Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 101: Does Productivity Impede the Deep Life?

Episode Date: May 31, 2021

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - Should I maintain a day free from all work? [3:55] - How do I take notes on a Kindle? [9:06] - How an I integrate accountability with my time-block planning? (Bonus rant on making workloads transparent.) [11:31] - How do I avoid over-structuring my life as a student? [19:49] - What is my (Cal) computer science research about? [21:35] - What is the best productivity system for someone who manages hundreds of tasks across numerous projects? [25:26]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How do you decide when to commit to a new role or project? [34:07 - Are my (Cal) ideas on passion in stark contrast to most philosophers? [39:44] - Have I (Cal) started a new book yet? [44:25] - Should I spend time on investing or my side project? [45:07] - What is the role of productivity in the deep life? [51:19]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 Deep Questions. Episode 101. Quick announcements. I'm recording this on Monday, May 31st, Memorial Day, and I'm a little embarrassed about that. Here's what's happening. I have a audio engineer who will now be mastering these episodes, so you'll be getting the levels right, he'll be getting the compression right, that final professional sheen that you would like on a podcast. In order for us to work together, of course, I need to get the episodes to him 24 hours in advance. So he has time to actually do the mastering and post him. I have failed to do this for the last two weeks. So all I have to do is get a couple days ahead to shift my recording schedule by a couple days and we can get the pipeline going.

It will be good going forward. And it's taken me two weeks so far and I have failed four times in a row. I don't know what that says about my schedule, but probably something not good. This is the week, however, I'm going to break that chain. I'm publicly committing to it for the accountability. I'm going to record Thursday's episode early, get the pipeline going with the engineer, and get that final sheen of professionalism on these episodes. All right, we have a good show today. No deep dive, but a good collection of questions, both about deep work and the deep life.

As always, go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can contribute your question. to the show. One more thing before we get started, I want to thank one of the sponsors that makes deep questions possible. This is actually a new sponsor of the show, Public Goods. So Public Goods is the one-stop shop

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they will be impressed. They will come in and say, huh, that Cal, he really has an eye for design. Anyways, great products, great-looking products, and I love the idea of having one shop you get all of these staples from, and you don't even have to think about it. Now here's the thing. I've worked out an awesome deal just for my listeners. You can receive $15 off your first public goods order with no minimum purchase. That's right. They're so confident that you will absolutely love their products and come back again and again that they're going to

give you $15 to spend on your first purchase. So if nothing to lose, just go to public goods.com slash deep or use the code deep when you check out. Now that is P-U-B-L-I-C-G-O-O-D-S dot com forward slash deep to receive $15 off your first order. All right, with that, let's get started with questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Quran, who says, after listening to your podcast about having 33 jobs, I decided to push myself this semester, and now I have eight classes and about 120 students. I am also working on a small grant project. My time during the week is limited, and currently I take Saturdays as my full no work days to maintain my mental health and take a break from all of my work.

While this day off is nice, I find myself working six to eight hours prepping for the week and still not finding the adequate time to work on my grant. my question is, do you spread out your leisure throughout the week or do you have one day where you completely disconnect from work? Well, I'm going to get to the meat of your question, but there's a few stops I want to make along the way. First of all, I want to note when I was joking slash complaining about having 33 jobs this summer and this fall, my intent was more actually to discourage people from becoming overwhelmed than it was to actually encourage it. So I don't know if that came through. It seems like you have a really busy schedule. Eight classes is a ton.

I think you need to acknowledge that your primary obligations here, your classroom obligations, is very heavy, and you might need to be in an all-hands-on-deck situation, which means to me removing from the deck temporarily unnecessary things. You might think about putting the small grant project, perhaps putting that on hold or really slowing it down, or seeing what else in your life you can simplify to compensate for the fact that your primary work right now

is at a really high level, really high level of load, at least. I would also say, with six to eight hours of prep you have to do for your courses, you might want to start trying to find a way, how do we automate? And by automate, I mean this thing at this time on this day, consistently. Automate this prep so they can in line with your week.

Perhaps you're prepping for the next week while you're executing the current week. Doing some weekly planning and daily time block planning will help you find this time. maybe your day starts a little bit earlier. Maybe there's some other logistics about your courses that you can simplify the way the grading happens, the way things are handed in to make this time. But I think you're going to be a lot happier if you don't see this as all day, let's say Sunday, all day, all I'm doing is preparing for the week ahead. And then when I'm in the week, it's just kind of chaos and I'm teaching and not much else is being done.

If you can find a way to really structure things during the day and inline that prep, I think that's going to make things a lot easier. All right, now getting to your core question about when to do leisure, two things. One, schedule shutdown confirm. You have your shutdown ritual every day. You've done your daily plan with time blocks. You have a weekly plan so you see the full picture. You shut down with confidence.

When you're shut down, you're shut down. Now, if your schedule means that shutdown is going to be an hour later than you would like, okay, then it's an hour later than you would like. If your day has to start an hour earlier to make it work, then your day has to start an hour earlier to make it work, but when you're done, you're done. So now you can get some leisure, self-guided activity, relaxation, whatever you need every single evening. In terms of the weekend, yes, I am a big believer in having a day of no work. I think the way the Jewish ritual of Shabbat is a great one. I think that timing is good. Sundown Friday, sundown Saturday. You're not working.

