Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 110: LISTENER CALLS: Making the Deep Life Happen

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast. - Why people get mad at me. [1:21]- Scheduling reading. [7:06]- Semester goals and time block planners. [11:41]- McKeown's effortlessness vs. Newport's automation. [25:05]- Translating the deep life into concrete action. [30:23]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 a deep questions listener calls mini episode. Quick announcements. I am starting to run low on my archive of listener calls. I'm down to around 45 calls. So now is a time. If you have questions, you want to submit for these listener call mini episodes. Now is the time to do it. If you go to Calnewport.com slash podcast, you will see instructions for how to submit your own listener call is easy. It uses a website called SpeakPipe that allows you to record your call straight from your browser. Very easy to do. Anyways, I need more good calls.

So go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how to do them and submit your audio questions. We got a good show today. I've got a good collection of questions that touch on both deep work and deep life type issues. So without further ado, let's jump right into them. We will get started with a query about what it is exactly that people get mad at me about. Hi, Cal. Amy here. I am a PhD student in a humanities field, and I am two semesters from defending my dissertation,

fingers crossed. My question is, what do people get mad at you for? You've mentioned several times, usually in passing, that in your efforts to have good boundaries around your work hours, and your email inbox that sometimes people get upset with you, but you usually say things like, but I deal with it. Could you please go into more detail about what kinds of ire you're coming into in setting these expectations and how you respond to it?

Well, Amy, it's a good question. In my professional life, especially in my life as an academic, which is the more traditional aspect of my professional life, there's really two big reasons why I most consistently upset people. The first is slow responsivity. So I time block plan. My email inbox, for example, is something that gets looked at. If and when I put aside time to look at it,

this means during a day or series of days from really crunching on something that's important, I might barely look at my inbox. I do not like most people run my day in a list reactive mode where I'm constantly trying to keep up with stuff that's coming into my inbox where I see getting that inbox low or keeping up with the flow in my inbox as being my primary goal for work. So because of this, because I do not adopt that mindset, it might be days before I get back to you. It might be days before I see your message.

So I get a lot of messages being repeated, a lot of like, Cal, did you see this? I sometimes miss things. And so that does, to use your terminology, on a semi-regular. basis attract some ire from those whose life would be much easier if I prioritized quick responses to messages to come into my mini inboxes. The other broad category of thing that I think generates some upsetness is I say no a lot. So again, I'm really strictly, really strict, I would say, about what I have on my plate. I have my semester plans that go into my weekly plans, that go into my daily time block

plans. I have clear objectives about what I'm trying to work on this day for this week, for the semester, for what's going on this year. Because I time block plan, I have a really good sense of how long things really take. And so I have very careful quotas about a lot of work. So, for example, of course I'm going to sit on program committees as an academic, but only so many. Of course, I'm going to do peer reviews as an academic, but only so many. Of course, I'm going to do committees as a university professor, but there's only so many that's still going to enable me to keep making progress on the things that matter. I'm still going to meet people, interesting people, but again, only so many, et cetera.

So I have to say no a lot. And that upsets people. You know, sometimes that upsetness is implicit. I just feel it. Sometimes I literally get yelled at. I've had a member of, like, our own faculty, for example, tell me that I was selfish for not accepting a big committee assignment during the same year. I was the same semester, rather, I was doing an international book tour for digital minimalism.

I remember him essentially characterizing my work as quote-unquote writing productivity tips for students and basically something that I just do with my sort of academic consulting hours and that I needed to stop being so selfish and do much more administrative work. I then went on to sell 300,000 copies of that book. It was featured not only as New York Times bestseller, but on mini best of the year list and was covered in just about every major publication worldwide. So, you know, I guess these productivity tips for students have been making a little bit of an impact there. Can you tell them still a little worked up about that one?

So anyways, that's the other category of things where people get upset at me. So how do I deal with this? Well, it is difficult. And I would say there's really two foundational things required if you are going to be able in a sustainable manner to actually keep upsetting people in these ways. one, you can't do it haphazardly. If you're not responding to emails, if you're saying no to things from a place of just momentary overload or from a place of disorganization,

that is not sustainable. You're going to feel out of control. You're going to feel guilt. You're going to annoy people in a way that's going to be hard for them to shake off. The other issue is you have to deliver. If you're going to be saying no to things or be a little bit slow to response, well, you better be on the ball about the stuff you say yes to. You better have a great reputation that will.

