Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 100: LISTENER CALLS: Scheduling Household Admin

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.  - Dealing with time blocking overload. [4:13] - Planning household admin. [9:04] - How theoreticians schedule proof work. [16:24] - Retyping notes (or not). [27:57] - Becoming a better conductor. [34:15]Thanks to 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 a deep question's listener calls mini episode. Quick announcements. This is episode 100. I don't really have a profound reflection or observation to make about getting to the 100th episode, other than it's a nice round number. I'm pleased we made it this far, and I think it's cool that that landed right around the one-year anniversary mark. Now I've been talking about in recent episodes, many different changes I'm in the process of making, all aimed at improving this podcast to make it sound better, to have video to go along with it, to have better segments.

All these changes are happening. Some people have been asking me why these changes are so slow to come. And that's because this podcast is really a side project for me. I treat it in terms of my scheduling systems like I would treat a hobby. So my primary job as an academic and scholar and technologist who writes academic papers and writes books and writes articles on issues for major publications, that's my primary job. It takes precedent. So I've had to find ways to essentially integrate this podcast recording onto the side so it doesn't get into way. It uses all of my productivity skills, my time blocking, my weekly planning, my strategic planning. I'm pretty good at it. I have it pretty efficient. But a side effect of this is that any changes or upgrades, they happen slowly because other work often takes priority. And when the work does happen, it gets doled out into little blocks and my time block schedule. So everything takes much longer than if this was, say, my tier one activity. If I was a full-time podcaster, each one of these changes

would take three days and I'd be done. So anyways, thank you for your patience is what I'm trying to say. Thank you for sticking around for 100 episodes. And stay tuned for all of the improvements that are coming. Turning our attention to today's episode, we have a good mix of listener calls. Among other topics, there is time blocking overload, how to integrate household to-dos into your productivity system, and even a query from a professional conductor. As always, if you want to submit your own voice questions, go to calmnewport.com slash podcast. I have all of the information there. But before we get started,

let's take a moment to thank one of the sponsors that actually makes this show possible. I am talking about our friends at My Body Tutor. We're coming out of the pandemic now. We're getting back out there into the world of other people. We're going to beaches. We're going to pools.

We're wearing summer clothes. Maybe it's now we are realizing that our health and fitness maybe took a bit of a hit during the pandemic. How do you get that health and fitness back? Well, let me suggest my body tutor. Here's how it works. You are set up with a one-on-one online coach.

The coach works with you to figure out, okay, what are we going to eat? How are we going to eat? What's the plan for me that happened? What type of exercise we need to do? When are you going to exercise? How much? What's that going to look like? You make a plan customized to exactly what you need.

and then you check in every single day. That is the secret sauce that makes My Body Tudor work is the accountability. You have a relationship with this coach. You're checking in every day. You don't want to disappoint them. And over time, much healthier habits become permanent. It really is a great way to get back into shape. If you want to find out more, go to MyBodytutor.com.

Mention that you came because of deep questions and they will give you $50 off your first month. That's MyBodytutor.com. Mention deep questions that get $50 off. All right. And with that, let's get started with our show. Our first question is about time blocking overload. My name is Tom and I'm a software developer in D.C. I've been time blocking since December.

Productivity has definitely increased. I'm ahead on most of my projects at work and getting more done around the home. But I'm feeling increasingly tired. I don't think I'm overloading my daily schedule and I don't think. don't time block on weekends, but I still feel like I'm wearing myself out by focusing for too long. My face will get sore from unconscious jaw clenching that I do while focus, and my ability to think straight is mostly gone by evening. Maybe I'm just burned out from not having a vacation since the pandemic started, or maybe I'm trying to do more than I've got the energy to do.

How would you advise someone to calibrate time block schedules to maintain energy day-to-day and not wear themselves out? Well, Tom, I love what I'm hearing here. This is quintessential time blocking. You know, when you actually give each thing you're working on your full attention and you try to accomplish it at your full cognitive capacity, it is intense. That is why you are exhausted. Typically, a serious time blocker is going to get a 2 to 3x improvement in how much work

you're able to get done for whatever unit time measure that you care about per day, per week, etc. So you're now working basically at a level that will get you twice as much done for the same time. Another way of looking at that is you're expending, roughly speaking, twice as much energy per day. That's why you're so exhausted. All right, what do we do about this? Well, there's a big picture solution and then some small picture tactics that can help. The big picture solution is, yeah, now you work less. Pull back on your actual work hours until you feel about equilibrium.

