Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 107: How Do I Stay Motivated on Long-Term Projects?

Episode Date: June 21, 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:- How do I cultivate urgency for long-term projects? [2:49]- How do I learn more about deliberate practice? [11:54]- How do deal with an "open door" policy at work? [17:06]- How can I return to academia after taking an industry job? [19:57]- Does a commitment to deep work block me from management? [21:37]- How do I avoid distractions when working from home? [24:56]- Can condensed deep work rituals still be effective? [27:45]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS:- How should I use boredom? [37:09]- Will organized schedules undermine my social life? [45:42]- What is my (Cal) take on Clubhouse? [52:11]- How can someone with few resources cultivate meaningful leisure? [56:48]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. 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 107. Now, we have a good collection of both deep work and deep life questions to get into today, and I'm feeling productive. So let's skip the quick announcements, do a quick ad read, and get right into the episode. The Deep Questions podcast is brought you in part by our good friends at Blinkist. as I like to say, ideas are one of the most powerful currency in our current culture and the best place to get ideas from are books. Not on Twitter, not in the comment section of Instagram, God forbid, not on TikTok. Books actually represent someone who has thought deeply about a topic,

research that topic, probably has worked with that topic for years, if not their entire career, then putting down their thoughts as clearly as possible. So books are where the best ideas come from. The problem is how do you figure out what books to read? That is where Blinkist can enter the picture. If you have the Blinkist app, you get access to short summaries, 15-minute summaries, either written or audio. You can choose of thousands of important and best-selling non-fiction books spread over 27 categories. If you subscribe the Blinkist, you get access to as many of these summaries,

what they call Blinks as possible. So what I recommend and how I use Blinkist is to quickly subscribe. survey a bunch of books on a topic that I'm interested in to figure out, A, the lay of the intellectual land, what are the big ideas here, what are the big trends, and then B, to figure out which of those books I want to buy and read in their entirety. I'm looking at their popular titles list right now. You have Yuval Harare's books on there. If you're curious about what are the 21 lessons for the 21st century, listen to the blink to see if you want to buy it. You want to know more about being addicted to technology? Adam Alters, Irresistible is on there.

the 15-minute summary and say, okay, is this one I want to read in more depth? Blinkist will get you to the books, which will get you to the ideas that matter more than ever. Now, right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep, you can start a free seven-day trial and get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% percent. off and a seven-day free trial. That's blinkus.com slash deep. All right, let's get started with some questions about deep work. The first one comes from Flora. Flora asks, how do I cultivate a sense of urgency

when working on a long-term project? When working on a long-term project, two or three years, how do I induce a sense of urgency to my workday? I do think that my work is important. However, I would like to feel more driven on a day-to-day basis. While on some days I am very energetic on some low-bred pressure days, by contrast, my work seems very incremental, and I find it hard to find momentum. Well, Flora, this is a good question. As someone who basically makes a living off of long-term projects, it's something I have experimented with quite a bit over time. Well, let me give you my three-part formula here. Number one, selection.

You probably need to be more picky than you might suspect when figuring out which long-term projects you want to commit to. I think people are often way too quick to commit to a project because in the moment it seems like it might be interesting. It might be fun. They like the idea of it, but it's a somewhat haphazard decision. The problem with this is that if your project is not really well thought through, that this is something that A, would open up a lot of cool things or be really meaningful if I accomplished it. And B, is tractable for me. I really understand enough about how this works that I can get it done, that you're not just saying, I want to be a novelist. You're actually figuring out how do people become novelist, what's involved, what

craft is involved, how do you get there, what's most consistent to get there. So if you don't have those two things, what happens is your brain gives up. Because your brain is smart. Your brain is a plan evaluation apparatus. This is part of what distinguishes humans from other animals. We come up with abstract plans and we evaluate them. If your brain doesn't trust your plan that, oh, I'm going to become a novelist and a famous podcaster and a TikTok star and I'm going to master Chinese and I'm going to be a really good Python programmer, if it doesn't really buy that you're going to do all those things or that those are all things you should be doing or that you even know really how to do them,

that you have a good chance of success, it will reject a plan. The physiological experience of your plan evaluation apparatus rejecting your plan is lack of motivation. And you find yourself hard to get that quote unquote momentum going. So that's the first thing I want to say. Be way more picky. Only have a very small number of long-term projects and really, really be sure before you commit to one. Two, planning. So what you really want to avoid is a reactive approach to your time management where you're saying,

I should probably work some today. I should probably work some today on this long-term project. If this is going to take two or three years, you're never going to accrete enough actual hard effort because work by definition is hard. It can be frustrating. If you're relying on motivation or momentum, you're probably not going to get anywhere near where you need to get if a project is so large. So planning plays a big role. At the quarterly or semester level, you should be figuring out what has to happen this quarter semester for this project. If I'm writing a novel, where am I in that process, and where do I need to be at the end of the summer? Where do I need to be at the end of the fall? That needs to be spelled out pretty clearly, and you need to trust that objective that is tractable and makes sense. Then when you get to your weekly planning, you're looking at that quarterly or semester planning and saying, okay, what has to happen this week or what should happen this week or what should happen this week to keep me on track or that quarterly or semester objective.

How do I want to make that happen? Oh, I'm looking at this week. It's really busy. I have a lot of afternoon meetings. So what I really need to do this week is every morning from 730 to 830 get right into writing. If we're doing this novel writing example, that's what I'm going to do every morning this week. Or maybe it's, you know, Friday's pretty light. I'm going to move the remaining things on Friday.