When you agree to something, that gets done. They can trust you. And when it comes to the big things, the things that moves the needle in your career, you need to be doing really good work. If you do those two things, if you're saying no and being slow to respond or what have you, from a perspective of I've thought really hard about my time and what's important and what needs to get done and how much things I can fit, and you deliver. You get the stuff done, you say you're going to get done, when you say you're going to get it done,

and you produce really high-quality work, then it's very sustainable. If on the other hand you're just disorganized and exhausted and just go through spasms of like, I can't do anything, I'm overwhelmed, people are going to think less of you. They're going to give you less leeway. It's going to create friction that's going to continue to build up. So I think it is necessary to upset people in most jobs if you actually want to do that job well. But not all upsetting is made equal. You need to do it from a strong foundation. All right, let's do a question here about reading. Hi, Cal. I'm Anthium, and I'm an undergraduate student studying in Japan.

The question I have for you is related to reading techniques. I'm really amazed at how you managed to read a lot of books. I think, as far as I remember, you read several books in a week. And, yeah, it's just amazing. since during your very tight schedule. I have a lot of things going on too, like thinking about my thesis, I mean, working my thesis, doing my part-time job, doing job hunting and other stuff. But there are lots of books that I'm really interested in.

So what I do in the mornings, I read some self-approvement books, I mean, a C. self-ebram book, during lunch and philosophical and then at night, like a fiction one. But I'm not sure if it's, yeah, I'm not sure if it's a very conducive way to do that. So any advice I would really appreciate. Well, I also ended up talking about reading habits during the last episode of this podcast as well. So I think there's something in the air right now about reading. and I'm happy to have an excuse to talk about it again. As I mentioned then, I am a huge believer that a large amount of reading is critical not only to an intellectual life, but also to a deep life.

You are right, I read as a baseline about five books a month, which works out to slightly more than one book per week. And it's a variety of books from really long, dense nonfiction books to academic press books, which tend to be quicker, some fiction. and some hardcover idea books, which I can sort of turn my speed up and down on. I slow down in the important chapters and speed up. I've read enough of those that I can pretty quickly get to the information that matters. But anyways, it's all part of my intellectual life, and I'm glad you're thinking about it. The way that you are breaking up your reading, I think is fantastic. Read in the morning, read at lunch, read before bed.

I think that is a great way to do it. I think that's a structure that anyone else listening should think about adopting that you read first thing in the morning when you read first thing in the morning, when you have that first cup of coffee burst, make reading your companion during lunch, and put aside some time at night with now your decaffeinated tea in a great chair, looking out a window at the trees blowing in the summer storm, whatever, where you do some reading then as well,

that type of intellectual structure to your day, that depth and slow cognition, beautiful frame, beautiful frame to your day. So that's great. The other thing I'll recommend, and I talked about this in the last episode, is think about reading as a default activity. That is, if this really appeals to you, if the reading life appeals to you, think about it as the thing that you want to try to find time for whenever you can. The thing you turn to with excitement when you find yourself with some unexpected free time. When you have a half hour to kill before you meet a friend at the restaurant. When a meeting is canceled.

when you're just done with work and want to do something else. Always have a book with you, always be looking for times to read. That's how I end up reading at the pace I do, is that aggressive trying to fill things in. I'm the dad at my son's Little League games, who's out there on the grass hill with a book to read during the inning changes. I'm the guy who has the book at the restaurant when I go to grab a sandwich, etc. And as I talked about in the last program, if you're thinking that you don't really have a lot of free time, to read. Simply look at the screen time report on your phone, how much time you're spending on social media apps, streaming video apps, and the web browser. If you replace that default activity

