Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 111: How Do I Tame Distracting Thoughts?

Episode Date: July 5, 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.FROM THE NEWSLETTER: Notes on Quentin Tarantino's Writing Routine [3:39]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS - How fluid are my quarterly plans? [17:00] - What is a good approach to take notes in meetings? [19:59] - What do you include ads o your podcast? [23:31] - How do I install a deep work mindset in my team? [25:25] - How do you (Cal) use Evernote? [32:37] - Am I planning an app version of my time-block planner? [35:30] - Any tips to help me actually do the things I have time blocked? [37:21]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS - How do I stop embracing my distracting thoughts? [45:37] - How does a high school student find things to be interested in? [55:24] - How do I get started writing on an already popular topic? [59:42] - How does deep work relate to Dave Epstein's idea go Generalists vs. Specialists? [1:05:45]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 111. Quick announcements. First, I'll just note briefly. I typically turn off my air conditioner at the Deep Work H.Q. When I am recording, I sweat it out for your benefit, but I'll tell you it is too hot for me to do that today. So I do have the air conditioner on. I don't think it will show up on the recording because in my,

infinite wisdom. I set up a studio above a bar. I have some pretty heavy gating going on my audio processors to help filter out noise of bands and bass and clinking plates from my recording. That's a pretty heavy gate, so it's probably going to cut out this AC background sounds as well. But I've just always symbolically turned off the AC because I figured make whatever you can control quiet. Not today. Too damn hot. I don't think you'll hear it. If you do, You know why. I also want to give a really brief update on the progress of the podcast evolution. I've mentioned several times over the past few months that I am moving towards wanting increasingly the second episode of the week to be me doing a collaborative deep dive with another real person.

And when possible, a real person who is sitting across for me in the newly redesigned Deep Work HQ. In fact, my video guy is coming by today as I'm recording this to help make. the final plan of where the cameras are going to go. From a timeline perspective, this really will be probably late summer. I'm away for a lot of July. I'm giving some talks. Kind of exciting to be flying again and going places to give talks and doing a two-week vacation.

So really August into September is when I really expect to get things rolling with this format where we're going to have much more of me talking with other people as the second episode. One quick note, some people are worried that the listener calls that I typically feature in that second episode would then become more scarce. Never fear. My idea is if I'm going to have a collaborative deep dive as that second episode more often, I'll probably just move more of those listener calls into the main Monday episode.

So the Q&A episode on Monday could be more of a mix of written and call in questions. That seems to make a lot of sense from a format point of view. Anyways, as always, I like all feedback on the show and its format. You can send notes to Interesting at Cal Newport. port.com. We have a good batch of questions about deep work and the deep life to get into today. Before we do, however, I often have fun experimenting with different segment types up front in the show, and I thought I would try a new one today, a new segment in which I take a recent

essay from my email newsletter, which, by the way, if you don't subscribe to, you should. I've been writing these weekly essays for this newsletter since 2007. It is sort of the intellectual home for all of the work I do. Ideas you hear on this podcast, ideas that show up in this book, ideas that show up in the New Yorker. A lot of this has its origin in my long-running newsletter. I thought it might be nice to occasionally take an article from the newsletter and go into it a little bit here on the podcast. So let's give that a try. I call this new segment from the newsletter.

On June 30th, I posted an essay titled Notes on Quentin Tarantino's writing routine. So the proximate inspiration for this piece was an interview. An interview I was listening to with Tarantino on Joe Rogan's podcast. There's an exceptional Tarantino interview. I've heard him interviewed on several different shows, but this was quite a good one. He had the space to really get into some things and really develop. some complex thoughts about how he put together various movies and how they were filmed and his own story. And all these threads were interleaved in a really interesting way.

The larger picture motivation for this piece and the very reason why I was listening to a Tarantino interview in the first place is that one of my summer projects, I always have personal projects going on, stuff that is completely unrelated to work. one of them that I'm undertaking this summer is learning film appreciation at a higher level. So I'm studying formal film criticism. And as part of this self-directed curriculum, I've been watching some Tarantino recently. We installed during the pandemic a big screen TV with a good sound system because my wife and I are used to be real cinefiles. And we wanted to be able to have a cinematic experience even when movie theaters were close. So anyways, I've been watching some Tarantino films, so I wanted to hear this interview. listening to this interview, great interview, and there's a part where Rogan asked him about his

writing routine. And what was interesting is that Tarantino said it changed. His exact quote was, it all changed more or less around the writing of inglorious bastards. Now he said before that he was, and I'll quote him again, an amateur mad little writer. Now, of course, we can all acknowledge the irony of him self-describing himself as an amateur. He had already won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Pulp Fiction at this point. He was seen as one of the top screenwriters of his generation or any generation. So he's not an amateur, but he was describing his habits, his writing habits as amateur. He elaborated that he would often work late at night, maybe pull an all-nighter until the early morning of the day, or he would go to a restaurant or a bar

where he would just sit there and drink a lot of coffee and put all this stuff out and just work in these frenzied, inspired burst. As he elaborated to Rogan, at some point as he was working on in glorious bastards, he decided he wanted to do something more professional. Now, the timeline here is a little hazy. That movie came out in 2009, but it's a movie that Tarantino worked on off and on for quite a while. Different sources say different things, but as early as 1998, he was working on it.

So probably this was a change that happened in the late 1990s. though he wasn't super clear on that timeline. So I'm now going to give an extended quote from Tarantino. This is from his interview explaining the new more professional routine he developed during this period. All right, here's Tarantino. I started writing during the daytime. I get up so, you know, it's 10.30 or 11 o'clock or 1130 and I sit down to write like a normal workday. I would sit down and I would write until 4, 5, 6, or 7, somewhere around there I would stop.

And then I have a pool and I keep it heated so it's nice. go into it and just kind of float around in the warm water and think about everything I've just written, how I can make it better, and what else can happen before that scene is over. And then there is a lot of stuff would come to me. Literally, a lot, a lot of things would come to me. Then I'd get out and make little notes on that, but not do it. That would be my work for tomorrow, right? In quote.