I think it's a good one. You can start prepping on Friday. I'm going to get things shut down before we get towards the evening. By the time we get the dinner, it's shut down, it's going to stay shut down through Saturday. That's what me and my family does. There's actually a lot of books written about this. Did you know Joe Lieberman wrote a book years ago about practicing Shabbat? It's true. I read it. I read a lot of books, a lot of weird books. And I have read Joe Lieberman's book on Shabbat, just in case you're looking for a little bit more senatorial advice there.

On the summarize, here's what I'm saying. You have a very hard semester. So compensate for that by trying to make other stuff less in the way. Inline your prep. Do very serious daily, weekly plans. You have clear shutdowns every day. And yes, I would take a whole day off starting Friday night from doing any work. Moving forward, if you want to continue with the 33 jobs mindset, which let's give it the optimistic spin of sort of getting after it, going after the things that you think are going to be really important, something that really helps make that sustainable is that if you're going to have busy periods like I go through, the more of that that is completely under your control autonomously, the better. So there's a real difference between I'm really busy with

obligations I can't control. So I doubled the number of courses I normally teach. That could feel crushing in the way that I've taken my normal schedule. Now I've added a autonomous book writing project onto that schedule where I fully control that time. No one's pushing me. There's no deadlines to this has to happen today. Someone's bothering me about this tomorrow. That type of overload is a lot more manageable. So going forward, if you're looking to what can I add, if I really want to get ahead, there's something I want to make a lot of progress on, adding things that are more in your control is usually more sustainable than just increasing the amount of things, the standard work that's not in your control. All right, I hope that's useful. Let's throw in a quick question

here, technical question. Jin says, you've mentioned how Kindle can export things you highlight in what you're reading. Is this in the app or just on a Kindle tablet? Do you know any other apps that do the same thing. Well, Jen, I'm talking about the actual physical Kindle device. I'm not a big believer in using the Kindle app on your phone. A, because that puts reading into the context of other distractions and information. I don't like being in that cognitive context when I'm reading. And B, the screen on a phone is backlit. That's going to be more of a strain on your eyes than the screen on an actual Kindle, which is electronic ink. That is a non-backlit screen that is not going to strain your eyes. Electronic ink is actually really interesting.

It really is physical. So what happens with a Kindle is the quote unquote pixels are actual disks. One side's dark. One side is not dark. And if you put a little bit of current, it flips to the dark side. Put a little bit of different current. It flips back to the white side. So the Kindle actually is creating a physical page when you turn to page.

You have a physical page, a black and white physical disc that you light with a light just like you would a book page. It's basically functionally equivalent to looking at an actually. actual piece of printed word. So I love that tech. When you're reading on E-E ink, you're reading physical printing, which is different than on your phone where no, you actually have different colored lights shining at you from a screen, some white, some darker, and that's what the actual ink is made out of. So it's the difference between lighting a physical surface as light and dark versus having light and dark lights shining at your eyes. All right, that's a little bit aside.

So I don't really think about Kindle on my phone as a viable option. I'd rather just have the Kindle tablet. The thing you actually hold. Now the thing about that is the note-taking feature is really cool. You can export your notes. And I'm sorry I don't have the exact menus. You can look this up online, but you know, you highlight things as you read on a Kindle book. There is a menu you can go to to basically export your notes.

Your Kindle account is associated with an email address. And it will actually just email to that address, a PDF, nicely formatting the notes. It's great. More people should do this. You should have a nice PDF maybe from every nonfiction Kindle book that you highlight.

You can print them out or keep them in a folder or whatever you want to do with it. But it's a feature that I think people don't rely on enough, but I really love it. All right. Our next question comes from Lillian.

Lillian asks, how should those of us who need external accountability build that into our time block plans? Well, Lillian, I like this question because it allows me to talk about collaborative time blocking. This is something I haven't really gone into in detail before, but I think it's a really powerful tool.

Here's the basic idea. You get a buddy. Time blocking buddy. They do not have to be in your same job or even your same industry. Just someone else who is time blocking on roughly the same workday schedule as you. Every morning you send just over text message. here is a picture of my initial time block plan. Later in the day on shutdown complete,

as you check that box, you send them a picture of how your plan ended up. So including if you use my time block planner, including all of your corrected time block plans, the columns that march to the right. As always, I push people towards timeblockplatter.com to learn more about that. This gives you great accountability

because you got to make the plan, first of all, because your buddy is expecting it. But you're also more likely to stick to the plan when there is a opportunity for you to voluntarily digress from your plan. You might actually decline that opportunity because you will be embarrassed if you had to redraw your plan excessively when you send that photo at the end of the day. You also get a source of external insight,

someone who's seen your plan and how it changes each day, who might say, you know, Lillian, day after day, week after week, you're putting aside this 30 minutes for email in the morning and you bust your plan every single time. Or you always put aside an hour for your Wednesday staff meeting. I'm just got to say as an external observer, it seems to be taking an hour and a half consistently. So maybe you need some more buffer in there. Time blocking collaboratively is a incredibly powerful way to get into that habit. This also brings up a semi-related topic. Managerial time blocking.

Now, to explain this concept, I'm going to start with a thought experiment. And I will warn you ahead of time. I am not going to actually suggest that this specific thought experiment be made real, but it's going to bring up some ideas that we can then build on to get towards the actual pragmatic solution I want to suggest. All right, so here's a thought experiment. Imagine you're an employee in a knowledge work situation, and every day, every morning, you do collaborative time blocking with your manager. whoever's in charge of you sit down and say, let's plan out my day.