with reading, you're going to get through a lot of books. All right? So I love what you're doing. Other people should follow a similar structure if they can. And if you really want to move your reading to the next level, train yourself to think about reading as the default thing you want to You want to get to with excitement when you find yourself with extra time. All right. Speaking of time, it would not be a listener calls mini episode if we didn't have at least one question on time block planning. Hi, Cal. I'm a doctoral student who has been using time block planning for quite a few years now,

but I've really enjoyed the transition from doing it digitally to analog with your time block planner. I'm wondering there are two things I'm dealing with right now. now and it is what the time block planner only being on a 13-week schedule, I usually operate in semesters on more of a 15-week schedule. And I'm wondering, you as an academic, how you use these planners, do you consider that threshold between end of the semester going into the summer or between fall and winter, for example, to be things that just kind of show up in whatever 13 week planner you're in in that time, or do you try and create clear distinctions between those by using a planner and maybe intermittently putting it in?

Well, this is a good question because it allows me to clarify the proper home for the different scopes of planning that I often recommend. So as regular listeners know, when I think about planning, there's the daily planning. there's the daily planning scale, then there's the weekly planning scale, and then there's the semester or quarterly planning scale. And so I am interpreting your question as essentially asking, how do I fit all three scopes of planning into my time block planner? For those who are new, of course, you can find out more about the time block planner at timeblock planner.com. So the answer to that question is not all of these plans should exist in your time block planner. For sure, your daily time block will be in the planner because that's the primary point of the planner,

is having that daily grid in which you can actually build out your time block plan, then march over to the columns to the right as you have to correct it throughout the day. It also gives you a place to capture things to come up in your mind so that you can execute your blocks without distraction. It has a shutdown complete checkbox. You can do your shutdown rituals and a place to catch. capture metrics. So it's for time block planning. I'm not surprised that you enjoyed moving to the analog planner from the digital. There is something comforting and effective about actually capturing your time block plans on paper. I don't know why, but it just works better. It somehow

separates the planning from the digital ecosystem in which the rest of your distracting highly reactive work unfolds. So I do like that. The time block planner does have weekly pages to do your weekly plan. There is a split in the time block planning community. And I don't know what the percentages are, but on one team, they like to do their weekly planning on those weekly pages in the planner. And the reason is when you build your daily time block plan, that is when you reference your weekly plan. So you have your plan, just a few pages earlier in your planner, your daily planning can be entirely analog. You don't have to see email. I don't have to see Slack. I don't even have to turn on my computer, I can sit down with my cup of coffee in this physical book and build my

plan for today based on my weekly plan. The other camp or team among time block plan are users, they do their weekly plan digitally. So they type it out, they use plaintext.comptivity, where you just have a plain text file and you can have in freehand text your plan with bullet points and lists. And they load up that electronic plan when they build their daily time block plan each day. both work, both are fine. Honestly, as far as I can tell, one of the biggest differentiators between which team you fall on has to do with your handwriting and comfort handwriting. So some people have really nice handwriting. They journal.

They're very used to writing things longhand. They really like the discipline of writing out and updating their weekly plan in those weekly plan pages. Other people have bad handwriting. They're slow to write. And it becomes a chore to try to build out a relatively complicated plan that's going to be quite exposit. so there's going to be a lot of text. They don't like doing that longhand, and so they do it digitally instead. Handwriting and comfort writing has nothing, no real impact on doing your daily time blocking because there you're just drawing blocks and labeling them. But for weekly planning, there might be a lot of words. You might be updating those words a lot of times throughout the week.

So, for example, when former bullet journalers move over to the time block planner or when they augment their bullet journaling with a time block planner, they tend to do that. their daily plans in the planner because they like their neat handwriting. They're from the graphic design world often. They like to write out their plan and it's a beautiful aesthetic object. Tech types like myself often have really bad handwriting do their weekly plan in a separate digital type format. And that's fine. Both are fine. When it comes to your quarterly or semester strategic plan, and again, academics, we tend to do semester planning.

Business people tend to do quarterly planning. there's no place in the time block planner for that. Right. So there's not really an option for that plan to be in your time block planner. So that needs to be somewhere separate. Now again, if you're a nice handwriting, hand-illustrated bullet journal or type, that plan might show up in a separate analog notebook. Most people I know build those plans digitally.

