Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 10: Battling Email, Online Learning, and a Game Plan for Escaping a Shallow Life | DEEP QUESTIONS

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions on battling email, online learning, and a game plan for escaping a shallow life. I also play some question roulette and answer the audio question of the day.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com (I send a survey to this list soliciting questions on a semi-regular basis.)Full list of topics tackled in today’s episode:* [1:23] Fighting the email onslaught* [4:50] Shutting down when work never ends* [9:53] Abandoning work blocks* [11:03] Grad school later in life* [12:20] Getting into grad school* [14:15] How to win at grad school* [15:40] My deliberate practice routines* [21:45] Question roulette: overhaul deep work habits* [25:31] Schools and social media* [28:00] Adapting to online learning * [31:40] Bullet journaling: yay or nay?* [34:40] Audio question of the day: too many tasks* [37:50] Elite learning without schools (bonus rant: the future of higher education)* [45:09] My dharma* [48:17] Escaping a long stay in the shallowsThanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. 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. The show where I answer queries for my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Now, today, among other topics, we'll tackle battling email, online learning, and seeking a reset in tough times. We'll also play some question roulette and do the audio question of the day. Now, as I mentioned in last week's Habit Tuned Up mini episode, I have, based on popular demand, started adding in the description of each episode, not just the questions that I answer, but the timestamp for each question. So it should be much easier now to actually jump back and forth to get to particular questions

to capture your attention. Now, of course, as always, if you want to contribute your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. I send out a survey for new questions roughly once every three to four weeks. You can send me feedback at Interesting at Calnewport.com and subscribe if you like the podcast. All right, so let's get started with some work questions. Joe asks, given that you can't pull out of the email ecosystem in the same way as you can from social media, what strategies do you use to fight back against the email onslaught?

Do you practice common strategies like inbox zero? Well, Joe, my general advice on email is that it's important not to think about your inbox as a given that you must now deal with. So I think a lot of people think about email this way. They think about, look, I'm going to, I have these messages, I have a lot of messages. I have no control over that. So I just need to focus on how do I organize them? how often do I check? Do I use folders?

Do I use labels? Do I want to use a methodology like Merlin Mann's inbox zero to try to automate how I process through those messages? But the fact that I have all those messages in the first place is a given. Now, what I recommend instead is, yeah, those habits can be useful, but you also have to get to the core of the problem. When you see an email in your inbox, you have to ask, okay, what type of project is is this message associated with?

And is there an easier way or a way that requires less communication or a smarter process to deal with this type of project? In other words, you get to the underlying workflows that are generating the email in the first place and ask, is there a better workflow I could put in place? Something that's more explicit that we agree upon. That's really clear. I'll give you a really simple example. For a lot of people, especially these days, when you can't just drop by someone's office,

there is an unusual amount of email in their inbox focused on meeting scheduling. All right, what about Tuesday, not Tuesday? What about these times that work? Thoughts? What about you, Joe? Can you do it? Okay, then maybe we should switch to this type of time. A lot of email is generated by the back and forth involved with media, meeting scheduling.

So once you understand, like, oh, the underlying workflow that's creating all this email is meeting scheduling, then you might say, huh, maybe I should instead bite the bullet and actually start using one of those meeting. scheduling services like Schedule Once or X.A.I or Calend and Lee or was it Calendly, calendar Lee or, you know, Outlook or Gmail has some built-in features, I think, along these lines, but whatever, right? The point being is once you understand the underlying workflow that was generating those emails you're seeing, there might be something you can put in place instead, like meeting scheduling software that suddenly, much less emails are required to get that same type of work

done. If you repeat this thinking for a lot of different implicit work processes that show up again and again in your work day, you might be able to actually reduce the amount of emails you have to deal with in the first place. So Joe, my advice is, sure, I mean, there's lots of different approaches to tackle with the email that's already there. And you should use those. I mean, it's better to have some structure versus being haphazard. But if you really want to fix the problem, you want to get to a place where you have less emails to deal with in the first place, and that's all about getting at the underlying workflows that are generating those emails in the first place.

If you can identify them, you can optimize them. If you can optimize them, you can often reduce their impact on your inbox. All right, Sarah asks, how does a high school teacher shut down for the evening when there's so much work to be taken home? And she elaborates that this is, is common in her profession that you are in the classroom all day and there's all this extra

work you need to do and the only time to get it done is at night when you're at home. Now Sarah, you're hitting on a bigger issue here in knowledge work that if you'll excuse a brief rant, I think it's worth emphasizing, which is the idea that we're doing this more and more. we're pushing more work outside of the actual work day. You know, it's like early in the morning, late at night after your kids go to bed. More and more in office work, we're pushing work out of the work day. I think this is a large part how we're temporarily compensating for the fact that we don't really have our act together when it comes to knowledge work.

that we're doing this type of work haphazardly. We're just rock and rolling on email and slack and jumping in and out of meetings. There's very little processes. There's very few workflows. There's very little thinking about, hey, what's the right way or the best way to get this work done? And because of that, it's affecting our productivity. Now, I think the actual economic measures of non-industrial productivity, the stuff that the Labor Bureau, those numbers that they gather, I think those would have actually been paradoxically falling over the past 10 or 15 years

because we've made ourselves so inefficient as we embrace low friction communication technologies and just said, hey, if we rock and roll, maybe we'll just get work done. I think the reason why those numbers are, they're not rising, they're basically stagnant. And that's a complicated picture. And I don't want to go down that economic rabbit hole because we also had a little something known as the Great Recession happening in the middle of this data period. So it's a complicated picture. but non-industrial productivity metrics as released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

have been basically stagnant through this period in which we had this communication revolution that means that I can communicate with anyone, basically anywhere in the world from anywhere with almost no friction, did not make us more productive. The numbers are stagnant. But what I want to argue is those numbers would actually be falling if not for this parlor trick of basically pushing extra work off the books. we're basically keeping our head above water even as our work habits get less productive