And I'm going to spend the entire day Friday working on my novel in this particular example, right? So you're looking at the plain pieces of your schedule, the chess pieces on your metaphorical board for the week ahead. You're looking at what you're trying to accomplish for this whole quarter of semester and say, okay, how do I want to make? or take advantage what's ahead of me. Then when you get to an individual day, well, you're just time block planning. And you're looking at your weekly plan when you do this. And so your weekly plan might have some hints

or some commandments about, okay, here is where long-term project work needs to happen. Oh, I'm writing every morning this week. So it happens at 7.30 or, oh, it's Friday. My weekly plan said I'm spending most of the day working on this project. Great. You put that into your time block plan along with everything else, and you execute your blocks.

Again, you're somewhat agnostic by the time you're actually executing, you're just trying to stick to your actual blocks. Now here's the thing. As with any work, some days it'll be exciting, some days it won't. Some days you will feel very productive. Look at what I got done during this block dedicated to a long-term project. And other days, you'll think nothing much got done. I'm spinning my wheels and I'm frustrated. There seems to be no quote-unquote momentum. But here's the thing. The momentum doesn't matter. Your subjective feeling doesn't matter. If you have a semester or quarterly plan, influencing a weekly plan, influencing your daily plan,

and you're executing your daily plan to the best of your ability, progress will accrete, regardless of how it feels. And that brings me to the third point, which is integrating the idea that you are someone who can stick with and accomplish long-term projects into your identity. The first one is the hardest.

That first book, that first language learned, that first side business pushed to profitability. The first one is the hardest. The second one is much easier. Why? Because you have now integrated into your conception of self. I am someone who can stick with something hard. And one or two years later, maybe three years later, get really big results out of it.

Now it's much easier to do that again. You trust that you can get to success. You have felt what it feels like when you get to success. You felt the career capital it gave you and all of the opportunities that capital, and opened up to you, becomes a part of your personality, and this whole thing becomes this whole thing becomes easier. I was motivated earlier in my grad student career when I read Steve Martin's professional memoir, born standing up.

And he talked about in that memoir, this notion of diligence. And he defined diligence not just as coming back to the thing that you're trying to get better at again and again, but also saying no to everything else. It was really clear that from early in his career onwards, he had two things he wanted to diligently pursue, pushing his comedy. He wanted to actually push the form into something new, which was not a super innovative thought. I mean, you have to understand the context of Steve Martin. Here's someone who's coming up in the 1960s. There's the counterculture revolutions are going on.

Change is in the air. Cultural experimentation expansion is in the air. Breaking down norms is in the air. Modernism in the philosophical realm is giving away to this. more fragmented self-referential post-modernism. All of this was in the air. And Martin thought comedy could also be reinvented. So I'm going to do that.

And it's going to take me years and years of experimentation and practice and craft to get there. The other thing he diligently focused on was his banjo playing. I want to get good at that. I'm going to say no to most everything else. And he didn't do it like the movies he's known for and the plays and the short stories. That all came later. There was year after year of him doing his version of diligence. And I remember that being really important for me to hear when I was a grad student.

I think among other things, it really motivated how I approached my writing career. Just keep writing. Just keep pushing. Don't get too distracted. You know, look at my first 10 years as a writer. I moved from student books to more sophisticated student books into hardcover idea books, culminating with deep work, which came out about 10 or 11 years after my first book and went on to, of course, sell a ton of copies and really change everything.

That's 10 years where I did very little else in the realm of writing. No social media, no YouTube. I would write essays on my blog mainly as a way to further sharpen my craft. I would write articles, but only to sharpen my craft. I would get commissions just to test out new techniques. I was Martin practicing and honing my version of a comedy act. So that was very influential for me. And I'm going to bring that thought here to help wrap together Flora

everything I just told you about big projects is that eventually you want to find pride in being the type of person who comes back to the same thing again and again and is able to say no to all the other things that are trying to derail you from that long-term effort. I love a life focus on long-term projects. Why? Because most people won't do them. Most people don't do them right. Most people abort them before they get there. So it becomes a real unfair advantage, a superpower of sorts and a knowledge economy if you are able to cultivate this particular skill. Our next question comes from Samuel. Samuel asks, how can I learn more about deliberate practice and how can I figure out how I practice it in my particular career or skill set? Well, Samuel,

if you want to know the theory behind deliberate practice, probably the most accessible book would be Anders Erickson's book, Peek. So Anders Erickson created the framework of deliberate practice. Peek was his attempt to actually render these ideas in a accessible form. So I highly recommend that book. Before that, there was a book called Talent is Overrated. That was an influential book for me. That's the book that actually introduced me to the notion of deliberate practice. It's a little bit more extreme in the way it presents it.

But it's also, I think, accessible because it's written by Jeff Coven, I believe, was a writer for fortune. So it's definitely coming at the topic from the perspective of its. application to the world of work. So that's also a useful one. Of course, Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers is perhaps the most famous book on Deliber Practice in the sense that it really brought that concept to a much broader audience. It also does a lot of other things as well, but obviously it's probably the most readable in the sense that it's the most enjoyable to read because Gladwell is a master. Basically, his idea in that book is that deliberate practice is so critical for being really good

that the best way to understand people who end up really good is saying what were the circumstances that allowed them, often arbitrary and serendipitous that allowed them to accrue a sort of unfair amount of deliberate practice before anyone else even got started. So that's also a good one. So those books will get you there.

Perhaps above all else, if you want the advice that most aligns with the way I talk about this, read my books. And in particular, so good they can't ignore you, So Good They Can't Ignore You has a chapter that's exactly about how do you apply deliberate practice in your job. So a lot of different books here where you can learn about deliberate practice

with applications to work in mind. Let me just quickly summarize the very high-level highlights here. The key to deliberate practice is that you are stretching yourself past where you're comfortable with the skill in question. So this is why it's different than flow state. It's different than performing. It's different than doing what you already know how to do. You have to actually stretch yourself past where you're comfortable.