I have a Google doc, one with my semester plan for my work life and one for my semester plan for my non-work life. You can do this in a Word document. You can do this in a text file. You can do this in your fancy web-based note-taking tools. So if you're an Evernote or Rome research person, I don't really care, but it's not going to be in your time block planner. There's no space for it there. And then you reference that semester or quarterly plan when you build your weekly plan. You then reference your weekly plan when you build your daily plan. You then reference your daily plan when you come up with the question of what do I do next. So it all connects together. Once you realize that that semester or quarterly plan cannot live in the time block planner,

then the length of the planner doesn't matter. I mean, I have a box of them, and when I'm done with one, I get another. The main thing that matters to me is that, hey, today I have a time block plan I can look at it. When I'm done, I'm going to shut down. I'm going to write down my metrics. Now, I do like to go back and quickly review my planner when one fills, but I don't need to align my planner usage to any particular calendar milestone. I don't need to plan my usage to when my semester plan comes up or when my quarterly plan comes up. I just always want to have a planner. I'm using when it fills, I go to the next one. The only synchronization you might do is some people like to wait until they get to their semester or quarterly plan update to go back and review their time blocking.

from that last semester a quarter and when you do that you might be looking therefore at two different planners to cover the most recent days that is a nice exercise because you get a sense of how much time you're really spending on things, how your metric track is going where you're falling short

where you're misestimating how long things take to get a sense of in my spending time where I want to spend it I tend to think it's easier and this is what I recommend the long introduction I have in the front of each time block planner, the sort of dissertation on productivity. I recommend you just do that when you finish the planner and not necessarily

synchronize that to your quarterly or semester plans, but some people like to do that thinking when they're building their quarterly or semester plans. The only other thing I'll note here is that the time block planner is an evolving product. You're going to go through these once every three months or so, right, because it can only fit so many pages. The planner will evolve as time goes on. So the planner you're buying a year for now is going to be an improved version of the planner you're buying now and the planner you're buying multiple years for now will be improved on that. And this rate of evolution is going to speed up. So we had a big initial printing. We printed 50,000 of these planners back when we launched it last November. I think we've sold about half of them.

Right. So it's going to take a little while until we get the version 2.0, but we're working on version 2.0 right now. So among other things actually, the reason I mentioned this is that the number of daily pages is going to increase in the new planner. We're working on the cover material. I want to make that a little firmer. We're working on the live flap. We're condensing the weekend pages in a way that gives us more total weeks. There's a lot that's happening. So keep that in mind.

The planner you have today will be different than the one next year. Moving forward, we'll be printing these probably in smaller batches. So it's going to allow us to evolve even quicker. So that's what I want people to think about. This is not a static product. It is an evolving product. So what you're buying is a commitment to time block planning that's going to evolve, evolve over time.

So this planner is going to only get better and better suited to solving these problems as we as we move on. I want to take a brief moment to talk about one of the sponsors that makes the Deep Questions Podcast possible and that is our good friends at Optimize. Now you've heard me talk about Optimize before. This is a subscription network aimed

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with optimized coach. And of course, if you sign up for that, let them know Cal sent you. I also want to talk about magic spoon. Growing up, I loved eating that treat cereal that was so popular in the 80s and 90s. Now I am old enough that I have to care about things like carbs and sugar and I can't just sit down with a big bowl of lucky charms like I might have in days past. Fortunately, Magic Spoon makes it possible to enjoy those types of treat cereals without the unhealthy stuff. Magic Spoon cereal has zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, and only four net grams of carbs and each serving. eat serving is only also 140 calories, right? So this is a keto-friendly, gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free, low-carb, and GMO-free product.