because we're slipping in extra hours at night. We're slipping in extra hours in the morning. Teachers like Sarah basically end up with 12 hour a day jobs. And we don't want to face the underlying reality of like, well, how do we actually make the work day itself more productive or more efficient? How do we make it so that you don't have to, to wait until everyone is asleep or no one's expecting email responses to actually get value producing work done. We don't actually want to deal with that. So we all just sort of look

the other way and say, yeah, it's just work. We got a hustle. Things got more competitive. But they didn't get more competitive. I think we just got worse at work. So Sarah, I'm kind of ignoring at first your actual question to make this rant that I think that is a canary and a coal mine for a larger shortcoming we have as a knowledge sector writ large. We are we are paying this over do bill on not taking seriously the mechanics of how we work. And the way we're paying it is by just like you see, pushing people to have to work many extra hours uncompensated off the books. Now, what can you do, you know, tomorrow, Sarah, to at least get some relief? Well, there's some things that might make this a little bit better. So again, your productivity system

probably has to be very tight. You know, follow my pillars of capture, configure, control. If you really have everything out of your head in a system and you really have a grip on everything that, everything that you need to do when it's due, you're really controlling your time. At least you'll have the ability to shut down when it comes time to shutdown. This won't reduce the work you have to do, but it will give you some cognitive clarity because at least you don't feel like there's just this amorphous blob that you're keeping track of in your head and that you're never getting it done. Also, when you're time blocking and time controlling and doing weekly plans,

It's, you can avoid pileups, you know, where four or five things are due the next day. If you don't realize that until the day before, you're going to be up late. But if you do weekly, daily planning, you can spread that work out and maybe avoid some of those type of overwork type nights. So that'll help. You know, tighten up your productivity system. That'll help. It'll give you some clarity. I'll give you some peace outside of your work.

But I think there is a bigger problem here, which is if people are having to do this over many different fields within the knowledge sector. That is a sign that the knowledge sector itself has problems. Okay, Rob asks, what do you do if you're really tired in the middle of a block of work? If you have the opportunity to nap at that point, should you? If you can't, should you take a break? You know, Rob, I think it's fine to take a break. I mean, if you're really tired, don't try to force it.

You're not going to get very, very much good work done. So the take a break is fine. If you're really tired, we need to get a good night's sleep and they're put in a nap is probably fine. Of course, if this is happening all the time, then you might want to make sure you're taking a look at things like sleep, like diet. Are you scheduling hard things earlier in the day and easier things later?

Do you have a nice shutdown after your work and time to rejuvenating to other types of activities? I mean, you want to do the general tuneups to keep your physical and cognitive energy high. But in the short term, yeah, not all blocks are going to work. You should not feel guilty about taking. breaks. Okay, so what we have now is a, I got a bunch of grad school questions, which I'm putting under work, and I figured I would just go through these three one after another. I basically consolidated them. So let's do a little grad student dash here. All right, so Chris asks about, would you consider going to grad school beyond your 20s as a move towards building career

capital. So, Chris, I'm going to caution you a little bit, you know, as you might know from earlier episodes, I don't believe in unspecified or generic career capital, just this idea that I don't really know why I'm acquiring this skill. I just think, you know, hey, it might be relevant one day. I'm a little bit wary about that, especially when it comes to grad school because it's expensive. So my grad school advice, as my longer time listeners know, is do not go to grad school.

unless there is a specific promotion job or position that you want, it would be good for you. That would require the specific grad school degree that you're going to get. So with grad school in particular, I say, don't go unless you have a concrete reason to go. You know, you're a banker. You want to be a managing director. To be a managing director requires an MBA.

All right. That makes sense to go get an MBA. But you just have an unrelated job and you say, hey, maybe if I have an MBA that will open up some opportunities, that's not a good enough reason. All right. Now, Anna asks, so these questions sort of move us. We're going from the decision to go to grad school to Anna's question, which is how to get into grad school.

So she says, how can you become a good candidate for grad school? Well, I'm going to break out PhD programs versus master's programs. You know, for the most part, master's programs is a straight mix of. of grades and GRE scores. Good grades at a good school with good GRE scores is what you want for the most competitive programs. Less competitive programs, you know, what you need goes down, but those are the numbers that mainly matter.

For PhD program, grades and GRE scores matter. The school you went to matter, your research experience matters. So if there's some sort of demonstration that you are able to do independent research, or if you have specific research skills in that particular field, That's important. The bigger picture note to put here, especially if you're coming out of college, is that grad school admissions is different than college admissions. So you should not be thinking nearly as much about like your extracurricular activities

or your statement or even your course load. Like, look, I took a lot of hard courses. The type of things that ambitious high school students think about to try to impress a college are largely irrelevant for graduate programs. Graduate programs usually have applications being they're going to be reviewed by professors in the program who care about the type of things professors care about. So that's one thing I just want to emphasize that we're not talking about college admissions. They're not looking for, are you an interesting person?

They're not looking for, are you a grind? Or are you a great cello player? If it's not a cello program, what's your grades, what's your test scores? Where'd you go to school? And if it's a PhD program, how do we know, that you can do research. All right, final grad school question comes from JT. He said, if you were to rewrite your book, How to Win at College for graduate students, what would differ? Well, I would say more broadly, I think of master's programs as an extension of undergrad programs. So whatever advice you would have

for, especially studying at the undergrad level would apply at the master's level as well. For PhD programs, you know, if I was ever to write a how to win at grad school type book, I would talk probably a lot more about research, how to become a good researcher, how to build an expertise, how to master literature, how to train and mentor at the feet of researchers who are already good. The big lesson here being,

