Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 105: Should I Read the News?

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - How do you apply deep work when your job is entirely shallow? [4:37] - Is batching emails a few times a day a good practice? [12:20] - Why are some tips for managing the flow of emails and texts from clients? [19:54] - What am I (Cal) working during my teaching sabbatical this spring? [26:45] - What are the ideal ratios for writing, thinking, and reading in a day? [29:47] - Can I (Cal) elaborate on how I track deep work? [34:17] - How do you avoid easing up on the gas after tenure? [35:58] - How do I teach my kids to appreciate career capital? [40:08]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How does Cal Newport handle stress? [46:44] - how much news should I be reading? [51:55] - Is there a connection between Stephen Covey's saw and Newport's buckets? [57:59] - How do you (Cal) deal with failure and setbacks? [1:00:21]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 105. Quick announcements. A bit of news that I was pleased to hear earlier this week is that as we arrive at June, we are, if you can believe it, six months into the year 2021. And so as they do each year, Amazon just recently released their best books of 2021 so far. So they do this list for the first six months, and then they do it again for the second six months of the year. And I was pleased to see that a world without email was selected as one of the best books of 2021 so far.

It was in the business and leadership category, one of 20 books selected for that category. The reason why I'm both proud and relieved is that is a really broad and difficult category. Amazon includes almost everything under the category of business and leadership. It's not just business books. I mean, you have Simon Winchester's new book, Land, was one of the other best books of 2021 in that category. You had Sanjay Gupta's book in there. You had the Empire of Pain, the book about Sackler family and the origin of the opioid crisis. You had the whiteness of wealth in there.

So it's a really broad category that actually captures a lot of general nonfiction. So, you know, I'm glad we somehow made it in under that wire. Really, there was two types of responses to a world without email. the type of response I really appreciated was the response that captured that there was some big ideas here, trying to really understand the current structure of work and how we got there and what that means for our future. The responses I was less happy about were those that queueed in on just productivity advice. Oh, so what are these suggestions for how we should use our email list? This was a big think book, and so I am glad that Amazon acknowledged that and put it as one of the best books of the year so far in a category full of

of other really well-crafted big think books. Digital minimalism was also selected for this list back when I came out in 2019. So I am pleased to keep that streak alive and I'm pleased for everyone who has so far bought the book. And if you haven't, my goodness, you need to. A roll without email. Come on. It is going to change the way you think about how we work, how we got there, and what

the future is going to look like. All right, that's enough for brief announcements. Let's do a quick sponsor read so that we can then get right in. to the questions for this week's show. And that sponsor is Magic Spoon. It's funny, we're leaving later today, my family to go visit my grandparents up in New Jersey at the home where I grew up. My dad asked me over a text message, who was at the store, oh, what treat cereals do your boys

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I do accounts receivables, and it seems that there's no room for deep work. And when I encountered your section in your book Deep Work about a shallow work budget, I was concerned when you said to go and start planning how you can transition into a new position at values depth. So is there no hope or should I try to do deep work at a shallow work job like a job? like accounts receivables. So in honor of the news of a world without email being selected for that list, I thought I would start to show with three questions in a row that are all relevant to that book. And this is the first such question. So Laura is talking about, there is a part in my older book, Deep Work, when I'm talking about

getting more explicit about how much deep work you're doing, how much shallow work. Remember, deep work is where you're concentrating. on something hard for a non-trivial amount of time without context switching or distraction. Shallow work is everything else. And in there, I argued, once you're clear, right, once you're clear about what these numbers are, if you think you're doing a way more shallow work than deep work for, in a way that's not reasonable for your position, you should really try to, in a quantitative way, negotiate this with your supervisor.

Here's how much shallow work, here's how much deep, what's the right ratio? And if they say, well, I don't care. you to work in a way that means you can do very little deep work, then you should consider another job. To clarify what I meant there is if you're in a job that deep work is critical to success in the job, and yet there is no way to avoid a working style where you work where deep work is almost impossible, that is when you should consider another position. It doesn't necessarily mean that the only meaningful jobs are jobs that reward undistracted

intense concentration. So this brings us to a world without email. A world without email, which is the follow-up to deep work. If you read deep work, you have to read a world without email. These are the ying and the yang, the alpha and the omega. These things just go together. In there, I give a much more nuanced ontology of knowledge work. And I break it up into three different jobs. There's makers, managers, and minders. So makers are people who, in a knowledge work context, create new value with their mind by implying hard-won skills to information to produce more valuable information.

This is the traditional type of job in which unbroken concentration helps you do your job better. So if you're a computer program, if you're a writer, if you're doing ad copywriting, etc. Your primary value comes from creating new value with your mind. It's a creative act. It's a skilled act. Deep work helps.

If you're a manager, now you're trying to manage teams. Now you're trying to manage teams of maybe makers, right, and other types of people. It's not that deep work is irrelevant. There is needs to be a place for long, hard thought, especially when you're trying to do strategy or solve a naughty problem about what's going on with your employees. I mean naughty there in terms of K-N-O-T-T-Y. Get your mind out of the gutter. So there's not that deep work is not important, but the bulk of what you're doing is maybe more logistical, making sure people have what they need,

checking in on progress, making sure that all of the gears in your proverbial knowledge, work machinery are meshing. Then you have minders, which is, I'm just being alliterative there, but really this means support staff, so that you are offering support, whether this is in, like, an executive assistant role or an IT support role or in a university. This could be in a grant management support role for academics, etc. Again, a job in which long periods of unbroken concentration might not be relevant. Okay, so what is important in all of these jobs? The thing I emphasize in a world without email is sequentiality. There's a word for you.