I edited a few Tarantino curse words in there because I want to avoid having to click that little explicit content button on this podcast. All right, so that's his routine. Focused period of writing during the middle of daytime work hours with this interesting coda where he would float and think about what he just did, capture those insights and notes, but then leave those notes to sit until the next day. That's how he would get started. All right, so in my essay, I pointed out three things that caught my attention about this new

professionalized Tarantino routine. The first thing is how he leveraged the return to a specific and notable setting, in this case his heated pool, to help support his creative insight. This comes up quite often if you study the rituals of high-level creative producers. If you're interested in these type of stories, I would recommend Mason Curry's book Daily Rituals, which just categorizes or catalogs, I should say, story after story of famous creatives and how they worked.

But this idea of having a setting that you associate with doing high-level creative thinking comes up a lot because our brain can build associations. Oh, when I'm in this setting, it is time to think creatively. So I know what networks to suppress. I know what networks to amplify. And I can do that without as much attention or energy actually invested. Now typically for this to work well, if the setting is notable, the hook here is going to be more powerful. So lying in the heated pool is a pretty good hook because it's not something that you would normally do in other types of parts of your day. It's a very specific thing. Darwin had this hook of the sandwalk, the path he had carefully laid out through his estate outside of London, that he would walk on a fixed number of circuits that help get his brain. going before he would do his thinking for the day.

You know, it was dramatic. It was notable. He built the walk just for that purpose. So that's a good tactic. Okay, the second thing I noticed, Tarantino is leaving at the end of each session a ramp to help him pick up speed the next day when he starts the next session. He has this collection of notes about either, and he clarified this in his quote, either how to improve the scene he was working on during the last session or if that scene came to a good conclusion,

what scene should come next? So the next day, when it's 10 or 11 or 1130, he's sitting down to do his daytime writing. He's not just saying, okay, what's next? And having to fire up all those circuits and brainstorm and think, and there's an hour lost, maybe with some false starts. He jumps right in. Yeah, I'm going to act on these notes I generated yesterday.

This is another tactic you see often with high-level creative producers. It is very difficult to get your brain into that mode, but once it's there, it can do a lot of good work. So it's a nice jump-starting routine. You do all this work. Leverage the fact that your brain is in that high-performance creative mode at the end of your deep work session to figure out really good things to work on next time and then leave that as breadcrumbs for tomorrow. By jump-starting the next day with what you do today, you want to graph out this, I don't know, energy investment per time spent graph, you actually are going to definitely reduce the total amount of energy required to get the same amount of work done. Because there's this big startup

cost, leaving a ramp to get up the speed the next day, reduces that startup cost. All right, my third and final point from my essay. And by the way, these essays are at calnewport.com. That's where you should go to sign up. You'll get them sent right to your email inbox once a week. My final point here, and perhaps the most important, is the way that this ritual underscores a reality that I've been working on in my work since at least 2009. That's the earliest evidence I can find in my own writing of making this point, which is that there is a distinction between hard work and hard-to-do work. So it is very hard in the long run to produce a screenplay at Tarantino's level.

No one would say that is easy. but his daily routine, if we look at just one day of Tarantino working on a screenplay, it's not overwhelming grinding or impossibly fatiguing. It's him riding in the middle of the day when his energy is the highest, sitting in a pool, reflecting, taking some notes, and then that's it. As he elaborated in the interview, then he likes to have his nights free to, you know, go have dinner or go watch a movie. He actually just had his first kid, so now we might add family things into that. as well. So hard to do work is work that in the moment is exhausting.

We often mix that up with hard work, which is work that's going to require the accretion of a large amount of high quality effort before it can be produced. You know, it's hard work to paint a large fence because there is a lot of different fence posts that have to be painted, you have to do each one well. But if you're just painting

a few posts a day, that work is never hard to do. And this comes up again and again in doing work that matters. This distinction matters. It is not about being able to grit your teeth through the inspired fringing, staying up all night, like the amateur

mad little writer trying to outrun your own constitution and get something brilliant produced. That is not really necessary. if anything, it can be counterproductive. Really important work comes from you producing at your highest level in a reasonable, sustainable way,

but relentlessly again and again and again. And for me, that has always been a very key distinction. People ask this sometimes about, let's say, the volume of books I have written. Because they tend to think about that in terms of all at once and how hard it would be to sit down and if you had to write a book, all these books all at once. But I think of it, and I say, well, look, I've been doing this I'm 20 years old.

It's rarely a hard day in there. There's also rarely a month in which I'm not working on a book. It's just my equivalent of sitting at the typewriter than floating in the pool. Repeat, repeat, repeat. If you repeat that for coming on 20 years now, you might look back in their seven books. And in Tarantino's case, as I wrote in the article, Tarantino writes then floats, writes then floats, a rhythm that's tractable on the scale of any individual day.

this has become, he explains this really nice, this really enjoyable, this really lovely way to write, but over time it aggregates to yet another Oscar-worthy outcome. And that last sentence is linked to the fact that In Glorious Bastars was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Screenplay. All right, so that is from the newsletter for this week. Let's do a quick ad reading that we'll get started with this week's questions. I want to take a moment to talk about our friends at Blinkist. You've heard me say before in our current cultural moment, ideas are power,

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Get the main ideas from those lessons. Does this feel like the type of thing that really? interest you? If so, then you can know to buy the book. Now, right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your free seven-day trial, you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven-day free trial, Blinkist.com slash deep. Let's get started with some questions about deep work. Our first one comes from Aaron.

Aaron asks, how fluid are your quarterly plans? You recommend including projects you want to make progress on your quarterly plans. If you complete all the projects you included during the quarter, do you add more? If things change significantly, do you consider your quarterly plan rolling or do you update it for time left in the quarter? Well, Aaron, for the most part, I don't update my quarterly plans that often. I give it some time early in the semester. For me, I do these semesters. I do it fall.

I do it winter. I do it summer. But same idea. I do it early in the semester. I look at it every week when I make my weekly plan. It tends to be pretty stable. I mean, if anything, I tend to have the opposite problem, I'm really all about the long game. that's at the secret of my slow productivity philosophy.