PhD programs are really about producing original knowledge in the world, and that's really where you want your head. So, JT, if you're looking for that advice, I've written some about it. on my blog over the years, especially a long time ago when I did a lot more student writing, but really the most direct way to learn how to do work well in a particular academic field is to learn from people who are doing work well in that academic field. So senior grad students, your advisor, other professors in the department, work with them, learn with them. How do they go

from conception to a paper that's published in a good venue? You want to master that skill as deliberately and as quickly as possible. All right. Final question we'll do for work. Comes from Shaku. And it's about deliberate practice. She asked, deliberate practice, can you share in detail

how you construct your deliberate practice? Well, this is, of course, a timely question. The late great Anders Erickson, as I've written about on my blog, unfortunately passed away last month. But as you know, I have been as I sort of wrote a tribute at calnewport.com recently he was a very influential thinker. His deliberate practice theory was a very influential theory on a lot of my writing. I kind of

detail that of the article. But one of my big ideas is that people in almost any field can apply deliberate practice to get better at what they do. It's the best way to get better at what you do. And you should do it if you want to get better. In some fields like chess, or professional athletics, you know, people, a course, are all doing this. They're all practicing deliberately. They're all training with coaches and training plans to get better. In other fields, however, we don't, especially office or knowledge type fields. We don't usually think about deliberate practice.

And because of that, our skills stagnate at a level much lower than our potential. So in a world like professional athletics, everyone is doing deliberate practice. And they're all doing it at a very high level, which means, what ultimately begins, ends up differentiating between the stars and the not stars. Well, then you get to other factors. Hey, we're playing basketball. You're 610 and I'm 5, 5.5. Like, that's going to start to make a difference.

Or maybe you're a sprinter and there's something about the configuration of the muscles in your legs. Which means even though we both trained exactly the same way very deliberately, you know, you're going to end up in the Olympics and I'm not. So in fields where people know a lot about deliberate practice and do a lot of deliberate practice, what really differentiates the top performers from other performers has to do with these other types of factors. In fact, this is so true that there's a little aside, when I first wrote about deliberate practice in so good they can't ignore you, my editor was suspicious about that section. And the reason why he was suspicious is that before getting into the publishing

industry, he had been a professional baseball player. So he had seen, you know, first hand, lots of talented athletes that were all deliberately practicing as, as best as they could, they all knew the same techniques. And then, you know, some of those players would be Bryce Harper and some would be Billy Bean. So he was like, I don't, I don't get this. I think, I think there's these natural skills that matter. But here's my point. Yes, but we're not, if we're not talking about baseball and we're not talking about chess, we're not talking about professional musicians, if we're talking about office work or knowledge work, most people do know deliberate practice. So these natural differences don't matter.

You know, if Jimmy Hendrix has never taught how to play the guitar, then I'm going to be able to play the guitar better if I have lessons, even though he has those perfect fingers for the type of playing that he does, right? Because who cares about the natural advantage if I'm training hard and you're not? Okay, so this is a long aside, just to bring me back to my main point on deliberate practice, which is that it should be much more broadly applied. And when we apply it to fields like knowledge work where most people don't do it, the advantages are even bigger.

So the original question is, what type of deliberate practice do I do? well there's two areas of my career where I feel like I do some deliberate practice and that's in my writing and that's in my theory paper writing. So let's say math proof solving. For writing, what I have discovered in my career is that writing for editing almost always stretches you more than just writing for yourself. So publish it on, let's say, a blog, for example. Whenever I would write for an editor, whenever I'd write something that could be rejected,

that would stretch me and I would get better. So I've always been looking for ways. I always look for ways to write for editing. Write an article for the New Yorker, write an article for the New York Times, writing an article for Wired. These stretch me. These make me better in a way that 100 blog posts written for myself won't

because you're pushing yourself past where you're comfortably because you want the article to work. You want it to be bought. You want it to be published. The other thing I'll do in writing to get deliberate practice sometimes is I will, this style or topic, I will choose in a way that stretches me. You know, I want to get better at this piece of my writing. Like, so maybe I did some of this with the New Yorker, for example,

trying to improve some of my journalistic reporting. I did this also was so good they can't ignore you. You'll notice there's a lot of journalistic vignettes, right? I traveled places and talk to people. That was on purpose. I was like, okay, here's something I'm writing for editing, and I'm going to force myself to do a type of writing or research that maybe I haven't done before.

That's deliberate practice, maybe better at it. For writing and solving proofs, the best deliberate practice I've found is trying to digest, understand, and explain to other people, other people's proofs. And once you can do with a particular topic, once you can do it, move on to a more complicated topic. It's incredibly difficult. To understand someone else's proof is very hard, especially when you're looking at a conference paper. You're not going to have every step. You're going to have to fill in some steps. I mean, it's really one of the most cognitively demanding things I think I do.

do in my life. By far, it's trying to digest, understand, and then reteach complicated proofs in my field. That's like doing a progressive weight routine or a really tough interval training in the pool. It makes you better at better that you learn new techniques. You stretch your ability to use these techniques. You stretch your ability to prove solve. And so I see that also through the lens of deliberate practice. All right. So that's a good question. Practice do it deliberately. You will get a really big advantage unless you're a professional baseball player and then it can only bring you so far. All right, let's play some question roulette. Now the idea here is that I'm going to take a question selected at random from those submitted in the latest question survey and answer

it right here in the moment, having never seen it before. So let me click over to my page here. All right, so the randomly selected question comes from Onica. And here. And here. it is. What questions are good to ask oneself when reevaluating your deep work process, your goals, and your expectations? Oh, that's an interesting question. So you want to do a sort of overhaul or regular maintenance, we can say, on your deep work habits. I would look at a couple things, Anika. I would look at how much deep work you were doing. So I talked about this in the last habit tune up mini episode, which by the way, if you're not listening to, you should. I just take four questions just about people's productivity habits and I give them advice and their audio

questions. You get to hear people's voice. So those are fun. And the last one, I gave this advice to someone asking about what's a keystone habit for a deep work practice. And I said track in your deep work hours. You should have a notebook. You should keep track with a simple tally how many hours they do every day. So you should be doing that. And that's a big part of a deep work habit overhaul. is just looking at how much deep work am I actually doing? All right? And if it's not enough, you're like, I need to make some changes.