If possible, you want feedback to make sure that this stretch is literally pushing you in the right direction so that you're stretching yourself past you're comfortable to do it better than whatever the skill is, better than you currently can. And you need the right feedback to make sure you're doing that. If you're stretching yourself out in the wrong direction, you're cementing in some sense the wrong circuit. neurologically speaking, that's actually a pretty good analogy. I mean, the reason why you focus on one skill and then try to push yourself past you're comfortable is what you're really doing is forcing a better configuration of neural circuits to fire. So a configuration that is associated with the better execution of the skill in question.

The key idea, of course, in neural learning is that what fires together, wires together. So as you really focus to fire this new configuration of neurons that represents the skill being applied better than you could before, you are wiring that network together in a way that will make it easier to fire in the future with less of that intense concentration. After a while, you can then apply that skill at that level with much less energy or focus, and now you can push yourself past it. So literally, you're focusing intensely past your comfortable. You're forcing yourself into a neural state that is better. It takes a lot of work at first, but then later doesn't take as much work. So that's what you need to be doing with the skills in your professional life that are critical for what it is you do.

If you're not stretching yourself, if you're not uncomfortable, you're not getting better. You're going to hit a plateau. On the other hand, if you were deliberately practicing the skills that might matter for your career, most of the people around you aren't. And it is going to look like a superpower. It is going to look like Samuel is such a talent. Like how is he able to, whatever, code so well or edit at such a high level when we're doing this video editing or, you know, put together these business strategies that really work, like really get to the metrics that matter. It's because you deliberately pushed yourself on these skills.

So the hardest thing about this, in my summary by saying the hardest thing about this is figuring out what skill to push and how to get feedback about what good looks like. There's not an easy answer there. Look at so good they can't ignore you. Look at peak. You'll get some more sense of that. I talk a little bit about this in my interview with Dave Epstein from a few months ago on the podcast as well. So you can go back and read that episode. But that's where the challenge is.

And that's why deliberate practice is so rare in the professional environment is finding the skills and finding what good means requires some work. But it is absolutely worth it because, again, if you're the only one deliberately practicing a skill to those around you, you are going to seem almost superhuman. Our next question comes from Mark. Mark asks, How do I deal with an open door policy at work? I understand its benefits, but it also creates an environment of constant interruptions.

How would you handle this? Well, for Mark, I got to say, it really makes me happy to hear questions like this because it just underscores the degree to which more and more, especially more and more places here into U.S., things are getting back to normal after the pandemic. I mean, if we went it back a year ago, the idea that you would be in an office with an open door

where someone could interrupt you would seem an unimaginable luxury. So that's just a little gratitude aside. So I'm glad these type of questions are relevant again. When it comes specifically to open door policies, there is a silver lining. There's a flip side. If there's this clear policy that we really value having a door open, which means you can come and ask people quick questions or this or that,

it means the implication of a closed door is even more clear. That, okay, when my door is open, stop in. And my door is open a lot because that's our policy here, that's our culture here. But that means it's really clear that if my door is closed, it is for a very good reason. So don't interrupt me. And because my door is often open, you can wait. You know my door will be open again soon, so wait until you see that. So the advantage of a place where the open door policy is made really clear is that clarity extends to the closed doors as well.

And that's what I would do. And if you need to put a do not disturb sign on your door when you close it, that's fine. One of my colleagues at Georgetown, I don't know if he does this anymore. But he basically did that to train his students how his open door closed door policy worked. If it was open, you could stick your head in and say hi and I do that all the time. But if it was closed, he's doing something where he doesn't want to be interrupted. And so I don't think he has to do it anymore, but he would put a hotel do not disturb sign on his door when it was closed to make it really clear. And then his students learned.

And I think that's why he doesn't actually have to put the do not disturb sign on now. One very small silver lining of the pandemic in particular is that there's a lot more people remote, even as office opens and therefore a lot more Zoom. And one thing we all learned during the pandemic is, oh, if someone is on Zoom, you don't want to stick your head in the door. you don't want to knock on the door because you will interrupt the conversation. So I think a closed door now is much more respected. You think, well, maybe he's on a conference. I don't want to interrupt them. So Mark, lean into it.

Great. Keep your door open. But when you get to deep work blocks and only when you get to deep work blocks, close it. Use a do not disturb sign if you need. Now you have this clarity of when that door is closed, I'd better be concentrating. No one will bother you. And in other periods, you can have it open. People will wait to bother you then.

Our next question here is a little bit of academic inside baseball. Samir says, I graduated last July and got a job last January. I have a reasonably good academic record and would like to go back to academia. What do you think I can do during my current industrial job? Well, Samir, there's probably dependent on the field, almost nothing useful you can do in your industry job that is going to help you get an academic job. You want to move as quickly as possible. If you want to try to apply for academic jobs, you need to do that as soon as possible. It's your academic record that's going to count more than anything else. And so you want to strike while that record is still fresh, while your advisor

still remembers you, while the other letter writers who will support your candidacy, have seen you recently at a conference, et cetera. So you want to strike now. You're basically, the job you have now is probably a no-op for your academic career, so waiting more time is only going to make things worse. There are some exceptions. There are some fields in which work you can do in industry is relevant to an academic career. If you're at some sort of R&D lab, for example, it's possible that you are doing peer-reviewable work at that R&D lab. And so, okay, that could be useful. But keep in mind, again, this is the bottom line. Peer reviewed work is all that matters. How good is it? How much of it is there? How much potential does the field think you have to do more

peer-reviewed work at a high-level quality. That's all that matter. So to the extent that your job is not producing more high-quality peer-reviewed work, if you want to go back to academia, you need to set those wheels in motion as soon as you can. Our next question comes from frustrated high performer who asks, does being an individual contributor known for being productive and performing deep work preclude me from transitioning into management. Well, it depends on the industry. In some industries, I think it certainly is the case that if you want to move to a management position, you have to show off your ability, develop and demonstrate your ability to manage people. So you need to start taking on initiatives within the company, running collaborative projects, getting involved

with the existing management team on certain programs, showing that you work well with others, you can manage others, you can work well with those who manage you, you're flexible, you're empathetic, you're organized, you're someone they can trust.