You're challenged, it's hard, but you're not exhausted. After a good break after work, you have some energy to do something else. Now, this may feel difficult because you are working less. They have to keep in mind, you're compensating for working less by being much more intense by your work. If you weren't burnt out before in your pre-December pre-time-blocking life, you were working eight hours a day, and now you are burnt out, and let's say you're working even at seven hours or six hours, you're still burnt out, you need to pull that hour back less. That means you're working more intensely. You're actually, you're actually exuding more

energy. I don't care so much about time. I think energy exuded I do care about. So pull back those hours, pull back those hours until you feel like your energy is an equilibrium. Now, as you get practice with this really focused, intense thinking, you'll get better at concentration. And you might be able to then push those hours longer again without burning out, but you might not want to. I'm just saying it might be possible. You're going to get better at this. But it doesn't mean that you shouldn't just take advantage of this. I mean, a lot of people do this. This is what we call the stealth part-time job here on the podcast, where you get very efficient from time blocking. Now you can get the same work done in a lot less time. And you reclaim that time unofficially to

work on other things. You might be in that situation, it sounds like Tom. There's a couple tactical things you can do as well to try to decrease the energy loss of your existing schedules. One, make sure that you're not context shifting. So if during these time blocks that aren't meant to be for things like email and Slack, you're still checking email all the time, you're still checking Slack all the time, that can be really fatiguing. So that will plus size your fatigue. Context shifting plus sizes your fatigue. It's why people who work in hyperactive hive mind shops where everything has worked out with these ongoing back and forth messages. They have a hard time really doing anything hard after one or two. They've worn out their brain

with the context shifting. So make sure you're being really careful about that. There's blocks to check communication. There's blocks to do other things. You really keep those pure. The final thing you can do is integrate breaks. So time block out more breaks. You know, make sure that you're giving yourself time. Now I'm going to go for a walk. Take a half hour and read. I'm going to do my lunch without any work. So give your brain downtime spaced out throughout the day. That can also plus size your energy. So those two things might allow you to get through more work and feel less exhausted. But overall, that is the magic of time blocking. It is so much more intense and effective and productive than normal ways of working that you have to completely rethink what work and a work day and a work

week looks like. And if in the end what it looks like is you're working five hours a day and you're spending the other three hours to, I don't know, build a canoe. That's not unusual, Tom. That's actually time blocking, working like it's supposed to. All right. Speaking of exhaustion, let's talk about some of that other work that has to happen when your professional work is done for the day. Cal, this is Lucy. My question is, when you do shutdown for the day, when do you realize, when do you realize?

engage with home to-dos, there's as much work at home as there is at work. Children's dental appointments, various things of that nature that you need to make time to do as well as keep track of. I love all of your productivity for work, but at shutdown, often the second job starts, and that's the job of being a full-time parent in addition to a full-time worker. Can you please address this? So let me talk about a few things I do and see if this is useful in thinking about your question. So first of all, when I'm time blocking my work day, the hours I'm time blocking before shutdown complete, there's a lot of non-professional work that gets integrated into that time block schedule.

Now, this is partially because there's a lot of house. Admin that involves interactions or stores or things you have to do during work hours, right? Like today I was scheduling going to a framing store. It's open like 11 to 5. Like that's going to be on my time block schedule that happen during my work hours. Appointments, right? Appointments are often going to be during your working hours. There's also an energy concern. I don't like doing too much that's cognitively demanding after my schedule shutdown. That's not. It's not. just, let's say, pure leisure, like reading a book or something. So if I have to do, just use recent examples, like the monthly budget, I will do that, I will schedule a block for that during

a day. And this is one of the advantages of time blocking is that you can make time for all these things because you see how all the puzzle pieces fit in a way that if you're just in a mode of now I'm working, quotation mark, quotation mark, and now I'm not working. You're much more likely to say, oh, I've nothing to do. I think I'm going to do the budget or go to the frame store. So one of the magics of time blocking is that you can actually integrate household admin throughout your day in a way that's minimal impact, but it's also taking best advantage of your time and your energy. All right. So now this brings us to schedule shutdown complete, to shut down ritual at the end of the day. As part of my shutdown ritual, this is when I confront the evening and make a non-time block typically, but rough plan of, okay, what needs to happen this evening? you know like remember this evening to have to run the watering system we got to water the garden