And now the manager has to see, oh, here's five hours worth of meetings. All right, here's the only uninterrupted block. I guess I want you working on the report. You only have two hours here. Okay, you have 200 emails arriving every day, so that takes up the rest of the time just to keep up with those emails. Like, they had to confront specifically, here is your time available during the work day they want you to work. What really fits in there? Now again, this is just a thought experiment, but in this experiment, imagine how this really

shifts the dynamic and work because right now, time is a private thing. It's like your income or your religion. We don't want to talk about it. You deal with your time. Me as a manager, me as a team. We just put stuff on your plate and the A players produce and the B players fall behind. And I don't want to be confronted concretely with how much time this stuff actually takes and how much time you actually have. Now, in this experiment where the manager had to sit down and confront your time block and they couldn't invent time out of nowhere, it would probably severely reduce, A, what they put on your plate, and B, lead to a lot less meetings because they say, man, I'm so frustrated. I really want you to do this and this, and there's no time here. So let me get rid of this meeting

and let's stop doing this. It would create a really useful back pressure. Now, the problem with an esthetic experiment is that you probably don't want to manage or looking at how you plan every minute of your day because that is pretty intense. Look, as time blockers know, running a time block schedule is very intense and you need some give there. And you also need the ability to go do other things. I need to take two hours off. I need to go to the store. I need to go to a doctor's appointment. I have my kid is homesick. I mean, we don't actually necessarily want that level of surveillance. But is it possible? So as we shift from the theoretical to the pragmatic, is it possible to find an approach to management that keep some of the advantages that reality check confrontation

of how much time you actually spend from the slide experiment and implement that in the real world without your manager knowing what you're doing every minute. I think it probably is. I don't know exactly how it will work. As I always say, I'm a theorist, not a management expert. I don't have my hands in the mix, as it were, and how companies actually run.

So caveat, mature, whenever I'm actually talking about how you might actually want to change how you run your company. But in my book, A World Without Email, I have this chapter, the specialization principle, where I get into some ideas about making available time budgets for different types of work clear and limited and explicit. So imagine if you will. Imagine if you will, you're at a company and you've moved away from the hyperactive hive mind.

So now it's no longer the case that what's on everyone's plate is implicitly contained in a bunch of different assorted messages, sprinkled throughout their inbox and on calendar invites and all in various places that's hard to really pin down and you're just mainly chasing deadlines or reacting emails. Let's say we've moved beyond that. And tasks that are assigned to you are in some sort of clear format. They're in a Trello board. They're in base camp somewhere.

They're in GRO. However it works, but it's really clear. Like, here's the different things going on. Here's who's working on what. Here's what type of work it is. Maybe even here's an estimate of how much time this will take. Now suddenly we can see really clearly. this is what's on Lillian's plate right now,

this many hours of work in these type of categories. Now imagine that your calendaring software is also giving you a clear report of here's how many meetings are on Lillian's plate. She is averaging five hours of meetings a day in terms of work on her plate that, roughly speaking, needs to get done this week.

There's about 40 hours of it. She has about 15 hours of free time if five hours a day is in meetings, there's only three hours per day left, five days a week, 15 hours, so she is more than 2x oversubscribed. These budgets are way out of whack. Something has to change,

flashing red lights or whatever the software equivalent is. The manager cannot avoid this as unsustainable. Something has to give. I talk about that in the specialization principle. Different ways you might implement this, but this idea of having clarity of who's working on what and how much that is and how much you want them to be working on different things

and how much is actually on their plate make people confront this head on. This is what we're asking you to do. This is what you have available. Let's make that clear. You have about 15 hours a week available because of how many meetings were put on your plate. You have about 40 hours of work per week we have on your plate.

Let's all just face that and know that's true. I'm telling this metaphorical soldier that they have to charge that beach and there's a machine gun nest up there. You want your commander to actually see that machine gun nest, see the sand being knocked up by the bullets before they make that call. Confront the thing you're asking people to actually do. Otherwise, you're going to be throwing people haphazardly under that metaphorical beach

when, let's say, there was another route to flank that machine gun now. So you can tell them on Memorial Day, guys. A lot of military examples here. All right. So this is a bigger concept that I think is important, is that we need much more transparency around how much time is really available of different categories and how much we're actually asking people to do. The hyperactive hive mind

makes that almost impossible, but as you move away from the hyperactive hive mind, this is one of the big advantages that you get. One of the big advantages that you get is that you can start to do things like gaining this transparency, which I think is at the key of reforming how knowledge work actually happens.

All right, let's shift here and do a student question. This one comes from Jacob. Jacob asks, how do I avoid overstructuring my day as an undergraduate student. Well, Jacob, you know, my stance is that when it comes to student life, the work that you know has to get done on a regular basis, the problem sets, the reading assignments, the lab reports. That should be structured. You should have the same times, on the same days, at the same

places you do that work so you don't even have to think about it. When you get the Tuesday at 11, you know you're going to this library to work on your problem set. Structuring to work in this way is superior than the alternative of saying, what do I want to do today? What do I want to do right now? That just leads you working late into the night two or three times a week to try to catch up on a bunch of work

that piled up until you realized, oh no, I have a deadline tomorrow. Now, when you confront the calendar this creates, if that feels overly structured, this is just a reality check. This is what's on your plate. This is your job. You have this much work to get done.