Sticking with something for a long period of time, do that long enough, something good will come out. I trust myself to do that, more than I trust myself to outwork someone, let's say, this week. So I often have the opposite problem where the things I have to focus on for the given quarter, a lot of them are just the things I'm focusing on the next quarter. So not making any changes is more my issue.

There are some exceptions. As you mentioned, something new might come up and that could go on to the quarterly plan. That certainly happens. Also, sometimes something changes. So you're working, this is something common for me, I'm working on an academic paper and the paper topic changes. We realize that's a dead end that a new topic comes up. So that'll change the quarterly plan. So there's sometimes changes.

Sometimes new things fall onto the radar. A new project that pops up halfway through a quarter. this is great. I want to do it, but it's significant. Okay. So in those cases, those would change. But I tend to encounter those as being more exceptions. I would not make your quarterly plan rolling. Sync it to those quarterly or semester boundaries. Do not just keep updating what you count to be the next quarter. I think it's good to have seasonal reflection. Not only is it a good regular rhythm to your workday, it also allows you to have a better chance at seasonality. So, for example, maybe the summer quarter or the summer semester, you pull back when you get there,

you get in the habit of that to catch your breath, whereas the fall quarter or semester, you maybe pile back on. I really like having a regular rhythm of checking in and reflection. But the key thing here is have a quarterly plan, know what your big picture goal is for the months ahead, look at it every week. Doing those things consistently really is critical for this sort of slow productivity notion of doing the hard thing again and again and again so that over time a hard-to-produce result emerges. Our next question comes from Brandon. Brandon says, what is your approach for taking notes in meetings and what you do with these

notes afterwards? Well, Brandon, one of my key meeting-related productivity hacks is that whenever a meeting goes on your calendar and you've put aside the time that meeting is actually going to take, you have to then add at least an extra 15 minutes to the end of every meeting for processing the meeting. You have to have at least 15 minutes for processing. Now, I'm not that interested in content-related notes from meetings. Honestly, most meetings don't produce content, like ideas or strategies that you want to capture somewhere so you don't forget it. The main thing most meetings produce is obligations.

Here is the plan. This person is going to do this. You owe this person this thing. We're going to get back together at this point. So meetings are open loop generation machines. That 15-minute processing block is where you close down all of those loops immediately. That is where you get every obligation that needs to go on your task list, goes on your task list. that need to go into your calendar, go on to your calendar,

if you need to update your weekly plan, because now something has fallen on your task list, it definitely has to get done this week. You update your weekly plan. You want to come out of that 15-minute post-meeting processing period, completely clear a mind, that there is nothing still floating around in your mind related to that meeting,

that your mind has to keep track of and keep fresh because it's not something you can forget. Critical. Now, I suggest you might as well, make that post-meeting period 30 minutes. A, because 30 minutes is easier on most calendars to drag and schedule than 15 minutes, but B, it gives yourself a breather. You can do that processing, that post-meeting processing. If the meeting runs a little bit long, you'll still have time for that post-meeting processing. And once you're in that logistical mindset, it's a good time to check in on your time

block plan, maybe to get into your email to see, you know, hey, look, I'm blown up all my context here anyways. Before I start something new, my is. as well, slather myself in attention residues, what's going on email, what's going on in Slack, and just have that period to get your arms around everything and update on everything before whatever comes next comes next. Now, think about if you have one of these terrible days that's become all too common, especially during the remote work saturated pandemic in which you have meeting after meeting after meeting. Now imagine that you have been artificially putting 30 minutes after every meeting. It goes on your calendar. It's just as if that meeting is 30 minutes longer,

so that there is at least a 30-minute buffer between every single meeting. Now a day full of meetings, you are processing every obligation of every meeting right after it's done. You're getting some emails checked, you're checking in on things. You get through a day of meetings

with this 30-minute post-meeting protected time in place. That is a significantly less stressful day than if those meetings have been packed, back-to-back-to-back. And all those open loops were just piling from one meeting to the next, and your inbox was getting bigger,

and bigger and at the end of the day, you're just completely overwhelmed. So that's my critical hack. A meeting has two parts. The part where you're actually talking to other people concurrently and the part where you are processing and making sense of what was discussed during that meeting. Do not forget the second part. Our next question comes from Asus, who asks, why do you include ads on your podcast? You know, I actually was discussing this on one of my recent appearances on Ryan Holiday's podcast. We were talking about the fact that we get this question a lot. The short, sort of obvious answer to why I run ads on the podcast

is that it's expensive to run a podcast and I don't want to lose money producing this show. If it was a money losing venture, it wouldn't be something I could probably justify spending regular time on. So as things stand now, the ad revenue from the podcast supports the podcast. supports the podcast. It covers my lease payment for the Deep Work HQ.

It covers the equipment required to do the podcast. It covers the video people. It covers the audio editor. So it makes it a at the very least financially neutral proposition which is what allows me

to keep doing it. You know, long term, I will say, it's possible that if and when the podcast grows, it might, the ads might play a bigger role than merely just

making the podcast solvent because there's a really high premium on podcast-based advertising, it really is a good medium. You have a trusted audience, and you can deliver detailed ads. It's a pretty effective form of advertising.

It's possible that as the podcast grows, these ads will shift from keeping this financially neutral to actually being a non-trivial source of income. That would have its own benefits. I mean, among other things, its income that could free up my time from other things, and therefore I'd have more time to work on projects,

to work on research, articles to work on books. And so that's possible. It's possible that this will become a important revenue stream in the future. And I don't think it's a bad thing if it does. But for now, hey, these things cost money and I don't want to spend money to keep this on the air. All right. Our next question comes from Thomas. This is more of a detailed case study followed by a question than just a question. But I'd like the specificity here. So if you will indulge me. This question is going to have a relatively long preamble before it gets to the actual query. So Thomas says, I work on a machine learning research team in private industry.