Okay, if we put people under you, you can keep up with the competing demands, you can be flexible as things shift, you could react to emergency. So in a lot of industry, yeah, that's a skill set you have to hone,

and it makes sense if you want to be put into a management position. In other industries, in particular in some tech industry, there is a tradition of taking focused talent on a technical skill and saying you're a great programmer, so now you get to run a team. That's a little more froth, of course, because you have no idea if that person is going to be good at it or not. And it's a common theme among scientists and computer programmers, etc., that they get promoted out of where they're comfortable, and then it becomes almost melancholy for them. They say, I don't want to do this. I liked really focusing on hard things.

So it really does depend on the industry. But the key question, I think, for you is, do you want to be in management? So if you want to lead people, organize teams, help get the best effort out of teams, help set the big initiatives for the direction of your company, move your way up through the executive ranks, then you shouldn't just be doing deep work on isolated, individually executed skills. because that is not all that's going to be relevant. So whether you're in an industry that demands to see that you can be a manager or you're in a tech industry where they'll probably just throw you into that role,

even if you can't demonstrate it, you better be working deeply on those management skills as well if that's what you want to do. Being able to manage is as complicated as being able to write code or solve a proof, and it's something that requires practice. I talk about this in a world without email. Talked about managers versus minders versus makers. And for all of them, focus sequential work is really important. Training is really important.

So if that's what you really want to do, then you should be practicing it, whether or not your job demands it. But if it's not what you want to do, then who cares? If what you really like doing is being an individual contributor mastering a skill that gives you a huge amount of leverage because you're good at it, then focus on mastering that skill and investing the career capital that just, generates to give yourself a lot of autonomy over that work and how it happens. It's a fantastic path to go down as well. So just be really clear about what you want. And only then once you're clear about what you want, asked a question of, okay, so how do I get good at that? All right, we have a question here from Avonash, who says, with work from home becoming normal these days,

staying home is filled and staying home is filled with distractions such as family, children, etc. What is your advice as to when to do deep work late at night or early in the morning? Well, Avan asked you submitted this question a few months ago. Since you've submitted this question, I wrote an article about this for The New Yorker.

I talked about it briefly on the podcast a few weeks ago. It was about working from near home. And essentially my answer to the question is time might be less important here than location. Don't assume that remote work means housework. Your home is very distracting. Even if those distractions are not acute, and this is one of the things I get into in that New Yorker article,

it's not just about the acute distractions. Here is a kid yelling, and that sound captures my attention. Here is someone walking into my home office and distracting me. There is also associative distraction. That as your mind sees stimuli that are related to your household duties, related to family issues, related to other things that you have to remember unrelated to your professional life, that will start firing up related semantic networks. Firing up those related semantic networks takes away cognitive energy from the work you're trying to do. It takes you out of a work mode. You now have competing networks.

You're creating an implicit context shift. It's harder to work. even at six in the morning or six at night, that could be the case. So I'm a big advocate as remote work does become more standard. There's more of it going on. Don't think about remote as meaning home. Try to carve out locations, at the very least, to do the deep aspects of your work. That is not your normal home.

Now, this could be on your property or in an unusual part of your home. It could be a converted garden shed in your backyard. It could be an attic office. you semi-finish an unfinished addict to make an attic office just for that. It could be, as a reader wrote me the other day, your local library. It could be a museum, especially if you live somewhere like Washington, D.C., where the museums are free. I used to do this. Wander into the museums, wander into the botanical gardens, and find places to actually do work.

It could be an office space that you rent. Spending money on this, if you can, is not wasted money, if it's, means you are going to be able to actually produce at a much higher level and maintain a lot more of your sanity. It's probably worth it. So anyways, Avonash, that's my advice. Forget work from home. Think about work from near home as the secret to making the most out of a remote work situation.

All right. I think we can fit in one more deep work question. This one comes from Marta. Marta says, I am fascinated by the use of rituals you propose as a way. to set the deep work mood. I have been thinking a lot about how to replicate this every time I need to do deep work, but when I cannot go for a walk in nature or go to a cafe, one thing that works for me is to read a passage of a book that is particularly inspiring.

I also read about writers using specific songs or music tunes. You have further tips on how to build more rituals or recommendations to read about this technique. So, Marta, I'm going to interpret this question as asking a, about condensed deep work rituals. As you allude, I am a big believer in having a set ritual you do every time you are about to start doing deep work so that your mind can, on autopilot, begin shifting to that mode without you having to wrench it into that mode. I am a big fan of physical rituals, going for a walk, changing your location.

I mean, I think that, of course, is we know that to be very effective. and I'm interpreting your question as asking, what about condensed deep work rituals? You don't have a ton of time, but you need to shift from, I've been an email, now I need to be writing, how do I do it?