Doing it haphazardly does not make it go away. Doing it haphazardly does not make your life more relaxed. doing it haphazardly certainly does not free up more time for you. Attacking it in a structured manner is going to actually minimize the footprint of this work on your time. So if you feel like there's too much on your plate once you actually confront what it is, the solution here is not to hide your plate, but instead to reduce what's on it. If you feel completely overstuffed, you need to adjust your schedule so it's less demanding. If you feel completely overstuffed, you need to pull back on some of the extracurricular commitments

that might be really pulling at your time. but the work that you actually have, you have to face that productivity dragon. Here it is, what's the best way to tackle it for good or worse? Hiding from the cave is not going to make the dragon go away. All right, here's a question that's sure to drive away more of our listeners. Marvin asks, what is your computer science research about? Well, I did a more extensive discussion of this on Lex Fridman's podcast,

if you want to go find that. He's a Lex's a computer scientist does AI work as a researcher at MIT. So we geeked out. Actually got into some details of a paper I was working on a paper that I should say since has been accepted for publication. So I won't go into those details here. And this is a audience that unlike Lex's does not come here to hear a lot of technical details. But really briefly, I did my doctoral work at MIT in the theory group and in particular in the theory of distributed systems group within the theory group at MIT. So that's Nancy Lynch's group. Nancy Lynch wrote the textbook on distributed algorithms.

So what I do is basically mathematical theory about how distributed systems work together. I specialize in particular on lower bounds when possibility results. Under these conditions, under these assumptions about how the communication or coordination works in this system, no algorithm can solve this problem or no algorithm can solve this problem faster than this many rounds with this probability. You can sort of see hints in that work connecting to the type of things I talk about in my public-facing work where I really think a lot about coordination and collaboration.

I mean, these worlds have some connection there. So that's what I'm an expert in, the theory of distributed systems. I did a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in a network and mobile systems groups, more of a systems type group because I was doing a lot of theory about wireless and mobile networks, and so I wanted to learn more about those networks. And largely speaking here at Georgetown,

most of my work is within that theory of distributed systems world. I do want to underscore, however, that I increasingly think about the writing I do or some of the conversations I do on this podcast is not being in a completely orthogonal plane to my computer science research. I'm a computer scientist at Georgetown.

What is Georgetown known for? Georgetown is known for not just the advancing of knowledge, but also caring about and advancing the impact of different fields of study on society. This is why, for example, in the early 20th century, Georgetown led the way in the field of bioethics. How do we actually understand how these new scientific technologies emerging in biology are going to impact our culture and our society? They really innovated that field. They're trying to do something now similarly with technological impacts in society and digital ethics, right? So Georgetown is very much, has a foot in the world of pure academia and a foot in the world.

It's a very Jesuit idea of how do these ideas impact the world writ large? How do we make that impact as positive as possible? So here I am a computer scientist at Georgetown who just finished publishing over the last five years a trilogy of books that I call my tech and culture trilogy about the unintended consequences or impacts of technology on culture and what we might do about them. deep work, digital minimalism, and a world without email. That actually makes a lot of sense. It's what you might expect from a computer scientist at Georgetown to also be doing. So I see these worlds as connected. I have my pure academic focus where I'm doing math proofs about distributed system theory,

but then I also turn and think about these systems and how they impact the world and how we could collaborate better and these type of issues, this focus on the world and not just their narrow academic silos. to me this all makes sense. I see both of these roles as increasingly intertwined. So I guess what I'm trying to say here, Marvin, is that when people say what is your academic work all about, my answer has become a lot more broad than maybe it once was. All right, let's do one more deep work question here. This one comes from Andrew. Andrew asks, what kind of productivity system would you suggest for someone who manages

hundreds of tasks across numerous projects and multiple domains. Well, Andrew, for someone in your situation, when you even think about the hyperactive hive mind workflow, you better start sprinting as fast as you can in the opposite direction. If you have hundreds of tasks and numerous different types of projects and numerous types of domains, there's no way that you can sustainably manage this load by just rock and rolling on email and Slack,

hey, what about this? Did you get this report? while throwing meeting invites at each other's Outlook calendar. That is chaos. You will operate at a fraction of your capacity. These projects will not be executed well. It's not sustainable. The two things you need to do here is you need to externalize where all of the information about each of these projects exist.

It has to be very clear and centralized. Here are the things that have to happen. Here's the things that are happening. Here's the things that do need to happen. Or have already happen, I should say. Here is all of the relevant information for this project. And at the moment, here is who is working on what. That has to be incredibly clearly externalized

and isolated project by project. That cannot just exist as a bunch of emails. It cannot just exist as a transcript extracted from a transcript of a bunch of Slack messages. A lot of tools can do this for you. You have Trello, you have Jira, you have Basecamp, you have flow. There's too many to even mention. But this work has to be externalized and clarified and isolated.

That's step one. Two, how the communication about this work, answering each other's questions and making decisions about who is working on what and making sure that people get the information they need to execute what they need to do. Those three things. So assignment, relevant information, and questions. That needs to be externalized too. And by externalized, I mean there needs to be a very clear protocol for how that information,

how that collaboration happens. It cannot be the hive mind. You cannot say I have 15 different projects, all of which we figure out who does what, we answer questions and pass around the information people need, just all through email messages, all intermix in our inbox. No, it has to be very clear. We have a status meeting. It happens on these times.

It is structured in this way. Before you show up at the status meeting, you have the day before post a update that everyone can review, and if you don't, you can't come. They last 20 minutes. We go in order. We check in on what happened before. We decide what's happening next. Everyone commits to what they need from everyone else.