Our supervisor is a former researcher, but now spends the vast majority of his time overseeing multiple projects and acquiring new business. As such, he now follows a manager instead of maker schedule. Ad hoc meetings are common. We are given minutes or a couple hours of notice at most, and even when they are scheduled in advance, their placement only respects his availability and sense of urgency around the topic of discussion. Within the meetings, we discuss our research, and he states the varying degrees of specificity and senses of prioritization ideas we could try. He does not typically assign tasks to individuals, and when he does, the task more often than not falls on the person who is most willing or is not limited in another

way, i.e. we don't have roles. This is also not an explicit method of tracking, or there is not also an explicit method of tracking who is responsible for which task and a sense of quantity of demands on each of our respective schedules. How do I, quote, lead from below, end quote, to install a deep work mindset in my industrial research team when my colleagues and manager practice this reactive mindset? Well, Thomas, let me start with the obvious observation. Your manager is bad at being a manager. What he is doing is bad managing.

If we want to make an industrial analogy to how he is a managing, assume you were going to a car factory. And assume you saw a floor supervisor at this car factory surrounded by a lot of different craftspeople and workers. And let's assume the way that work happened on this factory floor is that the manager would kind of walk around and see these Model T's in various states of construction and sort of grab people.

Be like, hey, wait a second. I think there's some steering wheels over there. these Model T's over there, I think they need steering wheels. And, you know, I was just over here checking out the cars and there's not a lot of back wheels and you know, hey Thomas, can you get back wheels on these cars? I think we need some back

wheels and oh, we're out. Looks like we're out of the screws we need for attaching the bumpers. Who can I grab her? Hey, Susan, look in, where's the screws? Go get some screws for us, right? And it was just this haphazard, him kind of seen what these cars in construction needed and trying to grab people to work on these things. And now compare that to a factory

where there's an assembly line. it's no real comparison. What he is doing in the cognitive context of knowledge work is like that first floor manager who just sort of grabs people to install or fix things he sees that need to be done on the cars in progress. It's a terribly inefficient way of deploying the resources available to build cars. In this case, it's a terribly inefficient way to take brains and produce value-rich machine learning research. So he's bad at it. All right, well, what can we do about it?

well, short term, get him a copy of a world without email. I mean, if anything, he just needs to read a book that makes attention capital theory clear. He has to understand the impact of a hive mind approach of work. We figure things out on the fly and all the context shifting and how it's worth actually constructing bespoke workflows for the stuff that has to be done that respects human brains. Engineers really understand this type of thing because I'm an engineer and I write in that language. So this kind of a short-term solution is somehow find a way to get that book into his hands. Now, if I was actually at your company consulting, and I don't really do this, because as I like to say, I'm great at theory, bad at practice. But if I was there, if you had convinced me to come there, probably the solution for the type of stuff you're doing, which is research.

Probably you need something like an agile project management methodology. That's probably a good fit for the type of work being done in your research team. There should be a shared board where all the things being worked on, all the things that need to be worked on, the status of the things being worked on, who's working on what is crystal clear. There needs to be structured status meetings, structured both in when they occur and what happens during the meetings, where we quickly check in on who's working on what, how did what they were working on go, what do they need to get done what they're working on today? meetings where we can have a very transparent and systematic decision of, okay, you're done with that. We need to put another thing on your plate for today. What thing from this list should that be? You know, this is probably what your team needs.

Engineers understand Agile because your computer development adjacent where those ideas were developed. So I think that would be a good fit. Probably you need something like office hours here as well, a way that when he has quick questions for people, He can go to them and ask, not having to pull people to him. You reverse the meetings that way it becomes incredibly more efficient, and you probably need, and again, these are all ideas from the book, protocols. And certain types of things happen. We have a proposal we need to produce.

There's a question that comes in from a client. Like, how does that get handled? Where's the information go? When do we talk about it? Where do the results go? So it's not just on the fly, let's grab people and have meetings. And there's a lot of things like that I think would be helpful. It's unclear to what degree.

you can induce someone above you to actually make those changes, but that's what I would do if I was advising your team. In terms of what you can do individually, this might be a good case to do the deep, the shallow work ratio discussion. Because when you sit down with your boss, hey boss, this is what deep work is, this is what shallow work is, both are important. We have to obviously discuss things and update people on things, but we also have to do the work.

What is the right ratio, do you think? for me for my job to produce the most value for this team of deep to shallow work hours in a week. Make them commit to a number. Then you can actually look and say, oh, we're not hitting this number. You know why? Because we're doing, on average, six hours of meetings a day. Or I have no unbroken blocks because meetings fall into my, whatever.

You have a number that you have fixed and you can see how far you are falling from it. This can unlock all sorts of innovation in company culture. Now suddenly maybe meetings get confined to just the afternoon or we do status. meetings at set times instead of ad hoc meetings, maybe mornings become completely protected. All of these type of changes are much more likely. When you're coming from a perspective of here is a number we've agreed on, we've agreed on not because it makes my life easier, but because it brings more value to you. It brings more value to the team. It maximizes to return on the investment you've made in my brain. Great, how do we hit this number? That shift and mindset can lead to quite a bit

of innovation and how work actually gets done. So to summarize, get in my book, try the deep to shallow work ratio conversation, but big picture, agile office hours protocols is what a team like this really needs to function at a high level. Our next question comes from Marie, who says, can you elaborate on how you integrate

Evernote into your productivity system? Well, Marie, I've shifted more recently from Evernote towards Rome, research is online note-taking tool. But again, I'm typically pretty tool agnostic. Let me talk about conceptually what I try to do with these tools. For me, it's for capturing content. So here is an idea for an article, an idea for a book, a thought that might be useful for

other books or articles. Here's a book I read and here's a summary of it. So it's content. idea stuff that can be the grist for milling the type of things I produce, like articles, like books, like podcasts. So I think of these as systems for capturing content that I can't obviously keep in my head. And then how I organize, it's not that interesting. When I use Evernote, I just have a bunch of stacked notebooks.

So there's like a notebook for every book project I'm working on. There was a notebook for blog post ideas, et cetera. Rome Research has a slightly different information organization metaphor. It's more of a hyperlinked network of ideas metaphor. So you have these pages and pages linked to other pages. You get all sorts of different connections. So you might just create a page to summarize a book. And then you have another page for a book idea of your own.

