion is critical.

How do we still find ways to carve out meaningful, deep work? Mike, you need more structure for how you communicate with your clients. A lot of people and client-facing services think that what their clients want is accessibility. It's not quite true. Clients want clarity. Clarity trumps accessibility. If they know how to reach you and are sure that they're going to get a timely response, the answer does not have to be they can reach you at any moment.

So if you have systems in place for here is how we check in on things, here's how you ask questions, here we make sure you have what you need, you don't need to be accessible all the time. One of the case studies in the new email book that I mentioned earlier in the podcast was of a UX design company that went through this transformation. They used to allow their clients to actually have access to their Slack channels. Right? Oh, terrible idea.

Their clients could bother them on Slack 24 hours a day. Huge disaster. One of their engineers burnt out. Quit. I'm done with this. Can't take it anymore. They knew they had the change. They said, we're going to make a drastic change.

Hey, we might lose all of our business, but we have to change something because this is just miserable. They went 180 degrees the other direction. They started making their client sign a client communication agreement that spelled out. this is how you communicate with us. And what they did for most clients, they said, we're going to have this conference call.

Set time every week. We're going to go over what's going on. Here's where we are. Here's what's happened since the last call. What questions do you have? Great. We will now record everything we promised and every action items from that call,

a summary of the call, and we will send it to you within 30 minutes. Clients turned out to be ecstatic with this. They didn't have to worry about it anymore. Like, great, I don't have to worry. about this company dropping things. I don't have to bother them. I don't have to get annoyed that they didn't answer my email in four minutes because I know, you know, we have this call. I can ask my questions then. They'll bring us up to date. We'll have everything summarized in writing. Great.

I can take this out of the corner of my mind that is preserved for or reserved for worrying clarity trumps accessibility. So that would be my my pushback on you, Mike, is you might be overestimating the degree to which being always available is important. If you can replace that with some more structure, you're going to find a lot more regular time for other activities like deep work. Let's see what else we have here. Scott, how is your phone set up? What apps you have? What's on your lock screen, your first page? Scott, I don't even know what that means. And I guess that's the point. I have an iPhone. My wife sends me photos on it. You know, I like the text message on it. You can send photos. That's good. I listen to a podcast. You know,

the purple button mapped. I get lost a lot. I use the maps. I mean, that's basically it. I don't know what a first page or a lock screen is. And I think that's the point. I like Steve Jobs' originally vision of the iPhone, which is it's the best iPod you ever had

and the best phone you ever had put together in one sleek device. Oh, and by the way, it has a map and can play some music. You don't need to run your life off of your phone. You don't need your phone to do that much. There's probably more important uses for your attention. All right, let's move on to questions about the deep life.

NAM asks, what are your tips for graduate students on becoming a professor? Publish papers in the best possible venues, publish more of them than you think is possible for you. Publish, publish, publish. That's everything. Don't think about anything else. Think about writing the best possible papers. How do you do this? Find people who already are, learn from them, what it actually takes. Don't invent your own rules for how you want to do your research. Don't invent your own rules for how the world should work. Figure out how people who do publish in the top places actually get it done. Learn at their feet. Get the best possible advisors you can. Get the best possible collaborators you can. Spend as much of your time as possible writing

papers. That is everything in the becoming a professor game. Krishna asked, how do you handle boredom. A little background here, Krishna is a student. Krishna, my advice is you have to just set things up so that boredom is unavoidable. The best way to do that is to do more things without your phone. So you just run errands, you walk the dog, you go to class, whatever, you do some things every day where you don't have your phone with you. Now what's going to happen is you are going to now unavoidably find yourself in situations where you're bored in the same. of there is no novel stimuli that you can deliver to yourself by just tapping on this little glowing piece of glass. You actually don't have that escape valve. Now, I don't think you should just

sit there and be bored and just marinate that uncomfortable feeling. I think you should instead, free from the artificial crutch that is our phone, see where that boredom drives you. It'll get you thinking about things. I'm not just going to sit here and think nothing, so maybe I'm going to think about my life. I'm going to reflect on some things. Maybe I'm going to have some ideas. Maybe I'm going to go take action. Well, maybe I'm not just going to sit here. Maybe I should get up. I'm going to go do something that is useful, right? Let the boredom drive you towards behaviors that feel in the moment like the natural response to that strong drive. Bortem is natural. Bortem will drive you to natural behaviors that will be fulfilling. You just have to get this