We write that down so it's in black and white. We'll check that in the next status meeting. Let's roll. If there's small questions, how do we deal with that that pop up along the way or brainstorming that has to happen? Well, maybe then you also have office hours. Here's the etiquette. You grab someone at their office hours.

If you have questions, if you need to talk something through, you grab them at their office hours. You have to externalize how the collaboration happens. That too can't just be in your generic communication systems. Now, Andrew, you can confront concretely, here's what's on my plate. Here's all the tools. Here's all that needs to be done. Here's when we talk about it. Now, you might discover that it's too much.

I can't keep track of all this. This is too many projects. There's too much on our plate. We don't have enough personnel. If that's the case, that's the case. And just like I was talking about with the student a couple questions ago, you don't want to obfuscate that. You don't want to say, let's just have a frenzy and just be busy.

And what will happen will happen. Face the productivity dragon. There's 10 projects and they each have all these things going on. There's not enough people to do them. Great. Now we know. Let's make some changes. But the key thing here is that once you get above even a minimal number of commitments in your professional life, you've got to get them out of generic communication channels. You've got to get them out of informal back and forth.

You have to externalize the information. You have to externalize the communication protocols by which questions or answers, rules are assigned, and decisions are made. All that has to get structured. All that has to get clear. then you'll be able to handle a lot more. And if you have more on your plate than you can handle, it will be crystal clear. Now you can make decisions about how to rectify that

that are going to be informed by your actual capacity what's actually going on and not just you declaring some sort of time management bankruptcy and veering too far in the direction of doing nothing or burning out or quitting or making severe changes, drastic moves. So externalize, externalize, externalize, Andrew. You're a case study for why the idea is in a world without email

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There really is no more effective way I can think of to actually push your health. That is the constitution bucket in your deep life plan towards something more healthy. So if you go to MyBodytutor.com and mention deep questions when you say, sign up, they will give you $50 off your first month. That's my body tutor, t-U-T-O-R.com, mention deep questions and get $50 off your first month. Now, once you have your constitution tuned up, let's move on to the contemplation bucket of the deep life. Let's talk about your mind, your philosophy, how you think about your life. And this is where optimize. into play. I've talked about Optimize for many months now. It's founded by my longtime friend

Brian Johnson. It is a paid subscription service built around getting you the actionable information you need to live a deeper life. The main things you get with a subscription to optimize is first access to their library of over 600 philosopher notes. These are summaries of some of the most important, impactful nonfiction books ever written. Every summary is written by Brian Johnson. They're the best book summaries in the business. You also get every day delivered right to your inbox a plus one video, a quick bit of advice delivered by Brian himself. Right below it is links to the philosopher notes to the relevant books from which that advice came from. So every day you get that hit of actionable advice. Finally, you get access to their 101 masterclasses. These are video

courses taught by experts on the types of topics covered in the network. I taught. one of these courses, Digital Minimalism 101, and I am one of over a hundred such video masterclasses available to subscribers to optimize. So to sign up, go to Optimize. Go to Optimize.combe. And use the coupon code deep when you sign up. Now, you will get a free two-week trial to check it out, but if you use that code deep, you will also get 10% off. So that's Optimize.combe. and use that coupon code deep to get a free two-week trial and 10% off your subscription. And with that, let's actually now do some questions about the deep life. Our first question comes from Faradha, who asks,

How do you decide when to commit to a new role? For example, such as starting your podcast. Well, the short answer is very reluctantly and with plenty of escape hatches. Longtime followers of my work know I'm not a big fan of this idea that you just need to get started. The key is having to curse to just jump in. That's what you need to do. I actually think it's an issue. If you're too quick to jump in, all in on anything that catches your interest,

you're going to overload yourself too much on your plate to actually get done the things that are important. and you're going to miss the big wins because you are mired in the near misses. So I have a much more careful approach to adding a new long-term or big commitment to my life. First of all, there has to be the time for it. I'm a proponent of fixed schedule productivity, which is the idea that you fix the work schedule you want to have. Here's how much work I want to do on each day. And then you work backwards to say, okay, how do I make everything fit?

I have some pretty clear thoughts about how much I want to work. So if something is going to come into my life, I have to identify up front. Where is this going to fit within my fixed schedule? If there's not time for it, there's not time for it. You know, something has to go to make time for it. It also shapes how you approach it. Notice, for example, that my podcast is based along a monologue format and not an interview format.

Well, that's in part because the time footprint's smaller. I had to find room up front. I'm a big pay-up front type of guy. I had to find room up front for this podcast before I would even consider it. So that might mean with other types of projects, how you shape the project, but also what else you take off your plate. I'm going to stop doing X so I can make room for Y. Don't just throw projects and say, I'll figure out when to do it later. What's important is that I get started?

No, no, find the time for it. That's going to give you some discipline. Two, I have to be really convinced that it's a swing that has a high probability of contact. Took me a long time to come around on podcast. I saw it growing. I saw the medium growing, but I didn't have a clear picture about what's the in-game here. What are you trying to get out of this? What comes back to you?

And I studied it and I talked to people at podcasts and I read a lot about it. And at some point last year, for me, for my very careful self, I said, okay, now I understand this medium. I understand how if executed properly, there's a chance that it could be a really important driver of what I'm trying to do here with my media company and then I moved in. So it took me years. I was way behind a curve, I suppose.