It might link to that book summary because it's relevant to the book, etc. Different information organizational metaphors. Somewhat orthogonal though to the point here, which is what goes into those systems in general is content, the fundamental nature of idea stuff. this is separate from planning or scheduling. So nothing in those notebooks has anything to do with how I'm going to write something, when I'm going to write something. What's my plan for writing something?

I use those notebooks just for content. The plans about how or when things are going to happen or what needs to happen, that lives somewhere else. I really segregate those two things in my systems. So for me, I have my semester strategic plans that lay out a big plan that feed the weekly plans to feed to my daily plans. There is the to-do list that go along with that. There's the calendar that goes along with that. So there's all of these other systems for keeping track of what I want to get done, when I'm

going to get it done, how I'm going to get it done, what needs to be done. And those are all separate systems. So I think that's probably the key point I would make. If you're in the business of transforming, alchemizing, if you will, thought stuff into valuable stuff. So you write articles, you produce copy, you produce music, you whatever. there's got to be a place where that, the fundamental elements of that stuff you produce can live and mutate and connect and sit there until you need it.

And keep that separated from the systems in which you actually try to figure out what to do, what you need to do when you're going to do it. Here's an interesting question from Al. Al says, would it be a good idea to build an app version of your time block planner? well Al I don't have an app version of the planner in the works but it's not a bad idea

and perhaps that's something I should think about it's just something I haven't had time to really get into one thing I will say about the existing analog time block planner is that remember as I like to say this is an evolving

product because it's not something you use just once because when you're built one you have to buy another keep in mind if you're using the planner now future versions will be improved. The improvement of this planner is an ongoing process. We already have a list of improvements. We're getting ready for the next printing of planners when we get there. So if you already use a time block planner or if you're thinking of using the planner, keep in mind that it's going to be a relationship with a product that's going to continue to evolve and improve. You can find

out about it at timeblock planner.com. An app is something I would think about. Obviously, I love the analog nature of the time block planner. I think that is important. but I do not think it would be inconceivable to have an electronic version of this where you can do your time blocks and repair your schedule and you'll maybe even have some metrics calculated. You can label your blocks by their type. Is it deep? Is it shallow?

Is it meeting and get some metrics back? Not necessarily a terrible idea. There's also probably something from an attention engineering standpoint that would be really compelling about doing your metric tracking of hitting a checkbox and seeing it, you know, swoosh, or whatever that might induce you to be more likely to actually track your metrics and hit your metrics. So there's something there that's interesting.

But apps are a pain. It's not something I'm thinking about now, but I could be convinced. Our final question about deep work comes from Rich. Rich asks, do you have any tips to help me actually do the things I have time blocked? Well, this is a really common question, especially with people that are new to time block planning. And they find themselves building their elaborate time block plan for the day and then promptly ignoring it. So the issue here is that a commitment to follow your plan is a little bit too broad and vague. Right.

It's, well, I'm going to stick with my plan. And then it gets kind of hard and something takes longer than you think. Your mind wanders. And now you say, well, I've kind of failed to stick to my plan. So I'm going to give up on that particular commitment. What I recommend doing instead, the commitment that I want you to make, the steadfast commitment, the one that you're not going to renege on should be, I will keep my time block plan updated. If I get off on my schedule, I will fix it next time I have a chance.

And if I get off that schedule, I will fix it next time I have a chance. I'm not making any guarantees about what I do during the day, but I will faithfully capture what I do on that schedule. and you can look back at those schedules being fixed as they march across the columns on your time block daily planning grid and you can actually see what happened. Well, this block went much longer. What really happens I had this meeting instead? I just didn't do that. You see it. You see what you did and you kept trying to make a plan with the time that remained.

That is a much easier commitment to follow. It was much more concrete. Hey, I'm off my plan. Yeah, I got to fix it. It takes two minutes. Not a big thing. That's much more concrete than just don't get off your plan. Why is this concrete commitment going to make a difference?

Two reasons. Number one, just taking that extra minute to fix your plan for the time that remains when you get off your plan can make all the difference. That extra two minute pause is what can get you back on intentional time allocation for the rest of the day versus just saying, I don't know, I blew through this first block, so I guess I'm done time block planning today. two, there is a discontenting or distressing friction involved in having to fix the plan. It's a pain, and it makes you confront what happened, the reality of I blew through this block. If your mind knows that distressing friction is coming, it might be more likely to stick with the plan as is. So for these, we can call them avoidable time block bustings where you just go on the internet,

Or you just don't do it. You have an admin block. That admin block has a few tasks you want to get done. You just don't do it. You might be more likely to actually do it if you know, look, the one thing I've committed to steadfastly is I'm going to fix my plan. So if I don't do this, I have to fix a plan and put this somewhere else or just not do it. And I don't want to really do that. And maybe I'll just do the task.

It actually really does work. Now you might be saying, well, what if I don't stick with that commitment? What if I don't stick with the commitment of always updating my plan? Well, at some point, Rich, I mean, you've got to throw some discipline at this. life is hard, you have to be willing to do some hard things. There has to be some lines in the sand that you draw on to actually put some structure in your life to actually build the road that you're going on towards somewhere you want to go. There has to be some hard commitments that are tractable that aren't asking too much of yourself,

but that actually you stick with. If you're going to time block plan, this has to be it. And if you're not even willing to do that, then look, you're an amateur. In the world of work, you're not a professional, you're an amateur. You're not willing to actually throw some structure at your time. You're not willing to do hard things. You're not willing to commit to what's going to actually help you get your work done. Then you're in a professional world behaving like an amateur.

This is a little bit of a tough love here, Rich. And I'm not saying that this is what you are going to say. You might be completely on board with this idea of, yeah, let me commit to actually updating my plan. But if you're not going to do even that, then you've got bigger trouble. That means you sort of haven't grown up yet. You're not really embracing the full notion of work. is work. It's going to involve things you don't want to do. So this is a very strategic place to invest commitment energy that's going to give you much broader returns.