and we have to send the check to whoever and we got to clean up the house for the house cleaner who's coming in the morning or something like this right that's when I'll confront that evening admin and what I'll do is I'll write it down on the time block planner I often just write it at the bottom of the time block on the time block grid under my blocks I usually have room and I'll say evening and underlying it and just bullet point these things because I have my planner around for capture in the evening and stuff like that anyway. So I just have it and I can look at it and just remind myself of,

oh, what's going on this evening? I mean, typically, look, it's not that many hours. So just the act of writing down, here's the things we need to do this evening. You'll remember them. Like, that act itself will help you remember, but if you forget, you have them written down. So the shutdown ritual is where you figure out,

okay, what are we doing? What are we doing this evening? But we're not time blocking this because we need a break. I mean, think about Tom's question from before. Look at how burnt out he is. after eight hours of really intense time blocking. We can't time block our evenings. So we've got to be reasonable about what we ask ourselves to do.

We can be a little bit looser about how we execute it. We could execute this household admin with a little bit more of this laissez-faire reactivity method that if we applied to our professional work over time would really hold us back. But it's fine when it comes to, you know, mailing a check to your accountant and water in your garden or whatever it is that you actually have to get done in the evening.

I want to throw a third hack that I've been experimenting with. It's something I used to do before, fell out of habit of, and I've brought it back, and it's been great. And it's the morning 30-minute block. And so my whole thing is first thing in the morning after breakfast, but before the workday starts, I do household stuff for 20 to 30 minutes. And here's the thing. You have to fill the time. I don't have a plan for it ahead of time necessarily. it's just like, great, just be useful doing household stuff for 20 or 30 minutes. Let me gather these forms. Let me mail this thing. Let me set this up to return at the post office. Like, I just got to fill this time, just 20 or 30 minutes every morning. It makes such a difference. It's not a big

thing in your schedule. And you can just adjust your schedule back earlier so that you have time for it. But by consistently having a period to whack at the small things, the impact on each day is small, but the aggregate impact on the pile of the small things is very large. And it really helps you feel as if you're not drowning. I first implemented this when we bought our first house. I don't know if I've talked about this before in the podcast, but when my wife and I bought our first house, the amount of, as you any homeowner know,

who's just the amount of logistical stuff in our life got bigger. And then we had our first kid right after that. So, you know, now we have a bunch more things we have to care about. There's a nanny. We have to figure out how does payroll work, how to taxes work, there's doctor appointments, like a lot of different stuff, right? House stuff, insurance stuff, renovation, not renovations, but repair stuff. And there's just a bunch of junk. And I had never faced that much administrative junk before.

But I had this window of time after my wife went to work right after the nanny arrived. Because I was a professor, I didn't have a, there wasn't a hard start that you had to be at the office at a certain time. And if anything, I, like a lot of professors who commute in the city, typically would work at home for a while before coming in. just to avoid the morning traffic. And so there's this window when my nanny would first get there. But I hadn't yet started my other work yet, but I wasn't watching the kid anymore

because my wife would leave earlier. So I would take care of the kid in the morning until the nanny got there. And I take this window. It's like it's still early enough, like 8.30 or something. Well, when I take this like 8.30 to 9 window and just try to fill it?

Fill out forms, mail things, look up insurance, like just whatever. And it made all the difference in the world. And it transformed. me from feeling like I, there's so much small little things and I can't keep up with it in my house and my family. And by the time you get the Friday, you're struggling to find things to do little things. You're kind of proactively going out and proactively trying to do things that are useful. And it's just 20 or 30 minutes a day.

Anyways, fell out of that habit. I've artificially added it back to my life and I love it. So I'm just going to throw that out there as a hack. The 30 minute morning block gives you a lot of breathing room. But from a time blocking perspective, time block household admin. into your day. Time blocking frees up a lot of time because you're so focused, so take advantage of that to do household admin when your energy is good and things are open. Evening plan can happen during your shutdown ritual. All right, let's shift now to a question that it's maybe a little esoteric in general,

but something I personally empathize with quite a bit. Hi, Cal. This is Thomas, and I'm a tenure track professor at an R1 university. My field is theoretical economics, and I often feel frustrated with the progress of my research projects, especially those that are co-authored with other researchers. My co-authors and I often come up with the plan to extend the theoretical model, do the proofs, and send it to a journal by a specific date. We then run into the problem

that we aren't able to solve the proof by the deadline. Sometimes we feel that we're very close, so we work on a couple of days or weeks beyond the deadline, and then we give up because we can't crack the proof. A similar problem is that we agree that this is the last model extension that we do, but a few months later, my co-author wants to do another model extension or generalization. This makes me frustrated for multiple reasons.