What's going on in my schedule? Why don't I have time? Am I not making the time? Do I have too much of my plate? Do I need to essentialize what's going on here? I would also look at what your deep work targets are. This is actually surprisingly difficult for a lot of people in a lot of positions. It's not always obvious.

What are the efforts that would best benefit from unbroken concentration? So this is something to give some thought to. You know, what are the things I'm mainly doing deep work on? Are these the right things? And that might require some reflection in thinking. So that should be a good part of any type of deep work overhaul. And then once you know what you're supposed to be doing deep work on, you can think about what should that deep work entail.

Again, for a lot of things, this is not obvious. You know, I mean, for some things, it's ours. Like, I'm a computer programmer. My deep work is computer programming. What should my deep work sessions consist of? They should consist of me writing code. but other times it's not so obvious, right? I mean, other times it's I need to be working on business strategy for my small startup.

And that requires deep concentration. Okay, that might be true, but what does it mean to work on business strategy? And so there's some effort to be done where you think about what are the concrete activities I need to do that I'm doing deep work on? What should those activities be? What should be the artifacts that I'm trying to produce? should I be trying to produce a summary? Should I be trying to produce a presentation to give to my co-founder? Should I be writing a memo?

Should I be putting together a business plan? Like trying to understand what it is, how I actually make progress. When I'm doing a deep work session, what's the actual efforts I'm doing, and what am I trying to produce? Those three things can be tricky. They can be informative. And Anika, I think it's a good idea to maybe once a quarter or once a season,

depending on how you want to break up your year. to sit down and go over that. Am I getting enough deep work done? What am I doing deep work on? What should actually happen during those deep work sessions? It's easy to kind of fall off track with this type of habit and just do things for the sake of doing. That's not really moving the needle. So it's a good question to ask.

And that would be my advice on what you should do. All right. That was a good round of question. Let's move on as always now to technology questions. The Luddite librarian. As the following, she says, schools are pushing for more and more social media presence for students, parents, and the community. As the school librarian, I'm posting everything for the school, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It can quickly eat up my hours, eat up the hours of my workday.

Knowing what we know about social media, what should K to 12 schools do with this perceived social media responsibility? Well, Luddite librarian, I think they should be very wary. school should be very wary, especially about asking for kids to do activities on social media or giving in and saying kids these days, that's where they are. We need to meet them there. So let's move more work on the social media. Let's move more work into the social media idiom. And that will somehow engage the kids more.

It's a dangerous tool to be around the teenage mind. It's a dangerous tool. It exploits psychological vulnerabilities tied to social. sociality and our desire for social acceptance, those particular centers of our brain become incredibly heightened and unusually vulnerable, especially as we go through adolescence. So that does not mix very well those technologies of that age group. So I'd be very wary about schools requiring students to do anything on social media. As for the librarian or school administrators using social media to keep in touch with the community,

etc. I mean, look, it's fine. I tend to think websites and email list are probably more appropriate technologies. People get the information they need. You're not collaborating with these giant platforms that own all your content or trying to monetize it. I mean, I think that should make you feel uncomfortable if you're a public institution, but it's not the end of the world. If your school uses a Facebook group, for example, to help organize parents. But in general, I think people are starting to shift away from those closed gardens where they don't control everything towards things they completely control, like email list, like easily updatable website. So that's the direction I would go.

I wouldn't sweat too much if you have to do some Facebook posting. I would push back if they're demanding you do a lot of Twitter and Instagram. There's no reason for a school librarian to be doing that. And you don't want to encourage your students to be on there. And definitely do not, definitely do not agree with the idea that there should be any type of assignment in schools that requires or even allow students to. use social media as the main platform. All right. Maria asks, with most universities moving partially or completely online due to the

recent pandemic, do you have any suggestions for students trying to stay focused when forced to spend so much time using technology? Well, Maria, I don't know that the problem is so much that the students are on their screen as it is that there's really just no separation between they're just at home. and this is where they do their leisure activities, and it's where they grew up, and then they're also kind of doing classes on their computer, and it's all happening at the same time.

That can be a very difficult environment in which to foster motivation or to avoid procrastination. So in my student books, where I used to give student advice, I used to push this idea. I called it the student workday. I said, college students, you need to have a plan for your day

that's almost like a work schedule. schedule. Like this is, okay, this is when I'm in this class, but this is when I do the work for this class. Maybe Tuesday mornings between these hours is when I always work on my problem sets for theory. And maybe it's Wednesday afternoon. I work on my lab notebook. And then I have lecture on Thursday morning, but I, you know, work on my reading assignments Thursday afternoon. I would tell students, take all the, the regular occurring work you know you have for your semester and find regular times each week to work on it. Put that on your calendar. Treat it like, a professional workday, that I know what I'm doing during different times. Then when you're done

with those things, you're done. I think that's more important now than it has been before, because now that you're not on a campus, now that you're at home, now if there's a complete mixture between your personal life, your leisure life and your professional life, you need some structure or you are going to find the whole thing collapses into an ambiguous, amorphous mush. So a student workday gets you there. I've really been, I've really been advising this for students. You know, have a plan, have a schedule for when all of the different type of work you to get done gets done. If the walls are closing in on you, you know, you have multiple siblings at home, you feel like you're too old to be in your childhood bedroom and having to

fight with your parents about the laundry. You might want to go back to some of the earlier post on my blog when I used to do student writing. And I talked about something called adventure studying, where I really, I would post pictures that students, would send me about finding exotic or unusual or inspiring places to go to do some of this regularly scheduled work. You know, you go hiking into the woods and you have a certain spot where you do your reading assignment. You have like a hammock in the backyard used for other types of work. You go for, there's a park across town and that's where you go to work on your math problem sets. You do it in a notebook longhand and you roam when you're when you're stuck on a problem. You walk a circuit

through the park to get unstuck. Adventure studying is great because it gets you, gets your mind going. It gets you inspired to do the work. It gets the juices flowing. So I would add that to the mixed juice. So use a student work day. So you have a schedule for when you're going to do all your work. So you can just execute that like a professional.