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S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C dot com slash deep and fuel your productivity and creativity with some delicious mushroom coffee. Let's move on now to some questions about the deep life, and our first such question comes from Rachel. Rachel asks, how do I train myself to embrace boredom instead of embracing my distracting thoughts? You have always said that we should embrace boredom in order to work deep, but I look for distraction, not in social media, but in my thoughts. And I make it there automatically. How can I avoid it and embrace boredom? Well, first things first, Rachel, let's quickly dispense with the role of boredom in a deep life. Unlike some thinkers, I don't lionize boredom.

I don't think boredom is a state that we should stay in for long periods of time, or or seek it out because it is in that boredom that we are going to have the creative insight. I think boredom is a very strong and distressing drive. It's something we should listen to because it's telling us that there's something we need that we're not getting. More specifically, typically boredom is driving us towards more meaningful activity, driving us to actually expend energy to make cognitive conceptions manifest concretely in the world around us. So I think boredom is a great driver of action.

It's at the secret, the key to our species' ability to succeed in the way that we have. Now, I do have a chapter in deep work called Embrace Bortem. But if you read that chapter, what I'm really saying is basically practice on a regular basis having little bits of boredom. So go for a walk, wait in line while you're in the car, just 10 minutes here, 20 minutes here, there where you don't give yourself stimuli, let's say from your phone. And that's all just about getting your brain used to this idea that boredom does not automatically get you stimuli. If your brain builds the Pavlovian connection between boredom and stimuli, boredom and stimuli,

it's very hard when it comes time to actually do something significant that requires unbroken concentration because your mind will, by definition, count this as boring. If you're doing the same thing for a long period of time, there's no novel stimuli. And if you've trained your mind, that always means my phone comes out. That always means checking social media. then it's not going to put up with it. And then you can't concentrate on things for long periods of time, and then you can't produce things of value.

So that's what I mean by embrace boredom. Practice just enough of it that you can handle it. Your brain's not going to go haywire when you have to sit down and read something hard for a while. It's not going to say, no way. Where's my screen? Well, let's move on from boredom here and talk about thoughts. You are labeling these thoughts that capture your attention, these ruminations perhaps as distracting.

I don't see them as distractions. I see them as your mind trying to make sense of your world and yourself within that world. You don't want to ignore these type of thoughts altogether. You don't want to avoid them as a negative thing that is getting in the way of more positive things. What you want to do is figure out a way to healthily engage. with them. So by engage with them, I mean actually having an inner dialogue.

Hearing the thoughts, talking to thoughts, trying to make sense of the thoughts, trying to build some structure or coherence around the thoughts you are having. I like to do this while walking. Other people have different activities they like to do when they're thinking deeply. Some do it when a meditative pose.

Some do it when they're driving. I like to do it while I'm walking. I do this all the time. I have a real sort of sophisticated conversation with myself. And then you need after this some way of actually capturing the insight that came out of these internal interrogations. You know, I've always since whatever this was, 2004, I keep a moleskin journal with me. It's for exactly this, insights about my life. And I review it once a month and I go through it and what's in there that's useful.

It's a place to really start capturing thoughts. what are the insights I'm having about myself, my career, my family, how this all fits together. There's a place to capture that. And then those notes over time can inform your strategic plans, your goals in life, your values documents. What I look for in particular, for example, in my Mulskin notes is repeated occurrence of certain themes. If it's coming up again and again out of these sessions, it begins to emerge as something that's important that might get more firmly rooted in the various systems. used to organize my life. But this solitude, which again, I define this in digital minimalism very carefully, is time that you are alone with your own thoughts and observing the world around you,

free from inputs from other minds. This state of solitude is where you make sense of yourself, the feelings you're having, what's going on, how you feel about yourself, what you're happy about, what you are upset about, where you think yourself is falling short. Now look, you're not used to this. If you're young and you've been able to avoid most solitude because, Unlike prior generations, you have this glowing piece of glass in your hand. It can offer algorithmically optimized distractions at any moment. It can be quite uncomfortable to actually have to confront yourself because the things yourself has to say might not always be positive.

You might have to confront the fact, I don't really like what's happening in my professional life. I could be doing better. I make excuses why I'm not, but really I'm just a drift. Or you don't like what's going on with your relationships. You don't like what's going on with your health. You don't like what's going on with your spiritual core. You feel some sort of intimation there that's being ignored, and you've been ignoring it with this glowing screen,

but it's right there and you have to confront it. So it can be unpleasant. Sometimes it can be exciting. But you have to get used to having this conversation with yourself. You gain insights. You put those insights into structure, capture concrete notes on this. Over time, this is how you evolve as a human being. You become a more nuanced, sophisticated, truer version of yourself.

You should be doing this type of solitude, this type of conversation with yourself multiple times a week. No phone, nothing in your ears. I put the qualifier healthy in front of this engagement with your internal dialogues because there is a trap here to be wary of and that, of course, is rumination. So at the core of the major mental health maladies of the moment, that is anxiety or depressive disorders, is ruminative thought. that is the excessive or obsessive return to the same idea again and again and again.

Now, if those ruminations are worrying about the future, then that is the foundation for anxiety disorders. If those ruminations are worried about the past, how did I really screw this up? I set the wrong thing there, et cetera. That can be the foundation for depressive disorders. But these are really two sides of the same coin, and that coin is constructed from obsessive rumination. So we enter the danger of that territory once we begin to engage with ourselves. However, ignoring engagement with yourselves is not the way to avoid negative rumination. That's going to take over whether you want it to take over or not. You can't ignore it.

And in fact, if you get more used to engaging with yourself, you get used to that internal dialogue, you get used to having compassion with yourself in that dialogue, understanding what's important and what's not and seen over time, how you're evolving. You're actually probably going to be more resilient to those dialogues spiraling out of control. Now, if they are, if you do find it becoming obsessive, crossing that line towards rumination, well, this is what modern third wave, second and third wave psychotherapy is all about. In the second wave, you have cognitive behavioral therapy. In the third wave, you have acceptance commitment therapy. These are talk therapy modalities that are built on rigorous peer-reviewed research. They're all focused on ruminate.