The right way to do this is to build your own variety pack box. The available flavors to build your very own custom bundle include cocoa, fruity, frosted, peanut butter, blueberry, and cinnamon. I've long been a big frosted guy, but I have heard of people blend. together half a bowl of cocoa with half a bowl of peanut butter to get something to taste not unlike a Reese's peanut butter cup, but in cereal form, and not bad for you. I mean, what else do we need? That's technology at its finest. So go to magic spoon.com slash cow to grab a custom bundle of cereal and try it today,

and be sure to use our promo code Cal at checkout to save $5 off your order. Magic Spoon is so confident that it is backed with a 100% happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it for any reason, they will refund your money. So go get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cow and use that code Cal to save $5 off. Returning to our questions, let's do one now about the relationship between effortless work and automation. Hey, Cal. I was listening to your podcast earlier this week with Greg McEwen.

I was wondering your thoughts on relating the concepts of his effortless with your automation that you talk about in your most recent book and you kind of mentioned before and other stuff. Thanks a lot. Bye. So just to clarify for the listener, our friend Jesse here is referring to episode 91 back in April, which was my interview with Greg McEwen about his most recent book, Effortless. So Jesse said he was listening to it last week. it doesn't mean the episode came out last week. So if you're looking for a new Greg McEwen interview in the last week, you're not going to find it. The episode 91 is from back in April, and I do recommend that you listen to it.

So to answer the question, my notion of automation can, but not necessarily have a role to play in McEwen's notion of effortlessness. But effortlessness is actually a much broader, deeper topic. So a real brief summary of McEwen's most recent book, what he's basically, saying is that the things that are really important, the really important work that you have to do, this doesn't have to be some sort of really relentless grind. Work that is really hard to do in the moment that you're pushing yourself to crush it and it's wearing down on you, but it's through that ability to push through the pain and the suffering that you're going to then produce big things. The no pain, no gain mindset applied to work. And McEwen is arguing it doesn't

have to be that way. In fact, you're more likely to succeed. If you take the important things, you create a approach to work and scheduling and lifestyle in which you make it easy to keep coming back to that work again and again. That is what's ultimately going to produce sustainable results at the highest level of quality. I once wrote about this on my blog years ago when I talked about the distinction between hard work and hard-to-do work. The big things that catch our attention are hard, but they don't necessarily have to be hard to do in the moment. So how do you make the important stuff effort list? There's a lot of different things to go on here. Sustainable pace is one bit of it. You know, I wrote my first book as a college senior and I wrote it

by waking up a little early every morning and I would write for one hour every morning. This is not particularly hard to do. This is not a grinding schedule. This was not a schedule that pushed the limits of my endurance, but I came back to this hard work again and again at a reasonable pace. And you looked up six months later and I had how to win at college. So sustainable pace makes a difference. Rituals make a difference. You know, you have a certain place. You do the work. You have a certain ritual you go through before you do the work. Like Charles Darwin's ritual of walking on the sand path at his estate for a certain number of laps before he would do his deep thinking each day. Some sort of scheduling philosophy can really matter here. I always

work at these times on these days, just like me writing in the morning first thing when I was working on my very first book as a college student. Now, you can throw into this mix, maybe automation. So Jesse is referring to automation as I referenced it in a world without email, where I talked about if there is certain types of work that you do repeatedly in which the same steps happen in the same order every time, you can usually figure out a way to structure that work that get rid of the need for unscheduled messages that require responses. So if you work with the same team every week to produce a podcast,

instead of just rock and rolling on Slack and just trying to get it done each week, you could probably automate that. I upload the garage band files to this Dropbox folder. When you see it show up and a new episode show up in that folder, then you master it and move it into another folder that is ready for review or something. And then I always review that the day before the posting date and whatever, change the title of the folder to ready to publish, and if you see that, then you go ahead and publish it.

You might have some automated, quote-unquote, system like that that allows you to get these podcast episodes produced without ever having to send a message that someone has to see, and therefore you reduce the context switching cost of unscheduled messaging. That's an example of automation. It's primary a way of reducing unscheduled messages. All right, so automation could play a role in effortlessness. If the particular thing you're working on is generating a lot of unscheduled messages,

and that's a source of friction, and you can figure out a way to automate steps of it, so it's easier to do the work, less unscheduled messaging, less having to be in your inbox. I guess that's fine. So automation could help make something more effortless, but it's just one of many things you could deploy to try to achieve that general state. So I think effortlessness is a deeper idea, and it's a critical one. Important things are generated by hard work. Hard work does not have to be hard to do. And in fact, if you can make it not hard to do,

you are actually going to improve the quality and the sustainability of those most important efforts. All right, we're at the 30 minute mark here. So let me just work in one last question. And this one is a little bit more philosophic. It has to do with the deep life. Hi, Cal. I really appreciate your work, both your books and your podcast.