Well, there's three things I would keep in mind when trying to come up with these condensed deep work rituals. One is context clearing. So a lot of the condensed rituals you mention, like reading a passage from a book or listening to a particular song, what this is in part about is changing your cognitive context to one that is way more neutral, way more work neutral.

So if I've just finished checking my inbox, I have all of these semantic networks fired up in my brain that involve work. If I immediately shift to another work thing that I want to do deeply, there is a direct conflict. We have these overlapping networks that could be very confusing. If I instead go to read a poem or listen to a song, you're letting that context clear out. You're letting those networks die down. The amplification diminishes because you're not actively involved in them. The thing you are involved with is completely separate cognitive context. And then when you now switch to the hard thing, there's not nearly as much conflict.

The networks that got fired up because you were listening to a song or reading and inspiring poetry probably don't overlap very much at all. The deep thing you're about to do, it's a much gentler transition into that new context. So that's the context clearing, and you can do this in five or ten minutes. Again, reading something, listening to something, that's fine. Visual cues, I think, are also really important. So if you can change something about the physical setting, our mind really takes seriously what it sees around us, and it can really set how we feel about things.

And so changing the setting can really change the mood as well. So that's another thing I push. If you're staying at the same desk that you were just doing the shallow work on, changing the environment in that office can make a difference. One thing I often talk about is clearing the desk, turning off most of your lights, except for a couple bright spotlights on the desk before you shift the deep work.

That visual shift can make a really big difference. Some people have multiple desks. There's my main desk with my computer, where I do my email, where I do my PowerPoint, where I do my zooms, and then there's another smaller desk in the space, and that's where I go to do my deeper work. It's a minor change in setting,

the sense of distance you had to travel, but it is visually a different, setup. So visually changing the setup seems to make a really big difference. So I think that is really useful as well. Finally, you can also try, as you allude, to hacking your motivational

systems. So exposing yourself to an example of someone doing meaningful, deep work, so reading a passage from Mason Curry's daily rituals, watching a video of an honest-to-goodness

craftsperson at work, watching chef's table clip on Netflix, seeing Anthony Bourdain talking to a chef somewhere, whatever it is,

you can hack your motivational center by exposing yourself to something that's aesthetically very pleasing, but psychologically very motivated. An example of someone who is doing deep work and it's very meaningful

for them in the world, that can really also help reduce your resistance to shifting to the deep work mode. And I think you allude to that when you talk about reading an inspiring passage from a book, that's what's going on there. So you could probably put these all together. I mean, I think if you if you reconfigure or change your visual setting and then shift over to something inspiring,

I'm going to consume something that is inspiring about hard cognitive work, you're actually hitting all three of those items I mentioned because watching that clip or reading that inspiring book is also neutralizing your cognitive context, getting your brain away from whatever work you were just doing. So maybe I'd put that all together, Marta, and maybe that's what I would recommend. You either go to a nearby setting or change your setting and read something or watch something or listen to something inspiring in the moment that's completely separate contextually from the work you were just doing.

Then shift to your deep objective and get after it. I want to take a moment here to talk about Four-Sigmatic. Now, Four-Sigmatic is a wellness company that is best. known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Forsygmatics mushroom coffee is real organic fair trade, single origin, arabica coffee with Lyons main mushroom for productivity and shaga mushroom for immune support. Now, this coffee tastes great. It does not taste like mushrooms.

Actually, the mushroom gives it a slightly smooth, nutty taste. So it's a great tasting cup of coffee. But the way I like to use For Sigma-Ground mushroom coffee is as part of my deep work ritual. There is this unique physiological signature generated by drinking the coffee that has those mushroom additives. So if you drink 4-Sigmatic every time you are about to start a deep work session, your mind will soon learn to associate that unique feeling with deep work, making it easier

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just go to public goods.com slash deep or use the code deep at checkout. That is P-U-B-L-I-C-G-O-O-D-S dot com slash deep to receive $15 off your first order. All right, back to our show. Let's move on now with some questions about the deep life. And the first such question comes from Raphael. Raphael asks, how do I use boredom? I'm in a part-time job as an over-the-counter salesman. With the lockdowns and rainy days, I find myself with periods of nothing to do, and I feel a lot of boredom.

Now, I try to be mindful and not to go after a distraction, but now I face this question. Okay, I'm feeling bored. What should I do? Write thoughts on paper, draw something, stare at the wall. Would something remove me from the state of boredom? Well, Raphael, I've been thinking a lot about boredom recently. I've been reading some books on and then thinking about it, so I'm happy to get into this. There was this moment a few years ago where there was multiple books and articles that had the hot take that, hey, boredom is good. In fairness, I think the point these books were trying to make is if the opposite of boredom is constant distraction, that constant distraction is not good.

but generally speaking, I don't subscribe to the idea that boredom is a good thing. Bortem feels really disagreeable. In general, things that feel physiologically speaking very disagreeable have a good reason for generating that feeling. This is just evolution, right? Being hungry feels really bad. Why? Because it's important that we eat.

Feeling thirsty. Feels really bad. Why? Because it's important that we drink water. So the fact that boredom feels really bad means it's probably not a state that we need to be reveling in, that we need to be inducing and spending long periods of time in, any more so than we shouldn't live our life constantly hungry or seek out the feeling of being thirsty. So your response to boredom should be, oh, okay, something is off here. Let me change my circumstance if possible to get rid of this feeling. That is to correct the issue that my mind is pointing out.