Sequentiality. Doing one thing until you're done or get to a natural stopping point, taking a beat, then switching to the next. Now, if you're a maker, the one thing might be three hours of computer programming. If you're a manager, that one thing might be, I'm having a conversation with this employee. And then the next thing is, I need to look at these numbers and make it for the, quarterly forecast and see if I need to adjust my plans. And then the next thing is I need to talk on the phone with the head of HR about some new policy changes. And if you're a reminder,

the one thing might be, I need to check in on this question I asked on behalf of the person I support about some reimbursement. The next thing is I need to book travel. The next thing is I need to pull together a rough version of this proposal. They're submitting one thing after another, what those one things are look different, how long they'll require. Is it? different, whether or not they require intense concentration or not will be different. But the unifying thread is that by giving something your full attention before moving on to the next, you were getting the best usage out of your brain. You're going to do that whatever it is, be it long and contemplative or short and logistical, you were going to give that effort, you're going to

execute it as well as possible and as quickly as possible, because this is the way our brains function. The alternative to this is an approach to your job where you're constantly paging in and out all sorts of different things. You're interleaving. I'm kind of working on a minder. I'm kind of working on getting an answer to this, but answering a few other messages at the same time. I'm working on a draft of this proposal,

but I'm also answering email questions about something else. As a manager, I'm on my phone answering emails as I'm in the meeting with you. I have my slack open while I'm on the Zoom with the person from HR. I'm constantly interleaving lots of work. As the minder, I'm coding, but I'm also trying to answer subject matter expert questions that are popping up in my chat, or I'm a doctor who's trying to do diagnoses, but the epic messaging is continually bothering me and I'm trying to keep up with it. That is going to really reduce your ability to do whatever you're doing well.

It's going to slow you down. It can produce worse results. And it's going to give you cognitive fatigue. It's going to burn you out. You're going to be able to work less total hours. You're going to be less useful and a less happy employee. So I think this is a much more general approach to how we should structure work if we're going to be very aware of how the mind works, one thing at a time, giving it your full attention,

then move on to the next. That, I would say, Laura is more useful than thinking about deep work is good, shallow work is bad, I need a job with deep work. What you need is a way to structure your job so you can do one thing at a time with your full attention. You're going to be much happy, you're going to get much better work done. Now, there might be other reasons why you want to shift that job. If you're in a minder role at accounts receivable, you have good systems, you're giving things attention one at a time, you don't have mental fatigue, you're on top of it, that might not be scratching the itch that you have. We know from self-determination theory, for example, that some people have a real calling for mastery of something more difficult or they want to express themselves creatively and maybe you're not getting that.

And that might be a reason to shift to another job. Sure. But not everyone has that itch to scratch. So I'm giving a long answer to this short question because I think it's important to give this, I think it was a purely generalized approach to work. Now, if you apply this purely, I would call it cognitively aware approach to optimizing work, a lot of the suggestions of deep work, which apply primarily to makers, fall out of that. Yeah, if you apply this theory to deep the makers, yes, you should be doing long periods of uninterrupted work. And if your job makes that impossible, but you're a maker, you need to change something.

But now we can apply the same theory to minders. We can apply the same theory to managers. Again, I get into this in great detail in a world without email. Continuing our email theme, our next question comes from David. David says, I completed your email academy and in reading your new book, as I make process and protocol changes, is batching email a few times a day is still a good practice. In the current hive mind email frenzy, batching email at a few times a day helps, but there's still some angst about not always checking email. I should probably first quickly clarify when David refers to the email academy. This was a short video course I had produced as a pre-order thank you.

So people who pre-ordered a world without email got access to that course. So let's talk about email batching, this idea of I Will Check Email Less. This was one of the original solutions that was proposed when email overload first became an issue. I mean, the timeline I trace, roughly speaking, is 1990 to 1995. you see the spread of email throughout offices. It's spreading to solve a practical problem. It was replacing fax machines. It was replacing voicemail.

And it was replacing inner office memos and it did a really good job. And it was cheap, relatively speaking. So it spread really quickly. Then once it was there, and this is the argument for my book, it transformed people into a new way of collaborating that I called the hyperactive hive mind. We say, oh, I have low friction digital communication. I can send a message to one or many people very quickly. this led

emergently, without intention, without design, without a managerial directive, it led naturally or emergently to a new way

of collaborating where we just figure things out with back and forth ad hoc messages all the time. The issue with this is it didn't scale.

We soon had dozens and dozens of different concurrent ongoing asynchronous back and forth conversations, which basically

forced us to have to check our inbox all the time to try to keep up with all of them. Therein lies the problem

of email overload. So you first get the signal of email overload being an issue in the early 2000s. In the late 90s, we were sort of celebrating email. This is where you get the Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan movie, You Got Mail. It's kind of a cool thing. By the early 2000s, we begin to get the signal of email overload. David Allen's book, Getting Things Done, comes out around this time. So one of the first major time management business advice books to really identify email overload as an issue. In 2007, this is when Tim Ferriss's book

a, the four-hour work week blew up. And again, we often look back on that book in terms of its lifestyle design prescriptions. You know, you can radically redesign your life so you can work a lot less and, uh, and still make enough money to live. Let's rethink what our goals are. And very aspirational ideas. But the thing that kicked it off, and I've made this argument many times, the thing that kicked that book off was actually him pushing back on email. And that's because the timing was perfect. Email overload was just reaching a point by 2007, we're especially in Silicon Valley. People were done. We all feel it now, but they were the first people to feel it in the first decade of the 2000s. So when Tim Ferriss showed up

at South by Southwest in 2007 and gave this talk and focused in the talk on email overload, it was a huge response. And this is what drove this enthusiastic coverage from, at the time, very influential tech bloggers who were there. And that coverage is what really got this book taking off. It's why Tim was originally labeled a Silicon Valley guru is what jump started the book is rise. I just say that to try to pinpoint in time when email overload really became a thing. Okay, the original solution offered at that time was actually offered in Tim's book, was put on a slide in that 2007 talk. This was the idea from that original talk that I saw cited most often by the tech reporters was

batch when you check your email. Do it twice a day. Put an auto responder if you need to that says, I check my email twice a day. Here's when I do it. This was sort of the first salvo of an attack back against email overload and it made sense on paper. Okay, if I'm only checking it twice a day,

it can't cause me to do all this context shifting for the rest of my time. The issue is this never really stuck. You know, people tried the auto responders, but it generated a bad response from colleagues, and you don't see that as much anymore. Then we got some interesting research. Gloria Mark did some interesting research where they had thermal cameras so they could monitor stress reactions of the employees and correlate them with inbox usage. And they asked, they randomized a group, and half of the group was asked to batch their email. Only check it, I guess it was twice a day in this experiment.