First, I have a clear plan in my head that I want to get a paper done this month or this quarter, and then that doesn't happen. This implies that I often miss my quarterly and annual goals. Second, I usually focus on one project at a time, so I tell my other co-authors to wait until I'm done with this project until I can work on the other project. Well, the reason why I said I empathize with this question is that as a theoretical computer scientist,

my work is very similar to what you as a theoretical economist do, which is basically we write applied math papers. So if your field is anything like mine, you know, what you're encountering is that the level of work and the insight involved for something to be publishable is so high that you can't just root to not. this. Unlike other types of jobs or other types of fields, you can't just say six months from now there's a deadline I want to submit a paper to. All right, guys, let's come up with an idea,

work on it, make it good, publish it by that deadline. The issue is the make it good part. If we're trying to do proofs, it may never happen, or it may take two years, or it may take you down a completely different path. It takes another six months to get up the speed on. It's very unpredictable work because of that element of creative insight that's involved. It's actually hard, you know, to explain this to people outside of our types of fields, what it's like to do theory at this level, because it's so competitive. The work has to be so good and it requires an insight. You can't just, there's never a point in which you can just say like in another type of job. I have this skill level so I can build these things at the skill level as often as I want.

It's, no, you got to solve proofs that other smart people are trying to solve. They can't get broken down into a schedule. So how do professional theoreticians deal with this? Well, again, I don't want to generalize too far from my field, but in my field, you kind of have two models. There's the sequential brilliance model. I'm going to work on something until I have a brilliant paper and then publish it, then do that again. Now, that's not predictable. So people who do that, they're not working backwards from a particular deadline. They're just working really hard on something until they get a brilliant result and they publish it. And then they say, where do I want to publish it? what's coming up, they publish it, and they move on to the next result.

I definitely know some people who work that way. Now, you've got to be really smart because these better be great papers, especially if you're pre-tenure. So there's some risk there. The other model, which is more common, this is more how I do it with my collaborators, is the research pipeline model. You have several different groups of collaborators, several different problems. You're working on all of the problems in parallel, you know, sort of switching back and

forth. And as something gets ready to publish, you publish it. add more problems or projects into the back of the pipeline to keep it full. And so you kind of always have this pipeline where things are at various stages. And so usually there's something relatively ready to publish. Like the conferences, and in computer science, we do, we don't do journals as much as these very competitive peer-reviewed conferences, but sort of, it's like a journal with a deadline. Everyone submits their paper at the same time and 15% get in.

there are certain conferences I like to publish at I usually do but I'm not planning backwards like okay now this conference is coming up let's come up with an idea and publish at that conference it's more like okay this conference is coming up let's look at the pipeline what's near the front great something near the front let's take and really push on and get it ready for publication so that pipeline method is what people use that if you're in a field like mine and again I don't know about yours been a field like mine we have to publish pre-tenure, you know, I was probably publishing five peer review papers a year. You got to have a

pipeline to do that. You have to have overlap. In terms of how you actually approach your papers, you know, it's good to be making very steady progress. You're always working on it. But steady progress interspersed with big, collaborative epic pushes tends to be a very, I think, efficient way of trying to generate insight. This is one of the reasons why the pandemic has been hard, because it's hard to get together with collaborators, which I'm used to doing a few times a year. But this is probably the right way to do it, that you get together with your collaborators, you push each, pushing each other in person. Let's try to crack this. What's going on? Very intense. Back and forth, back and forth, hours, maybe a whole day. I would often do this in summer. I have certain regular collaborators to come