Now here is where things get tricky. There's two responses to boredom. There is the response that was the only one really available in an evolutionary sense back when this feeling, this boredom drive evolved, which is to do something energizing. Okay, I want to get to a higher state of arousal by finding something I can go after, have some intention in my mind that I'm trying to make manifest concretely in the world. world. I need a purpose-driven goal that is interesting and energizing and important or fun to do. That gets rid of boredom. That's the type of behavior, energizing behavior, towards some sort of meaningful outcome that boredom was supposed to drive us towards. And that's an important thing to do because keep in mind, the default instinct of animals is to preserve

energy because you don't know when you're going to need it. A cat does not get bored. A cat is completely happy sleeping in the sun all day. Humans do get bored. And that's what drives us to overcome that animal instinct to conserve our energy and actually go out there and do things such as invent tools, invent fire, invent language, and invent culture. It really has been at the key of our success. And so we shouldn't be quick to dismiss it. And the other reaction, which was not something that was available to us in the Paleolithic, is numbing. All right, this feels really disagreeable. I can essentially numb myself away from that disagreeability. You could do this with substances, but more likely right now, you're going to do this with low quality, algorithmically

optimized digital distractions. My phone can show me something that is going to pinpoint accuracy, invoke some sort of emotional response. It'll make me outrage. It'll make me laugh. It'll make me entertained. And I can just scroll from thing to things. There'll be a lot of novelty. and that will temporarily assage the boredom as well. The numbing response you want to be really wary of, right? Just like eating really terrible junk food will satisfy the hunger drive in the moment. It's not what the hunger drive was really trying to drive us to do. It was not the type of food or calorie intake that that drive was expecting us to do.

And if we keep responding to hunger with the really terrible junk food, we're going to get really unhealthy or really unhealthy rather physically. Well, the same thing cognitively. if you respond to boredom, this drive to do energizing meaningful activity with this digital junk food, in the moment it gives you some relief, but over time it is going to leave you existentially vulnerable, it's going to leave you non-resilient, it's going to leave you feeling adenic and numbed and like you have very little autonomy or control of your life, it's not bringing you where that boredom drive wants to bring you.

It will make you unhealthy in the end. So that is the way Raphael, I think about boredom. I listen to it. And I listen to deep down, what does this really drive me to do? What are the type of things I could do that would make this go away that are energizing and are meaningful? So you need to find energizing and meaningful things that you can have with you or integrate into your life. It could be, for example, you know, if you're behind a counter and you're just waiting for customers to come in, subscribe to mouse books. have one of these short books in your pocket.

It's the size of a smartphone. You can bring it out whenever you have some moment and try to make progress. Can you finish one per day? Can you finish one per week? Do you have a reading group of people you were doing this with? And you know on Sunday you're all going to get together and discuss it. So you really now are driven to wanting to read from your mouse book every time you have a downtime.

And you feel really good as you're making progress and taking notes and you feel your appreciation of literature becoming more sophisticated. Just as an example. or there's some sort of technical skill you're trying to master. Say, great, let me go and work on this technical skill when I have downtime because it's energizing and it's meaningful and it's complicated, my intentions are being manifest in the real world, or you're writing something or you're building out some sort of community group,

and so you can spend time in your downtime trying to actually service that community group or build it up or post content for it. Maybe you've started a long-tail social network. Whatever it is. See what I'm talking about here, though, is energizing, meaningful activities, is driven towards making important intentions manifest concretely out there in the world. You got to get in the habit of responding to boredom with that because that's what boredom is telling us we need to do. Our boredom drive does not know about Instagram.

It does not know about TikTok. It does not know about Twitter. And it's going to overwhelm it if that's the response. One quick nuance I will put here is that, of course, my book Deep Work has a chapter called Embrace Bortem. Now, I don't want this to be interpreted as the opposite of what I just said. I don't want that chapter to be interpreted as me saying, boredom is good. Go spend a lot of time in boredom. Here's what I meant by that.

You should be comfortable with feeling the sensation of boredom. It should not be completely foreign to you. Because if it is, if your mind has learned that at the slightest hint of boredom, you immediately banish it with digital distracting junk food. it won't tolerate any of it. If it won't tolerate any boredom, you're going to be in trouble when you're trying to do something meaningful and deep because that is by definition boring

in the sense that there's not a lot of novel stimuli. And so if your brain has learned that boredom goes away immediately, then it's not going to tolerate deep work when it comes time to do deep work. So what I talk about in that chapter to embrace boredom is that just like taking a vitamin, have a few moments of brief, five, ten minutes, 15 minutes of boredom, sprinkle throughout your day.

Just so your brain gets comfortable with that. I can feel it. I'll be okay. And then I go do something else. So that when you're getting started on doing some hard, deep work, like reading something, and at first you're feeling bored.

It's not novel. Your brain's not really on board. You're comfortable with it. And you can stick with what you're doing until that feeling banishes. So to put these two things together, I'd say, Raphael, you just have little moments of boredom all the time,

be comfortable with it, but don't revel or dwell on boredom. Don't seek out extended periods of boredom just for the sake of it. Instead, listen to what that boredom is telling you. What is the high-quality activity that that boredom is pushing you towards to eliminate it? A simple way to ask this is, if you're not allowed to use your phone, what would you do right now to make that boredom go away? That answer, that instinctual response is actually something you should take seriously. Now, I always like to work in at least one student question. This one comes from Eileen.

Eileen says, I am a college junior looking towards my senior year. After a fractured junior year due to the pandemic, I am hopeful that my senior year will look much more normal socially and academically. I want to prioritize taking advantage of spontaneous social activities that I missed out on during remote slash hybrid learning. For example, getting a call while I am into library to go for a hike with a friend. How can I have regular deep work sessions while making myself available to these spontaneous opportunities that I believe are important to the college experience? So, Eileen, as you probably know, I'm a big believer in having a regular schedule for school work, especially at the college level. That you go through and construct what I call the student work day. We take all the regularly occurring work you know you'll need to do.