For a lot of people in the group, it really raised their stuff. stress. You know, the idea that I'm waiting to check my email actually made them less happy. It made them more miserable, right? You can actually tie this to specific traits from the Big Five personality survey. So in particular trait, neuroticism was really highly correlated with stress caused by batching. But what was going on here is ultimately, once this hyperactive hive mind approach a collaboration emerged as the dominant form of collaboration in offices, you need to check

your inbox all the time for the wheels of work to keep turning. If you have dozens of ongoing back and forth asynchronous discussions, collaborations, decisions being made with these back and forth messaging, at any moment, there's some messages that have come in that until you answer them, that whole conversation's at a halt. Now, think about a lot of these conversations need to happen quick. These are things that in a pre-email day we would have got on the phone and done it in five minutes.

Now we're doing it with back and forth, we kind of need this conversation to resolve today. I mean, we can't drag out something we used to do in a five-minute phone call over five days. Now, if you have ten different conversations that are going to have to have five or six back and forth and they all have to fit within the same day,

there is really no way to avoid having to check your inbox all the time. This is why batching fails. It is a superficial fix to the deeper problem. As long as you have dozens of these urgent back and forth conversations happening in your inbox, batching causes problems. Because of that, it's going to be stressful and you eventually are

going to have to go back to the way you're doing it before. The ultimate solution, and this is the key point in a world without email, is you have to change the underlying rules by which you collaborate so that there isn't six or seven urgent back and forth messages used as the primary way that you reach those decisions or collaborate or get an answer on a question. We need alternative ways that doesn't require me having to see, emails arriving unpredictably and get back to them quickly. So I like to use the metaphor of a boat filling with water. To me, batching is like, hey, when bailing out this boat, it's filling up with water because

there's a hole in the bottom. Instead of using a small cup and trying to bail more frequently, use a big cup and try to bail less frequently, you still have a boat filling with water at about the same rate. The ultimate solution is how do we fix that hole? And so, yeah, I'm not a big believer in batching as solving our problems. In general, I'm not a big believer in any of these inbox-centric user hacks being the key to our problems. You cannot notification adjust, batch, or subject line tweak your way out of the issues of the hyperactive hive mind. We have to go underneath and replace the underlying rules by which we collaborate so that unscheduled messages requiring urgent responses become incredibly rare.

All right, let's do our third and final email-themed question here. Russell asks, do you have tips for managing the flow of email and text from clients? I work in real estate. I might have 10 to 15 clients at a time in various stages of looking at homes or under contract working towards closing. Ad vendors, attorneys, etc. and none of them can, I dictate communication policy. Buyers looking for a new home may need to contact me urgently to see a new listing. All of this adds up to a hodgepodge of comms. That's a good band name, Hodgpodge of Coms. I'm having difficulty finding a way to bring some order to it.

Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated. Hoya Saxa. Well, Russell, this is a good question. I, of course, would not expect anything less from a fellow Georgetown man. I actually had some interesting conversations about this specific issue. When we last sold a house, so when we moved a few years ago, I was having some conversations with a real estate agent because She knew I'd written deep work and et cetera, et cetera. And we'd have some interesting conversations about her relationship with email and text.

And like you and like I think most successful realtors, it is not a very happy relationship. So to help answer this question, I'm going to draw from a key idea from a world without email. When we think that clients demand accessibility, and as you say here, with none of them, can I dictate communication policy, often we are overestimating the reality. Often what we see as a demand for accessibility is actually a demand for clarity. In the absence of any clear structure I trust for how interactions with you happen, my default is going to be, okay, I want to hear back from you right away. Why? Because otherwise, I have to ambiguously keep track of this thing indefinitely in my head. That's a cognitive burden. I don't want it. So if I, in this case,

I'm working with you to buy a house and I come across a listing and I don't know, we just always have texted and sent emails haphazardly. I'm going to say, okay, great. Now here's something on my mind. I have to get back to work. I don't want to have to just indefinitely keep track of this. So what I would love to do in the absence of other structure is just text Russell about this and have them get back to me right away because then once you get back to me, then I can release it from my mind and clear up that cognitive space. if on the other hand there's much clearer

trusted structures for how this communication works it gives me another way of saying okay here's how I can take care of this get it off my mind right now

and trust it will be taken care of I am fine even if you don't get back to me right away in fact in many cases and I talk about this in a world without email

I don't even really want you to get back to me right away because I'm doing other things right now I'm just trying to upload this off my brain but if I don't trust

that this is going to get handled then I better get a response right away so I can get it off my mind. All right, so what might that look like for a real estate agent? I'm just making things up here because I don't know your industry well, but I just want to give you a for instance. Imagine, for example, that you maintain office hours every day.

Maybe they're often in the morning when you're not showing as many listings. They're accessible in a really nice scheduling tool. You have a white-labeled version of Callanley or something that's branded with you and looks really nice. And you really hammer home with your clients in a positive way. You have any questions, you have any concerns, you want to talk about a trend you've seen, you want to check in with what's going on. Grab a 30-minute meeting whenever off of this scheduling tool and I'll call you on the phone. We'll get into it.

Any day you need it, grab it. I always want to make sure that I'm here to discuss things with you. There's one example. For a lot of people, that's great because, again, let's go back to my theory that it's cognitive burden relief that people are looking for, not actually accessibility. So now here I am. We're buying a house with Russell. We're going with him because he's a Georgetown man and we would trust nothing less. And I don't know, something comes up.

You know, we see some listing a house go for what's cheaper than we thought in our neighborhood. We get really worried. We're like, oh, man, I don't know. I'm worried about this. This is now a thing I'm worried about. I want to talk to Russell about this. It's on my mind. In the absence of this structure and say, okay, I guess I'll just text them about it.

I kind of hope you respond right away because otherwise I have to keep track of it. But what if in the moment I could say, oh, man, let's grab a meeting. And I jump on the calendar and grab something for Wednesday morning, 30 minutes. You're like, oh, no, I don't have to worry about it. I don't have to think about it in my head. On Wednesday morning, Russell will call us, we'll get into it. I got cognitive relief. I didn't need to talk to you right now.