And when you're done, you're done. Deploy adventure studying. If the walls are really closing in on you and you can't spend yet another hour inside your childhood home, those two things will help. Of course, the best solution will be let's get, we can get all the students back to the classroom and as a college professor, I'm telling you, we like having you there. Our job is harder when we can't see you, when we can't have those interactions. That's kind of why we signed up for this in the first place.

So we're all fighting to get to a place where maybe this question is a lot less relevant. But for now, Maria, that's my advice. All right. Andy has a question here. Andy asked about bullet journaling. He says bullet journaling, yay or nay. So bullet journaling, if you don't know, it's a productivity system. It's a way of capturing information in a notebook about things you have to do or information

you want to capture. It was invented by writer Carroll. He has a website that goes into it. There's also a book that he published called the bullet journal method. I think I actually blurb that book. So I know writer. I gave an encouraging blurb for that book. It's a cool system.

What I like about it is that it, It has the full capture notion that you might have with David Allen. So you're capturing all of your task in a particular notebook. It also has a very compact notation format so that you can check on the status or change the status of things you have to do really quickly. And he has this emphasis on customization. So you have this one notebook where your whole life lives. And he really pushes you should be using this to track things that are important to you.

Right. So not just what are your professional? tasks, but, you know, the books you've read or recipes you've seen. It's a place to a commonplace book in some sense for you as a person where you can keep track of and track things that are important in all aspects of your life. So it's a really cool system that's very popular. I blurb the book. I like it. Mainly what I've found I've written about this before is that is very good for organizing and getting more out of your life outside of work. It's also very good if you're like a freelancer or a solopreneur. It can be really good for organizing that

work. I know these are bullet journals are very popular among like graphic designers. I think writer was a graphic designer. The one place where it struggles a little bit is in a lot of knowledge work office settings, especially email or slack driven office settings. The issue here is twofold. In a knowledge worker office setting, often there's just hundreds and hundreds of things coming at you, often through email or slack. The bullet journal method really requires you to keep everything on your plate in a notebook handwritten and you have to transfer these things on a regular basis to new pages. The standard knowledge worker might have four or five hundred things on their plate, and it changes very rapidly. So it's not necessarily a great fit for that.

Also, the standard digital knowledge work office is very calendar driven. You have shared calendar suites and a lot of invites going back and forth for various meetings that are going on. Your days are really driven by these calendars. So the bullet journal, an analog notebook is not really the appropriate tool for keeping track of what's on your plate. if you're in one of these offices that's very meeting driven, you're going to have to use their custom tools anyway. So for those type of overwhelmed with digital incoming style office jobs, bullet journaling might not on its own fully keep up.

I don't see that as a flaw of bullet journaling. I see that as a flaw of standard office work. So we have a bigger problem to solve there. So let's move on now with the audio question of the day. Hey, Cal, my name is Catherine, and I'm from Rockville, Maryland. So I have a planner. It's a daily one. I feel like it's a pretty good system. But is there such thing as too many tasks for the day?

Well, Catherine, fellow Montgomery County Maryland resident, I can tell you, yes, there is such thing, such a thing as too many tasks for a day. And that is more tasks than you are able to accomplish. the day. This is why I'm not a big proponent of what I call the reactive list-based method to productivity, where basically you run your day through two things, reacting to things that are incoming, such as through email or Slack, and then also trying to make progress on some sort of optimistic list of things that in general you would like to make progress on. And that's a really a crude level of control over your actual resources in the day.

So what I prefer instead, of course, is time blocking, where you, actually give work to specific times in the day. So during this half hour, I'm working on this, during these two hours I'm working on this, during this hour I'm working on this. Now, once you get good at this, with some practice, you do a pretty good job of figuring out how long things actually take, because what happens is when you're new to time block planning, you get these plans wrong a lot at first. By wrong, I mean, you don't give yourself enough time. And then if you blow past your plan, the time block planning methodology says next time you get a chance you have to stop and redraw a plan for the rest of the day. Now this is a natural consequence because you don't necessarily want to have to keep redrawling your plans again and again.

So eventually you get good at actually not lying to yourself and saying, yeah, this is going to take an hour. These five things are going to take 90 minutes. I wish it didn't. Optimistically, I wish I could just do it in 20 minutes, but it's going to take 90 minutes. You also get good at noting, hey, there's a difference between, for example, 9 to 10 a.m. when I'm on my first cup of coffee and I'm rock and rolling versus, let's say, three to four p.m. in between two meetings where my energy is going to be much lower. And the type of things I can actually get done during that period is going to be much different

than what I can get done during the 9 to 10 a.m. period. So you get really good at all these type of things. And you build plans that actually captures, here's what I'm going to do and when I'm going to do it. And so the number of tasks in one of those plans for a given day is the right number of task because it's making good use of your time and it's what can actually fit. So that's my big piece of advice is, Catherine, move away from just having a list that you're trying to make progress on or that you optimistically hope that you get done with and instead give every minute of your day a job, build a plan that makes a lot of sense for that given day and you can trust that you are doing something well with your resources during that particular

day. All right, that was a good audio question. Let's move on now to our final category, which is questions about the deep life. Shockey asks, is there a way to get the value of elite academic experience by self-learning? Okay, interesting question. I mean, I think to some degree, obviously the answer is yes. I mean, in theory, you can learn almost anything on your own with the right with the right information, with the right discipline. My longtime friend Scott Young did this. So he's famous among other things for his MIT challenge, where he did the entire undergraduate computer science curriculum at MIT.

He did it on his own and he did it in one year. And he was able to do this because MIT was part of this open courseware initiative where they had videos online of all the lectures of the major courses and all the assignments were up there. So he could actually go through and take the course on his own, grade himself, and go through all the material. And he did. I, you know, I helped them. I mean, as a computer scientist who got a doctorate in computer science at MIT, I was an informal advisor for this project. And so I was helping him structure it. And I can tell you, he was learning the material. I know in part because the one exception to the MIT curriculum was he decided for his capstone,

he was going to do that with my graduate level theory of computation course that I was teaching at Georgetown. So now we're at a graduate level course. And I gave him the exams. He did the course on his own. I gave him the exams and I graded him. And he did well. He knew the stuff. He did well.