The problem sets, the lab reports, the book reading that you know it's going to happen every week. You figure out when do I do that, where do I do that? And you put it on your calendar and you don't have to think about it. Tuesday morning between my 10 o'clock class and my one o'clock class, I'm in the engineering library working on my problem set. I go to lunch on Wednesdays to this cafeteria because there's a really nice student center above it that overlooks the Potomac and I go up there to work on my book reading for my literature class. You figure out what is the work I have to do, when do I want to do it, where do I want to do it, so that when you go from day to day, you don't have to think about it. You don't have to say, what am I going to do today? What am I going to do now?

You have already put some intention into that planning. I even go so far as say, do this with major assignments too. Look at your syllabus. Okay, there's a term paper. I want to spend three weeks writing this turn paper. Let me start tentatively blocking off time three weeks earlier. We're going to start working on this. I have a big exam, my midterm.

I need to study for a week. Put aside an hour every afternoon for that whole week for studying for that. right, actually see, visualize, and play with concretely the time demands of your student life. And let me tell you as an aside, if it doesn't fit, then you have too much. But you want to see where it is and have some intention of where it goes. All right. So what happens if your friend calls you, as I'm sure happens all the time in the library and says, let's go for a hike, but you already have a session planned?

Well, once you're already doing this habit, it's easy. You say, all right, let me move. this session somewhere else. And if you can find another time to do this session, that's reasonable and gets to work done, then go take the hike. And if you can't, then you don't have time to go for the hike. Don't go for the hike.

If it's the day before midterm, you say, I don't have anywhere else to put this study. I'm doing the lab report writing here, and I have to do some reading there, and I have a study block here and another study block in the evening. There's no time for me to go for a hike today because I can't move that anywhere. The exam is tomorrow.

Then you can't go for the hike. And if you can, you can. and you can do so in this system without any stress because you say this work will get done, I know when it's going to get done. The other tip I would give you is if you do as much of this work as possible earlier in the day, it'll be interrupted a lot less. Students are lazy. They don't really get up and going until late in the afternoon or the evening. So if you're taking advantage of your mornings and early afternoon, you're going to get a lot of work done before people are even thinking about activities. you can also make use of the evening as a fallback. So I think it's good for college students to be roughly approximating a normal workday.

I know students tend to start later in the morning and probably need to work a little bit later in the evening, but I'm not a big believer in the post-dinner work block as a standard block. I think it's too much work. Your brain doesn't get time to relax or do other things. It takes a lot of social options off your plate. if you're very careful about laying out your student workday, you can typically move these pieces around to get things started early enough that you can end work by dinner time. So now you can go to movies and shows and just go read someplace scenic or read Heidegger with Heffawisen at the bar, whatever, right? It opens up a lot of things. Typically, you want to leave that open, but you can use it as a fallback. Okay, we're going to go skiing or whatever. I'm going to lose two blocks from the afternoon. I don't normally, none of my regularly occurring work is scheduled for the evening, but I will move these. blocks of the evening so I can do this social event. So you can have your evenings free as a fallback.

So if you're occasionally using your evenings to take advantage of spontaneous work, you'll be fine. The thing I don't want you to do here, Eileen, is say, I have this abstract scenario. It's never really happened, but who knows it could? Where someone might call me and say, go on a hike, but I can't because I'm too scheduled. And therefore, I'm going to get rid of structure and schedule.

Don't use this as a way to fish for rationales for not facing the productivity dragon, for not saying this is what I actually have to get done. Here's how much it is. When do I want to do it? What do I feel about that? It is never, ever, ever going to be better to just take that day by day. It is going to be more stressful. It's probably you're going to have less open time for doing social activities because you're constantly to be something that's due. You're wasting a lot of time the afternoon in the morning, but not enough time to actually do something else. You're going to probably be less social, get less out of college, and you'll be more stressed.

So be structured, know what you're going to do when you're going to do it. If something else comes up, that's fine. Just confront it and move it. My final piece of advice goes for all students. Take the easy as possible semester you can get away with in the fall. Last year was rough. I want you to spend the minimum amount of time that you need to in classes to get to your major and have as much free time for being a college student as possible.

if you have enough extra credits coming into your college that you can actually take a couple courses off and still meet your graduation requirements, now is the semester to have a light course load. If you can avoid having to pile up a bunch of hard classes, do it. This is my general recommendation to all college students out there, especially the fall, but maybe next year in general, is not the time to be Captain Studia scholar. I think it is the time to hardcore embrace all the stuff that you're going to look back on later in life when you look back at your college years and have that gazi happy nostalgia. And for all of you, Georgetown students who are potentially taking my discrete mathematics course this fall, I'll go easy on you. The aptly named pseudonym asks, what's your take on Clubhouse? Well, last March when I was doing Lex Friedman's podcast, he convinced me that I should try Clubhouse. There's something going on here that is different than, let's say, a typical attention-gobbling lowest common denominator social media experience.

And so I did. I accepted an invitation from the New York Times tech reporter Kevin Ruse. I did a conversation on Clubhouse that was moderated by Ruse. And then Lex came as well. So it was me and Kevin and Lex. and we spent an hour. And they asked questions, the audience asked questions. And I would say I came away positive.

I mean, the way Lex explained Clubhouse to me is that it is like an interactive podcast. So if you're unfamiliar with Clubhouse, I mean, the way it works is you go into a room and it's all audio. Right. It's all audio. And you can talk and everyone in the room hears you talk. And there's people up on the stage who can just talk whenever and everyone will hear them. And if you're in the audience, you can raise your hand. And if someone on stage calls on you, you get to come up on stage and you can now talk and everyone can hear you as well.