What I needed was not to have to keep thinking about this thing right now. And that has solved the problem. Imagine in another hypothetical case study here, you have a special text address or a special email address. It's not your name, but an email address that's, you know, listings or something like this. And you just have the system like, hey, if you ever see a listing, you want to know more about your interested in, just, you know, shoot the Zillow link or the Redfin link, just shoot it to this text message, shoot it right to, right to this address.

And we will get, we will get something on the books. And, you know, you check this a couple times a day or you hire a virtual assistant that checks this every hour. I mean, however you want to do this. Or you have a web page set up with your calendar, where there's time. however you want to do it, but you could imagine a way where basically you have a system for people showing you listings they're interested in. And there is a process for quickly getting that into the system and getting an appointment set up later that day for you to go see it or something like this, right? That doesn't involve you having to see and respond to that text on the flight.

Now think about, I don't know, your works with attorneys or title companies or something, and maybe you have two half days a week that this is my attorney time, you know? And it's like I don't do showings during those two half days. this is when, you know, the attorneys I work with or whatever, the loan agents, like I just hang out at their offices. It's where I always batch all of these meetings. Again, these are hypotheticals, but I'm giving you a rough picture of what a more structured life would be like. And the structure here, again, is trading accessibility for clarity, ways for people to get what they need in a way that gives them immediate cognitive relief. They don't have to keep track of things because they can do something right now that puts into a system they trust. It gets the thing addressed with no more effort from them. And then there's some structure to what happens when that I don't care as a client.

I mean, I don't know that your Wednesday afternoons or your attorney time. Okay, whatever. So we're not doing showings on Wednesday afternoon. I don't care about that. I just want to make sure that we're seeing listings and you're doing a good job selling my house. So Russell, I would say have hope. Do not assume that you can't dictate communication policy. Accessibility is overrated.

People don't need that as much as you think. Go back and read the principles in a world without email to get some more inspiration. and I think you can make your life quite a bit better. All right, let's speed things up here with a couple quicker questions. Questions not necessarily about email. This one comes from Aaron. Aaron says, hi, Cal. I was just wondering what specific projects you will be focusing on during your teaching sabbatical this spring.

All right, so as Aaron points out, I have been on a teaching sabbatical. It's actually called a senior research fellowship, I guess. It's a fellowship out of the provost office at Georgetown, which buys you out of your teaching obligations. So what was the purpose of that fellowship? What was my proposal? It was actually to focus on some of these issues of the impact of technology on culture, especially in the context of the workplace. The proposal was for me to do some deeper thinking about those issues, as I think from a public intellectual perspective, these are topics, especially now with the pandemic and remote work. and transformation of work and trying to renegotiate this.

This is a time where these issues have become quite relevant, and it's a place to have some deep academic thinking. So probably the best place to see some of those thoughts reflected in recent months would be the New Yorker writing I've been doing recently. So I've been really trying to the best of my ability to have some impact on the conversation, especially when it comes to things like work and work from home and what's going on with the pandemic and trying to understand those. There are also some longer-term academic projects and collaborations that have been kicked off during this period.

there's no publicly visible work from that yet, but the groundwork has been laid for a shift in which academic work, including not just in prestige publication like the New Yorker, but also peer-reviewed academic work on cultural criticism, technology and culture, philosophy of technology, these issues that I work in, is going to start to have a place next to my peer-reviewed computer science work as a combined academic portfolio. So stay tuned for that. Now, the spring is over. We are now in the summer at Georgetown. A thing about universities is that you don't work in the summer. I'm on a 10-month salary. I'm paid for 10 months. I'm not paid for June and July.

Now, you can get research grants to pay your salary in the summer, so you can work on that research. As a junior faculty going for 10-year, this is what I did every summer. This is actually the first summer where I'm taking no research funding for the summer, entirely paying my paycheck from writing-related income. which means I am entirely free in some sense from Georgetown for the summer. And I'm really trying to lean into that. The one exception, of course, is I still meet with my PhD student because he is working on stipend this summer.

We're working on research. And I still am doing computer science research. I'm still meeting with my collaborators and working on that. But I'm otherwise very much temporarily free from the university because, hey, I'm paying my own paycheck. So this is a, it's an interesting feeling to have that type of temporary, true, free. So we'll see how that goes. Our next question comes from Victor. Victor says with eight hours in a given workday, what is your ideal ratio to aim for between

deep writing, deep thinking, and deep reading? Well, Victor, I'll answer this question for myself. Let me just lay the caveat up front, of course, that the answer to these questions differ significantly depending on what your job is. So this is not universal answers. So for me, the key ratio is deep to shallow work. For my job, what is the ideal ratio between deep work and non-deep work? Now, within that deep work piece of the ratio, you can subdivide that into sub-ratios for writing, thinking, and reading, which, as you point out, are roughly speaking, the primary things I do in my deep work.

Those sub-ratios shift all the time, depending on where I am on project cycles, where I am in the semester, where I am with what's going on. So I'm happy for those to shift. The thing that I'm going to try to keep more stable is deep to shallow work. My ideal deep to shallow work, honestly, is six hours of deep work to two hours of shallow. If I had a magic wand, that's what I would do. If I was a full-time writer, that is what I would do. That, of course, is not always possible. As a university professor, there is a lot of shallow obligations that you have to do to serve your part and some that you have to fight off.

book launch time also can really hurt that overall ratio. There's a lot of shallow work that comes up with book launching or with new logistical projects like the new web portal I'm working on. But if it was a perfect world, it would be up, exercise, six hours of some combination of writing, thinking, reading, two hours of phone calls, emails, talking to the web designer, approving things, whatever you need to do, and then boom, shut off for the day. That would be my deal. Now, again, I don't reach that.

I do in the summer more frequently, but in general, I don't reach it, but that would be my ideal. And then the sub ratios really shifts. Like right now, I'm on deadline for an article. So there's a lot of time spent writing. However, there's other times where I'm, let's say, working primarily on trying to crack a proof for an article. And it's very heavily thinking. Reading is something I just do a lot of regardless. I do a super lot amount.

If there's books I need to read for a, let's say I'm doing a, I'm writing a book chapter. I'm writing an article for something like The New Yorker, which is highly citational. I might read an extra amount because I'm doing research for that. But just my background rate is pretty high. I mean, I average more than a book a week. And so reading is just a big part of my routine because it is the grist to my idea generating, my idea of purifying mill. So I always do a bunch of reading.