He got a good grade. So, you know, Scott learned it. He did on his own. So yes, it is possible. It is possible. On the other hand, this is just something that's interesting to me. People have been talking about the demise of in-person higher education. People have been talking about this for a very long time.

There have been a lot of technological advances throughout the history of this very old mode of learning. You're in a classroom. There's a professor. You're on a university campus. There's been a lot of technological innovations during that long history. And yet we still do it more or less the same as we did back if you looked at like the University of Bologna, the University of Paris, one of the original universities well back in the medieval period. Now, some people point to that and say, ah, that's a sign that we're out of date.

Look, we're teaching today, basically the same way we taught 500 years ago. That's a sign that we're out of date and we need to change. But I see it the other way. I say, huh, that's a sign that there must be something pretty special about that way of teaching. So, you know, here's an example I like to give. I mean, let's consider this particular disruption, right? Let's say you're teaching in classrooms. You know, you have the professor at the front.

People have to gather, come from all over to this place, to this campus, to this classroom, to hear you lecture. And then let's say a technology comes along that threatens to completely up in this. It says, hey, we're going to gather all of the information you're learning, but we're going to get it from the very best people in the world. Right. So not just like some guy off the street teaching about Euclid, but like the world's expert on Euclid. And we're going to gather it all together.

We're going to put it into a completely remote or portable technology. That's very affordable, way, way cheaper than being, than having to go and pay tuition for a university. Let's say I told you we have this technology and it's very low cost and it's very durable. It works really well. You can learn this material without much money from. the very best people, probably people who are better than the professor that happens to be at the university in whatever city or state you happen to live at in this example. And they'd be widely available and sort of almost mass produced, mass accessible.

Right. This feels like if I told you that technology exists, like yeah, this feels like it should be disruptive. You're probably thinking that I'm talking about online learning. Maybe I'm talking about learning courses on the internet. You say, yeah, that sounds great. That sounds like it should be really disruptive. but I'm not talking about online learning and I'm not talking about the internet. I'm talking here about the introduction of the codex,

otherwise known as the standard bound book. The standard bound book combined with Gutenberg's standardized printing method, which means they were cheap and widely available, was a massive disruption. It should have gotten rid of this idea that we're literally going to leave London and go out to Cambridge and we're going to go to these, we're going to live at Christ's college and go into these classrooms. I mean, we've been doing that since, you know, the time of the Grove in Athens, right?

Like, come on, we're ready for something. The codex should have completely disrupted that because it had all those attributes I talked about. And yet nothing changed. So I don't know. I look back and see if we could survive the codex coming and yet that standard model of education persisted, then I don't know that, let's say, the Internet has something that's all that different. It's really all that different, you know, or more disruptive. So, hey, there might be some secret sauce in this notion of gathering together in a place,

being there in person. I think it probably has a lot to do with cognitive context. You know, I mean, it's a really difficult thing. You're trying to transform your life. You're moving on from living where you used to live before. You're going to expose yourself to big ideas and, and transform your mind. And I think there's, we forget how difficult psychologically it is to actually go through that transformation and motivation to go through that transformation to persist in that transformation. So that's maybe why actually physically co-locating at a campus and having a professor in front of you and classmates to work with.

Maybe that's why that's persisted. So I don't have a great answer there. I like the idea of learning being more widely spread. I like the idea that it's easier and easier to get information. I think the codex was a miracle. I think the internet is basically the codex improved, but great. But I'm also not necessarily part of that chorus at saying, yeah, COVID's going to show everybody that you don't need to go to campus.

You know, you don't need to pay all this tuition. You can just do Scott Young's MIT challenge for yourself. I don't know that that's going to happen because we've been through many more larger disruptions than that before and yet the model persisted. So there must be, there might be something there. So if you really want to disrupt higher education, honestly, what you need to do is figure out what is that thing? Why did we keep going to universities after the book was introduced? Why do we keep going to universities after the television was introduced?

You know, why do we keep going to universities after the internet was produced? Why are people going to, if they do, if people return to the universities after COVID, why? Figure out what that thing is people are getting from it. And you've got to look at what are different ways of delivering that. Because we know it's not just information. and we know it's not just the ability to see someone on some sort of screen talking about the information. There must be something else going on. If you can figure out how to disrupt that, I think that's how you're going to disrupt higher education.

All right. So Marlon asks, what is your purpose or Dharma in life? There's a breezy question. There's a there's a cocktail party opener right there. What is your purpose or Dharma in life? Marlon, here's what I'll say. let me be a little bit more broad, just so this can be applicable to everybody.

I'm going to turn this into a lecture opportunity. I think part of the issue with how people think about things like purpose or Dharma right now in our 21st century context is that we've been taught that it should be this one thing, and we've been taught, especially in an increasingly secularized environment, that this one thing should probably be professional. It's kind of what we're taught, especially if you're going through the normal college pipeline. Purpose is a professional thing. You know, I found the right job. I started the right company. I'm pursuing the right cause with my career. And from there, I get my purpose and I get my

Dharma. But if we rewind time, you know, a little bit before this sort of secularized moment where we kind of consolidated all thinking about things like purpose or Dharma into a professional conversation, we saw that people used to think about the life well lived a lot more broadly. There was aspects to your life, each of which you wanted to pursue in a way that was true to your values and virtuous. And that added up to a virtuous life. So that's why, you know, when I talk about the deep life on this podcast or in my writing, I talk about these sort of multiple different buckets. I'll say, you know, let's think about craft, different from community, different from constitution, different from contemplation. different from competency.