incredibly artificial construct, which is the internet connected phone out of your life to actually get back in touch with those natural rhythms. I like to use the analogy to hunger. Hunger is very natural. Junk food is an unnatural response to that natural instinct. So if you respond to hunger by just eating Twinkies, you're basically way overreacting to that impulse. You're going to end up very unhealthy. So if you equivalently respond to boredom by looking at social media on your phone, the digital equivalent of Twinkies, you're also going to end up quite unethical. healthy. So just put yourself in a situation where you don't have that crutch, allow the boredom to come, see where it takes you, you will get more used to it. Chin asks, are there any health

hacks or habits you have that you think contribute to your productivity and concentration? 100%. How you take care of your body has a massive impact on what you're able to do with your mind. If you do not take your body seriously, you are leaving a lot of potential on the There are things I track and try to do every single day. More than 10,000 steps outside every day. I very rarely miss that. I have a very simple workout routine in the dungeon I have in my unfinished garage. 30 push-ups, 30 pull-ups, and 50 combination of sort of terrible things I do on the dip bars.

Doesn't take long. Not trying to become a bodybuilder. I just want the major muscle groups of my body. every day to get pushed really hard. It just seems to me if I do that every day and I move for 10 to 20,000 steps every day, my body will be in the right mode of, yeah, we move, we do hard things, we sprint every once in a while, and the right types of systems will happen, whereas if you don't move much or if you rarely move your major muscle groups, I think things shut down.

Look, I'm not a physiologist. I don't know if that's true. I'm probably making a lot of this up, but I think it really matters. So I track those things. Almost never miss them. Sometimes I have to do these exercises. You know, it's 9.30 at night. I've got kids.

It's busy. But I get it done. I track it. I also care a lot about my food. I roughly, not they'll open the kimono too wide here. I automate breakfast and lunch. To me, that is fuel, fuel, fuel. I don't even want to think about it.

That's just plain fuel. I more or less go off of the dietary tips of Mark Sisson when it comes to breakfast. and lunch, which is, I don't know, he's semi-paleo, semi-primal. It's real foods, very little grains, a lot of healthy fats. I've cut down my caffeine to about two cups a day, which is a big change for me as well. So it's all automated. So it's like I'll have eggs for breakfast. I usually have some sort of salad with some protein for lunch.

I don't even want to think about it. For dinner, Michael Pollan is my guy. So just eat real foods. My wife and I cook. Let's make food from scratch. here for having pasta bread, I'll eat pasta or bread, you know, be a little bit less, a little bit less strict there, but just real foods. We try not to keep much snack food in the house. That's it. I track those things, by the way. All right, every day, it's in my journal.

I slip up, have something that's not on there. I track it. Alcoholic drinks. I write down how many going to see it, right? Got to face these things. Don't try to hide from it. And so I do track those things, I do think it matters. I do think I had to get serious about my health because, you know, with the kids, with the workload, I need the edges I can get. And I think this makes a difference. All right. So those are my advice. Get serious about your food. And again, the easiest thing to do is just automate from when you wake up the 5 p.m. just it's like you eat the same things every day. Really healthy. Don't even think about it. Real food at night. Move every day. Strain your muscles every day makes a difference. Zame asks, do you ever find yourself slipping out of the deep work

life unintentionally after being in it for an extended period of time? Yes, every year. Professors call it September. I don't like it. I get depressed in September. I love the summer. I do a lot more deep work. The broader point here, Zame, is yeah, you're going to slip and change because your life circumstances will change. The key is just intention. You know the type of life you're trying to lead. You know that you're trying to do the deep life philosophy of focusing on what matters and not wasting too much time on the things that don't. Keep coming back to that.

Keep making adjustments. You will be fine. Don't be too hard on yourself when those adjustments happen because they are unavoidable. All right. Final question. Kevin, I have recently been lacking a sense of purpose. A little bit of background here. Kevin tells me that he is a delivery driver.

Kevin, you are not alone with this question, especially now during these times of pandemic, where there are a lot of acute hardships piled on to everything else. Now, I think one of the issues here is that our culture has become really bad at helping people with something that's very, very important, which is living a life of purpose. We basically push that topic to decide. it used to be at the core of, let's say, a university education. It's the core of university education. It used to be at the core of most people's childhood and upbringing,

of community, parents, religious organizations. There was so much in people's lives that was focused on how do you build a structured life of purpose. We stripped that all away, and now we find ourselves saying, well, I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do. What we replaced it with is largely fairy tales. So I wrote about this in my 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. Basically starting the 1980s and really picking up speed in the 1990s, we started telling people these fairy tales that say, well, no, here's how purpose comes. You figure out like your passion, some sort of like job you're supposed to do or something.