But thinking and writing just depends what's going on. Am I preparing for an article? I'm thinking all day. Am I trying to get that article done? I'm writing all day. And I'm okay for those sub ratios to change. But that six hours to two hours, man, I think that is a sweet spot. A quick aside about this, Jim Collins used to do this.

So once he left Stanford, he was a Stanford professor, he left Stanford to focus on his business writing and consulting. And he talked about this in his interview a couple years ago on Tim Ferriss's podcast. I've also seen him talk about this in past interviews as well. He had this ideal ratio of, I think for him. him, it was teaching and thinking and something else. Service, I guess, like administrative, shallow work helping other people. And he had on his whiteboard. And now that I'm remembering this, I think I also wrote a blog post about this years ago with a picture of his whiteboard. But what he said is he bought a stopwatch that could have triple timers. You have three different timers on

the stopwatch. I think it was for like track and field coaching. He would diligently keep track of every moment, like what stopwatch is going. The service one, the teaching one, the research one, or whatever his categories were. And he really was like, I'm going to hit these marks. And he worked backwards from that and had to make major changes. I was saying no to a lot of things. He had to really simplify his life. But he found that really successful. Now, I think more recently, he's moved on from that strict timer method. And he simplified things even more so that it's sort of superfluous. You know, he's he is a guy. He's very interesting, very hard to reach. It's not that interested in coming to speak at your

company, not that interested in jumping on the phone. He really is locked in what he wants to do, but I thought that was cool that he did that so concretely. All right, let's do another quick question here. This one comes from Tony. He asks, can you elaborate on how you track your deep work hours? Well, Tony, I can't really elaborate that much. I mean, it's pretty simple. And I think in some sense, that's the point. So I use my time block planner, which of course you can find out more about it, timeblock planner.com. The time block planner has on every day a metric tracking space. Every night, I track my main metrics to things I keep track of to make sure that the keystone habits of my deep life get hit. One of the things I track

is deep work. I write D.W. colon. And then I do two hash tallies, right? So, you know, you know, three hash marks or four hash marks in a diagonal hash mark to get the five. I have one hash tally of the hours spent on computer science and one hash mark spent. on the hour spent on writing. I like to break those out because I have these two sort of distinctive types of deep work. It's not so important to me

that they're balanced every day. I just like to know the difference. And that's it. Now when I do my strategic plan updates, I like to glance back through my metrics like I suggest in the intro of the time block planner. And I can see if there's some interesting trends there. Am I getting enough deep work?

What's the balance? But honestly, as with a lot of metrics, the benefit is prospective. knowing that you were going to have to record at the end of the day how many deep work hours you did can in the moment give you that final push needed to actually stick to that time block schedule and do that deep work because you don't want to put the big goose egg next to that DW colon at the end of the day.

Our next question comes from Charles. Charles asks, how do you avoid easing up on the gas too much after tenure? Well, Charles, for some academics at research institutions, this is not an issue. The question's not relevant. They have a research direction they're really into. Maybe they're in a biochem lab and their experiments are having success and they're innovating a new technique. And yeah, 10 year is nice, but they're rock and rolling. They're going to keep going. Those NAH grants are still coming in. Or you're a theoretician. And you like it. You're on a roll. You're in a new area. You're writing a lot of papers. You enjoy writing the papers. Hey, tenure came and went. Okay, that's fine. But whatever.

a rock and roll. Now, if you're asking the question, you're probably in the other category, which is the hunt-to-get tenure, maybe starting to burn you out. Maybe you feel overworked. You know, you're in a position where you're worried about easing up on the gas means that you are feeling in your life some back pressure that's nudging you towards that direction, which is quite a few academics as well fall into that category. My suggestion for someone in that category is to not ease up the gas, but get looser with your route planning. All right. So I'm trying to follow a driving metaphor here. So don't just ease up on the gas and just say, I'm just going to do less altogether. Instead, you should get more bold, leverage the

autonomy that tenure grants, so that the whole purpose for academic tenure is to give you this freedom to now make intellectual explorations that are higher risk or more interesting, and go off that main road and explore other side roads that could be interesting that capture your attention that re-energize you. You're using the same amount of gas. You're not letting up on the gas in this metaphor, but you're also not just barreling down the interstate. Now, this might lead to a fallow period or a period of less publications, but if what it gets you to is intellectual rejuvenation, a new direction that energizes you, that's a fantastic place to be. that's actually 10-year working as 10-year is supposed to work.

This is kind of similar to what I was doing. I mean, I was barely out of MIT in the Georgetown foot down on the pedal. I had my directions, you know, paper, paper, paper, NSF grant, NSF grant, supervising PhD students, publishing a ton. I kept that momentum going, got tenure early. It went going a little bit longer after that because there's still a lot of momentum in the car. And I would say now, of course, more recently, that foot is as high. far down on the accelerator has ever been, but I'm trying, I'm taking exits off this metaphorical

interstate. I'm looking at new research topics. I, I didn't jump into a new large three or four year grant program after my last pre-tenure grant expired recently. I am, as I was talked about earlier, in, you know, on a research fellowship exploring also academic approaches to some of these philosophy of technology issues I deal with. I'm doing more public-facing public intellectual style writing. I published two books since 10-year and have done a bunch of writing for the New Yorker and a bunch of New York Times op-ed. So my foot is not off the gas pedal. But I didn't want to just keep going writing the exact same theory of distributed systems papers that I had been writing. Just, okay, now here's my next topic. Get a grant. Do that for three years. Here's my next topic. Get a grant. Do that for three years. When I can do that, but I just felt like that was not going to be intellectually satisfying enough to do that from now until I'm 65. And so I'm exploring some side where it's still publishing, obviously. I mean, things slowed down during the pandemic like it did for a lot of people with kids, but papers getting in, papers being submitted, but I'm also doing this other work, this exploration as well. So that's what I, so Charles, if you're in that situation, it sounds like you are, don't let your foot up the gas, that's just

going to, you're going to get stuck, you might fall into despair, you might have a hard time getting back into work, you might end up in sort of terminal associate mode where it kind of just lose your will to work. That's not going to make you happy, but use experimentation and exploration. Don't completely give up on your main research, but be willing to slow that down slightly to explore new research with the idea that a few years after tenure, you're going to be doing really cool, interesting new things. All right. Let's do one last quick question here. This really could fall under deep work or deep life, so I put it at the end. So it's sort of right on the border between the two.