to D.C. and we spend a couple days, and we're in empty conference rooms. It's like, let's just go. And there's usually a conference I go to every year. It's usually in Europe. Go to Europe. We all gather. Like, let's, let's spend four days. Let's get after it. Let's like think about these problems. Very intense. Not that. What about this? Really trying to push things. And then you can go work on your own very regularly to try to make progress on the insides you have from those push sessions. And then you probably need to get all back together again at some point. Back and forth, back and forth, whiteboard effect, push it, push it, until you break open to the next step, the next level of results. Then you have to work regularly on your own to polish those results, work through the

implications, see where you really stand and repeat. What I'm trying to help you avoid here is falling into a trap where you're just sort of on your own doing a little bit of work on a problem. I fall into this trap a lot. It's working on this a little bit every day, and it doesn't really add up to much. So I really think this punctuated equilibrium model is probably the right actual approach to how you apply your cognitive energy when working on these insight-based theory problems. Big hard pushes with collaborators followed by a long tail where you're making sense of acting and polishing and working out all the implications of that push. And then another push to get the water pressure back up and then you sort of spray it back out again, et cetera. So you should be doing

that probably on multiple switching back and forth between multiple problems. The other way I should say this pipeline gets full is that, you know, papers don't get accepted. you submit a paper, it doesn't get accepted, not quite there. Now that's back in the pipeline. But now you have something in your pipeline that just needs maybe one more big two-month push to get it to the level it needs to be to be accepted. So like one of the things, again, I'm going on too long probably about something is so narrow.

This is, there's so few people who care about this. I'll be quick. But it's interesting, you know, in theoretical computer science, it can be a real issue if you have a good year. This is actually a common thing. You have a good year, meaning everything you submitted got accepted. Well, you're used to 50% of that getting rejected and going back in the pipeline. That's part of what keeps your pipeline full.

It's part of what allows you to submit five papers a year. But let's say everything gets in one year. Well, the next year, you don't have two or three papers in your pipeline that are good, but need a little bit more work. You just have brand new papers. Now you're in trouble. So you see this a lot in my field, that a good year is followed by a bad year because you quote unquote cleared out the pipeline.

And now you have to refill it again. So we use that terminology all the time. All right, anyways, that is assorted thoughts about how to succeed in this really esoteric and narrow endeavor of producing really competitive elite insight-based cognitive work on a regular basis. That's the way at least I think about it. And now is probably a good time to think about thinking another sponsor that makes deep questions possible.

I'm talking about Optimize. Optimize is a paid subscription network that delivers to you the wisdom you need from some of the greatest nonfiction books ever written to create a deeper life. When you sign up with Optimize, you get access to their over 600 philosopher notes. These are six-page summaries of some of the most important books ever written. Every summary is written by Optimized founder Brian Johnson. They are fantastic. You also get access to the 101 masterclass videos taught by experts. There is a digital minimalism 101 taught by me among the list of available classes.

There is also a daily plus one video, a short idea, a piece of wisdom about living your life deeper that comes to you every morning in your inbox featuring Brian. Right below the video is to live. links to the philosopher notes of the books it came from. This is high quality stuff. I've known Brian for a very long time and very impressed by the Optimize network. So if you want to find out more, go to optimize.me slash deep. And if you use that coupon code deep when you sign up, you'll not only get two weeks free, but also 10% off. So go to optimize.combe slash deep and use that promo code deep to get not just the free weeks, but 10% off. And of course, what would a deep questions episode be if it didn't involve me mentioning

Magic Spoon? As you know, Magic Spoon offers great tasting treat style cereals like the type we enjoyed as kids, but without all of the junk. We're talking zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein and only four net grams of carbs and 140 calories per serving. This is keto-friendly, gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free, low-carbon, GMO-free cereal. You can take a moment of relaxation and enjoy one of these great tasting bowls of cereal without upsetting your my-body tutor coach. See what I'm doing there? Synergy. Now, you can build your own custom bundle boxes where you choose to flage.

you like and get them all sent to you as a custom bundle. The flavors available for these bundles include cocoa, fruity, frosted peanut butter, blueberry, and cinnamon. The power users mix flavors. Peanut butter and cocoa put together gives you peanut butter cup cereal. That's for the the Power Magic Spoon consumers out there. So here's a deal. If you go to magic spoon.com slash Cal and use the promo code Cal, you can get $5 off your order. There's 100% happiness guarantee here. If for some reason you don't like it, send it back, get your money back, no questions asked. But don't worry, you'll love it.