And so if you want purpose in your life from this type of framework, which is just a simplified articulation of a lot of the deeper frameworks that we've had for many millennia, you want to be essentially getting after it in each of those buckets. And each of those buckets acting or pursuing or committing to things that are virtuous or true to your values. And so I'm not going to get super specific about those buckets in my own life. other than to say that that's the broader view I take of purpose or Dharma, that if you focus just on the craft bucket,

and Marlon, I'm not saying you're doing this. I'm just using your question as a diving board off which, a spring board off which to jump into this broader topic. If you just put all of your chips in the craft, it's a pretty fragile purpose. Because, you know, what happens when that job goes away? Or what happens when you realize that, you know, you quote unquote, found your passion,

but you don't feel passionate every day. Well, then you're really, you're really, drifting out the sea. So if you really want to anchor yourself to shore, you really want to feel purpose, I think we should have this broader view. So it's more of a broad-based approach of there's different aspects that are important to a life well-lived. And you want to make sure that in each of those aspects, your commitments, your activities, and what you focus on is virtuous and true to your values. Now, that's a good question, Marlon. Felix asks, is it possible for someone who's been lazy and unproductive for most of their life to make significant changes and pursue

the deep life. Now, Felix, I've been talking about this question, I think, in a lot of episodes recently. So I don't want to, I don't want to cover the same ground I already covered, but I want to maybe take this opportunity to elaborate or refine some of the advice I've been giving. So like I talked about in the last episode when someone asked this question, I said, look at my advice, and I believe his name was Maniche, my advice was, okay, we have these five buckets that make up the deep life, craft, constitution, community, contemplation, and competency. Now, these aren't magic buckets. I mean, you can kind of make your own, but basically, like, here are the big areas that are important in life. And I said, to Manish, I said, yeah, you need to focus on building a good

foundation in each of these. Just like I just said to Marlin, right? Purpose in life is not about just one thing. Like, I have the right job. It's about having the right virtuous commitments in each of the major areas of life. And that's what I recommended to Manish. And that's what I would recommend to you. You can definitely get out of the shallows by looking at these main buckets and starting to build a real foundation in each. The elaboration I want to add today is let's talk about if you've really been mired in the shallows for a while, the shallow life, you're always on your phone. You really don't get after it. You feel undisciplined. You feel unmoored. You get knocked around by forces outside of your control.

How do you actually start doing this? I'm going to give a little bit of a operational suggestion here. So here's a particular game plan among many about how you can look at those buckets and start building the foundations and therefore deep life. So I would start with a couple, let's call these preliminary steps. Preliminary step number one, Felix, you got to detach from that phone. Now, you didn't necessarily tell me that you're looking at your phone all the time, but I'm going to guess you are.

You know, why? Because this is what has happened in modern society is that when you do not have an intentional foundation for how you live, these phones and mainly the attention economy services that deliver themselves through these portals, they come sliding right in. They say, we can handle that for you. We can numb you to that nihilism. We can numb you to that existential despair. We can numb you to that self-recrimination.

Just look at this. We'll distract you, we'll entertain you. We'll give you villains that you can yell at. We'll make you feel something. And we'll keep it easy. No real effort involved. So I'm going to assume if you're mired in the shallow is what has made that, what has made that livable is the numbing from your phone.

So my preliminary step number one, this is scary, but you're going to have to really detach from that, think of it as like an emotional or psychological pacifier. So what does that mean? Take everything off your phone that makes money off of your time and attention when you click on it. So all of your social media, all your online news, games, get it all off the phone. You can access those on your computer. If you do access it on your computer, do not have the password save. Give yourself some friction. You can still go to Twitter, but you've got to go to Twitter.com.

you've got to type in a password. That only adds 10 seconds, but that will take off 90% of the accesses. The time you do spend entertaining yourself with digital entertainment, be it social media or streaming, you need to do this by appointment. All right, that needs to be by appointment.

It's like a great TV show. It's from 8 to 930. I go on and look at weird Twitter or inspirational Twitter or, you know, if you're in the fitness, you're looking at Instagram fitness stuff or whatever it is. You do it by appointment.

It is not a default activity in your life. It's not an escape that you can deploy to get away from a hard thought or emotion in the moment. It's something that you put aside. And as part of that preliminary step, you need to start reading things more. Long form reading. This is just getting your brain back in shape and used to this idea that it can deal with complex, empirical, nuanced understandings of the world. Right.

So that's my first. This is just getting yourself in shape. So you're really downplaying the pacifier nature of your tools. and you're starting to get your brain back in shape with long-form reading. Listening to audiobooks is fine. Just pay attention. Listening to long-form podcasts with smart people, that's fine, especially if it's mine. So we'll just throw that in there.

But long-form, complicated context. Second preliminary step, and this is much more concrete, I want you to buy a notebook, like a planner-type notebook, like a Moleskin notebook is fine and a pin you really like. This is going to be with you. You are going to start using this for a tracking purposes that I'll explain in a second. All right. So you've done this preliminary disconnection from the digital numbing device. You have your notebook. Let's get into it then.

How do you actually build your foundation in the major buckets of the deep life? And again, I've talked about these buckets in great detail in past episodes, everyone. So I'll point you back to the past episodes or to my blog for a more extensive discussion of what falls into craft and community and constitution and contemplation and competency. But you can probably guess. All right. So what should you do, Felix? The very first thing to do, especially if you're just leaving the show,

shallows. The very first thing you should do is you want to have some behavioral commitment in each of those buckets. And you need to have a way of easily tracking in your moleskin or whatever notebook you have at the end of each day whether you did those commitments. So I do this. I have little codes, like one letter or two letter codes for each of the things I track. Then I can just put a checkmark next to it or write down the code if I did it. I really get the friction down really low. There's only going to take 10 seconds. You have one commitment in each of those areas.

Like in Constitution, it might be something like you've automated, like what you eat for breakfast, what you eat for lunch. Maybe you just like, I don't want to think about it. Here's my option. It's healthy. It fits with whatever nutritional philosophy I agree with now. And I just have a little marked. It says, I did it. From when I woke up to 5 p.m.