It comes from Mike. Mike says I have a 13, 10, 8, and 5 year old. I never completed college, but found success in my 30s as a self-employed mortgage broker earning a six-figure income. income. I'm trying to get my oldest children to start thinking about developing rare and useful skills, but they're distracted by everything that distracts children of that age. Well, Mike, in general, my advice, which you should take with a grain of salt, my kids are largely younger than yours, and I'm not a particular expert in parenting, but just hearing from readers of mine about how they've applied these ideas, what works, what doesn't,

I would say when you have younger kids at home, the most effective tool you have at that point is leading by example, live your life visibly in a way that personifies the values you hope to pass on. They need to just see this through osmosis year after year. If you want a kid, for example, to not live a life a complete shallow distraction on a phone, don't have a phone with you when you're in the house. If you want a kid to recognize the power of career capital, let them see you. Focus on the things that matter, build up skills. Use that to keep pushing your job and your living situations into better situations, more

autonomy, more mastery, more satisfaction, and be clear about narrating what you're doing. But it's sort of a show-don't-tell strategy. Now, when they get to college age, I think that's probably the right time to start to get explicit. Like, let's start talking about, as you transition towards adulthood, let's start talking about actually putting some meat on these implicit bones. Let's start talking about articulating the philosophies here that describe the life you saw me lead. And then that's a good place where you say, okay, here's so good they can't ignore you. You know, I want you to read this, etc. Right. So right now, lead by example for, you can narrate it, but basically lead by example. And then once you get to about college

ages where you have to start actually getting explicit about what they were seeing and how you accomplish that before that, an adolescent brain just has too much else going on to sit down and say, yeah, tell me about Cal Newport, tell me about leveraging career capital, tell me about the auction versus the winner take all markets for careers. Like, I'm not thinking there now. What I'm thinking about is am I being ghosted by my girlfriend and it's going to be awkward if I go to that party? Lead by example now. Flesh out those examples soon. Before we move on to questions about the deep life, I want to briefly talk about another sponsor

that makes this show possible and that is grammarly. If you can write clearly, it is like a superpower. People will be impressed by you. People will understand what you're trying to say. People will be convinced by you. It opens up all. sorts of doors. Now, the issue is writing clearly is something that's difficult, requires practice and feedback. Now, if you're someone like me who has been a professional writer since I

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It can also give you vocabulary suggestions, help you avoid overused words and phrases, help keep your readers engaged. I mean, this is stuff that I used to get from editors. I'm very impressed. I don't know how the machine learning works here. I'm very impressed by how well Grammarly Premium can simulate that for you, again, on all the places you write on all the devices that you do that writing. So it's time to do more than just spell check and get your writing to that level of clarity that you want it to be at. And you can do that with Grammarly Premium. Now here's the good news.

You can get 20% off a Grammarly premium subscription when you sign up at Grammarly.com slash deep. That's 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y. Dot com slash deep. I also want to talk about ExpressVPN. Now, if you're not using a VPN, you should be, especially when you are connecting to the internet away from your home. Here's how a VPN works. Instead of just directly talking to whatever web server or app server that you're trying to communicate with, you instead create a

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to the ExpressVPN server is so secure means that people who are trying to listen in right next to you at the cafe or in the airport are just going to see encrypted gobbly gook that even with the world's most powerful supercomputers they would never be able to break. I mean, one way to think about using a service like ExpressVPN is that it provides a similar role to your internet use that car insurance provides for your driving.

You wouldn't go driving without car insurance. Well, you shouldn't be using the internet, especially in public, without having a VPN. And when it comes to VPN's ExpressVPN is my favorite. They have servers all around the world with really good capacity. So the connection is very fast. You don't even notice you're going through a VPN server. And it works with all of your devices in a seamless way. easy to actually deploy. So if you want to use a VPN and you should, ExpressVPN is your best

choice. So secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash deep. That's XPR, E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash deep. And you will get an extra three months free if you go to ExpressVPN.com slash deep. And with that, let us move on to questions about the deep life. Our first question comes from Noel. Noel asks, How does Cal Newport manage stress? I'm in my third year as an assistant professor.

I've been feeling really stressed about the pressure associated with my position. I don't have enough time in the workday to do everything. I can't work later weekends because I have two small children. I feel stressed by having too much to do and not enough time. Noel, this all sounds familiar. when I was a third year assistant professor, I also had young children at home. I did not have the option of working outside of normal work hours

because that's when our child care ended, et cetera, et cetera. So I can definitely empathize. Now, the one thing I want to make clear up front is that I did feel stressed. And I still do feel stressed. There's all sorts of things in my life that produce stress. Ten year maybe reduced some of the research stress, but there's a lot of stress that comes along with moving to the next level in my writing career.

there's a lot of stress that comes along with some of my business ventures. There's stress that comes along with trying to change my research direction partially in the slump and publication that produced. And I don't necessarily handle stress that well, Noel. I mean, for me, it tends to screw up my sleep, which is not fun. It makes me just in generally a less fun person to be around. Now, my philosophy is the avoidance of stress in general is not only not really feasible but not desirable.

Stress often accompanies pushing for something. ambitious or aspirational, as an assistant professor trying to become a tenured professor, there is real value in that, both to your life and to the institution, but it's stressful to do. What I'm wary of is persistent stress or chronic stress. If my life is constructed in such a way that I just continually feel stressed, that's a no-go for me. So there's a few things I throw at this issue. One, in the very short term, and this time I'm going to do this, short-term, medium term, and long-term, In the very short term, I really rely on scheduling, planning, and shutdown rituals.