So go to magic spoon.com. right now to create your own custom bundle and use that promo code Cal to get your $5 off. All right, let's do a question now about note organization. Hi, Cal. This is Susan. and I write about and speak about sustainable productivity, which is creating habits that work in a way that you can maintain lifelong. So basically, I'm helping people battle burnout. Your work is really fantastic.

And when I recently read World Without Email, I found myself highlighting passages and flagging pages to read more in depth on a topic or pull an article you referenced or, you know, to call out your work in one of my talks. So as a researcher, I know you take extensive notes. How do you organize those? It seems like retyping them all in description. Grvener might not be a sustainable practice that I can maintain lifelong. But, you know, leaving them as a flag and highlights doesn't seem like it's productive for easy recall and reference. So I'd love to hear how you organize your notes. Well, first of all, Susan, I love the idea of sustainable productivity.

So keep up to good work you're doing. when it comes to notes, in particular for my writing projects, how I organize them, it really does depend on the scale of the project. In particular, an article is going to have a different approach than a book. So let's take an article first. The most recent article I wrote was this thinking outside the home piece for the New Yorkers, about 1800 words. It involved a bunch of case studies of how famous writers wear and how.

they would work, a little bit of science reporting in there as well. For that article, what I do, and for articles like that, is I want in Scrivener, I use Scrivener for these articles. I want in my research folders in Scrivener. Everything I might use in the article, I want it right there. I don't want to have to leave Scrivener when I'm working on the article. So I will copy out of articles all of the different information I might want to directly quote. Right. So for example, in that article I talk about Maya Angelou's habit of going into hotel rooms to write and taking everything off the wall. I went and read the George Plympton interview from the Paris Review where that information was revealed and I copied big paragraphs out of that article and pasted them right there

onto a Scribner page. Everything I might want to cite or quote directly, I wanted it to be in there. So when I'm writing an article, that's my mindset. My Scribner research world should be self-contained. so I can just write and everything I want to see or quote is right there in a system. When I'm working on a book, there's too much information, at least so far when I've worked on books, there's too much information to try to do the same thing. You know, because when I'm working on an article, I get more or less what I need for the article. When I'm working on a book, I might have 5x more information than I'll ever need in that book. and if I was really copying down, everything I might possibly use in the book in the form

that gives me all the information I need in a self-contained way. So I would never have to leave Scrivenor or what have you. It's just all right there, or it's all right in Evernote, or however you want to do it. That would be way too much information, be way too inefficient. So if I look at my most recent book, a world without email, a few different things to point out here. One, I read a bunch of books in preparation for writing that book, and I mark up the books with pencils or pins using my slash check method where you slash the corner, if there's any notes you're highlighting on the page, and then you put check marks or brackets next to sections on that

page. It makes it very efficient to go back through and get the highlights out of that book again later. I'll put some summary in my notes about, okay, I read this book. It has some good quotes on XYZ, but I'm not going to copy all those quotes out. I don't know what I'm going to use from that book. I just want a placeholder somewhere that here's a book I read that generally talks about these topics. And when I get to a relevant chapter, then we can maybe go back through those highlights and deal with them. But when I'm first working on the book, I have a lot of books that are just highlighted. I also have collections of articles. Like for that email book, I went and downloaded every academic article that Gloria Mark ever wrote. And I wasn't going to copy every possible

relevant thing from every article and separately put them in Scrivener or something like this. I had a big directory full of all these different papers. And then at some point I wrote an index to those papers. Just real briefly, this paper's about X, this paper's about Y, so that later, when I'm writing about a topic where Gloria's research is relevant, I can look at that index and find a three or four papers that might be relevant and go deeper on them right there in the moment. All right. So there's a lot of things that I'm not at first extracting the citable information, extracting the relevant information. Notes remain in books, papers remain unmarked up. And then when I get to a particular chapter, I deal with that chapter like I'm dealing with an article. All right, now I'm going to be

writing. Let me start going through these different sources and figuring out what's relevant. Which books might be relevant to this chapter? Well, let me go back and read their highlights that I marked in the book. Which papers might be relevant. Let me go to that researcher's paper. Or for a world without email, I also had folders would be like assorted papers on X. And I would have a bunch papers in there and a text file index with a sentence or two about what each of those papers was. So let me go read again now the five or six papers that seem relevant to the topic. Now I'm going to extract notes. Now if I'm using Scrivener, I'm certainly going to actually highlight passages from the relevant paper and paste them in a Scrivener note. I'm going to highlight