But again, I take my time really seriously. I have a fixed amount of it. I don't want to eat up a chunk of that time unless I'm sure, not that I'm definitely going to have a success, but that the swing has a reasonable probability of making hard contact. Finally, I'm all about escape hats. Okay, I'm going to try this in a way that does not consume a massive amount of my resources and does not commit me very long term to things.

So when I launched this podcast, for example, I launched it as a summer experiment. Told myself, I'll do two months. The summer, I have a lot more time as a professor. So let me work on this podcast for the summer, see how it goes. If it finds an audience, then I can think about committing to it longer term. but if I say this isn't really working out, it still would be fine. I'd have like a summary collection of whatever it would be

a dozen episodes answering some questions. It would have been fun to do. No harm or no foul. So I didn't buy a lot of equipment. I didn't commit to much. I didn't find advertisers. I just launched the podcast, soft launch late May of last year,

did it over the summer when I had plenty of time. And when I got to towards the end of the summer, I said, you know what? This has found an audience. I think it's useful. I like it. I had a more ambitious plan. that I'm only in the early stages of, begin to formulate.

And I said, okay, now with much more confidence I could commit to this, and then changes happen. I shifted to this office space. I got the Deep Work HQ. I set up the Better Studio, invested some more money into this, signed up a year's worth of advertisers. So I connected with a good ad agency. We've sold out the ads for all of 2021 because the audience was there.

And you guys are a desirable audience for a lot of advertisers. But I didn't do that in May, right? This was the fall, late summer and early fall, after I had evidence that I actually connected to it. So the summary is, this is what I would say. Be very careful about what you add to your plate. Make sure you have the time for it. And if you don't, something, you can't do it

or something else has to give. Once you found the time for it, make sure you've convinced yourself that it's a good high probability swing. You don't have to be convinced you'll succeed, but you have to be convinced that there's a non-trivial chance you'll make hard contact. And then three, start with escape,

patches. Don't overcommit yourself, give yourself the way to get out of it, have clear milestones about what you'd want to see to stay in it, so that you're ratcheting up bigger commitments in terms of time and resources, only as performance actually justifies it. All right, so I think that general approach can apply to many different things. Ignore the advice to just get started. On the other hand, don't just be paralyzed with an action. Be strategic. I want to make the most out of my resources. I only have so many available. So let's continually be looking at for things, investments to make, but be careful about how and what ones we actually do. All right, we have a question now from Minnie. Minnie says, I've read many philosophers and experienced in my own life that love and passion

for work is important to continue my life's mission. Your idea. is in stark contrast. I doubt what is exactly the answer to this riddle. Well, Minnie, I think we can help get towards an answer by first clarifying my answer, my ideas on these topics of career satisfaction, because I don't think they're nearly as starkly in contrast as you might assume. So in my relevant book on this topic, so good they can't ignore you,

I don't argue that passion for your work is bad. or I don't argue that it's meaningless. I don't argue that it's something that you should avoid. My complaint is about the storylines we tell about how people achieve that goal. The dominant Western storyline about workplace satisfaction is that a passion exists in advance. You're wired for it. You discover this passion through introspection, and once you have discovered it, the key decision in your career life is at the beginning,

whether or not you have the quote, unquote, courage to match your work to this unearthed preexisting passion. And if you match it to a preexisting passion, you love your work and you enjoy it, and if you don't, because of all these bad societal pressures that are pushing you do something different, then you'll be unhappy. My argument is that we don't have a lot of evidence that that is a common story. In fact, if you study people who are passionate about their work, unearthing some preexisting passion often had very little to do with it. Nine times out of 10, Passion for work is cultivated over time. You are more passionate about your work 10 years in than you are on day one.

This is not about matching your efforts to a pre-existing inclination. It is about shaping the work you do into something that can be a real source of meaning. So the philosophers, you're talking about the experiences in your own life. What is being promoted there? Work that is a source of satisfaction is something I think is highly desirable. and I wrote a whole book trying to help people do that. But I'm trying to give more sophisticated advice for it because if you tell people this Disney storyline,

you were born to be a social media brand manager for a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company and now all you have to do is have the courage to find that job. Like people are going to be unhappy because that's not how it works. When they're on day two of their job and they're not loving it, they say, I must not have found my passion. So I should be loving this. And you start doing the job hopping

and you have the insecurity and the anxiety, getting people the more realistic advice is going to more realistically get them towards that goal. So what is the more realistic advice? I mean, this is complicated, but roughly speaking, careers have to be shaped towards a source of passion. You're going to need autonomy. You're going to need master. You're going to need a sense of impact. Most people also need either connection to people or a sense of creativity.

Those two, by the way, sometimes it's one or the other. It has to do where you are in the introversion, extroversion spectrum. So some people get great satisfaction out of creativity. and construction and are quite happy to do that isolated in their writing shed somewhere. And other people where they really get satisfaction of their work is the people they're with every day, that they're working alongside of or they're working for. Different people feel differently about that. So it's good to identify where you fall.

How do you get those traits? Well, they're rare and valuable. You have to have something rare and valuable to offer in return, and that's going to be unambiguous skills. So using deliberate practice and focus, essentialism, time blocking, and productivity, and all the different stuff we talk about. You focus on what's important. You build up really rare and valuable skills. You use that as leverage to shape your work towards these things that resonate and away from

things that don't. Over time, this continual shaping where you are bartering your increasing value in the market for increasingly valuable traits in your job gets you towards a career. That will be a real source of meaning and satisfaction. I really like my work right now, for example. It's nice to be a tenured professor that can spend a lot of time in a Deep Work HQ writing and recording podcast. and doing New Yorker pieces and going on book tours, it's great. There's a lot of autonomy. There's a lot of mastery.