In cognitive behavioral therapy, you're actually going to identify distorted thinking and correct it. So it's a corrective dialogue with your own internal rumination. With acceptance commitment therapy, you're not so much engaging with your own internal dialogues as you are learning to find some separation from them, allowing them to sort of just exist kind of in their own space. You don't engage with them. You instead commit in the moment to value-driven action. These are fantastic modalities. and that is the right way to deal with

if the internal dialogue is turning up a sort of obsessive quality to the thoughts. Just like if you're having a health issue, I would turn towards the expert in that particular health system and say here is what they recommend for your diet here if you have a thyroid issue, if you need to get your back stronger because of back pain,

like here is the workout routine to work with. So this is the picture. A healthy life needs a regular healthy, solitude-induced engagement with yourself and your internal dialogues. Without this, you can't grow as a person. Ultimately, as you get better with this, it's going to be the foundation for many good things in a deep life. If you find this internal dialogue spiraling off towards the obsessive, well, this is where second or third wave psychotherapy comes in. If you hurt your back, I'm going to say go to a back doctor. If the dialogue gets out of control, I'm going to

say go to a second or third wave talk therapist. They will help you get back in touch there. but avoiding these internal dialogues is going to stunt your growth as a person and is not going to save you from these mental health issues, if anything, it's going to make it worth. So those thoughts, Rachel, are not a distraction. It's something is a companion that you need to learn to build a healthy long-term relationship with. Our next question comes from Ayush, who says, How do I find things to be interested in? he elaborates that he is a high school student and he's thinking forward towards college admissions,

recognizing that he needs some sort of strong interest to succeed with competitive college admissions. Well, Ayush, the good news is, as I say for many different topics on this podcast, I wrote a book about that. In particular, I'm talking about my 2009 book, How to Become a High School Superstar. Now, I love this book. It is probably the least well-known of the Cal Newport Cannon, but is actually one of my favorite books. Yes, it is technically about college admissions, but it is written like a Malcolm Gladwell title. I basically came at this question of how do you get in college without having a stressful or negative high school experience? And I tackled it from an idea book perspective.

I deconstruct the various notion, the very notion of what it means to be impressive and what it means to be interesting in how people get there. And I have all these case studies of students who did it. And I draw from biology and I draw from psychology. And it's this weird, wonderful mix of all these different ideas. It's probably my least well-known book because it's the most narrow in scope and it has kind of a stupid title. But I really love this book. And as I've talked about before on this podcast, I wrote this book right after Penguin merged with Ramp. Random House. So I was at a

Random House imprint at the time, and then that imprint went away. I think it was Broadway books at the time. And that went away, and then it got a different imprint came in. And when they came together, they fired a lot of people. So the book went through a bunch of different editors.

By the time they were done firing people, the person who the book's lap fell into had no connection or idea of what they had bought. It was kind of the least of their concerns. And so I was free to write whatever I wanted. And so I wrote this crazy, brilliant, interesting off-the-wall book. But one of the big ideas I get into that is how do you as a high school

student become interesting? I identified this as a core element of these, I call them relaxed superstars, these students who did really well in college admissions without being stressed out, their interestingness was at the core of this. I really get into how you do it. And it requires a lot of unstructured exploration. There's whole sections in there about how you actually minimize your obligatory schedule, your course load, your activity so that you have more room to explore. And then it talks about when something clicks, how to quickly ratchet that up to someplace that is very impressive.

There's this whole idea called the failed simulation effect that you definitely should read. I think I actually wrote an article, thinking on the fly. I think at the time I wrote an article on the failed simulation effect for Tim Ferriss. So, you know, back then, a couple years after four-hour work week, Tim Ferriss's blog was still his main home online. This was before social media had really picked up and certainly before podcasting. So Tim had this blog, Tim.com. And he even, like, built a Ning network, like a custom social network. But anyways, his blog was his main thing.

and I've crossed path with Tim off and on over the years. We have some friends in common. And I think I wrote an article about the failed simulation effect for his blog. So maybe you can find out, I wish if you Google it, but it's this cool idea from the book about what makes a high school student really impressive. It's not that what they did is objectively very, very hard, like I'm an Olympic athlete, but that they did something that's not easy for you to simulate in your brain how they did it. And it can actually be much easier to get to a place where you generate the failure.

simulation effect than it is to get to a place where what you've done is just objectively, competitively, very hard. Anyways, read that book. It is exactly what you're looking for. And for everyone else, if you have a student in your life, that you are worried about becoming a stressed out mess as they think about college and you're a Cal Newport fan, you've got to get them this book, how to become a high school superstar. Our next question comes from J.K.

Who says, I love consuming content about personal finance, productivity, leadership, and then applying it in work and life. I want to get started on writing in this field, but how do you build an audience when there is already so much out there in these topics? Or is it pointless?

Or should I start with something super niche in these broad areas? Well, JK, typically my perspective on getting started riding this type of pragmatic nonfiction, whether we're talking about a blog or doing a podcast or trying to get a book deal, is that you need a compelling philosophy or take on a topic that's interesting to a non-trivial number of people, and you need to be the right person to be writing about it. Those two things come together. Then you can create an audience. Then you can create a community. Someone who wants to keep encountering this compelling take you have and you personify it yourself or you're the right. person to be talking about it. That can be a really good recipe for growing an audience. Without those two things, however, it's going to be much harder. So let's take productivity as a topic. The absolute,

not worse, but just the biggest waste of time you could do here is say, great, I am going to add value through my content production, right? So you're using that terminology from content marketing. And I'm going to start up a blog. And what matters is a publication schedule. And I'm going to write three times a week and and it's going to be, you know, 11 tips for doing this and just the actual content's not so important to you as much as you have the right tech and you're doing the right SEO and you have your right content schedule and you already have your plans on how you're going to hire other people to keep writing and you're going to generate enough content. That's going to go nowhere because your SEO doesn't matter.