And then when you get that match, you find a right one thing to do with your life, you will feel great. So you've got to find that purpose. You find this one thing. You do that thing. and then you're going to be much happier. This is a very recent idea. It's counter to almost all of philosophy, literature, and theology on this topic.

It doesn't help very much. So where does purpose really come from? Well, it's a much more complicated, rich, and interesting question. But if we look back, even in the oldest of mythologies, where we see the hero like Odysseus going through the trials after the battles in Troy as he works to get back home, we see a very clear pattern. The first thing you do is you survive the hardships.

So the hard things happen. His ships are dashed on the rocks. He finds himself down in Hades at some point. In the literal underworld, in the myth of Odysseus, he survives. He perseveres. He gets out of the water. He gets off of the island of the lotus eaters. He blinds the cyclops.

He survives. He gets past the hardships. Sticking with this particular myth, he gets back home. Gets back home to his, his, island kingdom and finds that his household is in disarray. There's these suitors who have come in and are trying to usurp him. So he gets his household back in order. And the myth, he literally kills them. But again, this is mythological language. What this really means is that he survives the acute hardships. Then he gets his life back in order. Gets things organized, gets his household

back in order, gets control of himself. Then the final part of this myth, which is not actually in the version of the Odyssey that we know, but is part of the deeper myth that is based on is that he then goes on this journey into the inland, on the mainland inland, where he brings an oar with until he gets to a place where no one knows what an oar is, and they haven't heard of all of his old accolades, and he does these sacrifices, and he basically transforms into a deeper, more meaningful life. And so sort of the final step of this classical mythological journey to purpose is that after you've, with great persistence and resilience, gone through the acute hardships, and then second, got yourself in your life in order.

The third thing is you say, then, how do I evolve this life to be more useful? And that almost always means for people, responsibility, serving other, serving your family, serving your community, doing things that's useful to the world. Humility, doing it without the need to feel like you have to beat your chest on Instagram or have people see, you know, how good you look or have some accolades published in the paper. And perhaps a touch of quality and gratitude in there. Just appreciations for pieces of life that really are beautiful no matter what the other circumstances are. Right. That's the basic pattern that we see in the Odyssey, which is basically the original myth is the oldest extant mythology we have in the Western canon.

You see that same structure come, show up again and again and again. throughout ancient philosophy, you see it all throughout theology, you see it in literature as well. So what I'm going to say, Kevin, is that there's meaning in these myths. There's a reason why they have survived. And this is probably the type of template you need to think about. Not the 1990s fairy tale of you were meant to be a race car driver. And the only thing, the only problem is, is that people have told you that you can't be a race car driver. And if you could just have the courage to do it, you'll have purpose.

That's a fairy tale for kids. that's a Disney movie in that case that's literally a Disney movie that's the plot of Cars 3 movie I don't like I don't like very much the deeper solution here is no no no here's what you do when the real hardships come you get through them

you get through them with strength you know it's hard but you know you can survive it and you get past the acute phase you get your life in order you eat well you get in shape you get your finances in order in your job so I'm going to do this well I'm going to get better at the job. I can support myself,

I can support my family. And then third, you begin to take on responsibility. You begin to take on humility. You begin to take on the challenge of, I want to do things in this world that is useful. And then along the way, keep pausing for gratitude, keep seeking out those moments of quality, that also makes life rich.

A much more complicated answer, but also a much older and more persistently told answer. And the way I see it is if an idea like that has survived, as long as it has survived, then there must be some memetic value there. There must be some truth underlying it. So that's my answer. It's sort of a general question.

The key to purpose is really seeking the deeper life. And these are the elements that are in the deeper life. The fairy tale of if I just find the right job or something, I should just feel good all the time. That's for kids. grown-ups like Odysseus in that original myth survive the hardship, get their house in order, then transform their life in the something that serves the world

and has some quality, has some gratitude in it. All right, that's my prescription. That basically is the deep life philosophy that I have been preaching. It is hard work like any of these things are, but it's incredibly rewarding. All right, everyone, so that is the end of episode number one.

I hope you enjoyed my answers to your questions today. Again, I solicit new questions from my mailing list. On occasion, once I run out of questions, I send out a form. It's a giving new question. So if you want to have a chance to submit your own questions to this show, you need to sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. And I hope to see your questions. Then, until then, stay deep.