I'm wondering if you can elaborate a bit on how you connect the dots at a high. level to the more mundane day-to-day work that you do. For example, the buckets that you mention craft, constitution, contemplation, community, once you've laid out your ideas, your vision, the principles and virtues you ascribe to in that process, how do you translate to the more granular goal setting and plans for your life, your semester plans? or quarterly plans. All right, this is a really good question.

I'm going to paraphrase it as saying, how does your thinking about the deep life get transmuted into actionable steps, things you're doing today, things you're doing this week? Well, here's the way I handle it. So, as I've talked about before, my treatment of the deep life divides my life

into important areas that I sometimes call buckets. Over time, I do an overhaul of each of these areas of my life, or I'm trying to think about how to focus my time in that area on the things that really matter and not waste too much time on the things that don't. That thinking is going to translate into three types of things. Some things are going to be habits or behavioral rules. I mean, I always talk about starting with one keystone habit per area to jumpstart to transition to the deep life.

But as you do a full overhaul over an area, there might be multiple habits, including multiple habits that you are tracking. The second type of thing that these overhauls might produce for each area are prohibitions. And there's like a code of contact. I don't do this. I don't do that. The third type of thing you're going to get in each of these areas as you overhaul them and focus on them is going to be actual concrete objectives. I am going to transform, for example, in Constitution, I'm going to transform my garage into a gym.

It's like a one-time objective. whereas I'm going to do this amount of exercise each week as a habit, something that's happening all the time, right? So you have this combination of three things, regular behavior, prohibitions, and objectives that in each area you have worked on importantly. And you return to these areas, at least once a semester I would suggest, or once or twice a year, and you check in on your overhaul and tweak it and work on it because this is very important.

Where does this information live? I would suggest your quarterly semester plans. As I mentioned, I have one of these plans for my personal life, and I have one of these plans I maintain for my professional life. So the relevant information for the non-professional buckets would be in my personal life plan, and the relevant information for my professional life plan. It's just in there. Like, here's the things I'm doing. Remember, here's the things I'm not doing.

Remember, here's the big objectives I'm working on. So they're right there in your quarterly or semester plans. Now my whole system, the whole mesh of gears that makes up my system will take over because those quarterly or semester plans you look at every week when you build your weekly plan. So A, you're reminded about your habits and prohibitions, but also you get now asked a question of for these objectives, which of them am I going to work on this week and when am I going to have time to do it? Then when you get to each day and you build your daily time block plan, you will be looking at your weekly plan. and then those things will actually get put into action. Now, if you have a new habit or a new prohibition, you might want to note that in your weekly plan

so that when you build your time block plan every day, you're reminded, make sure to do my daily half hour exercise. Oh, yeah, that's new. Let me put that in my time block plan. Remember, I'm not drinking during the week anymore. Okay, that's in my time block. That's in my weekly plan, so I'll remember to do that today. And then as you get used to habits and prohibitions,

you don't need to write them down in your weekly plan anymore. Just you'll remember them. But that's another useful thing you can do. And so now you have this deep thinking on the deep life, work its way down, this cascade of actionable planning from quarterly semester to weekly to daily. So that is how this big thinking goes from your reflections by the stream about what you life wants to be to today at 11. I am hanging up the mirror in my home garage gym. So it's a great question because if you don't connect these two things, if you do not connect, your philosophical musings about your life,

ultimately with what you're doing right now with your time. If there's not a linkage of systematic connections between those two endpoints, all of the naval gazing in the world is not going to get you anywhere. So I'm glad you asked a question, and that is how I handle that connection. All right, that's all the time we have for this mini episode. As I mentioned earlier, I need more listener calls. So go to calnewport.com slash podcast to learn how you can submit your own calls.

I'll be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions Podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.