a retype text from a book that I think I'm going to take that quote and I'm going to use it probably in the chapter. And then I go to write in a self-contained word. where everything I need is in my research folder for this chapter, and I don't have to go back and sift through things while I'm writing. So it's really a two-stage process for big books. At first, no, I'm not recopying everything. I'm just capturing pointers and descriptions of lots of different stuff that could be relevant, but when I get to a particular chapter, I try to create a self-contained information rolled around that chapter on demand as I'm about to write that chapter, and then I can just write. All right. So Susan, hopefully those distinctions aren't

too arbitrary or subtle and give you some instinct about how I handle those challenges. All right. There's one more question here. As promise, I have a question from a conductor. It's a bit of a long question, but I'll try to give a short answer. Hi, Cal. My name is Jeremy, and my question is about narrowing down and focusing on the skills that I need to build to be so good that I can't be ignored. I'm a conductor, and while the skill of conducting seems like the one thing. It's actually made up of a whole bunch of other skills and things that I could be working on. I know about your top performer course and I haven't taken it, but I've heard your advice about seeing what people who are successful do and then

following that path. And I actually run a podcast where I interview conductors and I've done almost 100 interviews, so I have actually an overwhelm of paths and skills and initiatives I could be taking. It's really difficult to get conducting experience, and it's really expensive, even when we're not in the middle of a pandemic. So I'm trying to identify skills and initiatives that I can do on my own that are worth it, because time is really limited and valuable while I'm working from home, but that will also have a great yielded in rewards. Any advice that you can share to help with building my career in this very amorphous profession?

Thanks so much. Well, I really appreciate this question. Not that I know anything about becoming a conductor, but because it gives me a chance to talk briefly about, in general, trying to get an election. elite, highly competitive professional position. So to be a conductor of a significant orchestra is a very rare job. It's incredibly competitive. It's very elite.

It's very difficult to do. So it's a great case study for this more general question. This can come up in many topics, becoming a professional athlete or chess player or billionaire investor or best-selling novelist or whatever. There's a lot of these elite professional positions that often peak people's aspirations. So the first step of two to do here is what it sounds like you're already correctly doing, which is confront the reality of how does the existing competitive structure work for this particular position. What is it?

How do you get into it? How do you move up it? What separates the people who are able to keep moving up versus those that don't? What do they have to do? What type of talents do they have to have? What type of training is involved? What is the differentiating factors as we move up this existing competitive. structure.

It's very important to understand that reality. Talk to people about what they actually did, how the world actually works. Because there's a tendency, and I want to make sure that you don't have this tendency right now while you're home in the latter stage of this pandemic. There's a tendency that we have to say, can I hack the structure?

Can I get around the incredibly difficult and trying work of trying to battle my way up at a competitive elite, competitive structure by just being closed. clever about what I do, that if I put my effort into finding a better way of training or doing a better system, a better route, if I find that better route, that hack route, all the effort went into coming up with the idea of that route, but then I can get to the top of the structure much easier. That is 99% of the time a mirage. It's not going to work. It's not going to work. You can't trick your way into being a professional athlete. There's no special software you can

invent that's going to make you a professional chess player without all the hard work. Now, there is room for innovation. If we use the chess example for, as our case here, Magnus Carlson did a lot of training innovation famously using computer algorithms, computer games and computer algorithms. But here's the thing. Carlson came up still through this grinding, incredibly difficult, highly competitive, tournament-based competitive structure with all the training and skills and prodigious talent that's required. He didn't bypass all of that. He added the innovation on top of that.

It's like Laird Hamilton doing this giant big wave surfing. They added innovative training and tools on top of a foundation of doing all the things you need to do, lifetime of work to become a really good surfer. So innovation, of course, is very important, but it's not this innovation allows me to bypass the competition and with much less effort and get to the top. No, typically innovation. is in addition to doing all of the stuff that the people typically do in this competitive structure, I've added on innovative extra work, and that's helped me continue to make progress or get farther up than I would have been able to get before. So that's the first thing we have to recognize when you're

thinking about something elite like becoming a conductor. That leads naturally to step two, which is a step that's not talked about as much during commencement speeches, which is asking the question, do I have a shot in that structure? There's a lot of reasons. that would really restrict someone from being able to successfully enter and progress through a given competitive structure. I mean, depending on the field, sometimes it's just you didn't have the lifetime exposure to the skill.