Your publishing schedule doesn't matter. The WordPress configuration doesn't matter. What matters is, man, do you have something really compelling on something I really care about, a really compelling new take, and you were the right person to write about. You have that, I'll pay attention. If you don't, it's going to go away. Now, let's say by contrast, in the productivity area, you have some really unique approach, some type of technique or tool you have or some philosophy of how you organize things. It's pretty extreme, but really kind of technical and cool, and it's generated a lot of success for you, and you're preaching this philosophy out

there to the world. Now you are playing with fire. Now I want to hear about what you're doing. I want to see videos of what you're doing, because if that philosophy you have, that approach you have, that community you're building, if that piques my interest, then I want to be all in. I'm interested in you. I want to see it happening, et cetera, right? It's like in fitness or something like that. If it's, hey, I'm producing content that adds value on my medium thing, and I want to make sure that I'm writing three articles, but the articles are like, why your crunches are going bad or six techniques for doing better pull-ups. Again, nothing's going to come with that. But if instead, You're like, look, I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I exercise in the woods, and there's this, like, natural approach, I think, to integrate exercise with life.

And I sort of lift rocks and meditate. And you have a, you know, a man bun and a beard, and you look like you're in good shape. And there's going to be an audience for that because you have a compelling, unique thing you're saying you're the right person to write about it. And if that, again, if that hits my interest, I'm going to be all in. So that's what you need. Now, it's hard because sometimes you don't have a compelling new tool. take on something, or maybe you have a compelling new take on something, but you're not the right person to write about it. You don't personify it or you don't know much about it. You're not,

you know, a very successful screenwriter who has some interesting take on producing creative work or whatever. Then it's also a problem. But that's just the reality. It's why it's a very competitive field. That's why in writing there's only so many people who are successful at it, even though it seems like a nice thing to do, is because it's difficult for those things to come together. So what can you do if you don't have a compelling philosophy about one of these things or you don't have a compelling philosophy for which you're the right person to talk about it is, well, you need to develop a compelling philosophy and be the right person to talk about it. And that means you've got to live deeply and interestingly.

Focus on what matters to you, focus on what you're interested in, put a lot of energy into the things that really matter, don't waste energy on the things that don't. As you make your life deeper and more interesting and more intentional, you're much more likely to come across. a way of living, a way of acting, a way of operating. That's interesting and compelling that you can now share with the world. You sort of have to make JK a compelling person before you can produce compelling content. And whatever you do, do not skip that step. Pragmatic nonfiction that focuses on the quantity of content and not obsessing about what the content is, it does not go anywhere.

Your seven tips for finding the best credit card followed by an ad for, hey, use personal finance so I can get the referral code or what have you, personal capital that is. So I get the referral code. It's not going to go anywhere. All right. Let's do one more question here. This one is from Carl. Carl asks, can you discuss how your own philosophy of deep work relates to Dave Epstein's philosophy of generalist versus specialist? So what Dave talks about in his book, Range, which is what I think Carl is referring to,

and I should point you, by the way, I interviewed Dave about this book earlier in the summer, so you can find that podcast episode. But just to briefly summarize, he makes this argument that there is a real value to be in a generalist. And by a generalist, he means someone that is not on a long-term quest of specialization in one area, but someone who instead builds up reasonable skills in multiple different areas. and then see serendipitously where that leads them. This is more or less, this distinction between generalists and specialist

is more or less orthogonal to deep work, and mainly because we're talking about different scales of time. Deep work is relevant when you're saying, here is something I want to produce, and it is cognitively demanding. Deep work is going to help you produce that at a higher level of quality. That is given it unbroken concentration versus scattered concentration is going to get more out of your brain,

produce something of higher value, therefore you should be careful to protect deep work. You need time when you're working on hard things in which you don't have these context switch induced by different distractions. The generalist specialist discussion really takes place at the scale of your career overall. It takes place on the scale of years, not hours. Should I spend the next 10 years trying to master this, or should I just spend the next one year mastering this and then switch over to this

and master that and see where it leads me? There really are orthogonal. They really are orthogonal topics. And one of the things I talked about with Dave in that interview I did for the podcast is neither of these paths, generalist or specialist, frees you from having to work deeply and in particular practice deliberately to get better at something. The difference between the generalists and specialists is just what degree of expertise you need to obtain. So if you're trying to be a specialist, you might be trying to become a world-class expert, and it takes 10 years of work.

If you're trying to become a generalist, you don't need that, but you have to become not bad. In order for a collection of skills to be possible to be reconfigured and there's something interesting in your life, you have to be at least above the amateur level. You know,

Dave talks about he was in graduate school for, I think it was geology or geoscience, and that really helped him when he switched the writing because he understood science. science. Well, yeah, he was not a specialist. So he did not become a world-class scientist, but he trained for years in graduate school. So he became a not bad scientist. He was not an

amateur. He knew about science at a non-amateur level. That's what enabled that skill to be useful as part of his generalist portfolio. And so even if you want to be a generalist, this doesn't mean you can just do what's interesting today and then tomorrow I'll do something different. It means, okay, I can master multiple skills at a reasonable level, a level of non-amaturiness, and then see how they combine, but getting to the non-ametricness can still take months or years, and it requires unbroken focus, requires deliberate practice,

it's a very deep endeavor. So again, no matter what you're trying to do in the big arc of your career, when you zoom into the short term, the stuff that moves the needle, requires unbroken focus, it requires deep work, it requires deliberate practice.

And so it's all a question of scale. There's no way to avoid concentrating hard and learning hard things and doing deliberate work. matter what path you take, and whether at the big picture scale you choose to be more general or to be more specialist, that's a whole other debate. I've talked about that before on the podcast. They're both valid approaches. I talk about both approaches and so good they can't ignore you. I call them something different, but I get into it in that book. That's a cool, interesting debate. But there's no answer there that gets you out of the short-term requirement

to actually sit down, focus hard on something that is cognitively demanding. And with that, my schedule is demanding that I wrap up this episode. You go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how you can submit questions for the show. I'll be back on Thursday with a listener calls mini episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.