I do not want to keep things in my head. I do not want to be at 8 o'clock on a Tuesday worrying about, well, what about this report and getting back to my collaborator and this question my chair had. I want things out of my head, so it has a chance of actually clearing out some of these professional networks really inhibiting those networks. And so I have my strategic plan, which feeds into my weekly plan, which feeds into my daily time block plan, which ends with a schedule shutdown complete. I have reviewed everything before I do that shutdown and I'm comfortable shutting down until the

next morning. In the short term, that makes a big difference. In the medium term, I embrace seasonality. Okay, here's a busier time. I need to offset that with a less busy time. I need to purposely try to arrange, okay, these summer months I'm going to pull back aggressively. I'm going to work on just research, just three hours a day and take the rest of the days off. Okay, in the fall, I have a big service teaching requirement.

So I'm just going to be working on my NIH grant and just. just doing that. And then I'm going to take the Christmas break off, the holiday break off pretty aggressively. Go off the grid. And then in the spring, I'm going to be more research focused, my teaching loads less, up and down, up and down. Pulse, harder periods, which are unavoidable and hard jobs like being a professor with less hard recovery periods. A good book here, read peak performance. That's co-authored by my friend Brad Stolberg, who did a deep dive with me. I think was last week or the week before. And that really gets into the rest recovery cycle, which was, of course,

innovated in the context of athletic training, but makes just as much sense when you're doing intellectual work. And then at the large scale, something to help me, Noel was, you know, I had a couple different semi-Orphagonal at the time directions, my family, my writing, and my CS work. And that had always helped me. That helped me throughout grad school as well. I probably wasn't as stressed as I should have been pre-tenure. I would put some attention to the writing piece of it, and it would just give me some

relief. I felt like I had a couple different things going on here. So if one thing seemed struggling, there was another thing that might be doing well. And if that thing starts struggling, the other thing might be doing well. And having that push and pull balance of a couple different things really help diffuse the stress that comes when you feel like all of your eggs is in this basket and you have to watch that basket semester by semester and see how it's doing. I don't know exactly if that's generalizable.

I mean, I'm clearly not suggesting that you start a writing. career on the side, but there might be something you can put into your life. That is also really meaningful, but to use an investment metaphor does not have performance as highly correlated to the core academic work that you're doing. It's just at a large scale, that's also a stress reliever. Okay, so, Noel, I hope that's all useful. And finally, look, you're a third-year assistant professor. Give it three more years.

You'll be post-tenure. You're going to have a lot more autonomy. if you take advantage of that autonomy post-tenure and get much more aggressive about these things, seasonality, your mix of work, exploring different angles, then you're really going to have a great opportunity to keep that stress manageable for much more of your year. So you're thinking about the right things, you're asking the right questions, keep aggressively tackling this issue of stress. Don't put up with the stress being chronic.

Work backwards to figure out how you can stop that from being the case. All right. Here's an interesting question from Victor. Victor asks, in your view, what's the best medium for reading news every day? And assuming it's a physical newspaper, which do you recommend for the best writing and journalism? You know, honestly, Victor, my current recommendation for most people is that for the next six months, read almost no news. Especially if you live in the U.S., I mean, we have gone from the trend. the Trump election and the aftermath mixed in and followed by a chaser of pandemic.

We're done with the news. Just take a break. It is frying our circuits. It is overload. I know people worry if I'm not monitoring the news very carefully on my social feeds or this or that. I'm going to be a bad citizen or this or that. But let me tell you this. The republic will hold even if Victor is not up the speed on the,

the struggling talks between Biden and House GOP officials on the infrastructure bill. I think we need to take a break. We need to have a summer. We need to get in the sun. We need to focus on family and community and people around us and things we can do to make the world better around us. We need to temporarily become more local in our perspective so that we can heal our completely frazzled brains. If big things happen, you'll hear about it. If it turns out those UFOs are real, that news will get to you before the little.

Green Men zap you, et cetera. So don't worry about it. I mean, if you want to briefly monitor things, that's fine. I mean, you can do a, get a daily review email newsletter from a paper that you can glance at some days to see what's going on or look at, buy the Sunday version. That's what I used to do at college. By the Sunday version of a newspaper, you can usually get these at Starbucks. Just once a week, you buy it, have an hour where you kind of look through it and like, oh, here's what's going on in the world. Including the urgent stuff and an interesting sampling, if you have a physical paper of non-urgent, just interesting stories, you never would have stumbled across in a, let's say, social media news feed algorithm. So that's fine. But let's just take a break

from the news. One other exercise, though, Victor, I am going to suggest, I think more of us, especially again in the U.S., where there's been a lot of contentious back and forth over a lot of different issues. I think more of us also need to practice on a semi-regular basis, Socratic dialectical encounters. And what I mean by that is maybe once a month. Take an issue that is charged, something that your side, whatever that is, feel strongly about and that your instinct is the other side is acting egregiously here. And go and find the best apologia that you can from the other side. In other words, find something very thoughtful written about this issue from the other side. Now, what these sides are will just depend on who you are, where you live, what your personality is.

So, for example, if you cite yourself more on, let's say, the farther political left, there's an issue that the way you're seeing it in your social media feeds is basically there are these evil people on the other side and, you know, where the common sense sources of light, well, go read a thoughtful treatment of that issue from the way the right would talk about it, not the far right, but, you know, like the National Review conservative, old school conservative right. If you are, let's say, you're on the right and you're a real Trump person or something like this, there's some issue that you're so up in arms in and you're like, yeah, and you feel yourself really like, I'm really riled up about this, go see a treatment of that from the left,

a thoughtful commentator on the left, how they're talking about that issue. And if you're really more in the center, if you're like a lot of people, that sort of silent middle that finds both of these extremes to be kind of tiresome. And you see some issue where you're like, look how annoying this is, that there's such an extreme response to this. I mean, look what all these raging progressives are doing over here. Look what all these raging conspiratorial Trump supporters are doing over here. Maybe find a thoughtful treatment of a subject from the perspective of that extreme and see

why they're thinking that way and where's that coming from, right? The goal here is not, oh, you're going to change your mind. the goal here is that you are going to develop empathy and a more sophisticated take on the topic. And this is why I referenced Socrates. This was the basic idea of the Socratic dialectic method is that you have to clash opposing ideas together and it is actually in that clash that understanding is built. That just studying a topic, kind of an isolation, from the perspective of what you want to be true, is actually from a knowledge acquisition point of view, suboptimal.

you take a really good treatment of something from one side and really good treatment from the other and you put it together, then as they mix and fight back and forth and you see who's getting the upper hand and where the other things fall short, man, you come away with a much more sophisticated and nuanced understanding. Your roots of understanding go deeper. And you're going to need deep roots of understanding on any issue before it can really become the foundation for big decisions in your life or your worldview. So you're going to learn more about it if you do that. And you're going to gain more empathy because everything gets more new. nuanced, everything gets more complicated once you start doing these dialectical collisions.