You're never going to catch up to that fastball at the professional level if you don't start swinging a bat until you're 15, right? So sometimes it's just, have I built up the requisite skill or do I have the requisite skill? You want to be a Formula One driver, but your reactions just aren't there. You just don't have the muscle fibers are not quick firing enough for you to get that edge. You need to actually be one of the top 100 drivers in the world. It's just not going to happen, right?

So, you know, do I have that skill? Do you have the right access, right? I mean, a lot of these competitive structures are unequal, right? There's inequity in the sense of things out of your control play a big role in whether or not you get access to it. You got to confront that, you know, might be, shoot. my plan to become a head trader at Goldman. I don't know why that'd be your plan, but whatever.

You read Liars Poker and you want to make a lot of money or something like this. Like this plan's not going to work because they really just recruit from 10 schools. And I'm not in one of those schools. I don't have access to that. I don't have access to the ground floor of being able to actually

then fight up that competitive structure, right? And there's all other sorts of things. I don't have the time. I have no connections to that world and it's a world that's hard to get into. I want to be a, I don't know, a treasure hunter. I don't know anyone involved in treasure hunting or anything about it, you know. So I can't even get my foot in the door.

So there's this reality check that comes where you say, do I have a feasible chance? I'm willing to do the discipline and the focus and stick to the reality of the competitive structure, maybe even innovate on top of the competitive structure. Do I have a chance? If the answer is no, then also that's not the right pursuit. this is often the missing discussion in elite accomplishments is finding the right elite accomplishment to do. So many factors have to go together for you to be able to both enter and succeed

in a competitive competition structure that it really narrows down for most people their possibilities in terms of if for whatever reason. Again, this is not for everyone, but if I want to be elite at something, you don't have the whole menu available to you. I cannot be an elite athlete at this point. I'm not going to be an elite chess player.

I'm not going to be an elite pure mathematician. There maybe had been a chance if I had much earlier in my career fully dedicated that, maybe, but I didn't. I'm not going to be an elite musician, right? There's very few things. Now, there's some narrow windows that might be available to me. Like, I might have a shot in nonfiction. I'm working on it. Maybe there's a shot to get to the really high level in theoretical computer science.

the groundwork's been laid, I've been working on for a decade, and there might be something there. But that's kind of it. Kind of out of options beyond that. And that's true for most people, right? Because there's so many circumstances that have to come together that finding a competitive structure that you even have a feasible shot in, again, due to a lot of conditions that you have nothing to do with you. None of this is fair. That's a big part of the game. So, look, I don't know anything about your situation and conducting and your background and whether or not,

you have a shot within the competitive structure conducting. I'm hoping you're already three rungs up, and of course you do, and let's get after it, and you're going to succeed because you're really focused on the reality and fighting and discipline and knowing what matters and what doesn't and facing the reality, not inventing your own hacks. That's all great. Or you might be in a situation where you've just thought abstractly about conducting, but there's really no feasible way for you to get into that structure and go up.

That's good to realize, too, because now you can aim your focus, your energy somewhere that's going to be more receptive. So I appreciate this question because it just gives you. me a chance to talk about that more general point, that again, you're not going to get invited to a lot of commencement speeches with this idea where you say, class of 2021, there are many promising things out there that one could do. Most of them you're going to suck at. Hopefully, there's something you can do that's really well, but might not be, and it's going to be really hard to find it. And it's going to be really hard. Good luck. This is why I do not get invited to do

commencement speeches. But it's an interesting point. It's such an interesting topic, right? How people get to elite levels at skills. And we don't always dissect it that much. We try to water it down and generalize it so that we can produce advice for just generally getting good at things, which you can sell a lot of books about or what have you. But anyways, it's an interesting topic. And so those are my two points about it. Break down exactly how people in the real world get to those positions. What's the competitive hierarchy? How do they move up it? And two, do the reality check about can I get into that hierarchy and have a shot of moving up or not and be honest about your answer. And with that, I will be honest at admitting that we are over time.

So we will wrap up this mini episode, episode 100. You can go to calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how to submit your own listener calls. I will be back next week with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast, and until then, as always, stay deep.