So basically it's a place for it. You have audio-only discussions. And there's discussions, these clubhouse rooms on all sorts of different topics. People just create a room and then people join. The way that some people like Lex use it is they sort of surf from room to room like, oh, what's going on right now, serendipitously. Oh, here's an interesting conversation. I know some of the people here. Let me go over to that room, hear what's going on and join in.

I think it's kind of cool, right? I mean, I think it is better than a lot of passive content consumption style leisure activities. I think it is intellectually demanding often. Like there's an interesting conversation going on. It's social. It's talking with other people and it's interactive. You can be involved in those conversations. I think all of that is interesting.

I think all of that is cool. The typical caveats apply here, just like with anything. you would want to be careful about how much you use it. I mean, this is one issue I have heard about heavy clubhouse users is they say they use it too much. They're using it all the time. It becomes a backdrop to everything else that's going on. I do not think this has the same type of engineered addiction

that you're going to see in a TikTok or in an Instagram or a Twitter. But there is an implicit addiction, especially if you're at a statue where you often get to join the stage when you come into a conversation and that it really hits on some social button. So it can be pretty appealing. So you want to be mindful. about how much you use it. I heard from a lot of people that use it while they do chores,

so the same way that they would use a podcast, except for now they can chime in. I think that's kind of cool. So ultimately, I would say I am positive on this general model of group audio conversation, interactive conversation on interesting topics. I think there's a future in it. I have no issue with it.

I have not myself used it since that one time, but, you know, this is classic digital minimalism. I have already gone through the exercise of figuring out the things that are important to me in my life, what I want to spend my time doing in work and outside of work. I have a pretty good plan for how I use technology to support those things. So anything else that comes along is probably not going to play a major role into my life until if and when it gets promoted to some status of really pushing something that I find really valuable. Now, I think for a lot of people, especially during the pandemic, Clubhouse was helping them have this sort of deep, person real-time conversation that was hard to do when everything was shut down. And so you could

migrate that on the clubhouse. I live in a small town that's right next to a big city. I'm surrounded by lots of people I know and interesting people. I'm constantly in conversations because of my work and my podcasting and the podcast I do. I'm constantly already interacting with smart people. I don't just listen to a lot of podcasts. I record a lot of podcast. I'm the guest on a lot of podcast. And so that itch of having interesting conversations with interesting people, I do value that. That's already scratched in my life, so I don't really need to adjust that. But for someone else, maybe it's not, and Clubhouse does a really good job at it. So I think it's a great case study in digital minimalism. I like this tool. I don't really need it. For other people, it is really

satisfying an important need for them, and that's the way you should think about it, too. There's not a ton of landmines surrounding it as far as I'm concerned. So if it for you emerges as a very good way to use technology to promote something you care about like it does for a lot of people right now, you have my blessing. Our next question comes from Patrick. Patrick asks, how can someone with few resources cultivate meaningful leisure activities? I'm all in on the ideas from digital minimalism and I'm actively trying to replace low quality leisure with high quality leisure. However, I have a relatively low income and live alone in a small one-bedroom apartment in the downtown area of my city. Buying a house to renovate, doing modifications to my apartment, or leasing a

warehouse space and buying equipment to teach myself welding aren't feasible options for me. Well, Patrick, I don't know what to say. I think I was very clear in digital minimalism that when it comes to high quality leisure, you basically have two options. Renovating houses or leasing warehouse space to learn how to weld. So if you can't afford any of those, I think you're screwed. Now, I don't mean the joke, Patrick. I don't mean to be facetious. I'm just trying to emphasize that that's a very narrow, and this is good news, that is a very narrow sort of HDTV inspired notion of what meaningful leisure actually means. I mean, remember Matt Damon and Goodwill hunting, you can replace a $500,000 education with a buck 50 and late charges from your

local library, right? That kind of comes to mind here. You live in a big city. You live in a big city, this opens up all sorts of really interesting leisure activities that most people don't have access to. When I was a really poor grad student living in Cambridge, my wife and I used to go to museums a lot because those are cheap. And we got really into movies. We would go see a lot of obscure documentaries. Shout out to the Brattle Theater. Shout out to Coolidge Corner Theater. We'd go see basically everything because that movie ticket wasn't that expensive.

And this was before there was Netflix. This was before there was iTunes. So you could see movies obscure movies that you would never see before. We would go walk in. I spend a lot of time walking on the Charles, for example. In a cities have interesting places to move and walk. You can read books. You can build up an expert level knowledge of craft beer drinking or craft beer brewing.

You can get really into athletic pursuits like running that basically require what? A pair of shoes in a water bottle. You can master a new language. you can build a business, you can put together a community group, build up a strong community group that does great things in your community, get involved in existing community groups, get involved in local politics. I mean, there is no end of pursuits that are meaningful and energizing pursuits that better your life, give you better appreciation of the world,

and or make you feel more connected to other people. And these things have very little to do with how much money you have or don't have. And so what I really want to liberate you, from here, Patrick, is the old cliche notion of the warehouse welding vision of leisure. The key here is to be intentional with your time, direct it towards things that matter and that challenge you and that delight you to make you feel more connected, make you feel more capable. The options are almost literally endless, so now is the time to start picking and choosing and going after them.

But with that being said, if you need me, I will be down the street renovating houses. Well, speaking of leisure, this is probably as good a time as any to wrap up this episode. Thank you for everyone who submitted their questions. Go to calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you too can submit your questions for the show. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. And until then, as always, keep welding and stay deep.