There's a lot of impact. There's a lot of creativity. But the way I got to the situation was not just, oh, I decided that's the job I want when I was 22 and got it. I had the courage to choose it. It took about a decade and a half at this point's worth of deliberately practicing the key skills to increasingly build upon rare and valuable abilities that I increasingly leveraged to keep shaping my career away from the things that didn't resonate and towards the things to do. that's the path to get towards passion. You cultivate it. You don't unearth it.

All right, we have a quick one here from Jesse. Jesse says, you started working on a world without email right after deep work. Now that world without email is out, have you started another book? I mean, short answer is yes. I haven't sold it yet. So I'm not going to talk about details. I am a glutton for punishment, though. I don't go long without having a book to write before.

I end up adding one back on my plate. You know, a writer's got to write. So yeah, I'm working on things. I actually might be working on two. I'm in the proposal stage right now. If and when I sell those books, I'll start talking a little bit more about what they're going to be about.

But yes, this will be a summer where I will be back to writing. Our next question comes from Adrian. Adrian asks, how can I focus on what is essential? My big goal is not to exchange time for money anymore. Right now I'm working as a software developer and I'm making good money. The money that I make is invested in stocks and startups and in myself.

I'm also working on my own project on the side. I know that I will mainly achieve my goal through my own project. The problem is that investing is much more exciting than working on my own project. How can I focus on what is essential? Well, Adrian, you need to be careful here. As someone in the tech world myself, I have engaged. encounter time and again tech types who have convinced themselves that they're going to make a lot of money investing because they're used to in the world of technology knowing more about technology

than most people they know. So it's easy to convince themselves in the world of investing that because they've done their internet research and been on these threads and read these books, that they know more about investing than most people and they can do much better than most people. It's not really going to happen. Adrian, you're not going to find an angle in the market that's going to give you this really huge return that's above and beyond consistently over time what the market itself is doing. The fact that you are smart and that you do have time and you have had success actually makes your situation much more dangerous. This tends to be my philosophy. If you have a sort of normal amount of middle class money in the market, let's say under two

million dollars, almost certainly. You were better off just embracing the efficient market hypothesis, having your money in an almost automated way, straight in passive investing type funds like Vanguard funds, total market index funds. Once a year, you can do your reallocation between U.S. equity bonds or international equities, or if you don't even want to do that, just invest in a Vanguard target date retirement fund that basically just does those reallocations for you automatically every year. They'll also slowly start shifting your risk profile as you get in your retirement, but I like those funds in particular just because they do the reallocation for me. I don't even want to have to think about it.

So now all you got to do is just keep shoveling money into those funds. It takes almost none of your time. Next, take all that energy that you would spend with your super secret, brilliant strategy for how you're going to either, there's two ways, okay, let me say this. There's two ways that IT tech types fall into this investment spectrum. One side is you become like the hardcore boggle, which, you know, I like that way of thinking. This is what I'm advising you doing, but you get really obsessive about trying to squeeze out, you know, these extra little percentages on your, your passive investments and doing tax loss harvesting and very careful allocations. And then the other direction is, oh, I have my super secret system where I can identify, I can identify where there's opportunities in the market. You know, I read Charlie Munger.

I'm real big on value investing. I have it all figured out. Hint, you don't. You're not beating all the institutional investors that have the smartest people. in the world doing nothing about thinking about this all the time, the market is already accounted for that information, right? So there's two different ways that people in your situation get obsessed. Take all the time you would put into that obsession and invest it into making more money. My argument, and I think this is a law of consumer investments, is that if you have $2 million

or less in the market and you have you're smart and already have skills, you're a software developer, etc., the money you make by trying to make more money will far, wharf, whatever increase in returns you would have gotten by putting that time instead into studying your investments. The highest return investment that you in the situation have available is actually going to be in your own ability to produce income. And as you produce more income, because you're focusing on your own project or building your skills or gaining more autonomy in your job as you build up your career capital, if that commiserately creates more income that goes into your passive investments

so that then that income can take advantage of the overall growth of the economy over time. That is by far the greatest wealth. That's you're going to maximize your wealth by taking that approach. So again, let's put these two things side by side. One, obsess about your investments, get a small percent larger return maybe,

or perhaps even lose money because basically with those two buckets I talked about, if you're the, I'm obsessed with efficient market hypothesis and I'm very carefully allocate and I'm very carefully going to tax loss harvest and all these type of things. Okay, you're going to, you will probably make more money than just throwing it into a target date retirement fund, but just barely. If you're trying to market time or you have your value investing system or you think you can identify startups, well, you're probably actually going to lose money compared to the long term compared to the value, the investor doing straight passive income. But whatever, in either

of those scenarios, you will end up with less money than if you instead put intense energy into making more money. So now you're making more money, and therefore you're investing more money. Because again, the amount you make more each year as you invest in yourself is going to far exceed that extra 0.05% or 0.1% that you got out of doing very clever tax loss harvesting, and then you get the compound interest on that extra money for the next 30, 40 years. So I'm sounding the warning alarm, Adrian, because it's the people who are smart. that actually do the dumbest things when it comes to manage your money. So make that automated.