Don't worry, you're not going to be brainwashed. You're not going to be, you're not giving ground to the enemy. Forget what they say on Twitter. We have known for over 2,500 years that this is how the human mind gains more sophisticated knowledge and more sophisticated knowledge is at the foundation of sort of all thriving as an intellectual being. All right. So that's an exercise I'll throw out here. Don't do it a lot because, again, the whole point. point of not reading news for the next six months is to get away from a lot of this temporarily. But throwing in this exercise, let's say like once a month or so, is going to make you a much more nuanced thinker. It also means if you're in a position of advocacy for something, you're

going to be much more effective in that role. The deeper you understand it, the deeper your roots go, the more focused and effective you can be. Our next question comes from Vlad. Vlad says, how have your principles of cultivating a deep life, how are they related to Stephen Covey's concept of sharpening the saw? While reading Covey's seven habits, I noticed that the seventh habit is very similar to your craft community contemplation and constitution buckets. Have you been influenced by Covey in developing your own principles or are they in some way unique?

I would say I'm probably implicitly influenced by Covey. I mean, I certainly internalized his perspective. pretty early in my life. I think his notion of identifying different roles and then sharpening the saw in each of those roles has been influential. It's how I actually keep track of my. I've talked about this before, but in my values document, which I keep right next to my strategic plans, I break my life in the roles and talk about my values for each of those

roles. That's peer Stephen Covey. Buckets are kind of similar. It's not necessarily your roles, which was the Covey approach, but the aspects of life that you find important. so it's not a complete congruency there, but it's similar.

I think my approach of keystone habits followed by overhauls is practically speaking its own thing. But Covey's point, and this is the key point and why I think seven habits are highly effective people

is one of the best-selling advice books of all times. His key point, which is a great one, is that work and needs to be part of an incredibly intentional understanding of your life

and what you're trying to do with your life and concretely how you're going to get to those places you want to get. War cannot be this separate magisteria that just takes over all of your time and just business success is the only thing that matters and everything else in your life

is subordinated to it that leads to despair, that leads to ethical lapse, that leads to a life off the rail. So I think that fundamental point of Covey is one of the most critical points in the business literature. Yeah, you have some

professional roles and some non-professional roles and they're all important. You have your role as a manager and your role as a creator, but also your role as a parent and your role as a family member and your role as a husband. And all of these roles are important. And if they are, you better figure out how do you make sure that they're each getting the time they need? How are you sharpening your proverbial saw in each of these? Because if you neglect some, the whole picture is not going to come together in the way that you want. All right, let's try to fit in one last quick question here. Austin asks, have you ever had any major failures or setbacks in your career, how do you handle failure or what suggestions would you give to those who do not succeed in

their career goals or plans? Yeah, Austin, I have had them constantly. Constantly. And I think that, before I get into how you handle failure, now let me just double click on that idea. When you're monitoring someone from afar, I mean, what you're mainly seeing is their work product, and by definition, their work product that becomes publicly, generally visible are their successes. There's not a lot of articles written or publications made about, oh, here's the things that failed. Here's the book advanced that fell precipitously versus the last book because the last book didn't do what you thought it was going to do. Here is the you having to leave a publisher because they weren't that interested in what you had to sell. Here is your fallow year as an academic because of a lot of things came at the same time and you're unable to get your research program up and running.

Here is you failing to get this award or this distinction that you went up for. Here is watching these peers shoot ahead on these things you thought you were working really well on. Here is the money that you expected this year is not quite there. Now you have to make changes. All of these type of setbacks and failures, they don't get posted on blogs. They don't get written about in the New Yorker. They do not get attention on Reddit or Twitter. So everyone has their share of these.

So you're very smart to ask this question because your plan should not be How do I avoid failure in my life? So what should you do about it? Two things. Craft is just one bucket in the deep life. This is thing number one. So now you have your four or five buckets

that are important to you. And if the craft bucket needs an overhaul, that's great. You'll put your attention to it, but you have four other buckets that maybe are doing well. Seeing craft is one part of several parts that come together to make a fulfilling life gives you a ton of resilience.

And now when something's not working the way you want it to work in your career, you can step back and say, okay, maybe this month, I'm going to give my attention to this particular bucket, the craft bucket. Let's tweak these keystone habits. Let's do another overhaul of this bucket and see if we can get back on track. And that's the second thing, process focus. What is my process? How do I approach this thing in my life that I highly value? And where you get pride is in the fact that you are process focused.

You know what's important. You're constantly tweaking and updating your processes. You're disciplined and constructing a deep life. You get pride in that discipline. So when something's not working, you're like, yeah, I'll just try something else. I will tweak that. I will fix that. Those two things together is going to give you an incredible resiliency to the up and down

of professional life. You have this disciplined approach to life. It's broken in the many aspects. Craft is just one. When craft is faltering, you still have the others to support you and that you're in a mindset of what matters is I'm intentional about these buckets. I often get immediately following that sense of

guttural disappointment or embarrassment or shame that follows a setback, which is unavoidable, that's human wiring. Because I'm about the disciplined pursuit of depth. It's often followed by, perhaps paradoxically, a sense of excitement. Oh, I'm going to go back and do an overhaul now on that part of my professional life. And I'm actually kind of excited about what might come out of that.

Maybe I'm going to find a configuration that's even better, a way I work, what I'm working on a simplification that's going to be even better. There is an optimism that follows the darkness. It all comes down to this disciplined approach to here's what matters. I get pride out of prioritizing those and working on those. I will have ups and downs in my particular implementations, but the long arc of my particular time here on Earth is going to keep bending in the direction of deep and meaningful. All right. And with that, let's wrap up this show. Thank you to everyone who submitted their questions. And go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you too can submit your questions.

Thanks also to our new engineer, Mark Miles, who is now helping to make these episodes sound better. And I'll be back on Thursday with the mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.