I just stuck with that plan. It could be as simple as that. Or it could be, you know, you have a pedometer in your pocket. you track steps. I do that. A little aside about that, Felix, if you do want to track steps, don't use a watch or a phone,

just gathering that data and distracting you. Go online, buy a watch battery powered LCD pedometer that does nothing but be a pedometer. You just put in your pocket and all it does is count your steps. I love it, simple, single purpose technology.

You know, in craft, this commitment might be something like, I am going to do whatever. 90 minutes of deep work every day. You make a note that I do it. it or I'm going to, in contemplation, it's, you know, I have these books on philosophy. It's one chapter.

Did I read a chapter today or not? That's what you mark. All right. So you get into this habit and you have something in each of the buckets. You mark every day. Last thing you do before bed takes 10 seconds. Did I do it or not? Make that automatic.

Now, what things should you track? That's actually kind of hard to get right. So during this first phase, every two weeks or so, go back and say, hey, what's my success with the things I'm tracking in each of these buckets. And, you know, if you find this idea I had for craft, I'm really not doing it. I'm trying. It's not quite right. I never have time. It doesn't feel quite right. Try something else. It's not necessarily easy to find these type of discipline commitments that actually are tractable. They're hard, but not too hard. You can actually do them on a regular basis. All I want right now is for you to get to a place where you can

hone in on a collection of habits, one for each bucket, that you actually do and that actually feel like they make progress in that bucket. Like you're signaling to yourself, I take craft, I am kind of taking craft seriously, at least in this way. I'm taking constitution seriously, at least in this way. I'm taking my connection to community seriously, at least in this way. So this could take a long time. You should be prepared that you might have to tweak a lot. It could take a month. It could take two or three months. The key is, once every two weeks or so, check in, which of these discipline habits and the buckets am I doing consistently and write in my notebook and which am I not, and then try to tweak those,

either tweak your behavior, like, well, how could I do this more consistently or tweak the actual habit? The goal for this first phase is to get to a collection of what we can call keystone habits here. So you have one thing you do in each of these buckets, you do them consistently, you record consistently that you've done them. now you have taken a non-trivial step outside of the shallows. You are taking useful action in each of the main areas of your life. And more importantly, you have taught yourself that you're the type of person who can take meaningful action on things that are important to them. This brings us to step two.

So again, Felix, I'm giving you advice here to just operationalize the type of bigger picture ideas I've been given on the deep life recently. Step two is now you are going to give each of these areas of your life, whether they're my buckets or your own, these are just a guide. You're going to give each of these areas isolated focus for four to six weeks each. Right. So let's take craft. And for that four to six weeks, you're going to really think about how do I overhaul this entire part of my life. Let me do some serious reflection. Let me do some serious experimentation. Let me do some serious research and learning about this field. And let me come up with, you know,

what big changes do I need to make? What small changes do I need to make? How do I really overhaul this area of my life and get it into something that I'm proud about? That might take a month. That might take a month and a half. That might take two months. All the while, these keystone habits you have in each of the buckets,

every day you do them. Every day you mark them in your notebook. These are the drum beat, the foundational drum beat, always going on. So you take six weeks, eight weeks, you overhaul craft much more substantially. You know, how do I approach my work?

work in general. Maybe you build a whole new productivity system. Maybe there's going to be a change in your job. Maybe you introduce a deliberate practice routine. You know, you get a coach. You overhaul. Move on to community. How do you really overhaul the role of community in your life? And you give that a month, six weeks, eight weeks. You make major changes. You sort of cycle through all the buckets. So now you have really have done an overhaul in each of these buckets. Like you're really substantially reorienting each of these parts of your life towards something that is more value-driven. What comes next, you revisit. At least once a year, you want to come back and give each of these buckets a lot of attention in turn.

What's working? What's not working? What overhaul do I have to make? What do I need to emphasize? What do I need to prune out? So it's cyclical. Now, this idea of the cyclical return to various values in your life, you come back to again and again to give consistent attention so that all these areas each get their own sort of isolated attention. And this comes, there's a lot of practices to do this.

One particular practice that really focuses on that sort of cyclical self-improvement. There's a practice in Judaism known as the Musar, M-U-S-S-A-R. And that's one of the big ideas. This is an old practice that goes back hundreds of years, if not much more. But it's a big part of that practice is this sort of cyclical nature. You keep cycling through these different virtues or values in your life. And every time it's a new values time, you tune that up, you analyze it, you focus on it. And over time, you're continually refining and improving your life.

All right. So anyone who heard my advice in the last Deep Questions podcast episode for Manish, this will sound familiar. But what I'm doing right now is trying to give Felix a game plan. A game plan for someone who doesn't already have a life that's going pretty well, but they want to tune things up. Instead for someone who's saying they're completely mired in the shallas and they want to start from scratch. And that's what I would say.

So the very quick summer, you got these preliminary steps. You unplug, you drastically unplug from this world of distraction, from this world of numbing. It comes in through your devices and you buy a notebook. Step two, you keep working to get some sort of keystone habit in the main buckets of your deep life definition, definition that you're actually doing and that you mark every night in your notebook. Now you have a foundation. Next step, final step. You give each of those areas now long-term concentrated attention and overhaul each of those areas. be willing to return to this cyclical overhaul year after year after year.

Felix, it is not too late. This will absolutely work. Hopefully that game plan will make more concrete. Some of the bigger picture things I've been saying about the deep life. Once you leave the shallows and go somewhere deeper, life becomes a lot more interesting, a lot more resilient, a lot more impactful, and a lot more satisfying. So I'm glad you asked it.

And I hope that you actually act on these ideas. And if you do, let me know, I would love to hear the story. Okay, so that's all the time we have for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have your own questions to offer for this episode or for the many episodes I do as well, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Leave a rating or review.

If you like it, feedback can go to interesting at calnewport.com. Until next time, as always, stay deep.