Don't think about that. Put your energy into your own thing. Becoming more rare, becoming more valuable. Make more money to invest. Don't try to get slightly more money out of what you have invested. That's going to be your best bet. Of course, the reason why I said $2 million is if you have, let's say, $20 million in the market, then of course the returns on your money is perhaps way higher than you can control with your own income

and getting an extra half percent of percent is going to far dwarf whatever you can make by making your freelance business more successful. So that's a whole different world. That's a good problem to have. But I think that's not the situation we're in. So make your investments boring. Make your job more lucrative. All right.

I think we have time for one more question here. It comes from Daniel. It's a long one, but a good one. Daniel says, my question returns to the theme of productivity and its role in the deep life. in brief, is a deep life truly possible without inquiring to the meaning and value of the ends for the sake of which we want to be productive? Is the deep life more than mere efficiency in pursuing whatever ends one desires to pursue? In speaking about the elements that make a life deep, you speak of improving the function

that gets us from the input to output. But is such a functionalist approach to the deep life sufficient for real depth, given that it puts the central focus on the efficiency or well-functioning, systems rather than on the value of the ends for the sake of which those systems are designed. Now, it's perhaps not surprising that in his elaboration, it turns out that Daniel is himself a philosophy professor. So what I want to do here is pick apart a little bit productivity from the deep life because I think there's some of these concepts I talk about are being mixed together here in this question in ways that I don't actually present them. And I think clarifying this will

clarify what the obvious answer is. So let's start with productivity. Daniel, references my function definition for productivity. I've since elaborated that to a funnel definition. The productivity funnel, which I've talked about on this podcast and also on my blog, basically describes the stages that gets you from the universe of things you could be doing to what you're actually doing right now with your time. It has these different stages. It has activity selection where you figure out what things do I want to do, then organization. How do I keep track of and organized to things I've committed to and then execution? How do I decide what to do right now and do that in the best possible way?

Regardless of whether you're trying to live a monastic, minimalist lifestyle dedicated to charity and deep thinking, or if you want to, on the other hand, be an incredibly busy day trading startup investor business executive, whatever it is you're trying to do, thinking through that productivity, funnel makes your life better than not. You're still going to be doing stuff. You're still going to be selecting things. You're still going to be executing. But if you do it haphazardly, that is never better than being intentional.

It is always better to have some thought about how you select things, how you organize things, and how you execute things. There's always going to be better than saying, let me just wing it. There is no advantage to winging. There is a clear distinction between productivity by this definition and the cultural interest in overload or busyness. Two separate things. Bracing productivity does not make you

someone who is embracing overload is someone who wants to be intentional versus unintentional about how they actually organize their activities. Now, productivity in general in this formulation is just a tool you can deploy as part of shaping a deep life. Ultimately, the way I talk about the deep life is that you have these different buckets

that are important to you, and each of them gets repeated, careful thought. My systematic way of doing this, as you know, is you start with a keystone habit in each just so that you can signal to yourself that I take this seriously and I'm willing to take non-trivial action on behalf of these aspects of my life. Then you go bucket by bucket and do a more extensive overhaul about what that part of your life is like. It's when doing that overhaul, that productivity, this productivity funnel will be useful. So that overhaul, you can now apply this funnel to help make sure that you're

selecting the right things and not the wrong things in that aspect of your life and that it gets organized and it gets executed in a way that doesn't take up too much time, that's meaningful, that's effective, et cetera, right? If you don't have the tools or productivity, you're limited in what you can do when you do these overhauls, but the productivity is being deployed at the service of the overhaul itself. Now, how do you decide when you're doing these overhauls of each of these parts of your life, what to focus on? Well, that's where philosophy comes in. Now, pragmatically speaking, reflection, information consumption, and experimentation is where this insight comes from. You read deep things.

You think about it. You think about your own life. You think about the things you've read. You try to build these structures within your mind, your mental schemas for how you understand the world. You make them more sophisticated as you integrate this new information with your experience. You can then build new decisions on top of that. That's just straight up introspective thinking.

And you try things. You experiment. you change what's in your life, what you focus on, what you don't focus on. It's all a process. That's philosophy. That's really important. And it's something we all need to spend probably more time doing than we do right now. It's arguably one of the big casualties of the attention economy revolution because having that algorithmically optimized distraction in our pocket at every moment robs us of those times where before we would do that introspection, we would have that solitude, we would do that

thinking, we would gain those insights. Now we look at TikTok instead. It's an issue. You can't short change the philosophical work of actually thinking when figuring out what you want in these different parts of your life. So on the one hand, Daniel, I think it's good that you're emphasizing that philosophy part is hard and you have to do it and it's an ongoing process you have to do throughout your life. It's not something you can do once and then be set. But I would really downgrade to address the other part of your question. And the role that productivity plays in this, outside of the fact that it's just a useful tool you have when it comes time to actually make real changes in your life, regardless of what you're trying to do, again, to come back to this message again and again, having intention about how you go from, here's the stuff out there and here's what I'm doing right now, is always better than being haphazard.

So I would push back on this idea that I have a functionalist definition of the deep life. I actually have quite an introspective definition of the deep life. It's something that you cultivate over time. But then I have a functionalist perspective on how you execute things once you've decided how or what you want to do. There, having your act together is going to let you act in a more meaningful way than just coming at things haphazardly. And with that, I think we're coming at the end of this episode.

I thank you for listening. Thank you for submitting your questions. Calnewport.com slash podcast, learn how to submit your own questions. While there, sign up for my weekly newsletter, get my famed weekly essay on these topics. I'll be back on Thursday with a mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.